Set This Money on Fire
John:
All right, we shouldn't be on this tangent.
John:
We got a lot of things to talk about.
Marco:
We can say that about almost every topic almost every week.
John:
Yeah, we mean it this time.
Casey:
All right, so this week was our first real introduction to Apple Park and the Steve Jobs Theater.
Casey:
at Apple Park, which we've all seen many, many, many pictures, most of which are beautiful of the Steve Jobs Theater and of Apple Park.
Casey:
I don't have the link handy, but Dan, is it Frommer or Frommer?
Casey:
I always get it wrong.
Marco:
I think it's Frommer.
Casey:
There you go.
Casey:
Well, Dan, we apologize.
Casey:
But anyway.
Casey:
We will try to find wherever the link was that flew by earlier today, wherein he had like a little photo essay of his day at the Steve Jobs Theater.
Casey:
And the pictures are beautiful and really well done.
Casey:
And so you can check that out.
Casey:
But it was it was a neat it was a neat event.
Casey:
It was interesting that we knew a lot.
Casey:
We didn't know some things.
Casey:
And that's cool, too.
Casey:
And I guess do we want to start with just a kind of opening remark or do we want to just dive right in?
John:
We're going chronological like we always do.
John:
What's the first thing that it did?
John:
It's a Steve Jobs tribute.
John:
It's a Steve Jobs tribute, yeah.
John:
Oh, my word.
Marco:
Honestly, I thought it was excellent.
Marco:
They had to say something.
Marco:
If they're dedicating the theater to him and naming it after him, they had to say something, and I think they did...
Marco:
a remarkably good job of it.
Marco:
Tim delivered it really well.
Marco:
It was very well designed and written.
Marco:
It was really great to hear a recording of Steve saying some stuff.
Marco:
And honestly, I did not recognize that quote.
Marco:
And I've heard it from other podcasters, didn't seem to know where it came from either.
Marco:
That was new to me.
Marco:
I remember it.
John:
I would have picked a different quote.
John:
He said so many things.
John:
That's the one I picked.
John:
But anyway, I remember it.
John:
I know we're supposed to be talking about how much we love Steve Jobs and miss him, but
John:
That particular quote reminds me of some of the some of the worst aspects of Steve Jobs, because it was about like how some people express their, you know, their love for humanity by making great things for people.
John:
Tinge with a little bit like I may not do nice things.
John:
but I make really cool hardware.
John:
Like as a, he said that before of like, you know, when people complain to him about, you know, doing things that are not nice or not giving you charity or whatever, he's like, my time is I would do more good for the world by making an awesome phone, which is,
John:
possibly true right but also a nice way for him to excuse himself from doing nice things and i was reminded of that aspect by that quote so i was like please pick a different one he's got so many good quotes don't pick the one that has a tiny touch of uh sort of
John:
rationalization baked right into it um but but it's clear that most important thing was not the quote or the pictures or anything like that it was that it's clear that tim still does miss him and had real emotion you know the reason that segment took longer than you would think is he paused a lot between talking and i you know i don't think that's an act like i think everybody really does miss steve jobs including tim probably every time he gets up on that stage and thinks boy steve would do this better than me which
John:
true he says he does fine but i'm just saying like like just like he said steve loved days like today like and he would have loved to announce this new phone everything right and just it's the worst time to think about it you know like that's what he lived for all the hard work and all the yelling at people and and driving everyone to be their best and everything and to get to go up there and to announce it he loved that
John:
And so them having to talk about, like, here we are in this theater, you know, that he would have loved the theater, he would have loved to announce these things, but instead it's us and we'll do the best we can.
Marco:
I think if you were not holding back tears during that segment, you're not wired up right.
Marco:
It was incredibly moving and very, very well done and very fitting to what they were doing and, you know, to the time and everything.
Marco:
I do agree with what Jason Snell said on Upgrade this week, which he was saying this is probably the last we're going to hear about Steve Rample for a long time.
Marco:
And I think that's probably right.
Marco:
He's been gone for a very long time.
Marco:
This was a very fitting time to pay him tribute in this way.
Marco:
But I wouldn't expect them to make a regular habit of it, even when doing events in this theater.
Marco:
But it was a really, really nice thing, and I'm glad they did it, and I'm glad they did it the way they did it.
John:
Yeah, and I think the important point, well, first of all, there never is an occasion to talk about Steve Jobs.
John:
Like, they can make one every single time they do anything they could, but they don't, right, to their credit.
John:
And the intro part that I thought was fitting was the explanation of, you know, not explaining why they're talking about him now, because obviously the theater is dedicated to him, it's got his name on it, like that's the time to do it, right?
John:
But also that enough time has passed
John:
that they're that uh apple and we all in the audience like can have some more perspective on it right so it's not it's not as fresh as it was i remember uh you had a good tweet mark i think what tim said on stage was that we can what was it look back uh not with sadness but with whatever what did he say do you remember the quote like celebration or something like that or yeah right and and you tweeted i'm still sad yeah just we are still sad but
John:
Like the idea is that a lot of time has passed and now hopefully we all have some more perspective and this is a good time to be able to at least try to shift a little bit from just like it being completely raw and just being just, you know, forgetting and then remembering, oh, that's right.
John:
He's gone.
John:
He's never going to do that thing that he does again to shifting towards hopefully fonder memories of just like it happened long enough ago that it is not.
John:
you know that it's scabbed over a little bit and then we can look back you know and think that you know that uh i don't know like i i think that was a it's not like putting a cap on it to say we're never gonna talk or think about him again but to say this is this is a milestone right especially since the whole apple park thing was one of the last big as they noted one of the last big projects that he uh undertook
John:
that he didn't get to ever see completed but he definitely knew you know had a vision for how it was supposed to go all right so it was you know it was as with most things apple it was very taste well i'm gonna say as of most example as we expect from apple but as occasionally they don't live up to it was very tasteful like if you think of the intro videos they've had at other times sometimes they're a little bit goofy sometimes they miss the mark sometimes they hit the bad ones i think we just tend to forget but if we if we search our memories we can remember a lot of
John:
uh, opening videos that are like, I roll, whatever, take, get us the announcements.
John:
This was tastefully done.
John:
Um, and it was nice.
Casey:
That it was the right amount of time.
Casey:
It was the right timing and the right amount of time.
Casey:
It was long enough that it was taken seriously.
Casey:
I don't remember hearing it, but I saw widely reported that they told the people in the audience, like, hey, shut off your laptops and pay attention for a minute, would you please?
Casey:
I don't know how they phrased it, but that was basically the message.
Casey:
And I watched bits and pieces of the keynote again over the last 24 hours and
Casey:
And if you look, there were a couple of people with like phones or laptops open.
Casey:
But generally speaking, that theater was completely dark for that entire segment.
Casey:
And I thought that that was, you know, tastefully done.
Casey:
And I'm glad that the press actually listened because, you know, if we remember the turn off your Wi-Fi moment from years ago.
John:
Jobs would have yelled at them and said, he said, close your laptops.
John:
It's going to ruin the effect of the just welcome to the Steve Jobs Theater on a black background.
John:
Don't you understand?
John:
Look at the black levels on this projector.
John:
It's a completely dark room and white text and the background totally blends in, but we can't see it because you have your stupid laptops open.
Marco:
Anyway, so after that, so they moved on to the Apple Park intro video a little bit.
Marco:
Apple Park looks like an amazing building and an amazing campus and an amazing place to be.
Marco:
However, there's kind of this reality of it, which is like them showing off like, here's this amazing building we've made for ourselves that you're never going to see.
Marco:
Yeah, look at us, look at how smart we are.
John:
That's a visitor center for you.
Marco:
Yeah, there's a visitor center that's not really the main building or that's not really what you want to see.
Marco:
You're not going to be allowed near like the cool thing.
Marco:
You're not going to be in the big ring.
Marco:
You're not going to be in the courtyard in the middle of the big ring.
Marco:
Only the press will ever see the Steve Jobs Theater, probably.
Marco:
So it's just like, I don't know.
Marco:
It has this kind of, it's like, look at this cool thing we made.
Marco:
You can't have it.
Marco:
Like, I would love to see Apple Park.
John:
You could go there and walk around.
John:
I mean, you can't go into people's office pass where you have to badge through stuff.
John:
But I'm sure you could walk into the middle of the thing and go to the Cafe Max or whatever they're going to call it at this place.
John:
I bet I can't.
John:
You want to bet?
John:
I think you can.
Casey:
Yeah, okay.
Casey:
I don't think that's the case.
John:
You've got to get some Apple employee to escort you.
John:
It's less on Earth than Google where you have to print out yourself a little badge.
John:
You don't even have to do that at Apple.
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
I'm pretty sure we needed badges.
Casey:
I'm trying to remember when we went back or when we went there.
Casey:
I think you need stickers.
Casey:
I mean, that's what I meant.
Casey:
But, yeah, I think without an escort, you don't see squat.
Casey:
Like, you certainly didn't see squat at Infinite Loop.
John:
But if you just want to go through the food place into the middle of the ring where the trees are, I think you can pull that off.
Marco:
Yeah, I would love that.
Marco:
But even that is nearly impossible for anybody to actually do.
John:
Just get a friend at Apple, dude.
Marco:
Anyway.
Casey:
Oh, yes, because everyone has friends at Apple.
John:
All of us have friends at Apple on this show.
Casey:
The three of us do.
Marco:
So I visited Infinite Loop I think about four or five times now.
Marco:
I've been actually brought through and gone to Cafe Max one time.
Marco:
That's like once I've actually gone into the building.
Marco:
And not even really into the... I just walked through the building to get to the food court one time.
John:
So on the Apple Park thing, I remain unconvinced by the...
John:
utility of apple park it is unquestionably a beautiful place uh the buildings are beautiful as sort of works of art the views from and of the buildings are beautiful but i don't know if
John:
the buildings are good places to do the things they're designed for you to do is it a good place to work is it a good place to commute to is it a good place to i mean you can ask the press was it a good place to have a press event it seems like mostly pulled that off um yeah although you know because it's purpose built for that i would hope so like but there's the bar is low there because if you try to do it in like an actual old theater that's not designed to have a huge amount of press in it
John:
You know, you fill theaters with an audience and a small amount of press.
John:
You don't fill an actual theater like the Billy Graham Theater with, you know, giant amounts of press that every single person in the audience is there because they're reporting on something.
John:
So hopefully this fulfills that purpose.
John:
But even there, like...
John:
the the the top part of this building as amazing as it is to see a giant glass cylinder with a big hat on it you're like how is that big thing holding up there is it gonna collapse and kill us how do they get the wires up to the lights oh it must be these little skinny it's like a magic trick right um little spinning elevator and the cool stairs that are like the ones from the regent street store in london and all the things that you recognize from apple retail
John:
it's so empty of things like where are the garbage cans and, and the, and the bathrooms and the, you know, someplace to get a drink of water and something to sit down on.
John:
And it's like, well, those are outside and we bring them in and rent and have rentals and there are bathrooms there and you can get to them.
John:
And, but it's just, I don't know.
John:
I look at it and I think of it more as a beautiful sculpture and less as a functional place for people to do a thing.
John:
Um, but yeah,
John:
The theater, I think, can't afford to be weird, kind of like the Sydney Opera House, like it is itself a theatrical thing.
John:
The rest of Apple Park is still, you know, nobody knows.
John:
We'll have to wait until everybody moves in and then we can all talk to our Apple friends we were just talking about and say, what's it like?
John:
What's it like to work there?
John:
Is it better or worse than the weird 80s infinite loop canvas?
John:
uh you know is it better or worse than than google or whatever other place that you might have worked um so i remain slightly dubious about the utility of alba park as a place to work but uh certainly looks cool in pictures and none of us have to work there so we can just enjoy it in that way i mean probably as as the answer is so often with modern johnny i've creations probably the answer to all your practical needs is either wireless or dongles
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Get a dongle to put your garbage in.
Casey:
Mm-hmm.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
The AR installation looked pretty neat, though.
Casey:
I mean, it's totally like – I can't think of the word I'm looking for, but it's like, oh, of course you have to have an AR installation.
Casey:
But it did look cool.
Casey:
Like, you know, if you didn't see the video, it looks like they did almost like a monochrome 3D display.
Casey:
Monochrome also isn't the best word for it, but like a very, very blank-looking 3D display that somewhere, I guess, at the visitor center –
Casey:
And then you can take your like iPad or iPhone or whatever and hold it up to this 3D miniature of the park of Apple Park.
Casey:
And it will show you like the full res, you know, all the trees, all the happy trees everywhere and everything.
Casey:
And here's here's where here's where all the airflow is because people care about that.
Casey:
But it does look clever and neat use of AR.
Casey:
And speaking of airflow and things like that, apparently the whole building is 100% renewable energy, which is pretty cool because I'd like my kids, soon-to-be kids, to be able to, I don't know, have a planet to live on after I'm dead.
Casey:
So that's kind of neat, especially since it is huge.
Casey:
But yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
There was a lot of...
Casey:
And especially around Apple Park, there was a fair dose of self-congratulation, which I think some of that is to be expected.
Casey:
I think it ran a little bit long for my taste, but, you know, it's their event, not mine.
Casey:
So they can do what they want.
John:
Yeah, I think the Apple Park and the Steve Jobs thing, fine, right?
John:
But then when they went into the retail thing, which is the next segment, I started to think, all right, get on with it.
John:
You're allowed a certain amount of introductory material, right?
John:
But, you know, I mean, maybe it's just because I'm not that interested in retail, or maybe because it didn't seem like it fit in the event, because this is supposed to be an event about products, and the reason you get to talk about Jobs and Apple Park is because that's the venue and it's the introduction of it, but
John:
Retail, you could talk about any time.
John:
And I confess I mostly zoned out.
John:
And when I rewatched it, I didn't bother watching that segment again.
John:
Did they announce anything new or say anything that made it worth the amount of time that it took in this presentation?
Casey:
Of course they did.
Casey:
They did?
Casey:
Yes, they're not Apple stores anymore.
Casey:
Are they town centers?
Casey:
Town centers, indeed.
Casey:
Wow.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'd block this out.
John:
I'd block out the segment where they tried to redefine vocabulary.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
The problem with this whole segment is that it was full of retail jargon and the way that their internal initiatives are probably talking about these things.
Marco:
But there's a fundamental mismatch between how they talk about this to themselves and what we care about as the customers.
Marco:
And I don't think they respected that difference or understood that difference for this segment.
Marco:
And this is not the first time they've made that mistake.
Marco:
This is actually one of the...
Marco:
major criticisms I have of generally Tim Cook's presentations about things is that it seems like they often blur the line or don't find the right balance between internal language and external language and external concerns.
Casey:
Would you say that your customer sat is not exactly where you wish it was?
Casey:
Oh, it's blow away.
Marco:
So the whole thing with the store is Angela Ahrens is going through telling how they're going to have all these great events and they're making all these atriums and forums and theaters.
Marco:
And that's interesting.
Marco:
But what people want out of the Apple Store experience that we have today...
John:
In and out of the Genius Bar appointment in a reasonable amount of time.
Casey:
And nowhere to line up.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
What people want is literally shorter Genius Bar weights and make it easier to get appointments.
Marco:
In general, Apple stores are overcrowded and there's a huge burden on the staff that's there.
Marco:
So we need more of them probably and they need to have more staff.
Marco:
and i don't think people care if they're waiting for an hour in you know standing to a table somewhere or in something called a forum with a couple plants in it like that's nice and i'm glad they're doing things like that for their own sake but we the customers like that doesn't really solve a problem we have and the stores have real problems that seem to not be getting solved so it's hard to enjoy a segment like this
Marco:
When it's not solving the problems we really have and also full of this crazy jargon that we don't care about and that's really hard to pay attention to.
John:
I think the whole Apple retail thing is another great example of success hides problems.
John:
It is important that the stores are nice.
John:
That is important.
John:
It's part of the mystique of Apple.
John:
It's part of the reason people are excited to go there and see the products that are on the tables.
John:
And like, you know, all that is important, not to say that it should just be like a giant, like, you know, supermarket with a million checkout lines to be for efficiency.
John:
Right.
John:
It has to be a nice place.
John:
But the success that's hiding the problems is the reason Apple retail is, you know, worth more money per square foot than any other retail place is because.
John:
They sell expensive, high margin products and they sell a lot of them because they're really good and people want them.
John:
Right.
John:
That's it.
John:
Like you have a store with products that people want presented nicely in good locations and your margins on those products are good.
John:
And.
John:
That gives you this store that people just want to go to and throw huge wads of money at you constantly, like over and over again.
John:
People are crowding in the stores and you take all that success and you're like, we should make nicer atriums and have a living wall and carve this thing out of stone and call things...
John:
you know, you're losing sight of the purpose of this.
John:
I mean, maybe they're not.
John:
Maybe this is for the external thing, but the purpose of the store is exchanging goods for money, right?
John:
People come in with money and they want stuff to come out.
John:
And again, it has to be nice, but...
John:
None of the stuff you're doing is making it more likely that people are going to come in and buy your things or making it so that you sell more of them per second.
John:
It seems like it's mostly a wash and you're just polishing the tables and rearranging the decor and
John:
and trying not to interrupt the flow of money.
John:
But certainly, if your goal was to, you know, either increase the satisfaction, then you'll be like, less wait times, more staff, so on and so forth.
John:
Or if you want to increase profits, then get people in and out faster.
John:
And that might also increase satisfaction.
John:
Nobody is clamoring for even nicer materials in an Apple store, and yet they're constantly, you know, redoing things.
John:
I'm not saying they shouldn't make them nice.
John:
They totally should.
John:
But, you know, that's...
John:
i don't know maybe maybe we're unique maybe we don't spend enough time in apple stores i think they're plenty nice i think that i think they are really nice and i think they do they should remodel them and refresh them periodically but all that money flowing in lets them sort of stick their head in the sand and say yeah sometimes it's frustrating but the money keeps coming in so let's you know try to get a new material for the floor
Casey:
Yeah, you know, this is a somewhat silly example, but I went for a run and I was putting my phone into my little fanny pack.
Casey:
Hi, Brits.
Casey:
Hello.
Casey:
Yikes.
Casey:
I was putting my phone into my fanny pack or whatever it's called.
Casey:
Not that.
Casey:
Yeah, well, it's called that here.
Casey:
It's not called that there.
Casey:
But anyway, bum bag.
Casey:
Thank you, Slate 401.
Casey:
That's what I was looking for.
Casey:
I think that's the British version.
Casey:
Anyway.
John:
Is that real?
Casey:
Bum bag?
Casey:
Yeah, I've heard that several times.
John:
It's not just a parody of fanny pack?
Casey:
I don't think so.
Casey:
I mean, they're all kind of parodies of themselves, but yes, that's true.
Marco:
All right.
Casey:
Anyway, I'm going to get through this, darn it.
Casey:
So I dropped my phone on the pavement, shattered my first iPhone.
Casey:
It's the first time I've done that since getting my 3GS way back when.
Casey:
I made it almost 3,000 days without shattering a phone.
Casey:
I've had some like nicks or scratches or what have you.
Marco:
Is that before or after the last Mac mini update?
Casey:
Ah, that's a good question.
Casey:
I'm not sure.
Casey:
But anyway, I went to schedule an appointment on Friday mornings.
Casey:
This was at like 6.45, 7 o'clock in the morning when I was done with my run.
Casey:
And there was some availability.
Casey:
There was like a hair of availability Friday and some availability Saturday.
Casey:
And I ended up having to wait until Sunday and just a couple of days out.
Casey:
You know, the times that I had were not available to me were not terribly convenient, which, yes, I understand that like, oh, I live very close to an Apple store.
Casey:
Don't be creepy.
Casey:
You know, if you live an hour or two away from an Apple store, it's much, much worse.
Casey:
So this could have been a whole lot worse.
Casey:
But if I had been able to schedule like a same day appointment for a convenient time for me, that would have been amazing.
Casey:
Instead, I was like, oh, I guess that's when I'll go in.
Casey:
And then when I got there, it was like, okay, wait 10, 15 minutes for somebody to come talk to you to just verify the fact that you, you have the phone you say you have, and then wait 10 or 15 minutes for somebody else to come and grab the phone and then wait the two hours to have the phone repaired.
Casey:
And yes, I understand that this is a first world problem to end all first world problems.
Casey:
But the point I'm bringing, the reason I bring all this up is because if I had had like a next day appointment and would have been in and out in an hour, which I think if the store was empty or perhaps more appropriately staffed than I could have been, that would have been amazing.
Casey:
And I wouldn't have stopped talking about that forever.
Casey:
But instead, it's like, oh, well, I guess I got to go to the Apple store.
Marco:
You mean you have to go to Apple?
Marco:
Today.
Marco:
You will be today at Apple today, going into their forum atrium to be in their genius groove.
Casey:
I'm actually glad you brought that up.
Casey:
I actually think I like Today at Apple.
Casey:
I think I like the name, and I think I like the premise.
Casey:
Will I ever do it?
Casey:
Probably not, but I like the idea.
Casey:
uh i even though i don't think it's for me i think it's a good idea and i actually really really like the name today at apple and and in the little video they showed you know they showed today at apple we're gonna i don't know do a photo walk today at apple we're gonna do sketching today at apple we're gonna do teacher tuesday which i also think is really awesome um so uh as much as i i want to poke fun and and i know you were joking but i want to poke fun at today at apple i i actually do enjoy that apple town center however get out of here with that nonsense it's terrible
John:
All right, now we've spent too much time on retail accurately reflecting the presentation.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Personally, I prefer the pocketability of the original one because the shape is a little bit different, but they're both amazing.
Marco:
You can't go wrong with either one.
Marco:
They're both incredibly light, incredibly comfortable, and I highly recommend them.
Marco:
So go to atp.aftershocks.com to learn more about the Trex Air and the Trex Titanium.
Marco:
Thank you very much to Aftershocks for sponsoring our show.
Oh.
Marco:
Next up was Apple Watch.
Marco:
It started out with some new medical initiatives around kind of continuous heart rate, not full-blown monitoring, but kind of like passive checks throughout the day for heart rate monitoring that can do new things like attempt to detect if your heart rate is elevated when it shouldn't be, like if you're not exercising regularly.
Marco:
And they also announced a new heart study that they're starting that will – the goal of which is to detect things like arrhythmias and AFib.
Marco:
And this is a really big deal.
Marco:
This is exactly the kind of awesome thing that I think the Jeff Williams-led health initiatives really get right.
Marco:
i really hope that this works out for them i'm very glad they're doing this they should they should be commended for doing this because this is potentially life-changing for a lot of people a lot of people so that's awesome well you have to opt into this the study though it's not i mean it'll be better when if it if everything works out i don't know what the regulatory situation is but can they just like build this in so you don't have to know anything you just put your apple watch on and then
John:
One day you get some kind of notification says, hey, we noticed something weird.
John:
Maybe you should contact somebody and, you know, whatever.
John:
Versus now where you have to download this app, sign up to be part of the study, probably sign a bunch of disclaimer things or whatever.
John:
So it's good for people who already know that they might be at risk for this type of thing to have monitoring.
John:
But no one, as far as I understand, this program is going to passively get the benefit of this program because it's still in the sort of, you know, experimental stage.
John:
So it's a start.
John:
It's a start.
Marco:
Yeah, and I'm pretty sure you'd have to opt in to being in the study and things like that.
John:
You'd have to download an app and everything.
Marco:
Yeah, but Apple has been building a framework to do these things for some time now, and to do it at quite immense scale, too.
Marco:
So that's why these are so important and why they're so impressive.
Marco:
That, you know, Apple's doing this at scale with pretty advanced resources at their fingertips here or at their wrist tips.
Marco:
And so there actually is potential to do pretty significant things here.
Casey:
Yeah, they were saying that, you know, I thought it was during this keynote that they said that, you know, a lot of medical studies are something like a thousand people.
Casey:
And this is potentially going to be like tens of thousands, if not more than that, which is really awesome.
Casey:
We also skipped a brief moment.
Casey:
What did you think of the introductory video for Apple Watch?
Casey:
This is not the cellular video, which comes later.
Casey:
oh yeah where they really have like the guy like reading his letter from his car crash and stuff yeah yeah yeah exactly my main complaint about that thing is that it was not clear to me whether the people in the video were actors or the actual people well it's funny you bring that up i wish i could it's like we planned this uh friend of the show kyle seth gray or kyle's the gray it was a relay listener and i i think he listens to this show i'm not sure so if so hi kyle but um
Casey:
But anyway, he's definitely a relay listener.
Casey:
And he was one of the people in the in the video.
Casey:
He was the one on the bike and the stationary bike.
Casey:
And so that is a real person that I have met and I have shaken his hand with my hand.
Casey:
And he is real.
Casey:
So, yeah, I don't.
Casey:
Maybe others were actors, but I'm pretty sure not.
Casey:
And and I feel like we saw something fly by that the guy in the elevator was also a relay listener.
John:
It's always kind of weird to me when, I mean, they do this all the time, but they enter a segment about a product.
John:
And especially with the Apple Watch, where the new one looks just like the old one, it takes a couple seconds to ramp up to say, they're just telling us how great their existing product is, which they tend not to do.
John:
Like, there wasn't a big segment about how great the iPhone 7 is before the iPhone 8 part, right?
John:
But it's like, let me just tell you about... And it was also about watchOS 4, and people love their Apple Watch, and sales are great, even though we're not going to tell you how many there are, but trust us, they're great.
John:
And then the video...
John:
And then, of course, the new Apple Watch on top of that.
John:
But it was almost like, again, a lot of time spent on something that is not the announcement of the new product.
John:
But, you know, I guess they feel like it's important to them to emphasize...
John:
the fact that the watch is a success, like in a way that they don't feel like they have to do for the phone.
John:
I don't know.
Casey:
That beats me, but I thought the video was good.
Casey:
And I think to come back to where, where we were before I interrupted, I really think this, this Apple heart study could be something extremely powerful.
Casey:
And I'm,
Casey:
I'm pleased to see them doing it.
Casey:
This is another example of Tim or whomever deciding that this is something that's important to Apple or to them personally and then eventually Apple.
Casey:
And so they're making it happen and really making some stark positive change.
Casey:
Or hopefully, we don't know yet, but I would assume that'll be the case.
Casey:
And that's really awesome.
Casey:
So then after that, unless there's something else we had here.
Marco:
Series 3.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
So Series 3, which is with LTE.
Marco:
Oh, optionally with LTE.
Casey:
That's a fair point.
Casey:
Fair point is optionally with LTE.
Casey:
This is pretty exciting.
Casey:
It sounds like it will be a completely separate, of course, connection to your particular cell phone carrier.
Casey:
You will share, however, the same phone number with your iPhone.
Casey:
And there's been a little bit of chatter about how that's working technically behind the scenes.
Casey:
But the net effect is if you run out of the house and your phone is at home and you go driving somewhere else or running or what have you.
Casey:
And then if you get a phone call, your watch and your phone will both simultaneously ring and you can answer on either one.
Casey:
And you can send text messages from either one, et cetera, et cetera, in a way that you can only do now if you're either connected to Wi-Fi in certain circumstances or connected via Bluetooth to your phone.
Casey:
And that's extremely cool.
Casey:
What's not cool is that at least in America, it seems that all the cell phone carriers or at least anyone who's talked about it yet is saying it's going to be $10 a month for a watch, which I think is preposterous.
Casey:
I don't know what it is.
Casey:
I don't know why I came to this conclusion.
John:
Because the watch is small and you pay more money for big things.
John:
No, I think you're right.
John:
I think you're right.
Marco:
Okay, I know that we are spoiled by modern cellular plans being amazing, but it's an entirely separate cellular data device that is only $10 a month to have on your plan.
Marco:
That's a good deal.
John:
No, it's not more data.
John:
They're selling you air like Woody Allen's father in that movie that I can't remember.
John:
They're not giving you more data.
John:
It doesn't cost them that much more money to have another device on their network.
John:
Trust me, they're making a huge amount of profit at an additional $10.
John:
No, I know.
Marco:
But compared to the industry and what they do and what we've always paid for, to have an entirely separately activated device for $10 a month is pretty good.
Casey:
I disagree.
John:
it's the same it's the same it's the same phone number i mean here's the problem the problem with all this stuff is that it's not we don't know what we should actually be paying for these things because so many telecom companies have not a monopoly but you have one or two reasonable choices the competition is not strong in this industry oh sure regulation is not you know so we don't know what this stuff would actually be worth with competition and we do know that in other parts of the world you get more data and faster speeds for less money so the general frustration with carriers and telecom in the u.s
John:
Underlies everything.
John:
And so it's hard to say, you know, what you're saying, the argument you have, Marco, is the relative thing.
John:
Like thing X costs this amount and thing Y costs way less proportionally.
John:
I'm getting another device and it's only $10, but it just feels like...
John:
It feels like the bad, the doomsday scenarios of the net neutrality things where it's like every new thing you want to have, they can charge you money for.
John:
The carriers have always been there and remain there.
John:
And now it's like, well, great, everything's going to have a cell connection and I have to get not nickel and dimed, but fived and tened for every single one of these new items that I add.
John:
It's untenable after a certain point, especially if it doesn't come with more data.
John:
right especially if it doesn't so i i you know we all hate carriers and we wish they did a better job at this point when the number of devices starts going up like this like we fast forward 10 15 years and everybody in the family who is an adolescent or adult has a watch a a phone a tablet and not a laptop because apple will never add cellular to it because they're evil um
John:
that's a that's a lot of damn devices and you start saying can i just pay a huge amount of money for my whole family and just be like a flat rate for a huge amount of data and not have to get additional money every time you know someone adds a new device but we're far from that so anyway it's not that bad ten dollars it seems reasonable for the kind of people who are going to buy an apple watch with cellular which is already a pretty expensive product as a companion to their already expensive phone so apple's right on the money in terms of
John:
you know, who this product is for and what they're willing to pay.
John:
We'll get to more of that later when we start getting into the phones.
John:
But, you know, it looks good.
Casey:
I agree with you, Marco, that getting this for free and John as well.
Casey:
But Marco, I think you were I think you thought I wanted this for free.
Casey:
I don't.
Casey:
I don't think that that a free additional connection to, in my case, AT&T's network is reasonable.
Casey:
I don't think that at all.
Casey:
This is different, for example, than tethering, where tethering is still only one connection to AT&T.
Casey:
And how I choose to blow through my data, to me, should be my choice.
Casey:
And I found it completely egregious when tethering was an additional fee years ago because it's still only one connection and it's still just my data.
Casey:
And in fact, in some ways, they should encourage tethering because then I'm going to blow through my data even quicker and then hypothetically pay them even more money.
Casey:
This is different in that I do think it should cost a non-zero amount of money to have an Apple Watch connected to your cell phone plan.
Casey:
The thing that bothers me, though, is that I don't think $10 a month is a reasonable cost.
Casey:
I think it should be half that.
Casey:
Now, how did I come to that conclusion?
Casey:
No freaking clue.
Casey:
I think it's what John alluded to earlier.
Casey:
The watch is physically small.
Casey:
The iPad is physically big.
Casey:
It should be less than the iPad.
Casey:
And I concede that really, if you put that on paper, it doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense.
Casey:
It just seems bonkers to me that something that really shouldn't necessarily be drawing that much data, and even if it was, it's still the same bucket of data.
Casey:
It's not like I'm getting more data for it.
Casey:
I just don't think that $10 a month is reasonable.
Casey:
I think $5 would have been the right answer, and I wouldn't have blinked an eye if it was $5 a month.
Casey:
But for $10 a month, that's making me go, I think I want cellular, but I'm not so sure.
Yeah.
Casey:
I don't know.
Marco:
You want cellular.
Marco:
Forget it.
Marco:
Okay, before I set you on fire, this kind of micro price anger is why app developers can't charge money for apps.
Marco:
But anyway, let's not do that now.
John:
Well, you're right.
John:
$10 a month.
John:
$5 a month even is great for apps.
John:
Anyway, here's the thing.
John:
The cost of this device to the carriers is network capacity.
John:
Because every device that is communicating one of those towers adds...
John:
In the grand scheme of things, even with Apple's, we have no idea how many they're selling.
John:
We know roughly how many they're selling in proportion to the number of cell phones that are on a cell network at any given time, and it is minuscule.
John:
So there is a capacity increase for connecting these watches, but it is small, and all pricing of cell data plans is in the realm of whatever carriers make up and or collude with each other for.
John:
There is no market pressure to lower prices because there are so few people, and...
John:
the only one who's hungry is always like the one with the terrible network where i think it was that sprint these days or whatever or t-mobile right um and even they you know pull prices essentially out of thin air so it's hard for us to know how much this stuff is worth you know other than like i said looking at the rest of the world and realizing we don't have it that great here so i don't know um but anyway if you're like if you're remotely on the fence get the cellular one like don't why would you even bother getting these phones like
John:
and not get the cellular.
John:
Unless you, if you were already looking at a series two and you'd never had any interest in cellular, then, you know, get the series through that cellular.
John:
But if you thought, I would really love to have a cellular thing, but that $10 a month is, you know, I mean, you know, just drop one of your streaming subscriptions.
John:
Like this is an expensive product.
John:
For your expensive phone.
Casey:
Well, but I might add a streaming subscription because it's stupid Apple Music, which we'll get to in a minute.
Marco:
It's cellular on your wrist.
Marco:
That's awesome.
Marco:
Pay the 10 bucks.
Marco:
Oh, it is awesome.
Marco:
That's incredible.
Marco:
What, like...
Marco:
Even for this year, even for this day and age, even for the wonderful technology that we have, that is still amazing.
Marco:
This is like the Louis C.K.
Marco:
sitting in a chair in the sky thing.
Marco:
How is this not amazing?
Marco:
I've seen some of the comments that are like, it's just a watch.
Marco:
No, it's not just a watch.
Marco:
It's a tiny little computer that lives on your wrist and can talk to anywhere in the world without any phone attacks to it now.
Marco:
That's incredible.
Marco:
That is awesome.
John:
Can I run overcast on it?
John:
Because that's really what I care about.
Marco:
Amen, brother.
Marco:
But that's a software limitation.
Marco:
That is not a hardware.
Marco:
And we'll get to that.
Marco:
Okay, let's talk about that now.
Marco:
So cellular on the watch, what is it actually good for?
Marco:
And the answer so far is the basics of lots of times we have talked about and other people have talked about, do you bring your phone with you with the watch?
Marco:
And when the Apple would add features like standalone music playback from the watch, like to a Bluetooth headset, or when they talked about adding SOS earlier this summer,
Marco:
A lot of us would ask ourselves, why would I not have my phone with me?
Marco:
Because a lot of people, even when they go out for exercising, they still bring their phone with them just in case there's an emergency or somebody has to reach them or they need help or whatever else.
Marco:
So there's a clear reason.
Marco:
for lots of people who who would otherwise take just the watch with them somewhere i would love to do that but haven't been doing that not because of anything about like the watches hardware or software but because it just didn't have cellular itself which i guess is hardware but ignore that for a second so
Marco:
So that was holding back a lot of people.
Marco:
And so I mentioned last week, in our predictions episode, and we had already heard the rumors last week about the cellular watch, because that was from the HomePod leak.
Marco:
But I discussed, the things I want in the watch are for it to be a smarter and nicer looking timepiece.
Marco:
But what most people use the watch for is exercise notifications.
Marco:
And that seems to be driving the sales.
Marco:
So what Apple's doing here is very smart in that way.
Marco:
It looks like they've done...
Marco:
Zero to make it a nicer looking, better, smarter timepiece.
Marco:
But this is a massive jump forward for making it an exercise and notifications device because now there are significant times when people would want to bring just the watch with them.
Marco:
And those are times for which people are buying or want to buy the Apple Watch.
Marco:
So that's exercise, that's going on the beach, that is certain types of travel and activities.
Marco:
Let's be honest, it's mostly exercise.
Marco:
But that's a big thing.
Marco:
A lot of runners want to run without having a phone strapped in some weird spot on their body or anything like that.
Marco:
It's a huge market.
Marco:
So this is awesome for that.
Marco:
Now, going beyond the phone call in an emergency scenario,
John:
i think one of the other things and they mentioned the apple music streaming that's cool you know that that should be fine i'm a little concerned about how that will affect battery life but you know it'll it's probably it's probably you're underplaying that i think that's like the most important thing because when you take it when you're running i think a lot of people bring their phones with them they say oh it's in case i fall down i need to call somebody but really they want to play their music from it and yeah you can play music from your watch now but it's a pain in the butt i think streaming music plus airpods is like the killer app that's
John:
cellular for people you're going to tell them oh i can make phone calls that won't make me feel better but i think it is all about 40 million songs on your wrist and airpods like that is the ultimate i want to run and listen to something that's why i think it should work with spotify and all the other services i have no idea if it does i hope it's not constrained to apple music and i agree with your concerns about the battery life and the streaming but that is the killer and that's they show that in the ad like look at me i get airpods and i got wrists it's the lightest weight way to listen to
John:
all the music in the world while you do some activity, while it also tracks your workout and your pulse and everything.
John:
That, I think, is the total package on this.
Casey:
Yeah, that's exactly right.
Casey:
And that's why a minute ago I alluded to, you know, I might need to get an Apple Music subscription.
Casey:
I am a diehard Spotify kind of guy.
Casey:
I love Spotify for reasons that are not interesting for right now.
Casey:
But the thought of being able to go for a run, like everything Marco just said, to be able to go for a run with just my AirPods and my watch is
Casey:
and not have to worry about dropping my phone, but more importantly, just carrying my darn phone.
Casey:
That sounds amazing.
Casey:
And if I twist my ankle or something like that, that I can call for help and get help from Aaron or whomever, that's amazing.
Casey:
And that is what I want.
Marco:
But Casey, all this amazingness, including having all the music in the world accessible via voice control on your little wrist computer that you can wear anywhere and have cellular coverage, is not worth 20 bucks a month, is it?
Casey:
It's not worth 20 bucks a month.
John:
He's not complaining about the price of the phone note.
John:
He's complaining about the price of the carrier.
John:
I know that he feels like he's already paying for, especially if he doesn't bring his phone.
John:
He's not having extra network capacity.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
But anyway, but the problem, though, but leaving all even all my whining convention aside about the price of the cellular part, you know, it could be that I'm actually in ten dollars to your point, Marco, ten dollars for the cellular, ten dollars for Apple Music.
Casey:
But and that's monthly, which adds up real fast.
Casey:
But all of this really comes down to, however,
Casey:
The thing that I most enjoy listening to when I go for a run is actually podcasts and the particular podcast client catcher, whatever of choice that I enjoy happens to be overcast.
Casey:
And all I want in the world now is to be able to leave my phone in my house, take my watch and my AirPods and listen to overcast from anywhere.
Marco:
That would be nice.
Casey:
Tell me Marco that you're going to make this happen.
Marco:
I'm trying, but I don't think I'm getting anywhere anytime soon.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
I'll leave it at that because I'm literally not getting anywhere yet.
Marco:
But I am trying.
Marco:
I told you, you know, I said when I removed that feature, I'm going to try to bring it back.
Marco:
I am trying to bring it back, but so far I haven't.
Marco:
But I'm not going to stop trying.
Marco:
In fact, this has now lit a new fire under my butt because I really, really want this to be a thing that people can do, that I can do also.
Casey:
You know why that is, by the way, because I know why that is.
Casey:
And it has nothing to do with me or any of your customers.
Casey:
It has to do with your newfound obsession.
Casey:
And you don't want to bring your phone with you while you're riding your bike either, do you?
John:
Nope, sure don't.
John:
Shouldn't be listening to podcasts while you ride your bike.
Marco:
No, I actually don't.
Marco:
I more have been wanting this on dog walks, honestly.
Marco:
Biking, I'm still... And even though I don't... Fair enough, fair enough.
Marco:
Even though I'm not biking on the street, I'm biking on a trail.
Marco:
But even on the trail, I don't want to listen to things.
Marco:
I'm listening to the world around me because I'm scared out of my mind.
Marco:
But anyway, so also there are other reasons to want a cellular watch.
Marco:
So I thought of a couple.
Marco:
So obviously there's a lot of app potential here.
Marco:
The watch so far has been a pretty mediocre app platform, but this changes things quite a bit for a lot of different types of apps.
Marco:
So this could be a big thing.
Marco:
Right now, a lot of the watch has been held back by the fact that the apps on the watch are pretty slow compared to doing the same thing on your phone.
Marco:
But if now more people have more reason to not have their phone with them at all, and all of a sudden the watch is all they have with them, that opens up new potential for apps, new demand for apps.
Marco:
I also thought about things like, you know, so they mentioned in the keynote that if you leave your phone at home and if you bring just your watch with you, just your new Series 3 with LTE, that updates your location for fine friends tracking.
Casey:
Oh, yeah, that's right.
Casey:
That was really cool.
Marco:
Which is not only awesome for, like, exercisers and things, but also I thought, like, what if you wanted to track locations of your children and you didn't want to give them a phone?
Marco:
but you maybe could give them an Apple watch with LTE.
Marco:
Like, I know this is an awfully over-engineered solution to this problem, but I think that's actually, that's a potential use I thought of here.
John:
Give your children $300 watches.
John:
You know, I just bought a GPS tracker for my dog and it was much cheaper, so consider that if you want to track your children.
Marco:
It won't always be $300.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And that's less than a phone, by the way.
John:
The Apple one will always be.
John:
Well, $199.
Marco:
And $10 a month.
Marco:
That kills it for Casey.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
Anyway, so I do think this is pretty remarkable.
Marco:
And they did BS the size increase a little bit.
John:
um but oh i noticed that today yeah that was great judo there where the case is the same exactly the same side i felt like they they should have stopped there they shouldn't but they felt like they need to be honest and they said technically speaking the little thing that bumps out of the case is
John:
tiny bit bigger but the case they could have just said the case is the same size and left it because honestly it is bigger by a small amount and i bet nobody would notice but it because they're apple they have to cover their butts because it wasn't like a quarter millimeter like that that's a pretty small difference yeah two two sheets of paper they said it was almost nothing but to be fair if like samsung had pulled something like this we would be all well nobody would pay attention don't pay attention but because apple someone would say i put them next to each other and you could see two pieces of paper
John:
extra thickness no but it is i mean it is kind of bs though like just call it like you see it and say oh we made it infinitesimally smaller or bigger the most amazing thing i think i always have to remind myself of this when i look at the apple watch is that every time they talk about this like oh you know we essentially they've kept the watch the same size for many generations gotten a little bit thicker over time because the series two was thicker than the than the original series zero and this is thicker still so fine but in general it's the little airstream trailer with the bulge on the bottom
John:
then i remember it comes in two sizes and i think how the hell does the smaller one work they have to fit all the same stuff in there the only thing that is smaller is the screen so you can get a slightly smaller battery because you have a slightly smaller screen but everything else can't be doesn't shrink in power usage it's not like oh the small one has a cell radio that uses less power if they have a cell radio that use less power they use it in both of them so the small one is the miracle and maybe that also means the small one doesn't get as good battery life which is a bummer but
John:
that's always been the case the small one has always gotten noticeably worse battery life I know but I mean like does it scale linearly because now they add LTE oh it's still the same all day battery life blah blah is the small one even worse now because the battery must be so tiny in there and I don't know what the minimum battery size is to run any kind of
John:
sell radio to transmit to a radio tower that is potentially far away from you anyway uh yeah i'm reminded of that looking at the the models and oh yeah they make one that's like way smaller yeah it's pretty amazing what size what size does tina have i think she has a small one so yeah it's it's a thing she's gonna get one of these
John:
with lte yeah are you gonna grumble about paying ten dollars no i'm not i'm not gonna grumble i'm encouraging her to get it she uses it she uses it for the the intended purpose as shown in all of apple's ads so as long as they don't make a pokemon go app for it then everything will be fine
Casey:
You know, I wonder, I've heard through, you know, various reporting that the thing just, the Series 3 just feels a heck of a lot quicker, like opening apps and things like that.
Casey:
I kind of wonder, and something Marco said earlier made me think of this, if it doesn't have to like, so let's say, for example, I'm using Lyft for the first time in forever and I try to do it on my watch for whatever silly reason.
Casey:
It has to, if I understand things correctly anyway, it has to wake up the Lyft app on my phone or at the very least wake up the phone and say, hey, I'd like to use your Internet connection.
Casey:
But something has to get woken up on the phone and it needs to communicate with the phone, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
I wonder if.
Casey:
Not only, obviously, the processor is so much faster on the Series 3, but I wonder if just having its own connection to the rest of the world on these LTE models will also dramatically increase and improve performance and just make it feel a lot snappier, even leaving aside the tremendous gains in the processor.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, because with the watch, one of the reasons why the original watch was so unbearably slow is that the whole UI of apps was being driven effectively by the phone remotely over the Bluetooth connection.
Marco:
So every tap was basically going back and forth with the Bluetooth to the phone.
Marco:
And so everything they've done to make the watch more independent in both hardware and software...
Marco:
has had a noticeable increase of performance and responsiveness because anything you're doing to reduce those round trips is good.
Marco:
Now, the current watch, the Series 1 and 2, they were pretty fast, you know, relative to the first one, the Series 0.
Marco:
And I'll have a rant here in a second about these names.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
They could go over Wi-Fi if they wanted to, but they would frequently default to Bluetooth to the parent phone instead of making their own Wi-Fi connection for, I think, just power efficiency reasons.
Marco:
That Wi-Fi used a lot of power, so it was kind of like a last resort.
Marco:
The watch would attempt to use Bluetooth for as much as it could.
Marco:
And they made a few comments about the W2 indicating that it is not only much faster but much more power efficient for Wi-Fi and Bluetooth than the W1.
Marco:
So I'm hoping that the watch will be more aggressive at using its Wi-Fi and then when you're out using its cellular instead of just like...
Marco:
trying bluetooth first for everything to save power because that will make lots of things better if for instance i wanted to bring overcast back to the watch one of the big problems there was file transfer speeds and that's because most of the time it was going over bluetooth even when the devices would be plugged in they would still often use bluetooth to transfer the files that makes no sense to me but they would
Marco:
and and there was no way for me as a developer to say look this is a big file please for the love of god transferred over wi-fi the user is literally waiting for it right now and it's not being transferred over wi-fi like there's no way for me to do that in the api um so i'm hoping this will help push them in that direction having these new chips now before i forget about the naming here the first watch was called apple watch the second watch was called series one and two
Marco:
zero is zero index it's great for programmers yeah right and so is the fourth watch as they're introducing three now uh because series one and two had the same guts but series two was waterproofed basically and it but it was like the same chip inside like this most of the same internals so siri it was really like series one and series one waterproof like that that's what they probably should have called that
Marco:
Actually, they should have called them both Series 2 and just retconned the first one, Series 1.
Marco:
But instead, we have Series 0 unofficially called.
Marco:
We have the first one.
Marco:
Then we have Series 1 and 2 and 3 now.
Marco:
But Series 2 was discontinued because the new premium model is Series 3.
Marco:
So now we have Series 1 and Series 3.
Marco:
Now, the casual buyer will look at that and think Series 1 is 2 years old.
Marco:
when in fact it's only one year old and it's not two generations back it's one generation back and if you have an original apple watch and you're thinking about upgrading you're going to think the series one is the one you have so it's a very very confusing name now not the first confusing name in this event but the best thing is that the series three also comes without lte so it's like oh series three is the one with cellular like
John:
well yeah sort of right exactly like this these are just terrible names like yeah well the good thing is they all look the same like from people they're all lined up on the table they all look the same so i think the the stigma of getting the lesser thing it's like well they all look the same to me like they have a they got apple's website or something it has a big comparison thing like
John:
What do you want out of your watch?
John:
Do you care about cellular or do you not?
John:
Do you care about waterproofing or not?
John:
Do you care about GPS or do you not?
John:
Do you care about a red dot on the ground or do you not?
John:
By the way, can we talk about the red dot for a second?
Marco:
Now, I love watches.
Marco:
I love red.
Marco:
I even love red watches.
Marco:
Or red on watches, rather.
Marco:
I have a watch with red accents.
Marco:
It's wonderful.
Marco:
I do not think this red dot looks good on any color watch except maybe the white edition.
Marco:
on every single, and I haven't seen them in person yet, but in all the press photos and all the shop photos, I do not think this looks good.
Marco:
And again, I love red.
Marco:
Everything I own is red.
Marco:
I love watches.
Marco:
I love red on watches.
Marco:
This does not work for me.
John:
I think it works as long as all the rest of the colors are neutral.
John:
That's why you like the white one.
John:
Everything is neutral, and the only accent of color is the red.
John:
I mean, it doesn't clash.
John:
I think it looks fine.
John:
It looks okay.
John:
I don't mind it.
John:
But it really does limit your aesthetic choices when you've got the stupid red dot that you can't get rid of.
John:
I mean, maybe it is changeable.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Didn't they do this before with the edition where you have different crown colors when you bought the Hermes thing?
John:
Yes.
Marco:
well the hermes was always i think that was always black but but um with the original gold edition line that would have there was like if you bought the fancy little red one that would have the red dot also um tim cook was spotted wearing a watch with a red wearing a regular steel watch with a red dot on his crown at one of the one of the early events for the apple watch so it was kind of like oh he gets the special one with the red dot and even at the time i was like oh i want that but now that that's offered i'm like i think i think
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I don't think it looks good.
Marco:
Maybe it'll look better in person.
Marco:
But in the pictures on the Apple website, it does not look good.
John:
But it limits your choices.
John:
Because say you have a color scheme that clashes with red.
John:
Like you have a particular band that you want or like a body color.
John:
Like I want the gold aluminum with this color band.
John:
But the red clashes with it.
John:
So it's not great.
John:
Also, during the presentation, I was like, did they get rid of the stainless?
John:
Because that's the one that I like the best.
John:
That's the one that I have.
John:
Yeah, me too.
John:
I like that look the best.
John:
I don't like the aluminum at all.
John:
But it's still there.
John:
um they have limited choices i think i saw you can only get it with the milanese or with the white sport but like whatever the band they didn't change the size of they didn't change the band compatibility so if i was to get one of these which i'm not i would just get the stainless at tremendous expense and then not use the white things and use one of my other straps with it
Casey:
i i do not dig the red dot at all i think it's really terrible and and i don't know there there's a store online watchdots.com and they are not a sponsor i have no idea if their product is any good or not however i will seriously consider i'm i'm not kidding i i will consider putting a sticker over it something like completely you know it's not as simple as like so you can tell you have the fancy one
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
But yeah, so now – see, Marco, now I'm in $10 a month for the stupid cellular and then $10 a month potentially for Apple Music because it won't work with Spotify the way I want.
Casey:
And then $10 once for the stupid watch.
Casey:
I can't even get this out with a straight face.
John:
Yeah, you're not selling this.
John:
So before we leave the topic of the watch, which we should, I was trying to remember –
John:
It's like way back when we first talked about the watch.
John:
I don't remember if it was like after it was announced.
John:
It must have been after it was announced because before we had just had all sorts of wild ideas.
John:
But after the watch was announced, talking about it on one of the shows, and I remember being pretty vehement about the fact that even though what you see here is a watch that does the things that Apple says it does, this thing is going to have cellular.
John:
It's only a matter of time.
John:
And I thought I said by the fourth watch, maybe it will have cellular, but maybe I'm misremembering.
John:
But either way, like...
John:
When the watch was introduced, it was so clear that this thing is going to have cellular and live on its own.
John:
And the only reason it doesn't is because they literally could not do that.
John:
And I think they did it on a pretty good schedule.
John:
Like, it hasn't been that long since the watch was introduced, and they already got cellular into it.
John:
And they did that by doing something that we had previously described as very un-Apple-like, which is...
John:
Don't actually make it thinner year after year.
John:
Don't actually change the case.
John:
Keep everything gigantic, you know, airstream trailer on your wrist and reap the benefits of that by saying if we keep it the same size, we can get to where we know we're going, which is cell access on our wrist.
John:
Right.
John:
We can get there faster if they could have shrunk it.
John:
And kept similar functionality, but instead of shrinking it, what they did, let's add battery life, let's add GPS, let's add LT.
John:
Now, finally, in a couple years, in the next major revision, now they can shrink because there's probably not that much more stuff they're going to stick in there, like, you know, in terms of tech-wise, maybe some cameras, right?
John:
And maybe better microphones and speakers, but...
John:
Now, advancements in technologies don't have to be spent entirely on adding important features because they finally got the feature set that the watch always wanted to have.
John:
It's kind of like when the iPod left the nest and no longer needed to be connected to your Mac to initialize it or whatever.
John:
I think the phone, same thing.
John:
Didn't you have to hook up the phone to your Mac in the beginning, too?
John:
Yeah.
John:
all these devices want to be free of the tethers of their larger devices and the watch is finally free it is no longer you know i mean i guess it's still tied to your phone cell plan but it is as free as it can be in the world you can leave your phone at home go out with your watch and it does all the magic things that we always wanted it to do
Casey:
So really quick before we move off, Marco, are you going to buy one?
Casey:
And if so, is it going to be pretty much exclusively for testing or do you expect to use it from time to time?
Marco:
Both.
Marco:
I use the watch now fairly regularly, but I'm not wearing it all day every day.
Marco:
I prefer to take it when I'm, as I said earlier, when I'm going on dog walks or when I'm biking.
Marco:
I like to at least track my distance.
Marco:
and at least use it as a remote control for the Overcast app on my phone, even though I can't do local playback very well yet.
Marco:
Yeah, so I am going to buy this because I think I want to see what I can do as a developer with 3G on the watch, or LTE, excuse me, with LTE on the watch.
Casey:
Okay, so which one do you think you'll get?
Marco:
I'm probably going to get steel, and since I've been getting the polished steel for the last two watches, I think maybe this time I'll go black DLC steel.
Casey:
Oh, you fancy.
Casey:
That's one we all wanted way back when the first one came out, isn't it?
Marco:
Because I already have the black bracelet.
Marco:
I bought the bracelet separately.
Marco:
And I like the way the black bracelet looked with the contrast of the steel before.
Marco:
But now that I've become more of a watch nerd, the metal mismatch bothers me.
Marco:
Um, and I've been wearing it more on the rainbow, the rainbow sport band anyway.
Marco:
So, um, it's less of a problem, but, um, I want to try the black this time because, because I do like, like the, the link bracelet that Apple makes is one of the best link bracelets in the world ever.
Marco:
Like there, it doesn't have micro adjustment, which is unfortunate, but besides that one shortcoming, it's amazing.
Marco:
Like it's a really, really good bracelet.
Marco:
Uh, so I wouldn't mind getting more usage out of it.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
John, what's your plan?
John:
I'm not getting one because I never wear my watch, which is a shame.
John:
I would really like to have one.
John:
It seems cool, but no.
John:
well then you could i wouldn't wear it because i would love to be able to have a thing that's on my wrist that you know i wear i wear my apple watch like three times a year like when i'm traveling when i'm walking around city streets of wwc when i'm on vacation in london and for those times it's fun to do it but that the rest of the year i don't wear it sits on top of my dresser and if i got this new one i would wear it the same amount of time and and it would be cool to have cell access on my wrist but
John:
Maybe.
John:
Maybe I can be convinced if Overcast works on it.
John:
But I don't know what the context is.
John:
I would still bring my phone with me to work.
John:
Anyway, it's expensive.
John:
I'm not going to get it.
John:
Because the only one I want is the $600 steel one.
John:
And it's like, yeesh.
Marco:
And I would say, too, for anybody who might be waiting for Overcast before they get one, or might be buying one hoping for Overcast to work well on it.
Marco:
Don't hold your breath.
Marco:
Because I have not made any progress on that front yet, I can't tell you when I'll be able to re-add that feature, or even if I'll ever be able to re-add that feature.
Marco:
So don't make this decision for Overcast.
Marco:
Make this decision for other reasons now, and if down the road Overcast does end up getting the support again, by all means, reconsider it then.
Marco:
But
Marco:
That might be the next watch.
Marco:
I don't even know.
Marco:
I don't know when it's going to happen.
Casey:
I would absolutely love to get the gray ceramic case with the gray black sports band, but at $1,300, there's no freaking way that's happening.
Casey:
So instead, I will be getting the...
Casey:
So, instead, I believe I'm going to get the aluminum, which does not bother me at all.
Casey:
The aluminum one with, what is it, like the fog white or something along those lines.
Casey:
Basically, the default cellular sports, whatever, aluminum watch.
Casey:
And I will be getting one of those.
Casey:
Erin will likely be getting the same thing, but I don't think she's going to want anything to do with cellular, particularly once I explain to her it is a non-zero cost per month, even a dollar.
Casey:
She'd probably be like, oh, I don't need that.
Casey:
But yeah, that is my plan.
Casey:
So I will be waking up at three in the morning because the world has to revolve around California.
Casey:
And I'll be waking up at three in the morning to place my order for my two new Apple Watches.
Casey:
And that is just the beginning of me going broke this year.
Marco:
I will say also, though, if it was my primary watch that I wore most of or all of every day, that white ceramic I still think is one of the best looking options in the whole lineup, if not the best looking option.
Marco:
And especially if you're going to get the red dot, I would totally splurge for the white ceramic if it was my primary watch.
Casey:
That's a lot of money.
Casey:
Gosh, is that a lot of money?
Marco:
It is.
Marco:
It's stupid.
Marco:
But that's how watches work.
Marco:
When you like the way something looks, you're like, yes, set this money on fire.
Marco:
I need to have that on my wrist.
Marco:
So if you don't miss the extra money, the white ceramic is a pretty awesome option.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know.
Casey:
$400 for the, or I guess it would be $430 with the LTE.
Casey:
I don't have it in front of me.
Casey:
Something like that, though.
Casey:
Yeah, $430.
Casey:
So yeah, the silver aluminum case with fog sport band is what I intend to get.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
You can actually pull up your phone and just restore that file to your phone and view it right there.
Marco:
They also offer, obviously, the website for restoring.
Marco:
They also have a wonderful return by mail feature where you can have them overnight you a hard drive with your data on it.
Marco:
And if you just return the hard drive within a month, they don't charge you for it, which is pretty cool.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
That's
Marco:
I think they buy a lot of hard drives.
Marco:
If you're going to have cloud backup, which I highly suggest you do, because local backups like Time Machine or Disk Clones, those are good too.
Marco:
You should have those too.
Marco:
But an internet backup allows you to have off-site backups.
Marco:
So if something happens to your home where all of your local Disk Clones are, that could wipe them out too.
Marco:
But with Backblaze, you'd be covered from things like fire, floods, thefts, power surges, things that might damage any backup you have at your computer.
Marco:
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Marco:
Check it out today, backblaze.com slash ATP to get a free 15-day trial and see for yourself why I love it so much.
Marco:
Once again, backblaze.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Thank you so much to Backblaze for sponsoring our show once again.
Casey:
Now, we should move on to Apple TV.
Casey:
There's new Apple TV, 4K with HDR.
Casey:
There's still two storage tiers.
Casey:
The remote, which I won't mention out loud so I don't get flamed, really isn't that bad, is not changed with the exception of a raised loop around the menu button.
Casey:
Other than that, it's all basically the same old stuff.
Casey:
No USB-C ports.
Casey:
I don't think any of us really care that much, so let's move on.
Marco:
I cannot believe...
Marco:
Of all, okay, so similar to like, you know, when I mentioned earlier, like how like, you know, the one thing people want in an Apple retail store is like faster genius appointments and stuff.
Marco:
Like the one thing we want with the new Apple TV.
Marco:
That's not true.
Marco:
Is a better remote.
Marco:
Not all of us.
Marco:
A redesigned remote because this remote is terrible.
Marco:
And I would also say, I think high on the list of what people would want with the Apple TV, it would be lower entry price.
Marco:
And we got neither of those.
Marco:
The most insulting part is that they did change the remote.
Marco:
They made a change at all, but it appears that it's only different in that they added a white circle around the menu button.
Marco:
Maybe there's other internal changes.
Marco:
I don't think anybody knows yet.
Marco:
I hope there's more to it than that.
Marco:
But it is still a small, skinny rectangle that is symmetrical in most ways that you will still fall off your couch cushion because it has a smooth back.
Marco:
It will still slip between your couch cushion and get lost because it's tiny and thin.
Marco:
It is still too small for good ergonomics.
Marco:
It still relies on an imprecise, annoyingly accidentally inputted touchpad.
Marco:
It is still hard to tell which way is up in the dark.
Marco:
I don't understand how the people in charge at Apple could go through the trouble of changing the Apple TV at all, look at that remote, and decide, this is fine.
Marco:
We don't have to change this.
Marco:
Are they listening to anybody?
Marco:
To any customers?
Marco:
Does what we think matter at all?
Marco:
Have they lost their sense of taste for shipping that in the first place, and then two years later, however long it's been, shipping it almost identically again?
John:
I was reminded of when you mentioned talking about the remote.
John:
You started talking about the new remote we were going to get as if it was a done deal and it was just a question of what the new remote would be like.
John:
And I was feeling particularly snarky and I laughed and I said, wait a second, you think there's going to be a new remote?
John:
I am so upset to have been right.
John:
Because honestly, I thought there was going to be one too.
John:
But I was in a snarky mood of being like, oh, you think they're going to change the remote?
John:
We were all so confident.
John:
It's like, how could they not change it?
John:
Like you said, how could they not?
John:
It doesn't need that much.
John:
We need 4K, right?
John:
You know, update the hardware.
John:
They did gig Ethernet.
John:
Like, that was another big one in terms of hardware.
John:
Like, you got to do that.
John:
It's about time.
John:
It's 2017.
John:
I mean, come on.
John:
Right.
Marco:
We're celebrating that they finally upgraded the 10100 port...
John:
yeah yeah and then and then uh the new remote was that the only device in history that had a usbc port and a 10 100 ethernet port yeah probably yeah but but like yeah it just i don't they didn't have time to redo the remote so all they could do was it's this is basically the equivalent of the little bump in the imac puck mouse where it's like well
John:
We're going to design a new mouse eventually.
John:
In 2001, everyone will get an apology mouse at the Macworld Expo.
John:
But in the meantime, is there something we can do for the existing mouse to make it so that people can tell which end is up?
John:
How about we put a little divot?
John:
A little divot in the butt.
John:
And so this is like, I don't even know, having not seen one of these in person.
John:
Is the white ring even something that you can feel?
John:
Never mind that feeling around in the remote.
John:
I'm pretty sure it is.
John:
Feeling around in the remote is death because if you accidentally swipe the touchpad, then you have to remember the correct incantation to not cause the playhead to start playing in that position.
John:
Or you can just not touch it and put it down and say, don't touch it.
John:
It'll go away eventually and it won't accept my input.
John:
I hate their remote so much, and they need to fix it, and it's terrible.
Marco:
Honestly, I want to see Apple with new industrial design leadership.
Casey:
Oh, God, here we go.
Marco:
I want to see someone else designing these things.
Marco:
The current team is out of ideas and is prioritizing things that I don't think are fully in line with what customers actually want.
Marco:
Put someone else on these kinds of decisions because this needs editing.
Marco:
This needs new leadership.
Marco:
Nobody should look at that remote and say, that's so good, we should ship another one.
Casey:
I don't agree at all.
Casey:
So I've blown all credibility by somewhat seriously whining about a $10 a month fee.
Casey:
But the things that the three of us care about are not the things that most people care about.
Casey:
I personally don't really have a problem with the remote.
Casey:
Do I think it's stellar?
Casey:
No, I don't.
Casey:
Do I think it's amazing?
Casey:
No, I don't.
Casey:
Have I somehow stumbled into asking and answering my own questions?
Casey:
Yes, I have.
Casey:
So I got to get off this treadmill.
Casey:
But I mean, I'm not trying to say you're wrong by any means.
Casey:
I'm not saying that this is a shining example of good design, but it's functional and it works just fine for me.
Casey:
And sometimes I think it's upside...
Casey:
It's a low bar.
John:
It's a low bar.
John:
It should be better than it is.
John:
That's what we're saying.
Casey:
It should be, yes.
John:
It looks really good, right?
John:
But that's the only real thing that's got going for it.
John:
It's a bad remote, right?
John:
And we all have bad remotes in our life.
John:
And more importantly than it being a bad remote, I think the most important thing about this remote is that...
John:
It's difficult for people to use.
John:
Like, forget about tech nerds, people listening to tech podcasts, people who are like, you know, Apple enthusiasts who've been following the company forever, who care about the industrial design and everything.
John:
You give this remote to anybody, any plain old person off the street, anybody, and it is difficult for them to use successfully.
John:
They have accidental inputs.
John:
It's hard for them to swipe upward and right and left with their thumbs.
John:
It's hard to tell what's activated on the screen.
John:
It's not an easy remote to use in many ways.
John:
The five way was easier, even though it had a stupid circle that made it harder to tell when you were hitting up and down and left and right.
John:
And all of these things, all remotes are difficult to use.
John:
You've seen anybody using any kind of remote that difficult to use, but this remote in particular, I feel like does not have good usability in the old fashioned sense of the world in terms of how successful are people, how confident are they when using it?
John:
Or do they feel like it's a, it's a thing that they have to be careful touching because something could go wrong.
Um,
John:
I think people like us use this remote better than most people because we know all the nuances of how it works.
John:
We know how we have to approach it and how to work it.
John:
We have lots of experience swiping our fingers on things because we do it all day on our magic mice and on our iOS devices using our sophisticated gestures instead of just multitasking gestures and swiping from edge and all sorts of things that regular people don't know how to do because they don't care about this stuff that much.
John:
So I think...
John:
the this remote is more usable to us we're just complaining about it more because we're picky and we want more of apple i just think this is this is a this remote it falls down in in all ways as a to for what it's actually supposed to do and because we you know we in this podcast and we want apple to be you know the best at everything for like
John:
you get it wrong a couple of times, find, learn from your stakes, revise, do better.
John:
This was their chance to do better after a very long break.
John:
And they put a ring around the menu button.
John:
And so everyone is, everyone is angry.
John:
And I think, uh, justifiably so, but, uh,
Marco:
you know there's always i was gonna say there's always next year but there's always three years from now what annoys me so much about the apple tv is is not that it's worse than the competition the sad thing is that it's better than the competition but the but it really it could be so much better than it is it has always been an afterthought it has always been the lowest of low priorities over some over things like the mac mini i guess but like
Marco:
It could be so much better, and it's just so mediocre.
Marco:
And it seems like every time they do something new to it, either hardware or software, it's just two steps forward, one step back.
Marco:
Things about it are so frustrating.
Marco:
I think all three of us are heavy users of the Apple TV.
Marco:
For us, it is our only TV video source.
Marco:
The only things we ever do on our TV are Apple TV or the Switch.
Marco:
That's it.
Marco:
I just want this product to be so much better than it is.
Marco:
And I don't think my demands are that high for what I expect from a good product in this area.
Marco:
And it just fails to meet them so often.
Marco:
And it's very frustrating.
John:
So a couple more quickies before I move off of this because we do need to move off.
John:
One good thing about the Apple TV, aside from it being 4K and supporting HDR and all the HDR standards, is their announcement of their 4K media pricing, which is the same as HD and your HDs all get upgraded.
John:
So we always complain about Eddie Q's deal making or whatever, but this is a pretty damn good deal.
John:
Same price as HD is good and free upgrades of all your HD content is crazy good.
John:
I was really surprised by that.
John:
As the chat room just panned out, except for Disney, Asterix, yada, yada, yada.
John:
But if that deal is even remotely as real as it was announced on stage, that is a great deal for people.
John:
And it almost makes up for being locked into their ecosystem, being forced to use this remote too.
Marco:
or like i said you don't have to use your remote you can get another remote trained and blah blah anyway so that's good yeah that's awesome that like to you know to give them full credit on the apple tv like the 4k content deals with the exception of disney are awesome that is unexpected i am very very happy with that i'm even more happy about the 4k screensaver remaster i think that's your favorite feature and you get that comes for free
Marco:
Yeah, yeah.
Marco:
You don't have to pay for it.
Marco:
$10 a month for the screensaver, you'd pay it.
Marco:
I still don't know if I'm supposed to get the 32 or 64 gigabyte model, which for some reason still exists.
John:
I know people question that, but it's for games and for video caching.
John:
will your movie be cast on that like there's some automatic storage management the automatic storage management has an awareness of how much storage there is in the device and so if you want to have a higher chance of playing that movie or still being downloaded from the last time you played it three weeks ago get the 64 i'm getting the 64 that's what i'm getting it's 20 difference why are these two separate models that's that's two months of your watch what
Marco:
Or one one without music.
Marco:
I don't understand.
Marco:
It seems like when the Apple TV 4 came out, whenever it was, two, three years ago, the two big puzzling things about it were like, oh, why are there two different storage tiers?
Marco:
They never really explained why you'd need more storage.
Marco:
It's not really exposed to the user at all in the interface.
Marco:
And it just kind of seemed like, why are there two?
Marco:
Why does that exist?
Marco:
And then the other thing was why this remote sucks.
Marco:
And with this one, they fixed neither of those problems.
Marco:
They have not fixed their remote.
Marco:
And we still have two differently priced models.
Marco:
Although they're closer in price.
Marco:
I believe it was a $50 difference before.
Marco:
Now it's a $20 difference.
Marco:
The old one didn't get any cheaper.
Marco:
The new ones are more expensive.
Marco:
This is a theme of the Apple event.
Marco:
The new ones are more expensive...
Marco:
This is fine for people like me who are going to buy every Apple TV anyway because we use it so heavily.
Marco:
I don't see this really expanding their market much, though, because everyone else in the set-top box business like this is just killing them on price and features.
Marco:
Amazon and Roku have 4K boxes for $100 or less, and Apple's is now $180 for the small tier or $200 for the big one.
Marco:
The old one is still $150,000, where it launched two years ago.
Marco:
I don't understand why.
Marco:
I think that's a mistake.
Marco:
And whatever is causing them to keep the price high, even on the old low-end one, I got to imagine that's costing them market share.
Marco:
And I don't know if that calculus is right.
John:
The premium brand.
John:
I don't mind the pricing, especially in the grand scheme of things.
John:
The streaming services that you're going to pay for to watch on the thing are going to swamp the price of this device pretty quickly.
John:
But this is a catch-up device.
John:
There's a bunch of stories in the show notes for many weeks about people complaining how behind the Apple TV is.
John:
This is a catch-up device.
John:
It's catch-up on 4K.
John:
It's catch-up on all the other things they're adding.
John:
And maybe it's a little bit ahead in some areas in terms of the content deals or the 4K pricing or the live sports and live news.
John:
uh i'm not uh aware of what all the offerings are i guess you got youtube tv and a bunch of other stuff like that it's behind and on amazon video and youtube tv which apparently aren't uh still on this thing um but this is basically a ketchup product but it's a good ketchup product so i think they maintain their position they are the premium uh brand because they have fancy expensive hardware and their interface looks pretty nice and their remote looks nice as long as you don't touch it
John:
Uh, and people, people had a lot of content in, in, uh, in iTunes.
John:
And so this, this was the keep the lights on product and they did it.
John:
And, and I, and I liked the fact that they offered the big one because it's, this is what I always ask for, like make one,
John:
that is uh that has more stuff that's really expensive most people shouldn't buy it but if the people who care about it will buy it if there is some benefit and i think there is because every once in a while i will play a movie that the kids watched three weeks ago and it's gone and has to redownload and if the network is wonky or if itunes is wonky it'll spin for a while and i would rather just have it play it would be great if i could actually pin movies to the thing and say just keep it on here but anyway um so i'm getting this uh
John:
We do have to move on, but two quick questions for the people out there listening.
John:
Does this have a fan?
John:
I asked people.
John:
No one told me.
John:
It has holes in the bottom of it.
John:
The other one didn't have, but those could just be for passive cooling.
John:
I have no idea.
John:
I would love to know if this thing has a fan in it.
John:
If it does, I suspect it'll be as quiet as the one in the tower airport base station, which is so quiet.
John:
I literally cannot hear it unless I put my ear up to it.
John:
I'm just curious if it's a fan.
John:
Probably not, because it's the same chip as an iPad, and this is bigger than an iPad, but who knows.
John:
And then the other question is, does this do 24 frames per second cadence?
John:
Can it show 24 frames per second video where it shows each of the 24 frames for the same amount of time?
John:
which is what you need to do to show a movie shot in 24 frames per second without screwing it up.
John:
And no Apple TV that has existed before could do this, except for maybe the one that ran Mac OS X Tiger.
John:
That could probably do it.
John:
I forget.
John:
I don't know what the video output was like on that.
John:
But anyway, none of the little black pucks can show 24 frames per second video showing each of the frames for an equal amount of time.
John:
I don't know if this one can either.
John:
I asked a bunch of people.
John:
I got no answer.
John:
So next week, Apple people who work on Apple TV, tell me, 24 frames per second cadence, and is there a fan?
Casey:
So you said both of you guys are going to be getting one?
John:
Yep.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
Even though, do both of you have 4K TVs or neither of you?
Marco:
I don't.
Marco:
I do, and I'm getting it for that reason.
Marco:
But I'm also really interested to see how fast that new CPU is.
Marco:
The current Apple TV is kind of inexplicably slow during some common interactions that I have.
Marco:
So any CPU speed improvement would be welcome if that isn't the bottleneck, if it's not some kind of weird software thing.
Marco:
um and that and going from the a was it the a8 in the current one um going from that whatever it is to the a10x that's a pretty big jump um they have they have really spec this new one well um i still don't know why it comes in two storage capacities that are 20 different and why the old one is not cheaper but they have spec this one well so uh so i i hope i hope it's a lot faster
Marco:
So I would say even if you don't have a 4K TV, it might be worth it for some people just for that.
Marco:
Also, because the old one didn't get cheaper, it's still $150, and this one's $180, just get this one for future-proofing.
Marco:
If you're buying new today, if you already have a 4th gen, maybe the upgrade is a bit of an iffy question if you don't have a 4K TV.
Marco:
But if you're buying a new one, get the 4K one because it'll be probably useful for longer.
John:
and so john why are you getting it then just because it's better yeah it's better it's faster like it's faster it's gonna slot right in the best thing with the apple tv with the internal power supply is when i get new ones i don't even have to go back in the tv yep and unplug a bunch of crap you just pull it out and plug it right back into all the same cables
John:
oh yeah mine's still plugged into a ps3 power cable i don't even know what power cables are it's just the ones that are attached to the thing uh i mean i don't recommend people get one if you have the old one and it works fine for your thing this and you don't have a 4k tv there's no reason to get it that's me but i'm totally gonna get and i i almost that's one of the other reasons i buy the big one is because i want apple to keep improving this product and by buying the most expensive one i'm trying to encourage them with my money please keep keep going take another take another shot at it try again
Marco:
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Casey:
All right, so iPhone 8.
Casey:
Big changes are glass back with better glass, supposedly, although I feel like we've heard that almost every year.
Marco:
And that should be great for grippability, too.
Marco:
The reason that I like the Jet Black so much is that the back kind of feels like glass, so it's very tacky and grippy on my fingers without using a case.
Marco:
So having glass backs on that, that's a pretty big deal.
John:
Like I tweeted, it's jet black but without the scratches because glass is very resistant to scratch compared to whatever the hell the jet black thing is made out of.
John:
I don't know.
John:
Some kind of chalkboard material.
John:
So, yeah, it's all the benefits of jet black without the downsides.
John:
Speaking of... I wish I could look these things up in my past.
John:
I've got to use the podcast search.
John:
But back when...
John:
the iphone 4 came out and you know still my favorite physical iphone design glass front and back looked awesome uh but now you had a back that could shatter too and then the back shattered is not as big deal as the front shattering but people didn't like it it was cheap to replace the back cheapish you know because it's just a piece of glass but anyway after two generations without the 4 and the 4s uh i remember talking on some podcast maybe it was this one had to be this one or maybe someone was like apple's gonna come up with a new phone and you can bet it will not have a glass back
John:
And, of course, the 5 didn't have a glass back, and neither did the 5S, and neither did the 6, and neither did the 6S, and neither did the 7.
John:
But they found their way back to it because I think they like... I like that design.
John:
I love the 4 design with the glass front and back.
John:
It just had a couple of downsides.
John:
It took them this long.
John:
It took them, like, five phones, five whole years to say, can we get the glass back on this phone?
John:
And they went through all, like, the laser-welded mesh of copper and steel and blah, blah.
John:
Like, they...
John:
clearly like they wanted to go somewhere they went there and they backed off they regrouped and and they eventually got where they wanted to go again which is a glass back because there are so many vendors scratch proof it's good for grip you can make it look really pretty it's a radio transparent ish more so than metal right um you don't have that glass window like the fives had on the back for the radios and stuff like that so
John:
This iPhone 8, I was more impressed by the industrial design than I thought it would be because I had honestly, I hadn't been keeping up with the iPhone 8 rumors that had all been about the, you know, the edge to edge screen one and everything.
John:
I thought, yeah, these will just be like the sevens.
John:
It'll be fine.
John:
They'll have faster internals.
John:
I'm actually kind of excited about these because I think the physical design, despite being some almost the same dimensions.
John:
It's cool.
John:
It looks cool in pictures.
John:
And I think physical properties wise, it will be a better phone for people than the other phones that were also shaped like this.
John:
So I give the DA a pretty big thumbs up.
Marco:
Yeah, it's kind of unfortunate that it's going to be kind of buried in the news cycle for the most part and in the year and in the attention cycle by the iPhone X because it does look like a pretty good release.
Casey:
I was impressed by it, but of course I was only paying half attention to it because I was just like, yeah, okay, whatever, whatever, whatever.
Casey:
Get to the iPhone X, get to the iPhone X, get to the iPhone X, except not.
John:
I think you mean 10.
Casey:
Oh, no, no, no.
Casey:
I said that deliberately.
John:
We'll get there.
John:
We'll get there.
Casey:
Yeah, we're getting it.
Casey:
We're getting it.
Casey:
All right.
John:
Anyway, more good things about this one.
John:
So, I mean, we assume this would be the case, but it's worth reemphasizing.
John:
It's got the same chip as the fancy phone.
John:
It's not like it's got a lesser chip.
John:
This is not like, oh, this is last year's model, and it has the A with one lower A. It's got an A10.
John:
No, it's got an A11, and the A11 is nuts, as usual.
John:
People posted the benchmark showing it beating a 13-inch MacBook Pro in Geekbench benchmarks in both single and multi-core.
Marco:
Yeah, if those are real, by the way, that means that they have now beaten Casey's computer, which is awesome.
John:
Yeah, I mean, it's pretty amazing.
John:
And you get that in the 8.
John:
Like, you don't have to buy the fancy phone for that.
John:
It has wireless charging, which I didn't think it would have for differentiation purposes, but it does have it.
John:
And even though Apple's not ready with its charger thing, I love the fact that they use that Qi device.
John:
charging standard a friend of mine has that charging thing he bought wireless he bought like a wireless charging case for his iphone like you put like i forget which phone it was it was like a six or something you put this case in it and it wirelessly charged your iphone with this standard by like essentially having a case that makes it do the thing
John:
And it was like, oh, that's great, but you just bought yourself into a dead end because when Apple comes out with wireless charging, it sure as hell is not going to be this chi stuff.
John:
And when they came up with that slide, I'm like, they did it.
John:
They used someone else's standard because they recognized that they didn't have to fight that same battle they did with CarPlay.
John:
Because they're putting these chargers in cars and stuff now.
John:
And it's so hard to like...
John:
in the same way like the stupid 30 pin ipod port went to every hotel room and if you were another manufacturer and wanted to get in there it's like sorry we already picked the thing that we're going to put on our nightstands and it's this stupid thing um the chi charger am i pronouncing it right chi i believe that's right the chi chargers are are i don't know if they won the market but i've seen them around in a couple places i've read reports of them coming in cars or whatever and so apple getting on board with that but also finding a way to like add its own twist and influence the standard to charge multiple devices with that air power thing
John:
All that being on the quote-unquote lesser iPhone 8 makes this a pretty darn good phone.
John:
Like, the only reason people should, you know, the only reason we're all going to start ignoring it is because we're tech nerds and we care about all the stuff we're going to talk about for the iPhone X. But...
John:
This is an 8.
John:
It's one bigger than 7.
John:
It looks really cool.
John:
It has great features.
John:
If I had a friend or relative who was looking for a phone, I would not say, oh, just ignore the 8.
John:
I would ask them what they're looking for in a phone, and I think a lot of people should get the 8 instead of the 10, and I think it will be great for them.
John:
What's the other thing, Mark, are you talking about the camera?
John:
Did they add optical image stabilization for the zoomed-in one on this or only on the X?
Marco:
No, only on the X. But, I mean, like these are – so the camera, you know, we'll see how it is in practice.
Marco:
The specs sounded pretty good.
Marco:
It's still 12 megapixel.
Marco:
But, you know, they said it's an all-new sensor.
Marco:
you know more light better color etc you know kind of the usual suspects there which is awesome there's a whole bunch of like custom silicon sounding things or custom processing steps kind of things that they gave you know fun marketing names to or that they glossed over like they mentioned that um that you know like first of all i think it's interesting noting that the a11 bionic like they gave it a name the bionic afterwards like it was like the fusion made even less sense but whatever they want they want to have names they can have their names
Marco:
Yeah, but anyway, so they have a lot of names for these things now, but they also have pointed out in the presentation of a lot of these things that they have custom things.
Marco:
So they mentioned, first of all, this is a six-core chip.
Marco:
That's...
Marco:
awesome like that's and and i i have no idea you know what the performance characteristics of this will be but it seems like the answer is going to be fast um it does seem like there is a more than usual of a focus on power efficiency gains over straight performance gains um but it seems like they also got straight performance gains so that's pretty cool um again we'll see how this does in practice but i i have a
Marco:
One of the things that caught my attention is that they now say they have an Apple-designed GPU.
Marco:
The specs don't sound amazing at first.
Marco:
They said in the presentation that it is 30% faster than the A10's GPU.
Marco:
And for a GPU performance for an iPhone year-over-year, that actually isn't that amazing.
Marco:
They've had bigger gains before.
Marco:
They also said it can offer the same level of performance as the A10 at half the power as an alternative, I guess.
Marco:
So that's interesting.
Marco:
So again, focus on power efficiency.
Marco:
This is the first Apple-designed GPU core in there that I would expect, based on how they did when they took CPU core design in-house with the iPhone 5, where they had their first core, which is codenamed Swift, inconveniently now.
Marco:
It's very hard to search for that.
Marco:
But if you look at those performance graphs that they used to show but curiously didn't show this time, where it's had performance of the original iPhone and then this big ramp-up to performance of today's iPhone, there's a pretty noticeable acceleration in
Marco:
Right after the iPhone 5, that's when they took it in-house.
Marco:
So taking GPUs in-house as well, probably a significant long-term and will probably result in pretty impressive gains.
Marco:
Like they mentioned during the presentation that this is a custom design optimized for Metal 2 and Core ML, their APIs.
Marco:
And that's the kind of thing they can do when they take designs in-house.
Marco:
and when they can specialize the hardware to their software needs and they can do things like analyze every app in the app store and its performance characteristics and what kind of instructions it needs and what kind of optimization they need in practice and like they can do some really cool stuff with some really impressive performance gains when they take silicon design in-house they have in the past and they're doing more and more of that so we're going to see benefits of that you know continuing down the road that's pretty great
John:
For the GPU thing, we knew this was coming because of the whole imagination lawsuit or whatever thing like that.
John:
And that Apple had pre-announced, we're not going to be using your tech anymore.
John:
So they kind of telegraphed it themselves.
John:
But for the speed gain, it seems to me not having seen a floor plan.
John:
view of this chip that they spent their die space and transistors more on the six cores and the neural whatever thing and everything else and less on gpu because gpus honestly aside from what they said you know custom tailoring it to the apis that know they're going to get called and making sure it's efficient for those things and figuring out the right balance of execution units and stuff as they as they say gpus are embarrassingly parallel and essentially
John:
You can make them as fast as you want with, you know, just die space and power budget.
John:
Right.
John:
And so the iPads, obviously, they have more pixels to push and they have more die space and more power.
John:
And so it's the iPad GPUs that are the big monsters most of the time on the phone.
John:
You don't have as many pixels to push around and you just don't have the die space and the power to, you know, it's not like, oh, we couldn't make it.
John:
They could have made it 300% faster by just, you know, adding 10 times as many transistors and sucking up 10 times as much power.
John:
But like the trade-off they're picking is four tiny CPU cores, two big ones, the neural thing, the image processor, right?
John:
And then GPU, I think is like a distant third because as much as people are going to game on their phone,
John:
it's it's more important for the apple tv to have a good powerful gpu for gaming than it is for the phone the phone gpu is like i said it's like tertiary it's like primary and secondary is the the camera and image processing and the cpu and i'm not even sure what all of those should be in and then third is the gpu so i wouldn't worry about it i think this gpu gpu is not like oh it's not like swift where they're like
John:
the CPU, not the language, where it was just their first try and they weren't that good at it.
John:
I think they're already awesome at it, and this is just a trade-off they made, and the correct trade-off for the phone.
John:
And we haven't gotten to the battery life yet of the 10, but that's the weird thing about this being...
John:
the same system on a chip in both of them as far as we're aware like there's no differences but the whole neural processing thing for face id iphone 8 doesn't have face id it doesn't have the depth cameras doesn't have any of that stuff but i think it's still got the neural processing thingy in there otherwise they're making a custom version of it just for the iphone 8 that doesn't have that or it's like well it probably has animoji support
John:
uh i don't know anyway it's a little bit of weirdness there uh but i i think they're choosing to spend their transistors where they want and i think when you see the a11x you will see uh the graph uh continue just as it had before because they'll just have more room and more power
Casey:
The 32 gigs is gone.
Casey:
It's 64.
Casey:
And 128 is gone, right?
Casey:
Yep.
Marco:
And now they all cost more, too.
Marco:
It's 64, 256.
Marco:
Continuing the theme of price hikes throughout the line.
John:
So the explanation for that is that flash storage costs more money across all their products.
John:
And it does – well, I mean, that's the estimate.
John:
They gave it in their earnings call before where they're not going to be making up BS because they're held to that –
John:
statements there by the SEC and everything so they're basically saying hey our component costs have gone up and across the rest of the industry component costs have gone up and because of the magical capitalism they pass on that lack of savings to you the customer I mean they could have eaten it but they didn't and it explains why everything is more expensive why you know the price hikes across the board because all these things include lots of flash storage and especially because they got rid of the 128 so it's like
John:
64 as entry level, I think, is acceptable now.
John:
Finally, we can forget the days of like 16 top-tier devices of entry level.
John:
And the fact that it jumps all the way to 256, that's not as granular as you would want, but I like the fact that it doesn't top out at 128, which it hasn't for a few years now.
John:
So anyway, that's a typical Apple move.
John:
The big, big one costs you tons and tons of money, and even more money because of their component prices.
John:
What can you do?
John:
I think...
John:
I'm pretty happy with the storage choices here, because honestly, I think 64 is good for almost everybody.
John:
And if you feel like you want more, you should have the mostest, and that is 256.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, I don't love that they had to randomly increase prices across all their products, including the iPad Pro, weirdly.
John:
Yeah, well, that's what convinces you that it's component cost because that's not a strategic move.
John:
They don't want to have to do that, but they have to to maintain their margins.
Marco:
They're the only company that going into the holiday season increases their prices.
John:
I mean, we should look.
John:
I mean, if component cost is really arguing up for everybody, I think this will hit everybody.
John:
Maybe other companies are not in a position where they can pass that right on to the customers and say that they'll take it, but Apple is, and so they're doing it.
John:
yeah i i'm guessing apple's hand was not forced here i'm guessing they're doing it because they know they can also that's an important part of we're gonna go to the iphone 10 in a second but all these price increases like i don't know what the correct term for this is someone who's economics major who has read anything about it would know like pricey elasticity or whatever like bottom line is like if you charge your customers more if you increase the price of your product how much does the demand go down
John:
Right.
John:
And Apple has always been in this weird position, especially with its top and most popular products, where it's like a game of chicken against itself.
John:
It's like, if we add $100, how much fewer of these will we sell?
John:
And they add $100 and they sell more than like, hmm.
John:
did we just sell more but we would have sold even more if we hadn't increased the price and so they keep running this experiment if we had 50 will anybody mind right and they're learning for the most part especially on the high end they can keep creeping that price up and people i mean the mac pro is the perfect thing they don't even ask the question with the mac pro like how much can we charge this i don't know just like make up a number ten thousand dollars sure ship it like
John:
like whatever because they can they absolutely can and towards the top end of the iphone especially now that they have this ferrari of iphones they can just add a couple hundred bucks for that i mean they're already doing it with like oh you go up in storage and it's actually 100 bucks like they discover they can do that we're gonna add five dollar in component prices but the price the customers increase by a hundred dollars and we will keep it'll pocket the 95 like it is a great deal and so this you know the component price which i totally believe is a real thing
John:
They should have been pretty confident to say our component prices are going up.
John:
We can either take a hit in our margins or we can just increase our prices.
John:
And in fact, maybe we can increase our prices more than our component costs increase.
John:
So maybe our margins can actually increase.
John:
And so they're going to try it.
John:
And I think they're right.
John:
I think especially this will not deter customers.
John:
I don't.
John:
And it scares me because I'm like, if they doubled the price of the iPhone, how much would they sell half as many or would they sell like 20% fewer?
John:
It's scary how they toy with their demand.
John:
It's another way to keep people out of Apple stores.
John:
Just keep increasing the price of your products and become even more and more premium.
John:
I don't think this is a good long-term strategy.
John:
I think they should be cautious because you don't want to
John:
who leave a price umbrella as tim likes to say like leave the loan available to everybody else and it makes people angry even the people who can afford it as evidenced by all of us or casey and i anyway complaining about ten dollars a month we can both afford uh so it is a dangerous game but
John:
I think Apple is actually right that as the high end of their phones starts to get higher end, as I think it should because they should be expanding their line, having more diversity in their line and going for all the different things, they can add...
John:
Lots of money to the price.
John:
Because they have a product that people want, and it's really cool, and it's fancy.
John:
And, you know, just crank up the price and, you know, and sell people $100 case and $130 charging pad and just...
John:
yeah that's that's why they make all the money they're not they're not dumb and we we are willing to pay for it so i can't i can't unlike the ten dollars thing which i'm mad at the carriers i can't even be mad about this because unlike the carriers apple has products that people want and i want them and we're willing to pay for them and if we can't pay for them we will buy the lesser ones because they're still pretty cool
Casey:
But we have one more thing, gentlemen.
John:
Pretty appropriate use, I feel like.
John:
They save it.
John:
I don't think they should have retired it.
John:
I think it's fine for them to continue to use it.
John:
I think it is an homage, an honor.
John:
And they do save it for the important ones.
John:
And this was an important one.
Marco:
I agree.
Marco:
I think it is worth... They're allowed to use it if they use it sparingly and appropriately.
Marco:
And so far they have.
Casey:
Yeah, I agree.
Casey:
The iPhone X, which I did call X earlier deliberately because I still think it should be called X. I will not call it the iPhone X anymore.
Casey:
But my point earlier was that I was just waiting for this iPhone X to show up.
Casey:
And then sure enough, we are immediately told, no, no, no, it is not the iPhone X. It is the iPhone X.
John:
Wait, were you reading it?
John:
Were you in the Gruber camp where you thought they were actually going to pronounce that X is a 10?
John:
Or that X is an X, rather?
John:
I thought it was going to be X. So we saw the strings from the firmware, and that's the problem with all of us having read it before anyone ever said it, because we all read it in the leak, right?
John:
And there's no pronunciation guide in the leak, right?
John:
If the first time we had ever experienced this was on stage, I think there would have been a fighting chance, like not a big chance, honestly, but a better chance that
John:
we would all be saying it internally in our minds as 10 uh but now we had like a week or two of saying it in our heads as x and then they come out and say 10 and you know if i had to bet i would have bet against gruber i would you know i spent several years opening all my mac os 10 reviews by saying and by the way this is another reminder the x is pronounced 10 because no one knew what the hell mac os x was right so i had to
John:
say hey you're reading your view right up there there's an x i know you're probably reading this but just so you know it's 10 didn't work people still call it x there's nothing you can do couldn't stop them from calling in an eye touch you're not going to stop people from calling this iphone x or i watch yeah i will continue i will try to do 10 i will never to do 10
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
And all kidding aside, I will too.
Casey:
When I was saying it earlier, it was in the mindset of, you know, 20 minutes earlier in the keynote, I expected to see the iPhone X. But now we know it's the iPhone X. And if I slip up from now on, don't let me tell you it was deliberate because it isn't.
Casey:
But earlier that was deliberate.
Marco:
When they released one of the S models, I believe it was the 5S, and they gave it a lowercase s, and it just looked like the iPhone 5s, and nobody immediately, even in the initial reviews of it, everyone just capitalized the S because it was really weird without it.
Marco:
So everyone just went against Apple's wishes, and eventually I think Apple just kind of gave up, and it got normalized everywhere as a capital S.
Marco:
I think this is the kind of thing where I have a feeling a lot of people are going to call this the iPhone X. No matter how Apple says it, this is going to be the iPhone X to most people.
Marco:
And we're just going to have to deal with that.
Marco:
We're going to have to be okay with that because that's how it's going to be.
Marco:
Calling it X, yes, there is that history with Mac OS X, which everybody screwed up.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
That was such a smaller scale than this.
Marco:
The iPhone is so much bigger than the Mac ever was or will be that most people who are going to be calling it the iPhone X are probably not Mac owners.
John:
See, if the first time you hear the name of it is in an Apple store, the Apple people are going to say 10 and you won't even know that it's an X.
John:
If the first time you see it is an ad on TV, maybe you'll start saying, most people aren't reading about this in reviews like that.
John:
So percentage-wise, I think the breakdown will be about the same.
John:
It's just that the numbers are bigger.
John:
I mean, most people are just going to be calling it the new iPhone.
John:
Yeah.
John:
We had to be reminded by a listener, MT Walker.
John:
I had to be reminded anyway.
John:
that we had a show episode 172 the title of which was iphone space capital x do you remember that show no that discussion i didn't until i'd heard it so perhaps marco should click the link in the show notes and here are uh very we have discussion uh yes at 58 minutes and six seconds into episode 172 we will put the link to this in the show notes we have a discussion where we jokingly say that the next iphone should be 10 but it should be an x like a roman numeral
Marco:
And so here's the problem with this.
Marco:
If this was the only iPhone released this year, they could plausibly just call next year's 11 and be fine with it or move on.
John:
This one does not go to 11.
Marco:
So here's the problem.
Marco:
They have two iPhones that they released that are very similar in many of the specs, one of which is called 8 and one of which is called 10.
Marco:
So similar to the Watch Series 1 versus Series 3, this makes the 8 seem older than it really is.
Marco:
It really makes it hard to talk about these phones.
Marco:
We can't just say, like, oh, it's the 8 family or whatever else.
Marco:
So it...
Marco:
it makes there appear to be much more of a difference than there really is.
Marco:
That also is going to age badly if you start thinking about what might they do in the next couple years for the product naming.
Marco:
What are going to be the phones next year?
Marco:
9 and 11?
Marco:
This naming scheme, they're going to have to mess up the names again next year and it hurts their message this year of trying to make a lot of people still want to buy the 8s because it makes them sound even older than they are.
John:
That's why people thought they were all going to be called 8, but I think Apple's willing to eat that because most people will shop based on the product, not the name.
John:
And I think they have a plan in kind of the same way that when they went macOS, macOS 7.6, and then eventually macOS 8, which wasn't Copeland, even though it stole the name, and then they did macOS 9, and then they did macOS 10.
John:
with the roman numeral and that roman numeral did not ever change eventually it just went away and now we're just back to plain old mac os but we had a mac os 10 with names and version numbers and year after year after year of mac os 10 i someone uh being reminded again but someone sent me a link to my five years of os 10 review at ars technica
John:
And I mentioned starting the reviews with a section saying, what is macOS 10?
John:
So because people didn't know what it was and the pronunciation tips.
John:
And I noted that even Steve Jobs had said X instead of 10 on stage, like because, you know, he's a human being.
John:
And I also know that he said PowerBook instead of MacBook because MacBook is a gross name and he knows it, too.
John:
but it is a difficult name but it is a system that has been proven to work you just don't increase the number you never go to 11 you just do you just do the iphone 10 and uh this iphone 10 like
John:
they didn't lean on this as much as i thought they would but it is like two better than the eight right it's they didn't say oh and we skipped the nine and it's like living in the future and so on and so forth but that's the message that this is not just one better than the eight it's two better than the eight it is in the next generation of product they did say this is the in the same way the macbook air was the future of laptop this is the future of phones and it seems clear to me fast forward a couple of years
John:
They'll all be iPhone Xs.
John:
Like, they'll all be like this phone, right?
John:
The notch, the edge-to-edge screen, the physical design.
John:
And I don't think they're going to change the X, or they'll just drop it entirely.
John:
Like, this is what all future phones will look like eventually.
John:
Not this year, because the 8s look like the 7s.
John:
On an infinite timescale.
John:
No, but not infinite, like within a couple of years.
John:
As these things go down market...
John:
They're going to move this design down market because they said it themselves, this is the future of the phone, and they have a name because it uses a letter and not a number.
John:
And because people don't know how Roman numerals work after a certain point, I don't think there's a temptation to go Super Bowl LMVXIZ.
John:
There's no...
John:
There's no temptation to do that.
John:
So they either just keep the capital letter X or they just drop it entirely like they did in macOS.
John:
But it's an extensible naming scheme just about the time when the numbers are about to get unwieldy on iPhones.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, that makes sense.
Marco:
But the other thing to consider, though, is that... And this is one of the weirdnesses about that the line is now bifurcated, that...
Marco:
As you think about how the names scale, don't assume that the bifurcation of the line into the regular phone at the regular prices, plus $50, and the new phone that's $300 more or whatever, that's going to keep being there.
Marco:
They're not going to sell a phone for $1,200 massively this year and have a huge hit rate with that, and then next year say, let's make it cheaper.
Marco:
There's no way that's going to happen.
Marco:
Once they get used to selling phones at these two different price points and selling a ton of the higher one, they're not going to give up that profit in the future.
Marco:
But they're also not going to want to give up the market share of having the slightly less expensive ones also in the lineup at the base level.
Marco:
So they're going to keep having two lines for a long time.
John:
No, it's not going to be two lines.
John:
They're all going to look like that.
John:
They're just going to be three phones, three sizes.
John:
Wee, not so wee, and freaking huge.
Casey:
SNL references everywhere.
Casey:
Was that Austin Powers?
John:
That was SNL, right?
John:
Maybe it was Austin Powers.
John:
It was Mike Myers.
John:
Mike Myers doing his impression of an Irish gentleman.
John:
Scottish.
Casey:
Did you know, John, that if it's not Scottish, it's crap?
John:
Yes, I think it's the same thing.
John:
I hope it's Mike Myers.
John:
Anyway, the whole point is, yeah, the diversification of the iPhone line has not recontracted.
John:
They've only gone more.
John:
We've got the SE hanging out down there, which is kind of hanging out where the 5C was.
John:
And we got the little phone and the big phone, the 6 and the 6 Plus.
John:
And now we have this kind of in-betweeny size.
John:
and price range going down market with the se which is now like 350 or something like the cheapest iphone that has ever been in terms of just what the price is right and the most expensive one they're not going to give up that range i'm just saying tech wise right what distinguishes the 10 now is that it's got the edge edge screen it's got the notch uh you know it's it doesn't have a home button like it is a new phone design and apple said explicitly this is the future of the smartphone so within i think a couple years two three years
John:
They're going to come a September event, and all three or four, depending on how they deal with the SE, all three or four new phones are going to be notch-bearing, edge-to-edge, non-home button-having things.
John:
One of them is going to be $1,300, right?
John:
And one of them is going to be whatever the cheapest one here is, $400 or $500 or whatever.
John:
But that's what I mean.
John:
And once they all start being edge-to-edge, non-home button, notch-bearing, whatchamahoosies, you can name them as a family.
John:
You can market them as a family.
John:
It is a family that spans a range.
John:
And it will be more cohesive than it is now, where they show the family.
John:
You've got the SE design, and then the 6S and 7 and 8, and then you've got the 10.
John:
It's a little bit of a motley crew, but we're in transition.
John:
We're in transition the same way we were when we were transitioning to Retina, when we were transitioning to Touch ID.
John:
But, you know, things will flow downwards.
John:
And I have some confidence that...
John:
their product line will be much more coherent in a few more years, even if their names aren't necessarily, because let's be honest, Apple is a little bit weird with the names.
John:
There's a possibility.
John:
for a brighter future for naming but apple's really good at screwing it up so i don't put anything past them like as many people said this is the new iphone one year they're going to drop the 10 and just they're all going to be the new iphone and we're not going to have any way to talk about who knows but i'm sure it'll be fine so we knew a lot about this phone uh we didn't really acknowledge uh tonight that there was a tremendous leak of the ios 11 gm specifically for this phone among other things and
John:
uh steve in between the last show and now the leaks came so fast that we on our regular weekly schedule we missed an entire gigantic leak so uh we knew a lot of this we we certainly didn't know everything uh we didn't know that they were going to call this oled display super retina it's super such important things we didn't know on that point of like us not knowing everything i think we knew the most about this apple event than i've ever known about any apple event
John:
we had we had mock-ups of this phone that are indistinguishable on video from the actual real thing probably down to the millimeter perfect right we knew so much about the software from the software leak which has never happened before now that i'm you know like like i think a little bit about what would have been like in the era when people didn't pay attention to apple and apple didn't accidentally leak things and
John:
We saw this iPhone intro, and the 8 came out, and we're like, oh, the 8s are okay.
John:
They're pretty good.
John:
And then out of nowhere came this one more thing, and it was this phone.
John:
This show would have been 900 hours long, just about the 10.
John:
But luckily, we had months talking about the phone, and every single thing was...
John:
Even the late-breaking German leak about the swipe up for home button and all that stuff, even though it was phrased in kind of a wishy-washy way, it's pretty much on the money.
John:
That's what was there, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
So we knew so much.
John:
This is the new high-water mark for how much can you know about an Apple event before it happens.
John:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
We knew the Apple TV 4K deals.
Marco:
We had a picture of the watch.
John:
over the weekend from the software yep yep we had the picture of the red dot with the lte watch like oh man the new airpods right we had we had the face id face yeah oh god it was you know so this i mean it's it's a shame and apple will work on it um but honestly it's really fighting against the tide here like
John:
for products this popular for a company for so many people who are so motivated to find out this information it is a really herculean task to keep anything secret so that's why we should all concentrate entirely on the mac pro which no one will care enough about to leak and we will all be totally surprised
John:
Once again, the Mac Pro wins.
John:
Anyway, I'm sorry to interrupt you.
John:
You're gone, Casey.
John:
Back to the phone.
John:
I just want to contest the narrative that we didn't know much about this.
John:
We knew the most we have ever known.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
It was somewhat disappointing in that regard because we did know so much.
Casey:
But there were certainly some things that we didn't know.
Casey:
And so they pitched the Super Retina displays being brighter with wide color and better color accuracy and so on and so forth.
Casey:
Still is 3D Touch.
Casey:
A lot of people I saw on Twitter anyway asking, wait, what happened to 3D Touch?
Casey:
They never really talked about it.
Casey:
I'm actually looking at the keynote right now and there's a slide that says 3D Touch right on it.
Marco:
And they said it's now built into the display.
Marco:
I guess that's just like a construction detail about where it is mechanically.
John:
Yeah, I didn't quite understand that part.
John:
But anyway, it's still there.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
So now before we get into face ID, which we'll talk about momentarily, the home button is indeed gone.
Casey:
There's been a lot of back and forth as to whether or not the home button would be gone.
Casey:
It is gone.
Casey:
Well, I guess not after the leak, but until the leak, there was a lot of back and forth about the home button.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Uh, I noticed that when, um, it might've been, I think it was an iOS 11 beta.
Casey:
They got rid of the, uh, force press on the left edge of the screen to multitask.
Casey:
And I saw a few people who were really worked up about that.
Casey:
And now, as it turns out, you just swipe, not even force press, I don't believe, but just swipe the little, um, the little knuckle at the bottom that represents the like home grabby thing.
Casey:
What is the right term for this?
Casey:
I'm failing all over the place.
Marco:
Like a drag handle?
Marco:
Let's call it a gripper.
Marco:
It's not a question of where he grips it.
Marco:
Drag indicator?
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
A gripper.
Casey:
Let's go with gripper.
Casey:
So if you swipe laterally on the gripper, you can just swipe between apps.
Casey:
If you go halfway up, you can get into multitasking.
Casey:
If you go the whole way up, like I said, you're going back home.
Casey:
To get to notification center versus control center, it depends on where you're swiping from the top, which I'm not a tremendous fan of.
Casey:
I don't think that's going to be... Oh, that's the best.
Casey:
Honestly, this sounds awful.
John:
The swiping from the top?
Marco:
I think that is... This sounds like they're... So now the top has those two ears on each side of the notch.
Marco:
You basically pull down on the left ear for notification center.
Marco:
No, not the left.
Marco:
And you pull down the right ear for control center.
John:
the right ear is control center everything else is notifications including the middle so if you pull down from the middle like you normally do but like so basically this now puts control center in the hardest to reach corner of the phone if you hold your phone in your left hand oh yeah this is bad this is totally bad for people for lefties i totally admit that
Marco:
It's bad for everybody because reaching the top corners is already hard for almost anybody.
John:
The way I hold my phone, I think... I don't know.
John:
I'll have to see.
John:
This is the thing about the phone.
John:
We can all speculate on what it's going to be like, but as everyone who's designing software for it has said, it's really difficult to do anything until you physically get one of these in your hand.
John:
I have to say that I was super doubtful, cautious, worried about it based on the rumor, but seeing them use the home swipey thing...
John:
I started to believe.
John:
I started to believe two things.
John:
One, that the home swipey thing could be a thing I can get used to.
John:
I'm not sure about control center.
John:
I'll have to, like, I'm holding my phone now trying to see, can I get to that corner?
John:
Is it going to be?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I'm not quite sure what the deal is there, but Apple has some options.
John:
But the home swipey thing, certainly, that is something that we're going to use all the time, and I feel like that's going to be pulled off.
John:
And the second thing is, I think this phone, the iPhone X, and the presentation of it, worked its magic on me, at least, to the point where...
John:
i even just started thinking about my phone which has a section of the bottom which is not a screen and the only thing in that is a giant circle that i press to do something and it seems barbaric there's a section of like that that is just like this blank area of my phone with a with a button on it and even it's not like a button that moves anymore it is still like a button it's like what is that it's like it's like when you had to connect the track balls to pc laptops on the side with those little hooks right
John:
Like, Macs had trackballs built in where the trackpad is now, like, underneath the keyboard.
John:
And PCs, laptops were then made where the entire bottom part was keyboard from front to back, so they had no place to put a trackpad, so you could clip it on the side.
John:
And now I look at my phone, I'm like...
John:
this has this weird dead area appended to it where we have to put like a physical button that's like steam powered or something and it's just barbaric when the whole thing should be screened and i don't know maybe the screen will be terrible maybe i'll hate the gestures maybe i'll long for the button setting aside face id just in terms of like what it's like to go back home or to activate multi-asking or whatever
John:
But I came away from that keynote a pretty big believer in the correctness of the whole front of the phone being a screen and believing that pull up from the bottom or some kind of thing that is like I dedicate an entire edge of the screen to important common actions is better and requires less precision than finding that little button.
John:
again setting aside touch id setting aside face id just the part of like i'm using the home button to go home and do all the other stuff uh i i was pretty convinced i i went into this being skeptical that if i was going to buy a phone which i'm not this year whether or not i would get the fancy edge to edge one and i came out of it saying if i was buying a phone this year 100 i would get that one because i just i need to try that and i am now optimistic that that they're right about that they're right about this future that they're right about the fact that all screen is the way to go
John:
And we will look back on these phones that had these dead sections above and below that weren't screen and they will seem messed up.
Casey:
Now, for the record, I am all in on the swipe up home gesture thing.
Casey:
I think that's going to be great.
Casey:
I really honestly do.
Casey:
I think that's going to be way more convenient and it's going to be very natural, very fast.
Casey:
What I just don't entirely love is having to be more precise to get to notification center versus command or control center.
Casey:
And it may end up that it's no big deal at all.
Casey:
But I use Control Center constantly and I use Notification Center frequently.
Casey:
And so I'm a little worried, again, not having tried it, that that's going to be a little bit frustrating.
Casey:
But I am totally with you that I am all in on the all screen front.
Casey:
I am all in on the no home button.
Casey:
I am right there with you on that.
Casey:
Marco, what do you think?
Marco:
I'm basically with you, Casey.
Marco:
The swipe home button thing sounds totally fine.
Marco:
That seems sensible to me.
Marco:
If you're going to get rid of the home button, that seems like a pretty okay way to handle it.
Marco:
Having to pull down on the right ear to get to control center, I think that's a very hard place to reach no matter which hand you're holding your phone in.
Marco:
especially because this phone is now taller than the 7.
Marco:
So I think that's going to be a problem for a lot of people.
Marco:
Also, keep in mind when you're making size comparisons, which I'll get to in a minute.
Marco:
I have a lot to say about this, about the screen.
Marco:
But keep in mind that now because you aren't having that top and bottom chin, if you're thinking about whether certain parts of the screen are going to be reachable for you, keep in mind that you're actually going to have to reach higher on this one because you're reaching into the area that used to be the earpiece bar, the forehead area.
Marco:
So that's going to be a hard place to reach.
Marco:
Maybe one way to solve this, I haven't played with the software in the simulator yet, so maybe they can do this.
Marco:
Maybe there's some reason why they can't.
Marco:
But maybe a shortcut to Control Center could be if you do the home gesture swipe up when you're already at the home screen, maybe you can open up Control Center.
Marco:
I know that's not perfect, but having to pull down from that right ear area, that seems like it's going to be really hard to reach for something that people not only frequently use, but frequently use when they're one-handed.
Marco:
So that seems like something that needs to be fixed.
John:
On the iPad, remember, on iOS 11, they do the thing where you pull it from the bottom and the dock appears, but if you keep pulling, control spender appears.
John:
They kind of did the same thing on the phone, but now it's like if you pull it partway, you get multitasking, and if you keep pulling, it's home.
John:
I feel like they have some options if reachability turns out to be a concern.
John:
But the main thing I thought was really clever about control center is it is one instance where they made, you know, got some lemons, which is the notch, which I'll talk about a bit later.
John:
And they made lemonade, but it's like, well, we do have this notch here and it conveniently physically and prominently divides that bar into sections that are clearly understandable.
John:
Like,
John:
Imagine the status bar was just straight across and the top of the screen was flat.
John:
This kind of thing where it's like, well, you have to know that if you swipe down on the right-ish third of the single continuous thing, that it does a different thing than if you swipe down on the other two thirds.
John:
But because the notch is there...
John:
it gives them like essentially a button, like a physically outlined thing that says this place is different than the other place.
John:
And people can be forgiven for thinking that it's right ear versus left ear, but it's really right ear versus anything else in the entire bar is notifications, which lets people continue their muscle memory of swipe from the top.
John:
And you're right, Marco, that the top is topier than it used to be.
John:
So we'll see how that goes.
John:
But that still works because I don't know how many, I mean, I pull notification down from the center middle of my phone.
John:
And if you continue to do that, it will keep working.
John:
And since I can reach the center middle of my phone to get notifications, I feel I can probably get to the ear.
John:
I guess we'll all find out.
John:
But they do have – I feel like they have options because it is all screen.
John:
They've got a bunch of multiple edges.
John:
They could even somehow work it into the bottom, give them some time to work it out.
John:
But I'm mostly optimistic about how this is going to work, especially for poor people with a giant plus.
John:
I hope this phone brings people down from the ledge that is the plus.
Casey:
and says look you can get not as many pixels but more how do you feel about this is it better i don't know maybe it won't work people people like their giant phones well and so indeed on on that part though like wait hold on really really quickly yeah do you feel like this is going to be difficult for more novice users and maybe the answer is no novice users don't even really know what control center is or notification center for that matter but
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's just one of the things that I think was so great about the iPhone was that you always had a physical button to press when you needed to get out of jail, like you or you needed a parachute.
Casey:
Maybe it's a better analogy.
Casey:
And and I've noticed on Aaron's car, just bear with me on Aaron's car, which has a touch screen.
Casey:
There are there are occasions or certainly when we first got it, especially there were occasions when we got in some screen somewhere in the navigation and I was like, I have no idea where I am.
Casey:
And it was nice to be able to find I could see this physical button that I could just mash down on and I went back home.
Casey:
I'm probably I'm probably overblowing the issue here.
Casey:
And well, I don't even know that it's an issue, but I wonder I can't help but wonder if this is going to be difficult.
Casey:
So say you're like 70 or 80 year old, you know, grandparent who maybe is just now getting a an iPhone for the very first time.
Casey:
Like you need to explain to them, well, if you want to go home, you need to swipe up.
Casey:
But don't swipe up only an inch or so, because then you're going to multitask and you need to swipe all the way up.
Casey:
And where do you swipe from?
Casey:
Well, just from the bottom.
Casey:
Well, where on the bottom?
Casey:
Just from the bottom.
Casey:
You know what I mean?
Casey:
Like, I feel like this is...
Casey:
The home button was already so overloaded, where single tap does this except when it doesn't, double tap does that except when it doesn't, double touch but not tap is something else entirely, which, by the way, is going away.
Casey:
It just seems like there's a lot here, and I'm a little worried that for not us, it's going to be a little more challenging.
Casey:
But am I just being a big baby?
John:
Apple's doing the thing.
John:
Apple's doing something that I think is smart, where they have been shedding,
John:
the previous conventions as the bulk of their user pace has become more sophisticated because they grow up with phones or have used a lot of them so in the same way they got rid of slide to unlock and like oh now there's not an obvious thing with the giant arrow animated arrow saying slide here dummy to unlock your phone now the whole screen's thing but how will people tell can they see that subtle symbol people figured it out like i'm mostly convinced uh of the uh
John:
the fact that this will be successful by seeing uh people in the wider world use android phones which very often have basically soft buttons like buttons that don't press in but they're just symbols but you can press which are pretty awful i think uh because there's not even any sort of good haptic feedback in a lot of cases and lots of swipey gestures and i see people navigating these things with no problem they're just basically a minefield of touch sensitive uh
John:
icons and back buttons and home things and swipe gestures that are all different from phone to phone depending on what carrier crapware is on there and what version of android you're using a huge variety of fairly complicated swipes and you're right about it being difficult more difficult action than pressing a button and that is a problem but for the bulk of the market i think the market has become more sophisticated because they're spending more times with phones and appropriately phone vendors are
John:
But shedding the affordances that were required in the past to let people understand how the hell you use a phone that doesn't have a physical keyboard and doesn't have physical buttons and doesn't have number keys, that becomes less and less necessary.
John:
And so, you know, Apple is mostly catching up with the Android world in terms of how featureless and swipey the front of the phone is.
John:
and net net, I think it's, it's the right thing to do.
John:
It would be good if they could come up with some kind of better, more comfortable, safer system for people who have dog guilty with swipe gestures, which includes me a lot of the time.
John:
Um,
John:
But I think it's going in the right direction.
John:
I think this step-by-step progression is the right thing to do.
John:
Did they overstep this time by a little bit?
John:
I think it may just be in the details like Marco was saying.
John:
Like, okay, well, maybe the idea is right.
John:
All screen is right.
John:
But you have to rejigger things to figure out what's reachable and what's commonly used and stuff like that.
Casey:
So Marco, tell us about the screens.
Marco:
Alright, so we have kind of jumped through a million hoops with the iPhone X in order to get this edge-to-edge screen.
Marco:
And the reason we wanted an edge-to-edge screen, with asterisks on some of that, but the reason we wanted that is because we wanted to fit a bigger screen into a smaller phone.
Marco:
But if you look at how big the screen is versus how big the phone is, and if you consider the amount of space you're now losing in that big screen to things like the new status ears and the home indicator and the margins around these things, the gain, I think, is less compelling than I would have wanted it to be.
Marco:
the important thing to realize and i think i think this is going to bite a lot of plus fans i think a lot of plus fans are going to upgrade this phone thinking that it's going to give them the plus size screen in a smaller phone but it isn't that much smaller and the screen is not plus sized at least not the way you might think so the iphone 6 7 and 8 screens are 375 points wide so is the x sorry 10
Marco:
the plus is 414 so it's 375 versus 414 in width the iphone 10 is the same width we did not gain any width which means things like if you're scrolling for example in instagram or any kind of photo stream thing your photos aren't going to be any bigger you'll be able to fit more than one on screen maybe but it's going to be the same width as the small phones have been
Marco:
That also means the keyboard is presumably going to be the same width.
Marco:
So if you're one of the people like me who found it more comfortable to type on the Plus, you won't get that here with the iPhone X. It is the same width as the 6, 7, and 8.
Marco:
The height is substantially bigger than the Plus.
Marco:
So the height of the 6, 7, and 8 is 667.
Marco:
And these are all points, not pixels.
Marco:
The Plus is 736, and the 10 is 812.
Marco:
That is awesome.
Marco:
So you're going to have much taller lists.
Marco:
However, you're also losing some height due to the home indicator, the drag indicator thing, due to the margin around it, and due to the now taller status ears slash status bar.
Marco:
So if you actually consider, if you run the numbers and if you see the size of what I would call the application content area, if you assume an application that includes displaying the status bar on all phones...
Marco:
then how big is the area between the status bar and either the bottom of the screen, or in the case of the iPhone X, where you can go before you hit the home indicator?
Marco:
And so basically, how much area does an app have for its content?
Marco:
and the difference there is pretty small so again we're the same width between the old 6 7 and 8 and the iphone 10 the height though is 647 for the smaller screens 716 for a plus and 734 for the 10 so it is the tallest it's taller than the plus in usable area but not by that much
Marco:
So what you're basically getting is the same width, for sure, as the smaller screen phones, a little bit taller usable area than the Plus phones in a phone that is bigger than the small phones, but smaller than a Plus.
Marco:
And in order to get that,
Marco:
We had to change and give up a lot.
Marco:
We had to lose Touch ID.
Marco:
We had to engineer this entire Face ID system.
Marco:
We had to change the way apps use the screen.
Marco:
Developers have tons of design changes to do.
Marco:
Also, now those corners are now very rounded.
Marco:
So we have to stay away from the corners or design around that.
Marco:
We have to design around the notch and we have to use the ears and scroll content weirdly around it.
Marco:
Full screen things have a lot of work to do to either avoid the notch or go around it in a way that doesn't look weird or suck.
Marco:
This has been a lot of work and a lot of effort.
Marco:
And for the people who use the small phones like me, the phone is getting larger for a screen that is not wider at all.
Marco:
and is pretty tall, which is nice, but I don't know.
Marco:
Is that good enough for all... Like, all the sacrifices that had to be made, all the workarounds, all the hacks, all the UI changes, and all the developer effort that's going to be required, both in Apple and outside, to accommodate all this craziness in this new phone.
Marco:
Is that worth a screen that isn't any wider and is just taller?
No.
John:
so i don't know if this size is the right set of compromises but this design all screen gesture blah blah blah i like i said i i am optimistic that this design will actually in the end be a better overall design and when there's an entire family of phones including the big one and the smaller one that are all like this with ears then there's less pressure on this one phone to be
John:
the right trade-off between, oh, you know, change UI paradigm and all these sacrifices for not that much more screen.
John:
Well, you make something the size of a plus with edge-to-edge screen, there's way more screen there, right?
John:
Because you're getting rid of a very large chin and forehead on that phone because they're just so darn big, you know, compared to everything.
John:
And you hit diminishing returns as you go smaller because the chin and forehead are smaller on the smaller phones.
John:
Um, this may be not a great compromise, especially if the width is the same, but the phone is actually wider, which I believe is the case.
John:
So the phone is physically wider, but the screen has the same number of points on it.
John:
Um, then again, it could be that just like, what's the, uh, is this a three X?
John:
This is the thing.
John:
Wasn't, it wasn't clear to me.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
And to give them full credit, it is a true 3X.
Marco:
The Plus never has been true 3X.
Marco:
The Plus has been 3X pixels rendered down to a 1080p panel.
Marco:
And this actually is real 3X.
Marco:
So it is 458 dots per inch instead of 401.
Marco:
So it's going to look incredible.
Marco:
And OLED has benefits too.
Marco:
OLED's going to have better contrast and everything.
Marco:
So it is going to look incredible.
Marco:
But I can't believe we didn't gain any width.
Marco:
by making the phone bigger and going edge to edge.
John:
If you made something 100 points wide and you measured it with a ruler, is it wider on this phone than it is on the 6.7?
Marco:
I don't know the answer to that.
Marco:
I don't think so, but I don't know.
John:
The other important aspect of making a phone that is physically larger while the number of points is the same is that things are bigger for people with poor vision.
John:
So slightly anyway.
John:
And I know you have the zooming and all the text sizing and stuff like that.
John:
Anyway, I am less concerned with whether this exact size is the right compromise.
John:
uh because i truly believe that the the design will spread across all of them and once it does this problem goes away because then you don't have to worry about like like first of all i think the changes and the sacrifices plus or minus the notch which i will still get to are worth it if this is a better way to interact with phones than having dedicated buttons on it if face id is actually better than touch id and you know overall despite you know the edge cases where one might beat the other uh if
John:
Or arbitrarily swiping from the bottom is better than having to find a home button in the middle.
John:
Like, if all this turns out to be true, then I'm, you know, I think it'll all come out in the wash because they're not going to just make one size of this or whatever.
John:
And I would assume that they... That they...
John:
have some experience with sizes now they could have made this phone any size right they could have they could have chosen to make it wider or shorter or taller and this is what they came up with and i'm i'm hoping that the size is a reasonable compromise i think they did a good job with the seven the six size right that it is a pretty good compromise between you have more screen but it's not as big as the plus the plus of course is ridiculous but that's what people want so they want a ridiculous phone and they got one um so i i'm i think i'm less worried than you
John:
Marco, but even if this one is the wrong size for people, give them a couple years.
John:
I hope they'll work it out.
Marco:
And honestly, I would caution people who really love the Plus.
Marco:
This might not be the phone for you.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
For Plus lovers who absolutely need the Plus, that's why I'm telling my wife to get it.
John:
Even though she is a Plus lover, I'm going to have to talk to her about the fact.
John:
You realize...
John:
there's going to be less stuff on the screen.
John:
Like it's a smaller phone and it's not going to look like your plus does.
John:
It's not going to have all that stuff on it.
John:
So, but yeah, if you love the plus, this is probably not the phone for you because it's just, it's going to feel like using a big seven, a tall seven, right?
Casey:
Because that's what it is.
John:
You're not going to get all that, all that extra room.
John:
which like i said i think it's fine because i'm i know that there's a giant monster aircraft carrier version of this phone coming in a year or two or three and so the plus people will have their day and they'll have so much damn screen they won't know what to do with it yeah it'll it can be called the 10l it'll come with a style so it'll be great
Casey:
I agree with Marco, though.
Casey:
I think it's going to be very interesting and very funny to watch many of our mutual friends who swore up and down, oh, it's plus club or nothing, plus club or nothing.
Casey:
And I think they're going to have some really conflicting thoughts and some really uncomfortable thoughts about this.
John:
They all have to get it so they can talk about it on their tech podcasts, right?
John:
But I think they will be grumbly.
John:
I think there will be lots of... I bet a lot of them will say...
John:
uh i wouldn't buy this phone if it wasn't for the fact that i need to be informed about it and talk about it and like you know what i mean like that they're that they're taking one for the team because they have to right and you know some of them will just buy three phones and just use that one to to play with or whatever um god we're going long so i on the notch us i don't yeah i have a little bit there's probably way more that we can say about the notch and maybe we'll save something for a future episode but the one thing i want to say about the notch is
John:
This is my time to say exactly the same thing that I alluded to earlier about the LTE on the watch.
John:
The notch, Apple doesn't want the notch.
John:
The notch is there because it has to be to get the job done.
John:
Apple wants nothing more than to make this exact phone with no notch on it.
John:
Apple is going to do everything that it possibly can over the next five years or so to get rid of that damn notch so their screen can go edge to edge.
John:
They are doing the sort of hang a lantern on it thing where
John:
We had to do this notch thing.
John:
We couldn't figure out a way not to have it.
John:
So we have to embrace it.
John:
We have to say, we're not trying to hide the notch.
John:
We acknowledge that it's there.
John:
We're going to do all sorts of things and incorporate it into the UI and make it an aesthetic and super totally embrace the notch in the ways we'll all discuss here.
John:
But Apple, make no mistake, Apple wants to get rid of that notch.
John:
They want it to be top to bottom, left to right edge.
John:
Johnny Ive wants to not retire or die before he can do that.
John:
He might not make it.
John:
But they don't want that notch there.
John:
So the clock begins now and Apple's teams working two or three phones out are already trying to figure out how the hell they can get rid of that notch.
John:
So people may hate the notch and hate all the stupid compromises that it requires for software and it's going to be painful and it's going to be annoying.
John:
It'll have varying degrees of ridiculousness.
John:
But I am very, very confident that this is not a thing that Apple did not set out to make a phone with a notch.
John:
This is just what they had to do.
John:
And I think it's the right trade.
John:
I don't think they should have waited until they could have done this phone without a notch to do it.
John:
I think they should do it now.
John:
Whether they should have embraced the notch as much as they did is arguable.
John:
But I remain confident that we will have top to bottom edge edge screens, probably from Android makers first, but eventually also from Apple.
Casey:
I'm still bummed about embrace the notch.
Casey:
Like I haven't seen it.
Casey:
I haven't held it.
Casey:
I haven't played with it, but it just, I don't know.
Casey:
I, from everything I've seen when people have mocked up the, you know, kind of hide the notch approach where the, where the top bar adjacent to the notch is just black and,
Casey:
It's it's still to me looks better.
Casey:
But ask me again.
Casey:
And well, I was going to say in a month, but I won't have one in a month.
John:
But the nice thing is the humor interface guidelines, which many people are quoting from the section says do not attempt to hide the devices rounded corners sensor housing sensor housing.
John:
It's not a notch.
John:
or indicator for accessing the home button like do not they're telling you don't try it you must embrace notch but guess what app developers can do whatever the hell they want so i think it'll be interesting to see how people decide to do that do they follow the apple advice and say totally embrace the notch or do they decide to make the status far black and not embrace the notch uh it's a thing like i have a pretty big problem with my now playing screen
John:
yeah i mean but it's all uh it's all uh programmer addressable there's no trickery to make it seem like the screen is smaller than it is like applications it seems have the ability to draw pretty much anywhere on the screen i'm not sure if they can draw over the little home indicator under the home indicator thingy but
John:
lots of the by the way apple release a tons of sort of like wwc videos not a wwc of how to do this they're all about like here's your margins and your safe area and stay away from the rounded corners all with insets and with the idea that you know i haven't watched these videos yet but looking at the diagrams i'm thinking oh that means developers have to program all these insets in which is work for them but it also means that if they don't do that like on the watch and
John:
They could draw right to the edge and look stupid, right?
John:
And have it be, oh, no, the watch is the opposite of what you're supposed to draw at the edge.
John:
Anyway, they could draw right up against these rounded corners and look bad.
John:
In fact, I believe during the keynote or one of the commercials, I think it was during the keynote video, they showed that AR game that they were doing the demo from.
John:
I think it was like in a commercial with the AR thing.
John:
And one of the status indicators on the screen in the AR game was clipped by the notch because it was too far to the left.
John:
It was outside the safe area.
John:
It was a circle.
John:
It was like the flat tire Android phone.
John:
Speaking of things with screens cut off, it was clipped by the notch because they just hadn't updated it to move everything over.
John:
And in fact, if they had moved it over, I think you're just going to have to shrink those circles, right?
John:
So...
John:
In a way, software developers are going to decide this as much as Apple.
John:
Apple can tell you what they want everybody to do.
John:
But if the sort of consensus of software developers is, yeah, we're not going to brace the notch, then they won't.
John:
And it will be fine.
John:
I've only heard sporadic reports from people who use these phones in real life.
John:
The impression I get is that the notch is less onerous when using the phone than when watching it on video.
John:
I guess where our eyes are just drawn to it.
John:
When you're using the phone, you're not looking at that part.
John:
Kind of like Marco's not looking at the back of his phone that's all scratched up, right?
John:
You're kind of looking where the content is and you kind of get over it.
John:
But it is a lot of work for developers.
John:
And there are lots of awkward slash funny things related to this.
John:
Two of the best ones, I'll put these links in the show notes.
John:
Ben Packard had...
John:
an interesting bit where like the scroll bar you know when you scroll on ios that little line appears to kind of the proportional scroll bar that you can actually grab and scroll like shows you where you are with that hiding underneath a notch when you're in landscape lots of fun stuff happens when you're in landscape like you'd scroll it's like where's the scroll thumb oh it's under the notch and you scroll and you don't see anything up it popped up on the top it popped up on the bottom and the other one was uh bocce stavik did a uh a
John:
a joke post of look i fixed a notch where he had scrolling going by the notch it's amazing it's it's like a bunch of names and they're up against it's the beatles names and they're up against the edge of the screen but then when they hit the notch they sort of like bump around it no it landscape the notch is a disaster it's not a disaster if you don't if you don't embrace it if you just black it off now you just have a screen that is slightly offset um and people are worried about like they kept showing in the presentation here's video with the notch cut out of it which as many people guessed based on my last complaints about like
John:
the slightly rounded corners of a quick time player years ago pissed me off now this phone has super rounded corners you have no choice because literally the screen is rounded like there is they're not just not lighting up those pixels like there's nothing there forget it and now you're going to show video with a notch intruding into it no never but the thing is
John:
that's not not only do you not have to do that that's not even the default when you play video it will play as a rectangle and you will see every part of it it will be inset because it's got to stay away from the rounded corners and it's got to stay away from the notch uh but it's fine and that as far as i'm aware is the default on the built-in video players like in safari and
John:
apple videos if you double tap it it will zoom to full screen and then you'll be playing video behind a notch and you'll be losing all the corners uh but if you zoom to full screen on an iphone today unless your video is exactly the same aspect ratio as your phone which it probably isn't uh if it's like a movie or something
John:
if you zoom to full screen, you're already cutting off sides too.
John:
So I'm not that annoyed about the notch in the rounded corners in terms of video playing.
John:
Uh, I think it will probably be okay, but Apple's Apple's big push to embrace the notch is kind of, I mean, I mentioned hang a lantern on it before, which is a narrative device where there's something that doesn't make sense.
John:
I hope I'm getting this right.
John:
God, I was waiting a million corrections where something doesn't make sense in a movie.
Um,
John:
And you know it doesn't make sense, and you don't want people to say, oh, that scene was messed up because that wasn't plausible to me.
John:
So all you do is you have a character in the movie say out loud what the audience is thinking.
John:
So like, you know, we shouldn't be getting readings like this.
John:
They're impossible, but we are.
John:
And as soon as you have them say that by hanging a lantern on the thing that the audience knows is impossible, suddenly it seems okay because then the people in the movie are acknowledging the thing that you're all thinking.
John:
So by Apple hanging a lantern on the notch, like...
John:
We should be able to light up all the pixels on the screen, but there's this giant thing there.
John:
And Apple says that, yeah, there's a giant thing there.
John:
And we're going to emphasize that they're kind of, you know, they're making the best of a bad situation because nobody wants the notch.
John:
But if there's going to be a notch, they are embracing it.
John:
And they want you to embrace it too.
John:
And it is an interesting aesthetic.
John:
It kind of reminds me of those little cards from Rolodexes, which are actually before my time.
John:
I'm not actually that old, but like, you know, the little like cards with little notches, right?
John:
It kind of reminds me of that.
John:
It's kind of an interesting aesthetic.
John:
It does look a little bit like rabbit ears.
John:
It does look a little bit weird.
John:
in landscape and i feel bad for all the software developers who have to deal with it but you know you dealt with size classes and going from fixed layouts to auto layout and this is why you get the big bucks right or or don't get them unless you know how to exploit people with free-to-play gambling mechanics but anyway um i think it will work out but i am already awaiting the day when the notch goes away
Marco:
How long do you think that that is away from now?
Marco:
Because if I had to guess, I honestly don't know.
Marco:
They might just stick with us because if you look at the problem they're trying to solve here, they have a whole bunch of sensors and cameras and speakers and stuff that for these things to work at all, they pretty much need to be facing forward.
Marco:
And they clearly want the screen to go to the top edge and the bottom edge.
Marco:
So how would they get rid of the notch exactly?
Marco:
Would they somehow just make those things so small they would fit within the current bezel that's above the screen?
John:
You got it.
Marco:
They're not very good at making cameras small.
Marco:
If you look, they have this giant camera bump in the back because to make a decent camera, you need a little bit of size.
Marco:
I don't see how they get...
Marco:
How they retain the super thin bezel around most of the screen area while also fitting those front sensors.
Marco:
And by the way, now there's more of them with Face ID.
Marco:
So while also fitting those front sensors into that, I don't know.
Marco:
I don't see them getting rid of the notch as long as they have this general borderless design.
Marco:
I think the only way they can get rid of it is to...
Marco:
Basically backtrack on part of this design and make something that looks more like the S8, where it's like, you know, just thin top and bottom bezels.
John:
So as people have pointed out, this screen is not really edge to edge.
John:
I can see where it doesn't go to the edge.
John:
There's a big black band.
John:
Like, there are margins on this thing.
John:
And like you said, they could go notchless next year by just putting a very thin forehead on it.
John:
They don't want to because then they'd feel the need to do a very thin chin as well, and then they'd be giving up on the edge.
Marco:
They could put a home button in a very thin chin because if it doesn't need Touch ID anymore, then it can be a little skinny button.
John:
No, I don't think they're going back on that.
John:
I think they're all in on the gestures.
Marco:
You're right, they're not.
Marco:
But if you look at the Galaxy S8...
Marco:
I have never said anything nice about an Android phone for good reason.
Marco:
However, that's a very attractive design for a edge-to-edge screen phone.
Marco:
And that's a different set of trade-offs.
Marco:
And yeah, the stuff on the back, the fingerprint on the back is dumb.
Marco:
But if you look at just the front of the Galaxy S8 compared to the iPhone X, I have a hard time picking the iPhone X in that comparison.
John:
I think the iPhone cell looks better.
John:
But the way you get to the notchless without even the thin forehead is, yeah, like the March of Progress can make some components smaller and other components can be under the screen.
John:
Like that's how you get there.
John:
Like, you know, no one would have thought that cameras could be as small as they are now.
John:
You can make...
John:
lesser quality cameras even smaller say the one front facing camera is replaced by seven pinhole size cameras dotted along the top and the you know the the images are combined from that the company that you have the friend who works for that light camera thing like we're not saying this is you know technology that's available now you couldn't make a watch with lte on it when the apple watch came out and you can't make a notchless phone like this but i think you will be able to eventually i think there's nothing there's nothing about the array of sensors that makes me think they can't hide them in an edge
John:
you know it's somewhere around the edge of this phone uh in the space it's already provided because they don't go all in this the galaxy s8 goes way farther to the edge right and left than this phone does there is actually room around it and
John:
If they're willing to compromise a little bit, add two more pieces of paper width to the top to wedge things in and get the IR sensor underneath the screen somehow or the dot spreader underneath.
John:
I feel like it will eventually happen and this design will become viable.
John:
You asked me how long I thought...
John:
five years is is my best guess i think it could come sooner it depends on how what appetite apple has for it if they don't feel pressured to do it because everyone loves the notch and their whole line is notch bearing and it's just like they're sailing and it's like why do you know we didn't want the notch but now that we've got it everybody loves it and everyone's software is written for it and why would we even change it
John:
That could delay it just because they don't want to go for it, but I think technically plausible in five years.
Casey:
I couldn't even wager a guess.
Casey:
I mean, five seems reasonable.
Casey:
All right, so we are running long.
Casey:
Face ID seems to be mostly what we expected.
Casey:
I think we certainly got a lot more information about the mechanics behind it.
Casey:
I thought it was really fascinating that Schiller had talked about how they went and got Hollywood makeup artists or whatever or prosthetics artists in order to make these eerily realistic masks that apparently employees would put on to try to fool face ID.
Casey:
It's apparently considerably more secure than Touch ID, which seems weird to me because any face identification I've ever heard or seen anything about seemed very easy to defeat, whereas fingerprints seemed much harder.
Casey:
But I'm sure that's just because of crummy technology.
Casey:
And if Apple says it's better, I'm inclined to believe it's better.
John:
The reason it's better is because faces are so much bigger.
John:
So the problem with fingers is that the feature size down there, like the number of points they could sort of match up on your fingerprint, like the features are so small and there's not that many things to sort of hang on to.
John:
Whereas if you look at the number of dots that their little dot sprayer, assuming those diagrams are even remotely accurate, there's just more data points.
John:
So there's more places where things can vary.
John:
uh than on fingerprints plus people's fingers don't even fit entirely like the sensor doesn't even cover your whole finger so you're just getting like a window snapshot of a finger so it's not as if oh my fingerprint is the same as someone else's they gotta unlock my phone no it's one tiny little square shape region of your finger maybe close enough in the few areas that the the touch id sensor can i identify as distinguishing to a potentially totally different point on someone else's finger
John:
so i i totally believe that because i mean touch id makes this you know oh it unlocks my finger and it's great and no one else in my family can do it and so it must be perfect because we have this mystique around fingerprints but when it comes down to it it's a bunch of little ridges and skin and it's not even that many of them because the sensor is small whereas this thing is spraying our entire face with tons and tons of data points of you know not just what it looks like but you know all the depth things and everything like that i still don't understand exactly how the masks aren't able to defeat it
John:
But I'll take their word for it.
John:
I mean, there's obviously, you know, some secret sauce in there that can distinguish, I guess, living things from non-living, maybe with heat signatures.
John:
I mean, I feel like they didn't reveal all their secrets here because maybe competitive advantage or whatever.
John:
But we'll find out.
John:
I mean, I guarantee people are going to start trying to fake this thing out with masks.
John:
So I'm sure someone will do it.
John:
As soon as Touch ID came out, people faked it out by lifting people's fingerprints from cups and, you know, using like super glue or rubber cement and stuff and defeating it.
John:
um it'll it'll be defeatable and they did mention like oh by the way your twin is a problem and they didn't mention this explicitly but like maybe relatives that look a lot like you might be more of a problem too uh but you know i i believe less in this than when i can't you know as i came out believing in the idea of the all-screen phone with the gestures like believing that it could be good still having never touch one of these face id they basically said all the things i thought they were going to say
John:
I have the same attitude about it now, which is, you know, show me the unlock.
John:
Seeing is believing.
John:
I have to try this myself because I love fast touch ID so much on my phone.
John:
I believe, like I said last show, I believe facial recognition can be better than touch ID for situations where the phone is able to see your face.
John:
I'm not entirely convinced that the first gen is going to be better than second gen touch ID in terms of efficiency, but we'll see.
Marco:
The speed of it is my one big concern.
Marco:
When Touch ID first came out, we all were wary of it as well.
Marco:
So it's hard to know before we've actually had a chance to use it how good it is or what the problem areas actually are.
Marco:
But I noticed they focused a lot on how it worked, which I thought honestly was a little bit creepy the way it was presented.
Marco:
They're like spraying dots all over people's faces.
Marco:
I didn't think it was explained well.
John:
did you see the tweet that said uh the new iphone will mace you if you do a bad tweet yeah right holding the phone on this big big cone like i think that did them a disservice because it made it look like that you were having an actual spotlight shined in your face but my understanding is that it doesn't i mean you can't see ir unless you're a bat right so it's not or did bat see ir i don't know oh god i'm gonna get corrections from the people anyway
John:
Some people had video where they could see a flashing sensor, but video cameras often pick up IR that our eyes don't.
John:
I don't know what to think of it, but I think their demos made it look more onerous than it actually is.
Marco:
I think it was presented poorly or explained poorly, but I noticed that they focused on security and how it worked, but they never made any speed comparisons to Touch ID.
Marco:
and I suspect that we're going to have a problem there.
Marco:
I bet it's going to be a little slower.
Marco:
The other thing is they mentioned, actually, some of my favorite analysis of this event was on Back to Work this week, and they mentioned there something that I do too, which is, like Merlin was saying, that as he pulls his phone out of his pocket,
Marco:
he has already hit the home button with his thumb.
Marco:
And so the time the phone is out of his pocket and he's looking at it, it's unlocked.
Marco:
I do the same thing.
Marco:
Like I just kind of automatically unlock my phone as I'm taking it out of my pocket.
Marco:
So I never have to wait for it to unlock, especially with the new fast touch ID since the success.
Marco:
And I wonder like, is Face ID going to have these little like slowed down microscopic interactions that are going to irritate me every single day?
Marco:
Like, I don't know.
Marco:
I hope it's fast.
Marco:
If it's really super fast when it looks at you, when it does finally have a view of your face, maybe this won't be a problem.
Marco:
But it just seems unlikely.
John:
I heard from a couple people.
John:
You know the lock animation?
John:
It's got like a padlock type thing that basically when the top of the padlock twists to show you that it has successfully recognized your face, that it's unlocked, that that animation, like so many animations, actually lags behind it actually recognizing your face.
John:
So I'm hoping they did the good game development thing where...
John:
all right so it does have to have line of sight on me so forget about the touch id in the pocket um but you get it out and what i want to be able to do is get it out and as it comes in front of my face i want to do the swipe up gesture even though it hasn't been unlocked yet i've i've starting the swipe up gesture because if you swipe up and it doesn't unlock like it brings you to the like please type in your password screen right i
John:
I want to be able to begin the swipe up.
John:
And if it recognizes me when it's in the middle of the swipe up or in the middle of doing the animation triggered by the swipe up, abort showing me the screen where I have to enter my passcode and unlock the phone.
John:
Like if they can overlap it in that way, it will help to hide the latency, right?
John:
If instead you have to look at it, notice with your eyeballs that the animation of the padlock going and then begin your swipe up
John:
no matter how fast it is that will be annoying because the unlock animation has non-zero time you having to look for and recognize it has non-zero time i want to be able to take out swipe recognize open and that's probably the best they can do with this because you're right they didn't say it was faster it probably isn't faster it's probably amazing that it works at all and it's an amazing technological feat but it is also the first generation of this product and we'll have to you know try it and see i do i do love me some touch id but i'm like i said before
John:
The idea of this dead area at the bottom of my phone where there's nothing except for a circular button that's not really a button anymore does seem like the past in the way that these Apple events always tend to do to you.
John:
It does seem old and steampunky, and I'm willing to believe that it will go away.
John:
But we brave pioneers will find out how long it's going to take.
Casey:
One thing that bummed me out is it only allows for one face, which I totally understand.
Casey:
But one of the things that I really liked about Touch ID was that I asked Erin if she could register one of her thumbs on my phone so that this way, if, for example, I wanted her to respond to a text for me because maybe I'm like playing with Declan or something like that and my phone is not in my pocket, I could just say to her, hey, can you grab my phone and tell Marco and John I'll be there in five minutes or whatever.
Casey:
And I have a very, very long passcode on my phone because I almost never need to type it.
Casey:
It's exceptionally rare that I need to type my passcode.
Casey:
And it's something like 10 or 15 or 20 characters.
Casey:
And so having Touch ID available to her is really, really nice for both of us because sometimes she needs to look at something that maybe only I have, like an email that only I have, or sometimes I want her to respond to a text from me or something like that.
Casey:
And so she does know my password, but it's very inconvenient to type.
Casey:
And I'd really love to be able to register her face on my phone as well, which is a choice that I would make.
Casey:
And not everyone would make that choice, but that's something I would like to do.
Casey:
And as of right now, it is only allowable to use a face ID with one face.
Casey:
And again, I understand why I only have one face.
Casey:
The phone is a personal device.
Casey:
Do you understand why?
John:
Like that, like that's what the explanation, other than just say, Oh, this is a personal device.
John:
I'm assuming it has to be storage related, but the reports I heard from the people, it's like at launch only one face, which makes me think there's enough storage for more than one.
John:
Cause obviously they have more data points, right?
John:
And the,
John:
the whole evolving of the thing i can imagine it takes up more storage and touch id in the secure enclave where they have to keep all this stuff right um but i just hope hardware wise there actually is room for more than one because i've got fingers on every device in the house i've got all my kids devices my wife's everything because it mostly for convenience it's not like they're gonna keep me out of the stuff like i know all their passwords i can get into all the things it's just it's just convenient
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
And I had heard rumblings of the same that maybe in the future it'll be more than one, but I am a little bummed right now that it is just one.
Casey:
Again, as with earlier, you know, not really a big deal.
Casey:
This is still a phone that is unlocking by looking at my face, even in the dark.
Casey:
Like things can be a lot worse, but it did bum me out a little bit.
Marco:
uh what else about this uh what else is new other than 4k 60 marco wanted it he got it oh yeah i got it and all the all of them and they they didn't quite do a perfect job but they did a pretty substantial job in improving the telephoto camera in the two camera module uh but only for the 10 not for the 8 plus
Marco:
um where now the you know before i basically i said last episode what i wanted was that you know with the seven adding the dual camera thing to the plus the zoomed in telephoto camera was a narrower aperture so it let in less light and was noisier at night and was not image stabilized which basically made it very hard to ever use that in low light and get a good picture and the software was smart enough to basically not use it in low light and to just zoom in on the uh on the wide sensor that was better
Marco:
Now, the new ones, the aperture difference is smaller.
Marco:
It's still there, but it's smaller.
Marco:
And they're both stabilized on the 10.
Marco:
So that's really nice.
Marco:
I do wish the 8 Plus got the same module.
Marco:
I don't think there's much reason for it not to have gotten it, other than...
Marco:
just price and segmentation, because there's probably room for it.
Marco:
So, you know, like, it makes sense why the 8 didn't get it.
Marco:
There's probably not room for it in the enclosure, but, you know, I do wish they would have brought that to the Plus as well.
Marco:
But the fact that it's there on the 10, that's great.
Marco:
And that these now do all shoot 4K60,
Marco:
That's amazing.
Marco:
Because again, as I mentioned last week, almost no professional video cameras shoot 4K60 yet.
Marco:
That's very rare.
Marco:
And so to have that in anything, let alone a $700 and up phone, is really impressive.
Marco:
And on top of that, the iPhone is already such an amazing video camera.
Marco:
That's a pretty big deal.
Marco:
So I would say for most people, for most purposes, the iPhone remains the best video camera in the world.
Marco:
And this is a giant step forward, even for it.
Marco:
So I'm very impressed with the camera on paper.
Marco:
And I hope, in practice, I hope it proves to be as good as it sounds.
John:
240 frames per second slow-mo i thought that was what the old one did but i guess i'm mistaken is is that double what the old one did i think that did it but only for 720p and now it does and so they've up they've updated 1080p yeah yeah all right so that's good um but now we get to finally the real reason
John:
why people will buy and be happy with this phone if this is true two hours more battery life it's what we've always wanted don't make the phone thinner add more battery life this phone got a big giant screen on it a extremely fast powerful processor all sorts of you know cameras and wireless doodads and sensors and blah blah blah and they added two hours of battery life which is a lot of
John:
That reason, I'll have to see how it measures up to the plus, but the 7 was already pretty good.
John:
That is going to feel like a premium experience when people buy this fancy phone for all the money that it's going to cost, and they get this edge-to-edge screen, and it's a little bit weird, and blah, blah, blah.
Yeah.
John:
But A, it's going to be a new phone.
John:
A new phone's always lasts longer than your old one because your old battery is shot.
John:
And B, the fact that this actually has more battery life.
John:
If that comes out the way it does, that is perhaps the most high-end feature that you can give to iPhone users in particular who are used to kind of being starved for battery.
John:
So I...
John:
I was very happy about that because that was one of the few questions we had because we may have known the exact milliamp hour size of the battery from leaks.
John:
I don't know if we knew that or not, but even if we did, you never know.
John:
What is the overall battery life of this very complicated system that involves tons of components going to be, especially since software is such a big factor in balancing the components?
John:
That's one of the things that can almost never be spoiled for us unless we leak the presentation, which I guess is what will happen next year.
John:
We'll get the keynote slides a week in advance.
Marco:
We should get video of the rehearsals.
John:
Yeah, exactly.
John:
That's a hell of a thing.
John:
That made me extremely excited to see that.
John:
Not just like, oh, and it's a little bit better.
John:
Two more hours that I put that up on a slide.
John:
That is amazing.
Marco:
Yeah, I hope that translates into real world gains.
Marco:
We will see, you know, over time.
Marco:
It is worth pointing out that the 8 Plus still claims higher battery life.
Marco:
So, you know, if battery life is the most important thing to you, the Plus Phone is probably still the right move.
Marco:
Also, again, if screen size is the most important to you, Plus Phone, still the right move.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
i see i don't know this this is why like once again in the apple product line they have they have made it so that there is no one best choice like this was this was the case for a while in the ipads like it's definitely the case in the macbook pros like there is no one best model here it just depends on which things you prioritize over which other things fans of the plus should strongly consider getting the next plus uh instead of getting the 10 but
Marco:
The reality is, you know, all of us who talk on podcasts about these phones and everything, we're all going to get the 10 anyway.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I do want to mention that the, I think the 8 does as well, but doesn't the 10 get True Tone?
John:
yes the at least the 10 does i don't know if the other ones yeah i think i think they all get it which is surprising to me because that means they found a place to smuggle that sensor on the eights i mean it's nice i mean and although this is my my biggest surprise of the thing actually was no promotion which makes very little sense to me unless there was some kind of battery life thing because it's not like they don't have the the cpu grunt to do it and they're not moving that many pixels and there's plenty of room on the phone because it's a
John:
i mean it must come down to either component size or costs or battery life uh because it's like it's not a technical limitation so they found room for true tone for everybody but no promotion i wonder if maybe the oled panel can't refresh that fast yet at least it may be like people said that but i don't i don't see how that's like oled tvs are you know refreshed 120 easy like i think your tv does that already like
John:
Maybe they're different when it's smaller.
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
Or maybe their particular quality level of OLED panels getting their color and their contrast and their gamut.
Marco:
Maybe those can't do 120 yet.
Marco:
And they wouldn't have the 8's panels do it if the 10's panel couldn't do it.
Marco:
So that could be a reason.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I think it most comes down to the hardware to drive the panel at that rate.
John:
and finding room for it and potentially what the power does but i would love to hear from somebody who knows more about the you know the internal details of how you drive any screen at 120 hertz and how that might affect or if someone on the iphone team just wants to write in and tell us why the hell you don't have promotion um and especially since the animations on the 10 in particular they're
John:
they're kind of more prominent like when you when you go back to the home thing of like the the application that you just chucked upwards it like floats back into the icon that it came from and all sorts of scaling things and all those animations would look better at 120 because they're short animations there's not that many frames and so they can end up looking stuttery uh even if they're not actually dropping any frames because they're so fast so 120 would definitely help there and give a more sort of fluid experience but maybe next year
Casey:
I'm stoked for True Tone, though, because I don't have any devices with True Tone.
Casey:
And from what little I've seen, it looked really, really nice.
Casey:
Not to say Promotion isn't by any stretch, but I have seen Promotion briefly, and I thought it was nice.
Casey:
And I'm sure if I had time with it, I would start to say, oh, no, this is amazing.
Casey:
But I'm really stoked to have True Tone.
Casey:
And I think I heard it on Upgrade, and Jason had mentioned that
Casey:
A lot of times he's getting the brightness not to the position he wants it just because he's fighting kind of the ambient light situation in the room.
Casey:
And I feel like I suffer from the same problem from time to time for a very loose definition of suffering.
Casey:
But anyway, I feel like having True Tone is going to be really nice and it's going to be new for me.
Casey:
So I'm excited about that.
John:
Before you get off True Tone, the best thing I can say about True Tone?
John:
is that i enable it and i don't notice that it's on because that's how it should work you shouldn't notice that it's making your screen more brown and crap like this horrible flux and night shift things that i hate i leave it on and i don't even notice that it's there uh and if i turn it off like if sometimes i go back and say what would this look like without true tone you see it being like more blue when you're sitting in your house at night so true tone gets a big thumbs up from me as a quality of life thing
John:
for a screen where you're not doing like color work for like you know where you need accurate reproduction of colors where you just want it to like look look the way it's supposed to kind of look given the ambient lighting so i really liked your tone yeah yeah uh the stuff that we had talked about up until the iphone 10 uh pre-ordering friday as i
Casey:
This one, though, the iPhone X is not going to be pre-orderable for basically a month and a half until the 27th of October, which is again Friday, and available the following Friday, November 3rd.
Casey:
That's, I mean, in the grand scheme of things, not a big deal, but that's a bummer.
Casey:
I want to give Apple just unreasonable amounts of my money sooner than that, please.
Marco:
I think it's also, like many Apple launches of late, the official day one launch, if you're very lucky, you might hit that.
Marco:
But I think most people are not getting this phone probably before January.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm going to be really bummed.
John:
Yeah, and it's fine.
John:
I mean, like, we always knew this was going to be in, you know, that there wasn't going to be much supply and delay.
John:
Like, it's, you know, we'll survive.
John:
It's better than waiting around for the color you want, I guess.
John:
The gold phones with people getting in line.
John:
But, you know, that's, I bet Apple would have liked to have more squarely hit the holiday season, but they're just, you know, like, it's going to be January for most people.
John:
Sorry.
John:
If you want one under the tree, just print out a picture of it and put it in a little box and then just sort of cradle it.
Casey:
So any other thoughts?
Casey:
I have one final closing thought, but any other thoughts before then?
John:
I didn't see any battery packs for the 10.
John:
Oh, interesting point.
John:
No hunchbacks.
Marco:
Yeah, it appears that there aren't new battery cases.
Marco:
They're saying that cases for the 7 will fit the 8 and similar for the pluses.
Marco:
So I imagine that probably means that the 7 battery case will fit the 8.
Marco:
There is no 7 plus battery case, so that rules that out.
Marco:
And yeah, it does appear that there's not going to be, at least there isn't yet, a 10 battery case.
John:
Yeah, although they do have a folio case, and they do have the leather.
John:
The folio case, I saw someone with frustration had the same thing.
John:
They only show it from the back.
John:
There's two pictures on the Apple Store, and they're both from the back.
John:
I think that's just a mistake in the store.
John:
Not that I'll ever buy one of those, but I wanted to see what it looked like.
John:
But I was excited to see.
John:
The leather case for the iPhone X is essentially the same as the leather case that I have now.
John:
It comes in some interesting colors, and I'm a big fan of that case, so hopefully the new one is just as good.
John:
And because the leather case, Apple's leather case, the existing one and the new one, are totally open at the bottom, the one edge where you're going to be swiping constantly, you won't have to be swiping against the edge of a case.
John:
Oh, and fast charging on all the new phones.
John:
The whole, like, whatever.
John:
I don't know what standard it is for the USB fast charging.
John:
You can get a 50% charge in 30 minutes.
John:
Yeah, that was interesting.
John:
Setting aside the wireless thing.
John:
I think it's just like a USB fast charging standard.
Marco:
Yeah, it's USB-C power delivery.
Marco:
And so basically, if you have, like, one of the MacBook Pro adapters, or if you have the iPad fast charge adapter, none of these come stock in the box of any iOS device.
Marco:
But if you happen to have...
Marco:
the USB-C to lightning cable, which also doesn't come stock in the box, and one of these fast-charging power bricks that also doesn't come stock in the box, and that many of which aren't even made for these products, then it will charge faster, which is a nice thing to have if you need it.
Marco:
I do question why they didn't just boost up the power bricks that come with it.
Marco:
But, you know, Apple, what are you going to do?
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
They wouldn't be able to fit it in the boxes.
John:
The one they give you is the little tiny non...
Marco:
You know, I honestly think not to dress up too much, but I honestly think that one of the reasons why the Apple TV remote is so bad and unchanged is because they didn't want to make the box bigger.
Marco:
I bet that's a big reason for it.
John:
It's not it's not just the box.
John:
They don't want to make the remote bigger.
John:
That's what it comes down to.
John:
They feel like it should be it should be in scale and it should be elegant and dainty and they don't understand that people's hands are not that big.
John:
Yeah.
John:
or not that small rather a real-time follow-up someone in the chat room did helpfully provide a view of the front of the folio case i will never buy one of these but some people like them and so now there's one from apple because why wouldn't they charge you 70 bucks or whatever for a thing to put on your phone yeah that's
Marco:
There's a whole bunch of other small stuff from the event that we don't have time for.
Marco:
We didn't talk about Animoji.
Marco:
We didn't talk about AirPower or the mats or anything like that.
Marco:
I guess that'll be part of next week's show.
Marco:
That'll be our junk drawer of two weeks with a follow-up plus Animoji and AirPower mats and things like that.
Casey:
uh i don't want to talk about animoji other than to say uh i have received a few and they are pretty awesome and i don't know it's something that i'm going to be using a lot or doing a lot but they are pretty cool it it is it is very amusing and and we can talk more about it next week so closing thought marco what phone or phones are you going to be buying and when will you be doing that
Marco:
I mean, again, because I'm a developer and an Apple commentator, I have to get the X. No question.
Marco:
And that's probably going to end up being the phone for me overall.
Marco:
I am disappointed that the screen isn't bigger, wider.
Marco:
I feel like for the size increase and all the trade-offs, I would have liked a little bit more width than what I already have.
Marco:
So that's unfortunate.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
It's probably going to be great.
Marco:
I'm probably going to love it.
Marco:
I'm definitely going to love having that camera system.
Marco:
So I really want it for that, if nothing else.
Marco:
Oh, I'm going to need to do a lot of work on Overcast to make it fit the notch.
Marco:
Basically, it ruins my entire UI, is how this works.
Marco:
This ruins everything.
Marco:
So I'm getting the phone for that.
Marco:
If I were not a commentator and developer, I honestly might consider the 8 Plus instead.
Marco:
But, oh well.
Marco:
Maybe I'll end up getting both and putting the 8 Plus as a dedicated Waze machine in my car because Waze is amazing.
Marco:
Anyway, so... I'm definitely getting the 4K Apple TV.
Marco:
And just because, you know, again, I use it constantly and I do have a 4K TV.
Marco:
And I'm getting the 3G watch.
Marco:
Or, sorry, the LTE Watch Series 3.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Yeah, overall, it's been a pretty expensive event.
Casey:
Yeah, tell me about it.
Casey:
I mean, I'm in for two watches, like I said earlier, one LTE, one not.
Casey:
I'm going to be getting definitely one iPhone X in 256 space gray.
Casey:
Probably one for Erin, too.
Casey:
We haven't really had time to talk it over yet, but I suspect I will.
Casey:
I don't know what color she'll want, and I'll almost certainly just insist that she gets a 256 there.
Casey:
So between two watches and two phones, no Apple TVs for me, not yet anyway.
Casey:
I'm looking at something like $3,000 this fall, which is...
Casey:
truly and utterly preposterous and if you've ever listened to any one of our ads ever then thank you thank you if it wasn't for that i would not be getting probably any of these things so john john what's your situation you said tina's getting a watch and she's probably getting a phone as well and you're getting just the tv
John:
Yeah, the TV's for the whole family, not just for me.
John:
I'm going to live vicariously through my wife, who I'm trying to convince to get a 10, so I'll have one to play with, but it's not my phone year.
John:
I'm going to keep using my 7.
John:
I like it.
John:
I'll let the rest of the world experiment.
John:
I hope she gets a 10, because then I will be able to play with it and see what it's like without having to actually use it as my phone, which I'm not sure I'm ready for.
John:
If it was my year, I would get a 10, though.
John:
If it was my phone year, I would totally get that, because I'm very convinced that that is the one that I would want to try.
Casey:
It's the one that you want.
Casey:
Hoo, hoo, hoo.
John:
I got it, but Marco didn't.
John:
Oh, how'd you get that reference?
Marco:
Is it her influence?
Marco:
It's music.
Marco:
I know music.
Marco:
I have heard music.
Marco:
You can't live in the world and not have heard that song.
Marco:
You can.
Marco:
Thanks to our three sponsors this week, Squarespace, Backblaze, and Aftershocks, and we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
John:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them.
Marco:
At C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss.
Marco:
M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T.
Marco:
Marco Arment.
Marco:
S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean to.
Casey:
My God, this is a long show.
Casey:
Yeah, I don't know if we really need much of an after show.
Casey:
I was surprised you didn't bring up Aftershocks when you were talking about riding your bike, because that is the ultimate time for Aftershocks, because they're open air.
Marco:
I know.
Marco:
Well, the only problem is that when I'm riding my bike, I am terrified, so I don't want to die.
Marco:
So I've been mostly using the aftershocks on the walks and not on the bike rides.
John:
What are you afraid of on the trail?
John:
There's no cars that are going to run you over, right?
Marco:
I'm mostly afraid of just getting myself to the trail, even though it's quite close to my house.
John:
Oh, you're on the bike doing it still?
Marco:
I mean, I could just pause the podcast, drive to the trail, bike to the trail, and then resume it.
Marco:
I'll probably start doing that.
Marco:
I haven't gotten a lot of biking in.
Marco:
I guess this is our after show now.
Marco:
So I have finally completed my bike shopping extravaganza.
Casey:
That's a lie.
Casey:
That's a lie you're telling us and yourself.
Marco:
It turns out I am terrible at buying bikes.
Marco:
So the way that I buy everything else basically is I do a ton of research.
Marco:
It consumes my mind for like two weeks.
Marco:
And eventually I convince myself to buy the best thing and I buy it.
Marco:
And then I'm happy for a while until a better thing comes out.
Marco:
That does not work for bikes.
Marco:
What I have learned, basically, is that the correct best way to buy a bike is to go into your local bike shop, drive a few things around that you like, and whatever one feels the best to you, buy it.
Marco:
And that's it.
Marco:
You should do basically no research.
Marco:
You should learn about almost nothing about the high end of bikes.
Marco:
You should read no online reviews because they're pretty much useless.
Marco:
The way for most people to buy a bike is just that.
Marco:
To do it in the most casual way possible.
Marco:
The way most people buy everything.
Marco:
I have done such an insane amount of research online that
Marco:
browsing different things, looking at different specs, figuring, okay, I definitely want this kind of thing.
Marco:
I definitely don't want this kind of thing.
Marco:
It got me basically a lot of nowhere.
Marco:
It got me to a lot of wasted research time, a lot of consuming mental time.
Marco:
It got me to rule out things that I actually like, not knowing that I was ruling them out.
Marco:
It got me to...
Marco:
to get myself really dedicated to certain types of bikes that are not right for me, that actually don't fit my needs and that I'm not comfortable on.
Marco:
It has taken me a long time to finally figure all this out.
Marco:
What I did basically, and a special thank you to the people at Budnitz Bicycles, who I basically have been bothering and asking questions to and arranging, like trying to get a loaner to try out or trying to visit a showroom to try things out for a good three months now.
Marco:
They've been very patient with me.
Marco:
Um, and they even did arrange for me to test out one of their bikes in the Hamptons.
Marco:
And therefore I, I drove to the Hamptons.
Marco:
They arranged to lend me one of their bikes for free so I could try it and then order my own that, you know, things I would like.
Marco:
I tried it.
Marco:
It wasn't right for me.
Marco:
They were very, very tolerant of me, very patient with me.
Marco:
Thank you so much to the Budnitz bikes people.
Marco:
Um, and if you do want a, a bike of the kind they make, which is like a nice, a really nice city bike, that's amazing.
Marco:
Like they were ridiculously nice.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
But I learned basically through all this that what I actually want, what I'm most comfortable on, and what I actually need to ride this trail over here, which is the main way I ride here, is a pretty normal mountain bike.
Marco:
I was going to hope it was a penny farthing.
Marco:
No.
Marco:
But what I need is a basic mountain bike.
Marco:
What we've discovered, and Tiff and I went to a couple of local bike stores.
Marco:
We just discovered that...
Marco:
We don't want to buy the thing that all the research tells us to buy.
Marco:
We don't want to get the best possible thing.
Marco:
We just want to get a bike.
Marco:
And now Tiff and I each have bought bikes in the last 48 hours.
John:
And they say Trek on them in big letters.
Marco:
Close.
Marco:
They almost did.
Marco:
No, mine says specialized in big letters.
John:
Yeah, I was close.
John:
I was going to say, one of your requirements is going to have to give, and I bet it's the one with the logos.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
No, that had to... Yeah.
Marco:
Once you go into a bike shop, trying to get something that looks fairly tasteful is incredibly challenging because all the major brand bikes are just outrageous looking.
Marco:
My Mongoose looks awesome, by the way.
Marco:
Of course it does.
Marco:
Yes.
Marco:
Present company excluded.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
What Tiff and I both landed on, even though they are kind of slow at times, is that we both really had a lot of fun on 27.5-inch plus semi-fat tire bikes.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
tiff and i are each now owners of semi-fat mountain bikes uh both at the fairly entry-level price points um mine is literally this is the actual name of this product it is called the specialized fuse six fatty slash 29 wow is that a comment on the people who buy the bike get on the bike fatty
Marco:
I mean, I am buying this bike for fitness purposes.
John:
Seems like a counterproductive marketing strategy.
Marco:
This is a bike for you, Fatty.
Marco:
Yeah, so I'll put the link here.
Marco:
So I have the 6 Fatty 29, and then Tiff has the Orbea Loki 27 plus H20, which is a mouthful also.
John:
That's a lot of words for the name of a bike.
Marco:
But basically what happened is we tried a few bikes in the store, and I tried all the red ones, and Tiff tried all the blue ones, and she picked her favorite blue one.
John:
This is a great shopping strategy.
Marco:
And I picked my favorite red one, and we got pretty good prices on them.
Marco:
They're pretty inexpensive, relatively speaking, and they're not the best bikes in the world, but they make us the happiest, and we're not going to be bike power users for a long time, probably, so...
Marco:
I tried really hard to do my regular research-heavy thing and then eventually get the best or at least get the most sensible.
Marco:
And it turns out that's just totally the wrong way to buy a bike.
Marco:
And it's just so much easier to just go to the shop and find the one that rides the best for you and just buy it.
John:
Well, because you have so little experience with bikes, and bikes are such a large world.
John:
Imagine if you had so little experience with computers, and computers are such a large world.
John:
You'd end up buying one based on specs or something, but not realize the importance you placed on the OS, and it's just too much.
John:
But I bet your research strategy would work if you...
John:
ride bikes ride these bikes for many many years and kind of get a feel for what you like and then it's time to buy a new bike and then you would be able to do the exhaustive research knowing actually really what you like and what you don't like the same way you can with cameras because you've had a lot of cameras and you can do the 10 hours reading dp review because you're not going in with no with no foundational knowledge you know whereas bikes it was just like they have two wheels and you sit on them uh and then there's a bunch of words that other people's opinions are basically informing yours right
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And online reviews of bikes are all written by pro bikists, and they have very different preferences and needs than what I have as a casual recreational rider.
John:
Because you were shopping for pro bikes that cost thousands of dollars, so of course all the reviews are going to be from pro people.
John:
It's not going to be from like, I ride in the trail behind my house in this $3,000 bike.
Marco:
Also, the pro bikes are doing things like complaining about certain component choices in certain bikes and everything.
Marco:
If they say, oh, this doesn't have the SRAM A7 brakes, I'm like, I don't even know if that's good or not.
Marco:
I had no concept of what components were good and what weren't, and
Marco:
And there was a large price range for the different types of bikes people were recommending and that seemed to be popular sellers and everything.
Marco:
But what I found when I would go to a bike store and ride the really nice ones versus ride the base level ones is that I found that I just, in Casey fashion, I just didn't care about the difference.
Marco:
And the ones that I found that were super fun that just felt right to me were relatively inexpensive.
Yeah.
Marco:
No belt drive, no CVT.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
I tried really hard to find a mountain bike that has a belt drive and any kind of internal gearing option.
Marco:
I found one with a belt drive.
Marco:
The Spot makes one that has a belt drive, but it's fixed gear only.
Marco:
And I found zero that have a belt drive and internal gearing.
John:
That's what I was getting at when you when you listed like belt drive as your requirement.
John:
It's like you don't even know you don't even know this is you just discover this is a thing that exists and it seems fancier.
John:
So you want it.
John:
But there's a reason the chains are all in use.
John:
And I may just be the belts haven't trickled down from the high end yet.
John:
But that seems like most of the reason.
John:
There's also that chains are a tried and true technology.
John:
They are a solved problem.
John:
They can make them pretty well.
John:
And of all things, you would think mountain bikes would have the internal ones and not have it all be mucked up and everything.
John:
But I guess they're just either not there yet or the sort of chunky reliability of a chain.
John:
So I noticed this one doesn't have a front derailleur.
John:
Maybe that's an innovation in recent decades in mountain bikes.
Marco:
I mean it's I think it's probably also just because it's like a lower end model like it only has 10 speeds you know like you can get a lot of them seem to have like between 8 and 11 speeds that just had a rear derailleur which is that's fine for me in many ways it's probably a cultural demand thing like I don't think mountain bikists want the additional weight of internal gear hubs on the back wheels and also there seems to be a large need for them to be able to do repairs like while they're out so things have to be fairly mechanically simple for that to be possible and
Marco:
So a belt and a fancy internal gear hub, they exist.
Marco:
Thank you, I know about roll-off hubs.
Marco:
They exist, but it seems like putting them on mountain bikes is nearly unheard of, or at least is not usually done on bikes that you can buy that are stock-configured that way.
Marco:
People seem to customize them sometimes, but that's about it.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
All this is to say, I totally failed at buying a bike through my usual methods, but I did finally just buy one and now I'm done with it.
Marco:
And now I'm going to actually enjoy riding it.
Marco:
Because a quick way to burn through a whole fall full of nice weather not riding a bike is to try to spend all this time going bike shopping.
Marco:
I have spent so much time in my car in the last week, not just moving bikes around or renting bikes or transporting myself to and from bike shops that are far away.
Marco:
I have missed out on so much good riding time because I was spending too much time overthinking this problem.
John:
Sounds rough driving around to bike stores.
John:
Yeah, the struggle is real.
John:
Casey and I are at work, just so you know.