A Place to Stick Your Gum
Casey:
Fun fact, listeners, Syracuse is a much funnier person than you would ever expect.
Casey:
Like, you hear bits of that on the show.
John:
But more in a laughing-at-me way than a laughing-at-me way.
Casey:
No, that's not true.
Casey:
That's not true.
Casey:
You really, like... Well... It's a little accolme, a little accolme.
Casey:
Let's be honest.
Casey:
But, no, really, he is way funnier in person when not performing as we are all doing now.
John:
Are you trying to say I'm not funny on the podcast?
John:
He's way funnier than he is on this podcast.
Ha ha ha!
Casey:
That's not what I was going for.
Casey:
But if you want, I'm too tired to argue with you.
Casey:
So, yes.
Casey:
Let's start as we have to do with follow-up.
Casey:
TVOS 11.2 beta is out.
Casey:
Tell me about the output format switching, Mr. Syracuse, if you please.
John:
Not only is it out, but I actually got the update.
John:
I don't know what caused me to get it, but I checked for updates, and there it was, and I was very excited.
John:
So I immediately went into that setting screen that lets you say match source format, frame rate, or whatever, and then the HDR one is not applied to me, so I couldn't try that one.
John:
And then I played a movie and my television switched to what it displays as 24 hertz, which isn't really true because I'm pretty sure it's in some multiple of that refresh rate.
John:
But anyway, it works.
John:
It really, really works.
John:
Hooray!
John:
Of course, the movie I tried it with was a movie I purchased on iTunes.
John:
So I was using Apple's built-in movie app, which I assumed would have been updated to use the new APIs.
John:
And I guess it has been.
John:
I haven't had time to try it with Plex and Infuse and all the other things because I just assumed they would not have had time to update, but I'm just going to wait until 11.2 is out and try them as well.
John:
So I'm happy about this, and I'm one step closer to the probably terrible mistake of losslessly ripping all of my Blu-rays so that I can watch them on demand without touching a Blu-ray disc at full quality.
John:
But we'll see how that goes.
John:
And one additional note from this, Joe Rosenstiel has confirmed that
John:
confirmed a while ago and now is in the process of complaining and filing radars with Apple about the fact that the previous generation Apple TV, the not 4K Apple TV, doesn't get these features.
Casey:
Oh, womp womp for me.
John:
And also doesn't apparently get a manual 24 frames per second option.
John:
And like I said a couple of shows ago, I don't get a manual 24 frames per second option either in earlier versions of tvOS, even though my television supports it.
John:
But anyway, all these features are just for the fancy new Apple TV 4K.
Marco:
I don't think that's unreasonable.
John:
Well, it's the Apple way to do things, like why keep supporting the old thing, right?
John:
Although, as Todd Vaziri unfortunately found out, they still sell the old one because he was trying to order an Apple TV 4K and they didn't have any in stock, so he went to the store and bought one.
John:
He got a different size.
John:
He wanted to get the big one, I think, but he got the small one and brought it home, only to find that he just purchased the previous generation Apple TV, which looks very much the same if you're not very careful to look at the box and make sure it says Apple TV 4K on it.
John:
that's a shame uh and of course they continue to sell the other one because it hits a price point but they're not going to support it with the latest version of tvos in the same way like maybe there's a technical reason i can't really think of one but it's conceivable that there's some unknown technical reason why they can't do the switching but that's that's crappy
Marco:
they also in the most tim cook move ever didn't even lower the price of the now two-year-old one when they brought out the new one yeah well you know the currency they have it to hit a price point but it's a very not competitive price point suddenly suddenly it looks good it's anchoring the anchoring effect plus you've got inflation right so it was a long time ago so money is worth less now apple
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then tell me about APFS snapshots as used by time machine and software update, if you please.
John:
There were a couple of articles about this, but eventually they could all be traced back to a handy tech note thing on Apple's own site to explain how the cool APFS snapshots are being used by Apple's software at the very least.
John:
so time machine is using them um i'm assuming i don't know if this article says it but i'm assuming the obvious thing to do is take a snapshot and then do a time machine backup from that snapshot so you don't get the weird thing that you used to get where a time machine backups takes a half an hour to run and files that are copied to the beginning of the backup are 30 minutes newer than files that are copied at the end and you sort of get this weird image of the disk that is like
John:
It's like a rolling shutter on a phone, right?
John:
It's like a rolling backup.
John:
Like I'll start backing up and while I'm backing up, you're continuing to use your computer.
John:
But if I already backed up the file you modified, I'll get it in the next backup.
John:
It's weird.
John:
Snapshots, you don't have to do that.
John:
You can say point in time snapshot.
John:
That's what I'm going to back up from.
John:
That's exactly what this disk looks like at a particular point in time.
John:
And it will back up from that.
John:
But additionally, Time Machine takes snapshots every 24 hours while your computer is turned on.
John:
And it takes a snapshot every week as well.
John:
And remember, snapshots are just like a point in time on your disk.
John:
It's not a backup to your Time Machine volume.
John:
It's just snapshots of your regular disk as it was.
John:
And those are convenient for like, you can run Time Machine, even if you've never had your Time Machine disk, like your external Time Machine disk, attached to your computer for a long time.
John:
You can still use Time Machine to recover things from the local disk that were part of those snapshots.
John:
And I heard some report of someone saying, I deleted a bunch of stuff and my free disk space didn't go down.
John:
it really depends on how they were checking their free disk space because if you were checking it at the lowest level that would be true because if you make a snapshot and that snapshot includes like a four gig file then you delete that four gig file you don't get that space back because that snapshot is still holding on to those four gigs so that you could if you wanted to recover that file from the snapshot or whatever with time machine so that's a case where if you were getting your disk free disk space at the lowest level
John:
you would see that I deleted this file.
John:
Why didn't I get the free space back?
John:
But this tech note has a thing at the end that says basically, you know, are you worried about these snapshots eating all your disk space?
John:
Don't worry because if we, the operating system need, you know, if storage space gets low, which is what the tech note says, snapshots are automatically deleted starting with the oldest.
John:
And I'm quoting directly from the document now.
John:
That's why Finder and GetInfoWindows don't include local snapshots in their calculations of the storage space available on disk.
John:
So yet another complication, as foretold in many past episodes, of how APFS was going to make it much more complicated to even display things like free space, having to do a bunch of math and subtract out the space taken by snapshots and all that other stuff.
John:
so they just lie to you and say oh yeah no we freed up that space but they didn't they didn't free it up unless you need more disk space unless you really really need it uh it won't delete the snapshots and deleting shops that's just easy it's not like it has to delete a bunch of files it just says okay forget about that snapshot all those disks all those blocks that were part of that snapshot that are not part of any other snapshot are now free
John:
so it's the magic of apfs and my final note on this this tech note which i think everyone should read is it has it is forced to explain the horrendous ui of time machine specifically the weird uh timeline scrolly thing on the right with like that like is a little zoomy timeline some poor tech writer had to had to write out
John:
If you have one of these versions of the operating systems, a bright red tick mark means this.
John:
A dimmed red tick mark means that.
John:
If you have a different version of the operating system, a gray tick mark means this.
John:
A bright pink tick mark means this.
John:
And a dimmed pink tick mark means this.
John:
Oh, my God.
John:
These colors are very similar to each other.
John:
I would never have guessed all this stuff, how you can use the interface many, many times.
John:
And there's not a lot of text.
John:
it's like time machine good technology even though they got rid of the swirling vortex which i would argue is the best part of this interface they got rid of that right so it's not like completely frivolous but the rest of the ui is not it's not great i don't know what these colors mean i've read this tech note i'm never going to remember this i don't know what dimmed pink means what what is bright pink and dimmed pink it's if you only have dimmed pink how can you tell it's dimmed pink and it's not bright pink unless you have a bright pink to compare it to this is a bad interface apple please work on this
Casey:
Oh, wow.
Casey:
How do you really feel, John?
Casey:
Just don't hold back this time.
Marco:
Time Machine is just one of the many things that, as we have gotten the transition of the whole world and all of Apple's focus to iOS, it's one of the many things on macOS I look at.
Marco:
I'm just kind of sad that if macOS was still getting seemingly meaningful effort put into it,
Marco:
this could be so much more by now like this this could be so much better but it just seems like most of mac os is not only in maintenance mode but seems to have the b team working on it and it's just it just makes me sad and it's a little bit buggy too like i spend time in the interface trying to find things and sometimes it does weird stuff and you just i just shake my head and try it for a second time and it usually works a second time and who knows why it didn't work the first
John:
Like there's a lot of cool tech under there and you could build lots of interesting UIs on top of it.
John:
And the initial UI was fun and cool and interesting and had good ideas behind it and simplified it.
John:
But the way it's evolved or rather hasn't evolved is kind of depressing.
John:
One more minor point on this.
John:
They do take snapshots before software updates as well.
John:
I don't know if they do anything with that.
John:
like i don't know if there's any actual feature that says you don't like the software update you did don't worry we took a whole snapshot of your disk and you can roll back to it right now i don't think there's any ui to that but if third-party tools have enough access to snapshots they could offer that option just by listing all your snapshots um and same thing with time machine
John:
There was a backup program, I don't know if it's still in development, called Backup Loop that was like, hey, Time Machine is cool.
John:
Why don't we make a cool, powerful UI on top of it for people who want to nerd out a little bit more than is possible with the default UI?
John:
And that's the fun type of stuff.
John:
It's a third-party opportunity, but also at this point, the built-in one should be better too.
Casey:
I don't mind Time Machine, but I think it's because I'm almost never in Time Machine, so I don't have to deal with the Chrome UI very often.
John:
Did you know about the dimmed red?
Casey:
No.
John:
And the bright pink?
John:
No, you didn't know.
Casey:
No, I didn't.
Casey:
But now I know, and knowing is half the battle.
John:
You don't know.
John:
That's the whole thing.
John:
You didn't read this document, and even if you read it, it will just bounce off your brain.
John:
There is no way anybody will remember this.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
This is not a sponsor, but we wanted to take a moment out of our day to call your attention to the AppCamp fundraiser.
Casey:
AppCamp for Girls is an organization that's near and dear to all three of our hearts.
Casey:
We tend to sponsor their get-togethers at WWDC when we can, and they are trying to expand to three new cities, and they need a whole pile of money to do that because doing this sort of thing is not cheap.
Casey:
So we will put a link in the show notes to a fundraiser on Indiegogo that I have not yet had the opportunity to back because I've been traveling for work, but I will do so as soon as I am human again.
Casey:
So anyway, they are only about a little under halfway there as we record today.
Casey:
And it would be pretty awesome if we made them all the way there by the time we record next.
Casey:
Hint, hint, hint, hint.
Casey:
So AppCamp is a great organization.
Casey:
It does really great work in trying to encourage young girls, young women to explore technology and try to maybe see if they have a future in creating the kind of apps that Marco and I create.
Casey:
And they're smart enough not to ask these young girls to use Pearl because then they would never want to program ever again.
Casey:
So if you want to give money to people who don't program in Pearl, please feel free to check out this link in the show notes and send them any of your money.
Casey:
Even a dollar would help.
Casey:
And it would mean a lot to all three of us.
John:
You don't know they don't program in Perl.
John:
They could all be using Perl.
John:
There's probably some framework that lets you write iOS apps in Perl, right?
Casey:
There's one for every other language.
Casey:
I'm sure there's something on CPAN that makes it work.
Casey:
That's how it is, right?
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Fracture, who prints photos in vivid color, edge-to-edge on pieces of glass.
Marco:
Visit Fracture.me and use code ATP17 for 15% off your first order.
Marco:
Fracture
Marco:
uh because they go edge to edge you don't need any kind of frame or mat it is a completed thing so like you know before you'd have to like get things framed and it was expensive and time consuming kind of a pain and the things would be get there be so heavy fracture prints are nothing like that they are affordable they are great values they look great they go edge to edge and they're actually very lightweight because the glass is nice and thin and it's in front of this little kind of like foam board backing to make it easier to hang
Marco:
So fracture prints are incredibly practical and they look great.
Marco:
We get tons of compliments on them all around our house.
Marco:
We also give them as gifts very often.
Marco:
If you have someone in your life who you want to give photos to as gifts, maybe it's a grandparent or something like that, you know, giving photos of your family.
Marco:
This is a very common thing.
Marco:
And fracture prints are wonderful for gifts.
Marco:
People love them.
Marco:
The only thing is every fracture is handmade.
Marco:
And what that means is they can get backed up in the holidays because they have people actually making these things from scratch.
Marco:
That's in the U.S.
Marco:
in Gainesville, Florida from U.S.
Marco:
source materials in a carbon neutral factory.
Marco:
So all great things.
Marco:
But if you're going to order a fracture as a holiday gift, get your order in now.
Marco:
Right now as I record, the holiday season is about a month away.
Marco:
But fracture gets backed up because everyone gives these as gifts.
Marco:
So they want to let you know.
Marco:
They want me to let you know.
Marco:
please hurry up and get your orders in soon because they are so good.
Marco:
They make such great gifts that they might get backed up.
Marco:
So check it out today.
Marco:
And really, I mean today, not tomorrow, not next week.
Marco:
Check it out actually today so you can get there before the holiday rush at fracture.me and use ATP 17 at checkout to get 15% off your first order.
Marco:
Thank you very much to fracture for sponsoring our show.
Oh,
Casey:
So let's talk about Ask ATP.
Casey:
Nathan Walls writes in, now that you have iPhones 10 in hand, is it iPhones 10?
Casey:
I know that's the way they usually do it.
Casey:
God.
Marco:
No, it's iPhone XS.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
I just know that the Apple guidance is always so bananas.
Casey:
Anyway, now that you have iPhones 10 in hand, are you using or wanting to use a case with it?
Casey:
Which cases are you using?
Casey:
Thanks.
Casey:
I'll start off.
Casey:
If you recall, my iPhone 7 was the first phone in a long time that I had naked.
Casey:
And I paid the price because I dropped it on the pavement and shattered my first screen.
Casey:
Luckily, I had AppleCare, and so that was taken care of.
Casey:
And then I quickly scratched the screen within about two weeks of getting it replaced, which is delightful.
Casey:
Anyway, for the iPhone X, it's apparently, I don't recall if we talked about this last episode, but it's like $200 or something like that to do a front screen replacement and something like $500 to do a back screen.
Casey:
We did talk about it.
John:
You're very tired, I can tell.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm dying.
Casey:
But anyway, so the point is that it's extremely expensive to replace anything on this phone.
Casey:
I personally have not ordered AppleCare for my phone.
Casey:
I've been debating it, and I don't think I will, which we can play this clip when I inevitably break this phone in a few months.
Casey:
But I have put the official Apple leather case on it.
Casey:
I do quite like the official Apple leather cases.
Casey:
However...
Casey:
The thing that bothers me about most cases, including the Apple leather case, is that it makes doing gestures from the edge of the screen considerably more difficult.
Casey:
And that bums me out.
Casey:
But otherwise, it's a nice case.
Casey:
It's expensive.
Casey:
It's like 50 bucks, but it's a nice case.
Casey:
Marco, what do you got going on?
Marco:
I am also caseless.
Marco:
That's almost caseless.
Marco:
I bet you have thought of that many times.
Marco:
Sorry.
Marco:
So, yeah, I'm also going caseless.
Marco:
I, too, was cased only with the 6 and 6S, not before or after.
Marco:
The 7 I got in jet black because it was grippy, and I love that.
Marco:
The 10 is, you know, with the glass back and the smooth metal sides...
Marco:
the i would say overall so far it does not seem as grippy as the iphone 7 but it's not as slippery as the 6 and 6s so i'm a little well slow down though slow down though it is way grippier than my beautiful but bar of soap matte black
Casey:
or whatever they call it yeah yeah uh iphone 7 right yeah just whatever it was called but the jet black is obviously a whole different animal i'm not trying to argue that but if you happen to be coming from a matte black iphone or you know whatever the equivalent uh was that i would say that the iphone 10 is considerably more grippy than that but it sounds like you're saying marco it is less grippy than the jet black
Marco:
That's what it feels like so far.
Marco:
It could just be because it's new and doesn't have all my hand oil on it from a year worth of hand oil, which is really gross, but that's how it works.
Marco:
It could be that.
Marco:
But compared to the Jet Black, it is not as grippy.
Marco:
And it could also be that while the glass is kind of grippy, the sides are now just regular metal again, and so they're not.
Marco:
So it could be that.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I have considered looking into some kind of...
Marco:
film or maybe like a little stick on like leather thing just for the back of it with not even the sides like they may you know they make just like kind of single panel decals or stickers or protectors um for phones generally so i was thinking about doing that just to make the back a little bit grippier for and just for a small amount of protection uh i too did not get apple care as i explained last week um
Marco:
so i figure like you know i'll see how it goes if i drop it you everyone can make fun of me um and maybe i'll start you know spending two hundred dollars a year on apple care from that point forward um but right but i mean until like until i start dropping my phones that i i'm coming out ahead by not doing that so you're still doing your math wrong you have to drop your phone enough times to equal all the two hundred dollar all the money you would have paid for all your phones
John:
It's not $200 for each one because it used to be cheaper, but you have to add up all that money, and then if you want to try to balance the scales, you should really only start buying AppleCare after you match that amount.
Marco:
Right, exactly.
Marco:
And so far, I haven't had to do that yet.
Marco:
I would have to pay full price for a lot of replacements to make my policy worth reconsidering.
Marco:
And also, cases are also part of that, too.
Marco:
Cases are $50 at least for a decent one from Apple or a decent one from anybody else.
Marco:
You're generally looking at around that price range.
Marco:
This stuff that you're paying for all these protective things, but you're paying a lot for that protection.
Marco:
And so you really have to be breaking things on a regular basis to make you come out ahead with that.
Marco:
So anyway, I am caseless.
Marco:
You are caseless.
Marco:
You are also caseless.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
I'm not caseless this time.
Casey:
I was caseless.
Casey:
Oh, that's right.
Casey:
I'm rocking the black leather this time.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So how is it?
Casey:
It's like every other black leather case I've had.
Casey:
I mean, I like it.
Casey:
It's very nice.
Casey:
Like about the same one that they've been making since the sex, basically.
Casey:
Absolutely right.
Casey:
That one was fine.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, I choose black because when it wears, it doesn't really look any different.
Casey:
I know there's a lot of people that like, what is it, like saddle brown or whatever.
Casey:
And once it gets worn, it kind of gets that, I don't know how to describe it.
Casey:
It's not really patina, but it has that look to it.
Casey:
And I know a lot of people that really like that.
Casey:
That's not really my cup of tea.
Casey:
And I personally like a very quiet case in the sense of visually quiet.
Casey:
So I've always had black leather cases.
Casey:
uh mike curly is apparently i don't know if he's received it at this point but was looking into getting a bumper which actually sounded really interesting to me i don't think it would be what i would choose because that especially that back glass if you shatter that oof that's a bad day so i'm i'm gonna stick with the black leather case and we'll see how that goes
Marco:
The other thing with any kind of case and bumper is that it does interfere with the side gestures.
Marco:
And even though – once you get one – like I used my 6 and 6S the entire time I had them with Apple's other case.
Marco:
And you do get used to it.
Marco:
But it does make the swipe in from the side gesture a little harder to do, and it gives you a little less room to do it.
Marco:
And also, it just collects dust around that edge and everything.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
I prefer not to use a case unless I really have to or unless I feel like I really have to.
Marco:
And so far with the 10, I don't think I'll need it.
Marco:
The only thing that makes me nervous is just how expensive it is to repair and that it is a new size that I'm still getting used to holding and using.
Marco:
And we'll get to that later on in the show a little bit.
Marco:
But so far...
Marco:
I think I'm going to probably stay either caseless or with some kind of minimal stick-on decal thing on the back just to increase grip.
John:
all right moving on uh john you do not have an iphone 10 in hand is that correct i thought you were gonna move on like last week where marco edited out the part where i said whether or not i got apple care plus wow just move right on yes let's talk about the iphone 10s marco in case it gets it was just it was all about your wife it wasn't even about yours so it wasn't you know that's the iphone 10 we're talking about it's the only one i have i didn't get one
John:
Anyway, to reiterate, we got AppleCare Plus because my wife drops her phone.
John:
She drops her previous one twice.
John:
Also, on the leather case, the leather case for the 7 is way better than the leather case for the 6 was because they changed to metal volume buttons that poke out through, whereas the 6 had these lumps in the leather.
John:
I don't know what the leather case for the 10 is, but I can tell you that the leather case for the 7 is a big upgrade over the 6 for all the buttons.
John:
And I heard people saying they really liked the leather case for the 10, that it had aluminum buttons or whatever.
John:
um same thing with with the seven case and that is much much better than the lumps um as for cases i've always used a case on all of my ios things oh you've used a case and and what and you yeah whatever i saw you had like a little baggie that you would put your phone oh yeah no i do have that little pouch yep
John:
Yeah, I use the pouch mostly.
John:
I mean, I don't know why I started using.
John:
I think I got it from my iPod touches mostly just so I can shove it in my pocket without worrying about anything hitting the screen.
John:
And also it basically cleans the screen every time I do that around the house.
John:
I don't use it, obviously.
John:
Right.
John:
It's only, you know, when I'm when I'm going out or when it's in my pocket.
John:
uh most of the reason i'm getting the cases is for hand grip and for surface grip but in the modern era i think the main reason i probably will never go without a case despite everything marco said about uh gestures which is true is because it evens out the camera bump
John:
And that is super true on the 10, as we will talk about.
John:
So, yes, I'm using a case on my iPhone 7.
John:
My wife got silicone cases for her iPhone 10.
John:
And because she is impatient and loves different colors, she got two of them just like she did.
John:
But I think maybe she got three for a 6S Plus.
John:
Anyway, so in case it looks good.
Marco:
Yeah, actually, the leveling out the camera bump is a real thing.
Marco:
That's another reason because like the camera bump on the 6 is noticeably larger, I think, than the previous ones.
Marco:
And so like for the first time, I'm actually interested in leveling out the camera bump where I didn't care before.
Casey:
All right, so we have our next to Ask ATP from Kapila Wamala Rotne.
Casey:
Hope I got that right.
Casey:
Do you think Siri lagging behind Google Assistant will eventually hurt iPhone sales?
Casey:
And this individual says, I'm currently very tempted by the Pixel 2.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
It's an interesting question.
Casey:
I can tell you that I've...
Casey:
I feel like my feelings about Siri go through kind of a sine wave where the peak of the sine wave is like begrudgingly accepting how bad Siri is.
Casey:
And right now I'm in a valley because I frigging hate Siri and I feel like it's constantly giving me wrong data or not understanding what I'm trying to tell it.
Casey:
But I don't have an Alexa in the house.
Casey:
I don't have a Google Home in the house.
Casey:
I don't really ever use any Android or Amazon devices.
Casey:
So I don't really know what I'm missing.
Casey:
And because of that, for me, I mean, obviously, I'm all in on Apple anyway.
Casey:
But I don't think for me and people who don't have like these multicultural households, if you will, in terms of, you know, assistance.
Casey:
I don't know that anyone really realizes how crappy Siri is, including myself.
Casey:
But I'm curious to hear for like you guys that have multiple, you know, talking tubes in the house.
Casey:
Do you think that this is a much bigger risk?
Marco:
You know, for me, it depends on what you're using it for.
Marco:
You know, for me, Siri is just one part of why I choose Apple products and why I love the iPhone so much and why I use the iPhone over other phones.
Marco:
I think Siri not being as good as it should be is a real problem, but it's a real problem that is of different degrees of severity depending on the product you're talking about.
Marco:
So for something like the HomePod, that's a big problem.
Marco:
If Siri is not somehow miraculously way better and way more consistent and way less sassy and with way less personality on the HomePod than it is everywhere else right now,
Marco:
Then the HomePod is going to be, I think, really annoying to use in practice.
Marco:
Because when that's the only interface you have to something, it really has to be good and consistent and smart.
Marco:
And it has to do the right thing every time.
Marco:
And that's what the Amazon Echo does.
Marco:
The Echo is really...
Marco:
really really good it's really consistent it hardly ever fails and when it does fail it doesn't do so with a cutesy response where it's trying to be funny that really just makes you want to set the world on fire um siri in that kind of context is going to be a problem i think
Marco:
But for my phone, the other reasons I choose the iPhone are so much greater than the variance between Siri and the other voice assistants that the other reasons will always overpower that difference.
Marco:
Even if the iPhone didn't have Siri at all, even if it did not have any voice interface at all, I would still choose the iPhone over anything else just because the rest of it is so compelling compared to that.
Marco:
Now, other people might have different responses to that.
Marco:
But for me, and I think for a lot of people, I think the voice features are really secondary and they're convenience features on a phone.
Marco:
Most of what you do on a phone is not through that voice interface for most people.
Marco:
So, you know, again, like if your use case may vary, but for me, it's like, I want Siri to be better for lots of reasons.
Marco:
And I think it needs to be better for lots of reasons.
Marco:
But it's not going to kill iPhone sales in a meaningful way if it's not.
John:
so you missed the key uh booby trap in this question here which is the word eventually yes that's right it's everybody's favorite on an infinite timescale right so we need like an infinite timescale horn or something yeah a gong do you think serial lagging behind google assistant will eventually hurt iphone sales so there's two aspects of this and the reason i picked this question i wonder if i can fit a gong in my office i have the bell up here but the bell is nice and small a gong is not small infinite timescale gong yeah
Marco:
I mean, you can get a little desk gong, but if you're going to get a gong, get a real one.
Marco:
Get the one on the floor stand.
John:
Your accessories need to be under control here.
John:
So the eventually part of this, if...
John:
voice assistants become more and more important on phones and Siri continues to lag behind Google assistant, then I think your calculus might change Marco.
John:
If everyone else is talking to the phones constantly and get an awesome response from it.
John:
And it's like the most convenient way to do a whole bunch of things.
John:
uh but siri continues to lag behind that may change your calculus on exactly how important you feel it's not that it's going to make you buy an android front or whatever but the other angle on this is that google assistant is available on ios the only difference is that apple privileges siri to be the one with the good system integration so apple's ultimate out if it can never get siri to be as good as google assistant and if
John:
voice assistants on phones become much more important than they are today apple always has the ability to say assuming you know google deigns to continue to be on the on ios which i assume they will because if they're on now and they have 80 market share i don't see why they wouldn't be forever um
John:
is okay we will just make apis so that any voice assistant has the same kind of integration that siri does and then voila your iphone has just as good a voice assistant as google because it's the same voice assistant that would be kind of a failure scenario and showed that they couldn't hack it with siri but i think uh it is likely that voice assistants will become more important on phones than they are today i'm not sure how far it'll go but certainly it'll become more important and and uh more important and to casey's point about us having cylinders in the house
John:
I continue to have really good customer sat, as Tim would say, for my silly Google cylinder that mostly I ignore the existence of.
John:
But every once in a while, in addition to asking you to set timers and do math for me.
John:
Right.
John:
I will yell from three rooms away.
John:
Not even yell.
John:
Just like this is the most recent thing where I was blown away with it.
John:
Like I'm in my TV room.
John:
but just like two rooms away it's like kind of on the other side of the house but on the same floor and we were having debate about the ages of actors on the show we were watching and i just asked to the air in a slightly louder voice than normal but not screaming uh you know name of actor how old how old is this actor and how old was that actor it gave me the answers
John:
Like it didn't say I can't find a person by that name or didn't misspell it or mistranslate it because it's powered by Google.
John:
And Google is the ultimate engine for typing a bunch of characters that you think might approximate the spelling of a celebrity's name.
John:
And because they're a celebrity, it goes, I think I know who you meant, even though you got that name totally wrong.
John:
And it works over voice, too.
John:
That's not a very, you know, amazing thing to do.
John:
But if I had taken out my phone and asked Siri to do it or asked the HomePod, I can just imagine it.
John:
picking a name from my contacts that sounds like the celebrity name and giving me their age or saying there's no birthday information or saying it couldn't provide that information so uh i think the lead is real and i think it will eventually be a problem for apple but i think apple has the ability to turn back the clock to 2007 and say google powers all of our cool cloud stuff because they're great at that and we make the hardware in the os which would be bad as far as apple's concerned but it's always there as an out
Marco:
The other thing I would say, though, is in the context of phone sales, which is what the question was really about, we've had voice input on laptops now for a while, but it hasn't really resulted in people talking to their laptops very often.
Marco:
The primary way that people interact with their laptops, by far, is still typing and looking at things on the screen.
John:
My mom talks to her laptop a lot more than you would think.
John:
I think there is a...
John:
a kind of a divide of traditional computer users and people who for whom even crappy voice is better than mouse and keyboard it's not it's not widespread you're right most people don't talk to their computers but if voice assistants become better i feel like that could start to change too well yeah but but i'm saying like it's we've had it now for a while and it's still while some people do it it still is not the primary way most people interact with it
Marco:
And phones, we've now had voice assistants on phones for one day longer than Steve Jobs has been gone.
Marco:
So it's a while now.
Marco:
And they still have not become the primary interface for interacting with phones.
Marco:
And I feel like every form factor of computing device, you know, they become compelling, they become useful and popular to be used in certain ways.
Marco:
And, you know, the laptop is established as like the mainstream PC thing.
Marco:
And there's a way you use a laptop.
Marco:
It's with a keyboard and a trackpad.
Marco:
And that's been established for some time and nothing's really going to change that meaningfully probably.
Marco:
A phone has been established to be a screen that's handheld or approximately handheld that you can touch with your finger and do multi-touch gestures and type on the glass and everything and have that be the primary interface.
Marco:
You can do other things with them.
Marco:
You can control it by voice.
Marco:
You can do other methods with these things.
Marco:
But those have been the primary interfaces.
Marco:
And over time, we really haven't seen anything to suggest that these basic form factor categories and the way you interact with them really meaningfully changes or dramatically changes over time.
Marco:
A laptop that you buy today, while the keyboard sucks and it has no ports, is roughly the same proportions and form factor as laptops we had 15 years ago.
Marco:
It's just better.
Marco:
But it's the same general thing, the same approximate size, the same approximate class of device, and you interact with it roughly the same way.
Marco:
so a phone over time like if you think about like even on your infinite timescale argument like you know phones might be replaced by something else down the road um you know but eventually they probably will oh they're pretty they're pretty damn compelling now for and they they probably will be for quite some time a phone's primary interface is very likely to remain touch for a very long time probably for the entire rest of the time that phones are relevant devices that people carry
John:
But it doesn't matter what the primary interface is, though.
John:
I agree with you.
John:
It's a giant screen that you touch.
John:
Of course, that's going to be how you're going to interact with.
John:
But if voice becomes a more important part of how you interact with the phone, it doesn't mean you stop touching the screen.
John:
You're always going to touch the screen.
John:
It's the whole point.
John:
Like you said, it's in your hand.
John:
It's a little thing in your hand until it's replaced by magic eyeglasses or some other thing in your ear or something or whatever.
John:
Yes, you're going to be touching it primarily.
John:
But imagine, I imagine very frequently, how much better voice could be when I'm
John:
driving a car and i hear my little phone bing in my pocket i would love to say read that text for me but i can't say that i can't even say hey siri read that text for me because it won't hear me because it's in my pocket but it's connected to bluetooth through my car so it's using my car's crappy microphone like it could be it could be better um and for for you know when voice didn't exist on ios devices people were just touching them entirely right there was no no siri right um
John:
When voice was added, it didn't really change our lives that much, except for maybe we used to set timers and stuff.
John:
But it radically changed the way my mother uses iOS devices and Macs because her primary typing interface is speaking to her devices now.
John:
Does that not mean that the primary way she uses her laptop or her phone is by voice?
John:
Of course not.
John:
She's using the mouse or the trackpad or, you know, her fingers to use the iOS device.
John:
But any time text input comes along, she dictates it.
John:
I can tell because I see the dictators in all of her stuff and I've seen her do it.
John:
you know where it picks the wrong word like a you know homonym or whatever i'm picturing that as a vegetable even though i know what you meant but it's dictators yeah sometimes it's funny you have to kind of sound it out to figure out what she was she doesn't she doesn't go back and edit because editing would require her to try to like place the cursor in ios on her phone and it you know it's not going to work with her vision and her fingernails is just not going to happen um
John:
But I think that really has changed how she's done things.
John:
And if you said you can have a computer or a phone, but it won't do, you know, speech to text, she would not like it.
John:
So all I'm saying is I think it could potentially become more important.
John:
And if Google Assistant gets to the point where I can do things like who just texted me?
John:
Was that my wife?
John:
Like if I can interact with it in kind of a naturalistic way and a regular tone of voice and have an expectation that it'll know what the heck I'm talking about and respond in a reasonable way.
John:
That is a game changer, right?
John:
You cross some threshold, just like touch responsiveness, cross some threshold with the iPhone.
John:
It's like, oh, I see how touch is supposed to be.
John:
Voice, it's not there yet, but I feel like it could get there and become a more important part of how your phone worked.
John:
And if you saw everyone else driving with their Android phones, interacting, doing those interactions, not as their primary way of using their phone, but just like sometimes that's the most convenient way to do stuff.
John:
If you see that happening and your iPhone can't do it because every time you try to talk to it, it like bloops at the wrong time or like tells you it can't help you or runs like a web search and says, I found five things about, is that from my wife?
Marco:
Yeah, that's fair.
Marco:
And I do, you know, you're right that like if there's radical differences between Siri and its competitors, that does start to become an issue.
Marco:
But it's only an issue to the degree that voice input is important to that device.
Marco:
And so if voice input is always the secondary way you're interacting with this thing, if you're mostly still touching it, and voice is just like the secondary set of features, it's way less important whether the voice input is mediocre or excellent.
Marco:
And so I think Siri can contain... And because the rest of the phone is so much better than its competitors for almost everybody, for almost every reason.
Marco:
Sorry, Android people.
Marco:
That's the way it is.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Because the primary interface is so advanced and so compelling, the secondary interface, I think, has way more tolerance to be mediocre and still not make people change their buying habits.
John:
I'm always depressed that I can't even get my immediate family to get on board with iPhones.
John:
And this is the thing where I start to worry that even though it seems clear to us that iOS has advantages, advantages that we appreciate,
John:
It's very clear that they are advantages that most of the rest of the world does not appreciate, or at least they do not appreciate them enough to pay for them.
John:
So I, you know, my sister has an Android phone and she replaced it with another Android phone and I couldn't convince her to get an iPhone.
John:
You know why?
John:
Because she said, well, I got this Android phone and it was $200, but I got $150 Costco rebate.
John:
So it even costs less than that.
John:
Can you show me the iPhone I can buy for $150?
John:
And I was like, no, I can't.
John:
show you the iPhone you can buy for $150.
John:
And there's no way I could convince her that a difference between $50 net and $800 for an iPhone, like, but don't you see how much better iOS is?
John:
It's like, I do not see $750 worth of difference.
John:
And that's why Android has 80% market share.
John:
Like phones are such a commodity now that people just want a phone and occasionally they want a new phone.
John:
But it's like, it's like who buys batteries from the Seinfeld episode?
John:
Like, oh, you pay money for your phone?
John:
I got this one for 50 bucks and it's fine.
John:
I got this phone for 50 bucks and it's fine.
John:
Might as well be the Android slogan.
John:
Like it is an incredibly powerful force.
John:
Like you cannot, there's nothing you can say to someone who says, I got this phone for $50 and it's fine.
John:
Cause they don't care about phones.
John:
They're not phone enthusiasts.
John:
They're not phone power users.
John:
They just want a phone that lets them do phone things and it's $50.
John:
And there's nothing you can say to them to say that this thousand dollar iPhone 10 that reads your face like magic is like, don't you want this now?
John:
It's like, maybe if I have an infinite money, but I got this phone for $50 and it's fine.
Casey:
anyway that's a different show that's not this is the show we're all we're about to talk about how much we love our iphone 10 so yeah spoilers all right well we still have one more uh one more ask atp to go through ananda would like to know is marco getting in a sony a7r3 since they addressed the battery concerns he had with the mark ii
Casey:
So my understanding is your A7R II, if memory serves, the battery was just woefully undersuited for the device and you were charging constantly.
Casey:
So is that an accurate retelling and does the A7R III fix that?
John:
Oh, by the way, before I answer, I love how this question calls the previous version of a Sony camera, the Mark II.
John:
That's kind of crossing the streams there.
John:
It's not the Mark II.
Marco:
That's a little Canon lingo.
Marco:
And before that, many other things.
Marco:
Anyway, the a7R II, I had two main problems with it.
Marco:
The battery life was one, and the other was the general speed of handling.
Marco:
Things like...
Marco:
reviewing an image that I just shot or just, you know, speed and responsiveness of the controls and the system and shooting and everything else.
Marco:
It was, you know, capturing those giant 42 megapixel images off that sensor.
Marco:
The camera's image processor, I think, just couldn't handle that very well.
Marco:
And so a lot of operations on the 5D Mark, or sorry, wow, on the A7R II are just really sluggish.
Marco:
And when I switched back to Canon and I got the 5D Mark IV instead,
Marco:
it's night and day difference.
Marco:
I mean, it isn't as many megapixels.
Marco:
I think it's only 30, you know, quote, only 30 instead of 42.
Marco:
But processing those pixels and navigating and shooting and reviewing the images and zooming into the images to see if they're sharp and everything, like, it's just a million times faster on the 5D Mark IV than it is on the a7R II.
Marco:
So the a7R III was just announced.
Marco:
I don't know if it's out yet, but either way, it's out shortly or now.
Marco:
And when I sold my a7R II to Stephen Hackett, I kept my two favorite lenses, the 55 and the 35 Primes, because I thought, you know, lens resale value is not going to change much in a year.
Marco:
And if I end up buying back into the Sony ecosystem, you know, I have these lenses, I'd have to rebuy them.
Marco:
So I kind of left the door open that I could go back if I wanted to.
Marco:
The a7R III promises to... It uses the new batteries that the a9 introduced.
Marco:
And the a9 is like a fast sports camera that's not really what I would be looking for.
Marco:
It uses the same batteries that does, which have allegedly, I think, like two and a half times the capacity of the old ones.
Marco:
And allegedly, the a7R III also has a faster image processor.
Marco:
But until it's actually out and until people can actually review it and maybe I can rent one, it's hard to quantify that.
Marco:
It's like, well, how much faster is it?
Marco:
And how much better are those batteries?
Marco:
If it's only a little bit better, that's not good enough for me.
Marco:
If it can make it to the speed and responsiveness level of a Canon full-frame SLR,
Marco:
And with the battery life that could be similar, then we'll talk.
Marco:
But it's too early to know that yet.
Marco:
I am very tempted, though, because in the Canon world, while I do absolutely love the speed and the handling and the basically infinite battery life that full-size SLRs have compared to mirrorless,
Marco:
I do miss those 42 megapixels when I try to shoot myself a new 5K wallpaper.
Marco:
And I also miss the in-body stabilization to make every lens stabilize, basically.
Marco:
So I'm curious to rent one when it comes out.
Marco:
Whenever I can get my hands on a rental, it might be a while.
Marco:
But I'm not rushing out to buy it yet.
Marco:
Because I think the most likely outcome here is that it will be better, but not better enough.
Marco:
We are sponsored this week by Warby Parker.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
And they also sell both prescription or non-prescription polarized sunglasses as well.
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:
My wife did it.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
You can see for yourself, warbyparker.com slash ATP.
Marco:
Order your free home try-ons, and you can see quite how easy they make it.
Marco:
And Warby Parker glasses are an incredible value.
Marco:
They believe you should be able to afford more than one pair.
Marco:
Use them as a fashion accessory, just so you can have more than one pair of glasses, depending on how you feel that day.
Marco:
And for every pair of glasses sold, they also distribute a pair of glasses to someone in need.
Marco:
And they have sunglasses starting at just $95 as well, including polarized lenses, with prescriptions starting at just $175.
Marco:
Just like eyeglasses, their sunglasses are available through the home try-on program as well.
Marco:
And they have premium polarized lenses that are scratch-resistant and provide 100% UV protection.
Marco:
You can also see all these glasses in their Warby Parker app in the App Store.
Marco:
It has a home try-on companion feature, which allows you to quickly take photos wearing the frames, stitch it into a video, and share it with friends and family to help you pick a winner.
Marco:
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Marco:
That's an incredible value.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
See for yourself how great these glasses are and how great they look on you.
Marco:
Once again, WarbyParker.com slash ATP to get your free home try-ons.
Marco:
Thanks to Warby Parker for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
It's iPhone time.
Casey:
It sounds like all three households have received at least one iPhone 10.
Casey:
In the case of our house, I got one and Aaron got one.
Casey:
I got the whatever we're calling it, whatever the Apple term is for black, 256.
Casey:
Aaron got whatever the Apple term is for white, 256.
Casey:
Marco, how did your house end up?
Casey:
White, 256.
Casey:
And then John, how did you end up?
John:
I didn't receive a phone.
John:
I had to go out and get it.
John:
If you recall, I ordered a phone, but it was like two to three weeks wait.
John:
But in the days since ordering the phone, I've been using the store app to try to do in-store pickup.
John:
And I forget what morning, like one weekend morning or an 8 a.m.,
John:
I did my typical order and went to see what's available for in-store pickup.
John:
And I saw that my local Apple store has the phone that I wanted.
John:
So I said, please reserve that for me.
John:
I will come pick it up at the appointed time.
John:
And we did.
John:
And we came and picked up the appointed time.
John:
Now, it was tricky because this is my wife's son.
John:
Remember, she had an outstanding order.
John:
And we did the Verizon way where you enter all the information so that when you get the phone, it's basically already assigned to her phone number.
John:
When you take it out of the box and activate it, it deactivates your other phone and everything, right?
John:
We had that in process.
John:
It would not let me reserve for in-store pickup a phone with her same number on it, right?
John:
Because it says, you already have a phone.
John:
that's you know in process the only way you can do this it said basically was to receive the order and then like i don't know return it or something like it didn't even give you the option to say if you cancel the other order we'll let you go through this order it said no you cannot do another order until that order arrives or whatever so instead i ordered the iphone 10 for me with my telephone number
John:
because my wife just wanted to get the phone she's like just do it just do whatever it takes to get the phone we'll sort it out afterwards and so we did we ordered it with my phone number and my thing and took the iphone 10 went to the store to pick it up took it out of the box it activated as my phone it deactivated my phone then we did some sim swapping and a couple minutes later
John:
We were busily updating the stupid thing to iOS 11.1 because it shipped with 11.0.1 and restoring from a backup and completely forgetting to do the watch thing, which we'll discuss in a little bit.
John:
But all in all, she eventually got her whatever the hell it is, black space gray 256 that now is correctly assigned to her telephone number.
John:
And I'm back on my iPhone 7.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
I'm going to just start with some of my impressions.
Casey:
And if you guys let me, I'll carry on until I'm done.
Casey:
But in all likelihood, we're going to end up just all of us talking about everything.
John:
So before you begin, the point I wanted to make about the in-store pickup, if you have an order with Apple and you're waiting like, oh, man, I got to wait three weeks just every day in the morning.
John:
Go to the Apple store app on iOS, try to order it and see it and do in-store pickup.
John:
It is before you complete the order.
John:
It will show you what stores have the model, the model and size available in your area available for pickup.
John:
There's a lot of availability every single day.
John:
New stuff comes in every single day in the morning.
John:
Just do that.
John:
It's really easy to get a phone for local pickup before you're one that you ordered comes.
John:
You can always just cancel your order, which is what we did.
John:
So I would encourage everyone who's being impatient with the phone.
John:
Do that.
John:
Look for in-store pickup every day.
Casey:
So initial impressions at the time, I tried to take some very, very, very brief notes.
Casey:
It's heavy, or at least I feel like it's heavy.
Casey:
Not bad heavy, just, oh, this is heavier, kind of heavy.
Casey:
Curiously, though, the size...
Casey:
doesn't act i don't get actively reminded that it's bigger if that makes sense like if i think about it for a half second oh yeah this feels bigger than what i'm used to but it's not like the plus club where i feel like i'm holding a dinner tray it's just it's a it's close enough to my old one that it feels about the same do you do you feel similarly or do you feel like you definitely notice the size marco so i took notes as i was like experiencing it just so i could you know get some opinions down
Marco:
My first two notes are, it looks great, period.
Marco:
It's heavy, period.
Marco:
That's my initial reaction to it.
Marco:
Very, very clear.
Marco:
Actually, just for the sake of comparison, I just pulled my iPhone 7 out of the drawer.
Marco:
And first of all, man, this is way grippier.
Marco:
No question.
Marco:
Way grippier.
Marco:
But yeah, the weight difference is immediately apparent going either direction.
Marco:
It's definitely a weighty phone.
Marco:
But I will say about the size, I agree with you that it does not...
Marco:
feel that it doesn't feel like a plus phone i will say though it is like having a regular iphone 7 in your pocket and in other places like you know in docks and in cars and in cup holders and like it feels like an iphone 7 physically but when actually using it it feels like using a plus because it's so much harder to reach things
Casey:
I see your point.
Marco:
So to summarize, it's like having a plus in your hand, but a seven in your pocket.
John:
I mostly agree with that, but I think in my hand and in my pocket, my main impression of it is that it's taller.
John:
Like, I know it's not actually thinner, but because it's taller, when I mentally envision it and think about holding it, I think, oh, that's the one that's like skinnier than my iPhone 7, but taller.
John:
It's not, right?
John:
But because it's taller, that's my impression.
John:
And Marco's 100% right with like, okay, that's how it feels as a physical object.
John:
What happens when you start trying to touch a screen?
John:
And you're like, oh, there's a lot more screen than there used to be.
John:
And some of it's harder to reach.
Casey:
I can get behind that.
Casey:
I do feel like the width is the thing that I noticed most, or that makes me most uncomfortable.
Casey:
It's not, I don't feel like, I don't have numbers in front of me.
Casey:
It's not egregiously wider than what I'm used to, but it's wide enough that it's just ever so slightly uncomfortable.
Casey:
And I think, Marco, you're 100% right that, yeah, the screen is big enough that this is really a two-hand phone, but
Casey:
I think because I just knew that the screen was going to be much bigger, that I was like mentally prepped for that, but I was not mentally or physically prepped for it being noticeably wider.
Casey:
And if there's ever a time that I'm reminded about the physical differences of the phone, it's because I'm trying to hold it and I feel like it's just a hint wider than I want it to be.
John:
It also feels thicker to me.
John:
It may just be because my wife's got a silicone case, which might be thicker than the leather one that I'm used to.
John:
And I have no idea if it actually is thicker than the 7, but again, this is just how it feels.
John:
When I think about the 10 in the silicone case versus the 7 in the leather, like I said, I have the opposite of Casey that I feel like the 10 is skinnier, even though it isn't.
John:
and like like not as wide right and i also have the impression that the 10 is thicker i didn't notice the weight as much as you two i know i recognize that it is heavier and i guess if i did them side by side i would notice that but just having the 10 by itself i don't notice the weight as much but i noticed i noticed it's thicker and taller
Marco:
It is thicker.
Marco:
I just put them on a desk with their camera almost hanging off to normalize for the non-bump space.
Marco:
And yeah, it is thicker noticeably.
Marco:
I will say though, like I don't actually like when I'm not doing a flat on the desk comparison test, it doesn't read to me as thicker.
Casey:
Yeah, I would agree with that.
Casey:
I agree with what you said, Marco, that it's beautiful.
Casey:
One of the first things I noticed, and somebody else had said this on Twitter, and I don't recall who it was, but they had said it looks, maybe it was Panzerino, they had said that it looks as though the screen is Photoshopped onto the device you're holding.
Casey:
And I don't know if I would have characterized it that way had I not read it already, but that was a perfect description of it.
Casey:
That
Casey:
It seems like the screen is just Photoshopped onto this object that you're holding.
Casey:
I'm assuming it's just that it's so close to the glass, even closer than it ever has been.
John:
I can't wait until they actually get a screen on the surface of something, because this is exactly what we used to say when they did the fused glass on the floor.
John:
I was like, wow, the pixels are so close to your fingers.
John:
And it's true.
John:
Over time, the pixels have been getting closer to your fingers, and this is the closest yet.
John:
But I definitely think it was slightly overblown to say it looked like it was Photoshop on.
John:
Yes, it does look like it's closer than other phones, but it doesn't feel to me as if I'm running my fingers over a magazine, picture cut out of a magazine, right?
John:
It doesn't feel like the pixels are on the surface.
John:
They're just barely below it.
Casey:
Yeah, either way.
Casey:
I think it's beautiful.
Casey:
The screen looks great.
Casey:
I don't have a good enough eye to be able to tell you anything about color reproduction or anything like that.
John:
You don't notice the blacks?
John:
You don't notice the black levels?
John:
You don't watch a movie on it?
Casey:
No, I haven't really watched any video on it.
John:
Just watch a movie with credits in a dark room that has a black screen with a white title in the middle of it.
John:
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
John:
And then hold up your 7 with the same movie and realize the 7 is showing a gray background with white text in the middle.
John:
yeah yeah i'm with you um i i just don't think i i'm discerning enough to be wowed by that until to your point i do a side to side test um or side by side test and it does hdr too i realized that this iphone 10 is the only hdr screen i have in my house i watch the movies on it i watch try to find some hdr movies on itunes it looks pretty good
Casey:
Turns out.
Casey:
But yeah, the screen looks great.
Casey:
I will say that when I was on the plane earlier today, I happen to be sitting in the middle of two gentlemen that both had plus phones.
Casey:
I couldn't tell you specifically what vintage, but they were both plus size phones.
Casey:
And looking over at one of them, and this is probably just telling you how much of a jerk I am, but I was kind of repulsed by how big the chin and forehead were.
Casey:
I looked over and I was just like, oh, God, those look ancient.
Casey:
And they do.
John:
It's a place for you to stick your gum when you're not using it.
John:
Just put it right there.
John:
And then when you're done, you can...
Casey:
better than under the table right john because at least you know which one's yours um no they seriously though like they both look so ancient and just old like oh god that looks so old and uh in mine like i feel like this unequivocally looks like the future and we'll see what happens with the notch uh but it it just looks way newer and way more modern so while we're talking about the screen one of the you know typical like
John:
uh apple problem with the new iphone stories that went around was about the blue shift in in the screen there's a you know inherent quality of oleds that apparently it is i don't have enough experience with oleds too low uh that when you're looking at the screen head-on looks gorgeous but if you tilt the screen a little bit away from you or towards you or whatever that the that the colors shift towards blue um and so when i got the phone i tried this and they're right it shifts blue oh it definitely does but without looking no cheating
John:
What happens on a pre-10 iPhone when you tilt the screen off axis?
John:
Don't do it.
John:
Don't pick up your phone and do it.
John:
Don't look.
John:
Just tell me.
John:
This is the pop quiz.
John:
What happens on a pre-iPhone screen when you tilt it away from here towards you?
Marco:
Goes yellow?
Marco:
I have no idea because it doesn't matter because I always look at my phone straight on or not at all.
Marco:
And if I'm going to have...
John:
have to look at it diagonally i won't care if it shifts slightly like this is such an honest i don't think you actually do always look at it on axis like and i because i think you do look at it tilted i just think that changes in color like this blue shift are subtle enough that nobody cares and to spoil it for you what pre-10 iphones do what essentially ips lcds do is they get dimmer
John:
Instead of getting dimmer in all spectrums, RGB spectrum equally, the 10 gets dimmer in the R and the G, leaving the B a little bit more.
John:
I'm not quite sure why it does this, but that's how it works.
John:
But if you now take them both and put them in front of you and tilt them both,
John:
their their off-axis viewing is not great on either one of them right but as marco said either you're always looking at a head-on or it's tilted to such a degree that you don't care so if you read a story about the iphone 10 oled screen blue shifting it does but it is no more egregious than what every iphone you've ever done has done and i think most people will even if they've read 100 stories about this and are terrified about it you will not notice it in practice and this screen looks amazing
John:
from from from any angle in all situations yeah it's a total non-issue because like the fact that neither of us neither me or casey could tell you what happened if you looked off access to the all the previous i couldn't have told you either i had to do it i'm like well maybe you know lcds especially ips lcds are well known for really good viewing so i'm like oh well i guess it's just a disadvantage of oleds i'll take it because i like the black levels but lcds don't do that right then i took my iphone 7 and tilted i'm like nope pretty bad pretty bad tilt it and it gets very dim very fast like oh i
John:
i'd never noticed that before and why because you just don't you just don't in normal usage yeah like after 10 years of using these things neither none of us could tell you what happened so it's like it's obviously not a big problem in practice and now that you look like go look for go take your iphone 7 and put it on a white screen tilted it's not subtle like it gets really dark really fast like noticeably like if you put this on camera it'd be like terrible flaw iphone screen like that's just how the lcds work and we're all just used to it and it's fine and the blue thing
John:
Should not bother most people.
Casey:
Speaking of things that should not bother most people, in portrait is 100% a non-issue for me.
Casey:
Maybe you guys feel differently.
Casey:
I'll give you a chance in a second.
Casey:
But for me, in portrait, 100% a non-issue.
Casey:
In landscape, it's weird.
Casey:
I don't think it's as egregious as I expected.
Casey:
Well, in either direction, but particularly landscape.
Casey:
But it's definitely weird and noticeable in landscape.
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
it doesn't actively offend me but it is kind of like huh that's funny so john in the in your usage what have you thought of the notch so the the notch itself in portrait uh the only way it manifests for me in a negative light is what it does to the ui in terms of
John:
well this is not really the fault of the notch but i suppose but like the the control center and the notifications uh as i said in past shows i think it's a really clever use of you know making lemons that uh making lemonade out of lemons really clever use to decide okay now we have this physical blob there we have two distinct regions that are distinguishable and can do different functions so they put control center in one and uh and notifications on the other but due to the very large size of the phone uh
John:
I don't want to go all the way to the up left to get notifications.
John:
If I could go to the top middle or top right for notifications, that would be way more convenient for me as someone who mostly holds their phone in their right hand.
John:
And that's how the notch is annoying me, because it's pushing a semi-commonly used control farther away from my thumb.
John:
But other than that, the actual...
John:
notch itself like mucking up my screen in portrait i don't even notice that it's there and it's a non-issue in landscape i don't tend to use my phone landscape landscape the main thing that annoys me is the proportion of the phone in terms of like viewing video which is what i'm going to do it seems like a lot of the screen is wasted depending on what the the aspect ratio is
John:
uh the all in the chat room is saying that the entire thing is uh notification except for the right corner yeah but i can't use the right corner and also it doesn't occur to me to swipe my fingers over the notch to do it most of the time even though you can if only because i don't want to smear my greasy fingers over the lenses of the cameras which probably makes no difference because of focal distances but it's still something that i am averse to um and like i said it's not like oh do you always use the upper right hand corner of your seven no but my seven is not this damn tall so it you know it's it's stressing things out in landscape like i said it's
John:
i feel like a lot of the screen is often wasted in landscape and applications that do go full within landscape i don't really need i don't i don't need them to say oh i wish you could have used that last little bit is like imagine if you're reading like a web page in landscape or very often i'm rotating some stupid person's
John:
image of text like they upload a heavily compressed jpeg of text that i can't read in portrait because the line length is 700 characters long so i have to rotate the landscape just so their image can get big enough for me to read their paragraph of screenshotted text without scrolling the image left and right like a typewriter yep yep yep i've been here a thousand times right um
John:
even then i don't think the notch bothers me it looks awkward in screenshots and if you're designing an app i can imagine going oh how am i going to deal with this thing in landscape but so far in practice the notch hasn't bothered me you know its presence and it's and the lack of me having those pixels between the two ears has not bothered me in any orientation and just in portrait it's the reachability thing it's bothering me a little bit
Marco:
Yeah, I have basically the same opinion.
Marco:
The notch really has not bothered me much.
Marco:
It annoys me a little bit sometimes, but in practice, it's almost like the iPhone 7 virtual home button thing.
Marco:
I thought beforehand, many of us thought beforehand, like...
Marco:
This is going to be a big problem.
Marco:
It's going to be a huge thing to get used to.
Marco:
It's going to be really annoying.
Marco:
And then in practice, it just wasn't.
Marco:
And that's how the notch is proving to be for me.
Marco:
As a developer, it's a huge pain in my rear end.
Marco:
It's mostly in landscape.
Marco:
But as a user of the phone, it really is not that noticeable most of the time.
Marco:
I will say I do notice it when transitions happen that push content under it or pull content out from below it.
Marco:
So leaving an app, opening an app, any kind of full screen that gets presented in an app and then later dismissed.
Marco:
When your eye is kind of drawn to notice...
Marco:
vertical things like that that reach the top of the screen i do notice it more um but most of the rest of usage i don't notice the notch um it really isn't a problem the only other time i notice it is when i try to tap it to scroll to top and it doesn't work like because the notch is not touch sensitive uh so you can tap near the notch and it will scroll to top you can tap the ears it will scroll to top but the actual notch itself is not touch sensitive
John:
They should just do it, uh, that the drawing app does and make the camera button.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, they just leave the camera on and just sense when you put your finger over it, it blacks it out.
Marco:
Oh, what a, what a, what a hilarious, uh, but clever hack that was.
Marco:
Uh, it didn't make it through app review.
Marco:
Turns out what a surprise.
Marco:
Um, but anyway, uh, yeah, so yeah, not so far.
Marco:
I, I really, it really doesn't seem to be a problem.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
You can argue whether they need it to be there, whether they could have done something more like the S8.
Marco:
But I think what they did actually works.
Marco:
It pains me to say that because the notch is so weird.
Marco:
And in landscape, it really is a mess.
Marco:
But I never use my phone in landscape unless I'm watching a video, in which case I can have it do the zoom thing where it doesn't show over the notch, which I think any right thinking person should.
John:
But you wouldn't want to you'll never like the video thing is not something that people should worry about because very little video unless you're watching like Lawrence of Arabia or something.
John:
It's like, you know, really, really wide aspect ratio.
John:
Right, right.
John:
The phone is not the same aspect ratio as most TV and movies.
John:
It's wider than most TVs and movies.
John:
The only time the notch would interfere with your video is if you're zooming to cut off the tops and the bottom of your pictures.
John:
It's a really tall phone.
John:
And when you turn sideways, it's really wide.
John:
yeah so overall notch not really a problem it is it isn't perfect it's a little weird sometimes but overall it seems fine so unlike the iphone 7 home button or whatever it was that i'm moving home button was introduced i don't think we'll be here next year saying and you know what i actually prefer the notch to having no notch like it won't actually become our preference and as i said i think when we were talking about the notch a couple episodes ago apple doesn't want the notch to be there
John:
It's a compromise that is necessary for a whole bunch of other stuff that we're going to get to in a little bit, right?
John:
If Apple can get rid of the notch, they will.
John:
No matter how big a part it becomes of branding, eventually this notch is going away when the tech exists to do it.
John:
Because if Johnny Eyes is still alive, bless his heart, the true elemental form of the iPhone is to be an unbroken, it's not a round rack, hyper ellipsoid, whatever the hell shape he's going to make this phone completely uniform.
John:
And by the way, speaking of completely uniform, that's another thing about this phone.
John:
it is more symmetrical uh more physically tactilely tech yeah what's the word in a second yeah tactilely i don't know touch sensitively like the surface features of it are more symmetrical than almost any other phone certainly i think than any other iphone right because they all had something that was indented in some way
John:
on the bottom to tell you that's the chin and then the thing without the indents is the forehead or you could feel the little speaker slit for the forehead or whatever it's not like an apple tv remote and especially if you have a case it's pretty easy to tell what's up and what's down because the case apple's cases at least don't have anything on the bottom which will become super important when we start talking about how you use the stamp phone um
John:
but it have come closer than i've ever come before to briefly attempting to pick up a phone in the wrong orientation so that is a factor and when johnny gets his way and it is really truly uniform and there's no notch and like everything is it's a completely featureless beautiful polished stone um i mean maybe it won't matter because maybe like you can pick it up any way you want and the orientation won't matter because at that point johnny's removed the volume buttons as well and we just all talk to it to change the volume it's really convenient just tap
John:
triple tap three or tap out a v in morse code and it will change the volume or just say hey siri turn the volume up 80 anyway i'm getting all snarky but but either way that that is a factor with the 10 it is more symmetrical than previous iphones and there's the possibility of you occasionally getting confused about which way is up but only briefly i don't think it's really a problem but it's in in the first few days with the phone i have that experience
Marco:
I will say one area where they changed the symmetry aspect a little bit, I think for the better, is that unlike the 6, 7, and 8 and their plus varieties, the sleep-wake button is now no longer perfectly overlapping symmetrically with the volume-up button.
Marco:
Now the sleep-wake button has moved down slightly, so it is centered between the volume-up and down buttons.
Marco:
So now it is substantially easier to hit sleep-wake or volume-up without hitting the other one accidentally.
John:
but then you do have to hit them for that's how you get like the the shutdown thing to come yeah you will actually still be squeezing those buttons or do it yeah or doing the command alt delete sequence or whatever the hell that thing does was that change the dfu mode but you do like volume up volume up volume down volume down volume left volume left right volume right volume right it's like start right
Marco:
yeah anyway yeah but the only the other thing i will say though about the sleep wake button i do love finally that it is no longer lined up perfectly with volume up however it is fairly difficult to double click it which makes it really annoying to use apple pay yeah you'd actually take seven screenshots when you try to pay for something
Marco:
Yeah, like I have found Apple Pay is fairly tricky to invoke with that double click.
John:
My poor wife, like I told her how to use Apple Pay.
John:
I didn't tell her the story about the people being confused about that touch thing, but I did say, oh, you know, when you do Apple Pay now, just so you know, you hit the power button twice, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
you know what it's like when you're in like a checkout line and like there's the pressure for you to perform right it's your new phone it's your new phone and you're not you know you haven't used it before but you don't want to look silly and you don't want to hold people up and i think what she was doing was like you know how it brings up that little thing on the screen that has like a highlight on the screen says here press this button twice to activate the apple pay or whatever you know that thing
John:
I think she was tapping on that on the screen.
John:
And of course it's not doing anything and she's being flustered.
John:
And she, I think she eventually figured it out.
John:
Uh, but first experience, uh, it's just, I think that that guide, that thing trying to tell you what to do is a good interface and that will help people, but under pressure with people behind you with the checkout line, everyone can be a little silly.
John:
So, um,
Marco:
tiny bit of a learning curve there practice beforehand and i'm sure it will be fine also and and it's also annoying when you're downloading a new app from the app store and you know after purchases have the same thing where you have to double tap that thing on that you know the side button and if you hold your phone in your left hand that's surprisingly hard to do without hitting any other buttons accidentally um so that's it's just it's it's not a good gesture i also wonder like why does that need to be there why can't you just tap on the screen
Marco:
or swipe up from the bottom or do any literally literally anything else yeah why can't there be an on-screen gesture to do that i don't understand why that has to be the only way to approve payments like maybe if you're like holding your phone down like on a subway turnstile you want something that's not on the screen to activate it i guess yeah yeah i think you want a hardware thing as a fallback
Marco:
yeah but like why can't i just tap a button on screen saying you know pay like what i don't understand why i need to double tap a hardware button while face id has already authenticated me that doesn't make sense to me right yeah especially since you have to do face id anyway before that so it knows i'm right here like it's just yeah that that that's like the one it's there's one of two changes to ios that really i think were wrong calls to to accommodate for this phone that and control center's location
Marco:
I really hope that iOS 12 changes both of those things or gives us options to change those things.
Marco:
Because most of iOS has adapted somewhat gracefully, at least, to this phone.
Marco:
But that double tap to confirm a payment and the control center being completely unreachable, those are big problems.
Casey:
Where would you put control center if not there?
Casey:
Because I agree with you 100% that it is really an inconvenient location, but I'm at a loss as to where it should go.
John:
You could swap it for reachability.
John:
Swipe down on the home indicator, which doesn't make sense physically, but you can try it.
Marco:
Yeah, I turned on reachability because I figured I might need to use it because the phone's so tall.
Marco:
And I really have a hard time activating that, honestly.
Marco:
It is not an easy gesture to do because the area that you have to swipe down in doesn't have a lot of height.
Marco:
And it's already at the very bottom of the phone.
Marco:
So if you reach all the way to the bottom, which ironically for a feature name, reachability is actually not that easy.
Marco:
And then swipe down, which is also not that easy from already being at the bottom.
Marco:
So that's not an easy gesture to do.
Yeah.
Marco:
there's lots of options where they could put control center.
Marco:
I think some of them could be like, you know, certain, you know, maybe if you swipe up when you're already on the home screen, you know, something like that, or it could be like the top half of notification center.
Marco:
Somehow there's other, you could like swipe and it could be on the widget screen.
Marco:
Like there are so many places that they could put it.
Marco:
I hope they figure something out that's better because where they put it now is they've basically taken the controls that you are more likely than average to have to use while holding the phone one-handed on the move.
Marco:
And they have put them in the location that is the least possible to reach in that situation.
Marco:
So I think where they put it now is so bad that pretty much any other option would be better.
John:
I think control center itself could use some help.
John:
And other people have mentioned this, like the lock screen now suddenly becomes much more usable when like, it's not, you know, when face ID is in the mix, like the fact that we can wake the phone up by touching the screen now means that suddenly if I could add configurable things from control center on the screen, instead of just flashlight, what is the other one?
John:
It's flashlight and a camera and camera, which you don't even need a camera there.
John:
Cause you can swipe from the side.
John:
there are a few other options there's like apple tv remotes and stuff but like they made it slightly configurable on ios 11 which was nice it was welcome but yeah they could do a lot more there's a lot of room on the screen and control center itself from from whenever they changed this new control center i guess it was ios 11 yeah you can configure it by saying which things you want in it but you can't rearrange it and the ones you configure get to go down in like the the other area as they slowly built like it's there's a lot of room for improvement and customization there and some of that might actually help
John:
with the reachability control center not the activation but once you activate it if things can be nearer the upper right because that's where your thumb's going to be because that's where it just was to activate it like it just changes the calculus and how easy to reach things and while we're on this topic of marco talking about the reachability gesture being tricky before we get to face id i'm
John:
uh the other important aspect of this phone the lack of a home button manifests in in all of us learning about the lovely swipe up from the bottom of your iphone 10 gesture which is the replacement for hitting the home button and also depending on how fast you do it to get you into multitasking and stuff like that but really one of the most common operations we all do on iphones and we've been doing for a long time is
John:
essentially hitting the home button to go home right face id and touch id which we'll talk about in a bit is a separate thing and when you talk about touching the the home button sometimes it gets confused with face id it's like well you have to try face id multiple times sometimes your finger is wet and sometimes you just don't have it at the right angle all that is true
John:
but there's one thing i never have to try to do twice and that's pressing the home button for a non-face non-touch id purpose yes i do have to futz with face touch id i do it all the time touch id is really fast it works great most of the time but every once in a while i have to futz with it but never when i'm using my phone i'm in an app and i still i still go back to the home screen i tend not to double tap for for you know multitasking but even if i did that
John:
single tap or double tap it works every time i never miss the tap i can feel where the button is and when i press it works physical button fake home button that doesn't move either way it works with iphone 10 that gesture to go home
John:
i don't know how frequently but a non-zero amount of the time i have to make a second or even a third attempt at the swipe up from bottom gesture and remember there's no case they're interfering with me the apple cases do not extend across the bottom and i watch my wife use the phone and she too every once in a while has to try that swipe again
John:
It's not particularly time consuming, but for a very common operation, this is one of the aspects of using the phone that feels like a slight downgrade.
John:
The reliability of what used to be a very, very reliable thing.
John:
Pressing the home button now has entered the realm of sort of like touch ID where you might have to try it again.
John:
And I'm not sure why I'm missing.
John:
Am I missing because I'm not shimmying my hand lower and the phone is larger?
John:
I'm not getting good swipe on it.
John:
Am I missing because I'm just not good at edge swipes because I've had a case and it's a different thing when the edge has no case and I'm missing the target area?
John:
Am I starting too high?
John:
Am I starting too low?
John:
I don't know what it is, but I'm having to swipe multiple times.
John:
Have you guys had this experience where you've got to make a second attempt at the home gesture?
Casey:
I feel like I have, but it very quickly got a lot better over time.
Marco:
Yeah, I have not had any unreliability for that.
Marco:
I mean, it took me maybe a half a day to get used to it.
John:
yeah you should watch watch yourself or have someone else watch you to see if you're just instinctively doing it like swipe up once that because it's not it's not time consuming the second you're already there the second swipe is pretty quick and i don't think i ever have to do it more than two or three times but i thought maybe it's just me so i watched my wife without telling her that i'm watching her do this i've seen her do it as well to live in your house john it could it's her phone so she's mostly using it it could be a learning curve thing i'm willing to acknowledge that i'm just saying like first week impressions first few day impressions that is happening to me a little bit
Marco:
I mean, while we're on the subject of the home swipe, I think another kind of questionable area for me is the multitasking gesture.
Marco:
I know everyone has their little tricks for like, oh, you just do a little circle or you just press and hold or whatever else.
Marco:
But no matter how you do it, bringing up multitasking takes a little bit more time now.
Marco:
It's a little bit more error prone.
Marco:
And if you want to force quit an app...
Marco:
Now, granted, I know this is a controversial topic, and you shouldn't need to force quit apps, but sometimes you need to force quit apps.
Marco:
And that is now significantly slower than it was before, because now you have to, unless I'm missing something.
Marco:
Press and hold.
Marco:
Yeah, you have to bring up the multitasking switcher, which itself is slow.
Marco:
Then you have to press and hold on the app to enable the little wiggle mode like they have on the home screen, although they don't wiggle anymore, and then hit the minus button to force quit it.
Marco:
And that is significantly more gestures and more time than double tap the home button, swipe up, which is the previous way to terminate that.
John:
I like that because it's punishing habitual forced quitters.
Marco:
It is, but it is also... The problem with the forced quit controversy, the reason why...
Marco:
we can't just say like, oh, you should never need to force quit apps is because sometimes you do need to force quit apps.
Marco:
It's hard to look at something like this where it makes the force quit a lot harder to do and a lot more hidden of a thing you can do.
Marco:
It's hard to look at that and say, well, that's a definite clear win because you shouldn't need to do this.
Marco:
Because, yeah, you shouldn't need to do it, but you do need to do it.
Marco:
And maybe not for battery life reasons necessarily, although sometimes that is the reason.
Marco:
Some apps you do need to do that for battery life.
Marco:
But it's a kind of thing where it would be nice if you never had to do this.
Marco:
And then you could make it impossible to quit an app because why even have a way if you never have to do it?
Marco:
But we do still have to do it.
Marco:
And so to make it harder is annoying.
John:
It's not that much harder.
John:
The press and hold, I'm the hater of press and hold as much as anybody.
John:
I hit any action where I have to do something for a set amount of time and there's no way to speed it up.
John:
But for this action, I mean, I don't do it often enough that I would be annoyed by the press and hold.
John:
Because once you press and hold, you're in the mode and you can kill multiple laps by going kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, kill.
John:
So people can still do that.
John:
There's just a slight delay when you do press and hold to get into the mode.
John:
I'm more with you on multitasking, which I find very difficult to get into, mostly because you have to either pull up slowly.
John:
There's a whole bunch of moves.
John:
The thing that they added that I think is nice is if you want to switch back and forth on apps, you can swipe side to side with no delay.
John:
You don't have to do any weird motion.
John:
But if you want to bring up the switcher,
John:
especially, especially this kills me.
John:
If you want to bring up the multitasking switcher from the home screen, I would wonder if you just surveyed people, new iPhone 10 users, ask them, this is hard, find new iPhone 10 users who know about the multitasking switcher, but don't know that you, whether or not you can bring it from the home screen and ask them, Hey, can you bring up the multitasking switcher from the home screen?
John:
I bet people think you can't do it because that gesture for some weird reason is so much harder for me to do than it is from within an application.
John:
Do you guys find that?
John:
No.
John:
Go do it now.
John:
Take out your phone right now.
Marco:
I've been doing it during this entire conversation, and I have about a maybe two-thirds success rate.
Casey:
You're talking about the come up and stop or the inverted out?
John:
From Springboard.
John:
Go to Springboard and bring up the multitasking switcher.
John:
i find that very difficult to do bring up the multitasking switch from apps is just slow but i don't fail at it from the home screen i fail at it it's the same exact gesture i know it shouldn't be what's different i don't know what's different all i know is that i am not is it because they hide the home indicator and i somehow need that line on the bottom of the screen i don't know what the problem is interesting okay i can understand that maybe i'm misaiming like i i'm swiping up is not my from the bottom is not my forte let me tell you
John:
and again this could this could just be a learning curve but but initially like the first 10 seconds i'm using the phone i thought oh you can't bring up the multitasking switcher that's what i thought and then eventually i figured out how to do it but despite that after figuring out how to do it like i would i would go to the home screen like all right we're gonna do it we're gonna do it this time and nothing i'm swiping up uselessly all right try again and do i have to go faster slower am i starting in the wrong spot and then eventually it comes up um but i'll point out this is another area double tapping the home button
Marco:
it works every time the first time i can find the button i double tap it it always brings the multitasking switcher not if you have a triple tap shortcut for an accessibility feature enabled oh i don't i don't have that then it fails a lot for app development i'm sure that you have to test all this stuff but i don't have that stuff oh my life changed when i could just have siri turn on a voiceover
Marco:
then i could finally turn off the triple click because there were so many times when i would try to open up the app switcher accidentally triple click instead of double clicking because the button was a little bit mushy or something and then somewhere out in the world where i'm in public my phone says voiceover on turn it off turn it off
Casey:
I will say that I spoke to Erin very briefly before I recorded and asked her what she thought of her phone.
Casey:
And one of the things that she really did not like was the change in multitasking because she felt like it was considerably more fiddly.
Casey:
And there are, like Marco was saying, there are occasions when she will want or need to force quit an app.
Casey:
And it was really annoying to her that the new mechanism is so slow.
John:
What are these occasions and why are you both encouraging people to do this?
Marco:
You know what?
Marco:
It's going to be really bad.
Marco:
It's going to be next fall when we're trying to order our replacements to this phone using the Apple Store app on the phone and trying to force quit it over and over again to get it at 3 in the morning.
Casey:
Oh, God.
Casey:
It's going to be a disaster.
Casey:
Think about that.
John:
We're all going to fail.
John:
So, Casey, when are you encouraging Erin to force quitting apps?
John:
Why?
John:
What is she doing this for?
Casey:
I don't know why you're so deeply offended by this.
Casey:
She is not a habitual force quitter, but there are times when apps do things that are not right.
John:
Like what?
John:
When?
John:
Which apps?
John:
Does she use Facebook?
Casey:
I'm trying to figure it out.
Casey:
Well, yes, she does use Facebook, but I don't have to frickin' justify her actions to you.
Casey:
You're not the boss of her.
John:
I know, but I'm just saying, shouldn't you be saying, if force quitting is such an important part of your iPhone workflow...
John:
what's going on there are you using an application that always misbehaves that you have to use anyway like what's the because i don't think it should be a regular part of people it should only be like when an app is broken or misbehaving uh and right and that's what i do you know what a lot of apps are broken and misbehave all the time like facebook yeah but if they're broken or misbehaving frequently you stop using that app like broken means like you come back to the app and the screen is like all you are in fantasy land tell people to stop using facebook good luck with that
John:
well i know that's why i'm asking that's why i'm asking if it's facebook you can say oh it's because she uses facebook and i'd say okay well that's why it's important but if you i figured you'd know what it is i don't pay attention to how often i force quit apps but i feel like maybe once a day i'll force quit an app and and i would say the only reason i do it is because i feel like that app is misbehaving now which app that's where you start getting to the voodoo you feel like like i feel like this app is bad
John:
And I want to make it stop being bad.
John:
And then you force quit it and you're like, I've stopped it from being bad.
John:
Now I feel better.
Casey:
You're misconstruing me not being able to cite a specific example with me just doing it because magic.
Casey:
It's not that I'm doing it because magic.
John:
It's not magic, but you don't have enough instrumentation in iOS to really, really know whether what you're doing is helping or not.
John:
It makes you feel better.
John:
But are you doing, like, scientific tests to, you know, A-B tests, force quitting, not force quitting?
John:
No, you're not.
John:
You're just saying, like, I get the feeling that this thing is doing a thing that I don't want and I want to stop it.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
Okay, so let me give you an example that does not happen often, but I know you're not going to let this go until the king is satisfied.
Casey:
So as an example, on occasion, TweetBot will be, and I know, okay, Twitterific, blah, blah, blah.
Casey:
TweetBot will be confused as to whether or not it can be in streaming mode.
Casey:
And when I'm on Wi-Fi, I prefer to use TweetBot in streaming mode.
John:
It's a buggy app.
John:
but it's an example like you but you're not letting this go until i cite a specific example that is a specific example yeah all right all right i mean i'm saying is that you have a higher tolerance for using buggy applications and then you deal with that by saying well i know sometimes i know sometimes it gets confused when i change from cellular to wi-fi about whether i can use screening but my fix is i just force quit it and that becomes part of your workflow essentially you know that's a thing that happens with the app
John:
but you still want to use the app so you force quit it and i guess i just don't have apps in my that i use that do that maybe and you're all again you're overblowing the amount of times that i do this once a day you said average maybe yeah maybe once a day across all the different apps that i use during the day i'm trying to think back to the last time i force quit anything on my phone i guess it was probably the night we ordered the the thing because you know you had it to make the apple store app uh refresh your stuff but i
John:
think that's the last time i did it and had i not ordered an iphone at 3 a.m i would have like what's the time before that that i had forced to quit i would be hard pressed to say
Casey:
And Marco, can you defend me on this one or you leave me out to dry?
John:
He's force quitting his own apps because he's writing them and they have bugs.
Marco:
No, I don't need to force quit my own app.
Marco:
If you hit stop in Xcode, it force quits it.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
No, I will usually force quit maybe one app every one to two days for some reason.
Marco:
And they're usually, I think, decent reasons.
Marco:
And I don't think that's an unhealthy frequency or an unusual one.
John:
I would not have guessed those numbers because, like I said, maybe you use more apps than I do or try more new apps or more of the apps you use every day.
John:
Because if you use an app every day that has an annoying thing like that, like, for example, the last time I force quit an app on my wife's phone was we were setting up her iPhone X.
John:
And for whatever reason, Twitterific, here you go, Casey, Twitterific was having some problem where we could switch to one of her Twitter accounts, but not to another one.
John:
Don't even ask.
John:
And it would just go on the screen.
John:
It would say contacting Twitter servers or something like that.
John:
And I deleted the cache in Twitterific, which is a nice diagnostic tool that Twitterific gives you.
John:
And that did not help in this case.
John:
And so I had to force quit it because it was just kind of like stuck on that screen.
John:
And I think that was like, you should use less buggy apps.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Well, that's like you ported your stuff from into a new phone and we're trying, you know, like it was like restored from my cloud backup.
John:
And sometimes there are some problems like getting back up and running on that.
John:
But that's it.
John:
Like after that, it's fine.
John:
So that's the last time I did it for a buggy app reason, but that wasn't on my phone.
John:
And that was like a first setup where you're trying to make sure you sign into all the accounts and re-adding everything to Apple Wallet.
John:
And it's in the middle of God knows whatever photo analyzing stuff that it's doing.
John:
Like the initial setup is always kind of weird.
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Casey:
Well, in any case, so one of the things that Erin said was that she's frustrated with the multitasking.
Casey:
She didn't give a crap about the notch either in a good way.
Casey:
You know, she doesn't really notice it.
Casey:
She was very... And this is going to, I guess, segue us into Face ID.
Casey:
She was very grumbly about the angle of attack necessary for Face ID to work.
Casey:
So by that I mean...
Casey:
I think a lot of times she'll be like sitting on a couch or something like that and maybe reclined or just in a position where the phone, she wants to unlock her phone, but the phone isn't necessarily looking at her.
Casey:
And she was really annoyed that she has to have some amount of consideration of what the phone needs in order to unlock her phone.
Casey:
And she found that really frustrating.
Casey:
And you know what?
Casey:
I think she's right.
Casey:
Now, it doesn't bother me as much, I don't think, because I think more often than not, the phone is staring.
Casey:
I'm staring longingly into my phone's infrared eyeballs as I'm trying to unlock it.
Casey:
But I guess for whatever reason, I mean, because mom, because Erin, because any number of reasons, she felt like she was frequently getting tripped up by...
Casey:
Face ID not unlocking because the phone wasn't angled exactly right.
Casey:
And where it seemed to bother her quite a bit, it bothers me only a teeny bit.
Casey:
And the other thing she said was, and not specifically around Face ID, but mostly around Face ID, like this did bleed into other places like multitasking as an example.
Casey:
But she just said that everything just seems slower.
Casey:
You know, so as an example, double tapping a home button is much quicker than the swipe up and stop.
Casey:
The most recent touch ID is instant.
Casey:
And face ID is not instant.
Casey:
And I was talking to somebody just earlier tonight, actually.
Casey:
And I was saying to them, you know, if I take off my developer hat...
Casey:
I am actually lightly annoyed about how slow face ID is because it is noticeably slow.
Casey:
Is it egregiously slow?
Casey:
No, it is not.
Casey:
But it is noticeably slower than the most recent touch ID.
Casey:
Now, when I put my developer hat back on, it is a frigging miracle that this thing shipped in this quantity in the year 2017.
Casey:
Like, how is this even possible?
Casey:
How is it this quick?
Casey:
How is it possible to do all that computation that quick?
Casey:
But when I take my developer hat off, how is it this slow?
Casey:
Why would they have shipped it?
Casey:
It's too slow.
Casey:
Does that make any sense at all?
Marco:
Yeah, I think so.
Marco:
I mean, you know, to me, I mean, first of all, so to get back to what Aaron was saying, like the angles of it, I definitely hit that being like, this is now a thing I have to adjust with like...
Marco:
Yeah, just to consider a couple of people in the chat were suggesting that maybe try turning off the attention detection to make you like a lot happier.
Marco:
I think I'm going to try that because I honestly don't need incredibly high security.
Marco:
Like, I don't think there's a there has never been a situation where somebody has forcibly unlocked my phone by showing it to my face or putting my thumb on it or anything like that.
Marco:
So I don't think I really need that level of security.
Marco:
So I'm going to try that.
Marco:
But it definitely is like it takes some habit changing.
Marco:
And with Touch ID, maybe it did.
Marco:
That was so long ago now, I don't really remember.
Marco:
Did I have to suddenly press my finger in a different way?
Marco:
The answer is probably.
Marco:
I probably had to adjust to that too.
Marco:
And part of what makes – you were saying like some of this is just –
Marco:
It's slower, and with multitasking, that's slower.
Marco:
Some things are slower.
Marco:
Touch ID's speed does... I mean, sorry.
Marco:
Face ID's speed does seem to be certainly between Touch ID first and second generation, but a lot closer to the first generation than the second.
Marco:
I would agree with that.
Marco:
It's almost as slow as first generation Touch ID, which was still totally usable.
Marco:
We are spoiled by how fast second generation Touch ID was.
Marco:
Bingo.
Marco:
Completely agree with you.
Marco:
It is a step back in that regard.
Marco:
overall speed to unlock the phone in terms of taking it out of your pocket, unlocking it, and going to the home screen.
Marco:
I don't think it's that different.
Marco:
I think it might be a little slower, but I don't think it's a big difference.
Marco:
Just because that swipe is so fast and integrated in one continuous motion with Face ID being recognized, I think that's mostly fine.
Marco:
For accuracy, I think it's pretty good.
Marco:
It seems...
Marco:
again similar to touch id between first and second generations and maybe closer to first um but i have found that in you know i've had this phone now for a little less than a week and i have mostly adjusted myself to optimize face id recognition you know both accuracy and speed like it did take some adjustment i do have to then you know have it face me at a
Marco:
Like every other iOS developer who has phones tethered to a lightning cable sitting on their desk most of the day running apps on it, it is really annoying that it doesn't work while lying face up on a desk because the angle is just too steep to see you when you're sitting at the desk and it's like in the middle.
Casey:
You are right, but I will say in the defense of this thing, I was just lamenting that I have been pleasantly surprised by how aggressive the angle can be when it is sitting on a desk.
Casey:
You are right that it does not work near as reliably as Touch ID, but I was surprised that at...
Casey:
a reasonably extreme angle it would still unlock itself when it's on the desk so i'm not like directly over the phone i'm you know offset by like 30 40 50 degrees and it still was able to work which doesn't mean nothing of what i said makes you wrong i'm all i'm saying is that even though it doesn't work as much as i'd like it worked better than i would have expected
John:
So I haven't been unlocking this phone with Face ID, obviously, because you can only put one face in it, and the face is my wife's phone.
John:
But what I have been doing is, A, watching her use her phone, and B, paying more attention.
John:
I was doing this even before I had a phone.
John:
Paying more attention to the way that I have changed...
John:
how i use ios devices in response to touch id because we've all made changes to work with touch id even if those changes are the sort of instinctive thing i do when unlocking my phone that if it doesn't immediately unlock lift my finger and try again right or grabbing my phone in a way that my finger is on what would previously be a pointless place to put my finger like before there was a touch id sensor why would i be picking up my phone and having any fingers
John:
on the home button right unless that's how i'm going to wake the phone up or something right so the but i have made adjustments in my life to accommodate touch id to make it so you know to give me the final experience so that when i take out of my pocket i can start using it as soon as possible um
John:
And a lot of those are like you're gripping the phone in a weird way and then you touch this thing and then you immediately bring your thumb up to touch other stuff because you expect the thing to be unlocked.
John:
The thing about Face ID, before we get into all the techno mumbo jumbo stuff, is you have to adjust yourself in the same way.
John:
But with Touch ID, what you were adjusting is...
John:
where and when your fingers touch different parts of the phone with face id you are potentially adjusting your entire body posture to accompany uh to uh accommodate face id like so when it's on your desk yeah it can work at pretty steep angles but for people who are accustomed to leaving their phone face up on a flat surface and and waking it unlocking with touch id and glancing on something and putting it back to sleep
John:
That's not going to work if you if the phone is like off to your right, like it's by your right hand or whatever, and you can just glance at it.
John:
You have to kind of not leer over your phone, but you kind of got to get in the zone of the phone sensing.
John:
And you can't put your finger in the zone or your hand in the zone.
John:
You've got to put your head in the zone.
John:
Your head is connected to your neck, which is connected to your body, which means your entire body has to kind of lean over to be like, hi, phone.
John:
Even if attention is off, it needs to see the shape of your face from some angle.
John:
And it is impressively wide, but you do need to get – not get in the phone's face –
John:
But you kind of got to hover over the phone a little bit.
John:
You kind of can be like, here I am.
John:
Here I am, phone.
John:
And what I'm finding from watching my wife work with the phone and from listening to other people's stories is that a surprising number of people use their phones in a way that does not involve their face being over the screen of their phone.
John:
Casually on the arm of a sofa, unlocking it, even just waking it from sleep and glancing at it, which you can still do because you don't need to unlock it to do that.
John:
Like looking at your notifications or whatever.
John:
or really far down where you pull it out of your pocket like but your hands are still down by like your thighs and you just turn the phone up and look at it or whatever and it can't get your face from that angle or it's being blocked by your leg these are habits that will have to change for people to to use face id because it's got to see your face right and maybe the second gen will be better about seeing your face from more distances and more angles but
John:
that is a change in habits which we expected but it's a change in habit that involves more of your body than the change in habits for touch idea and i don't want to minimize the changes for touch idea because as i've been noticing them there's a lot of them uh and i find i my characterization of how fast it is again just watching my wife do it because i can't be doing it myself well i did use the demos in the store which is which you can have a little thing that just you know you learn through your face then you just unlock this pointless screen that just says we recognized you um
John:
I'm pretty surprised at how fast it is.
John:
Like, a little bit is what Casey said.
John:
Being a computer nerd, like, you know what it must take to do this.
John:
And it is...
John:
awe-inspiring that they are able to coordinate hardware and software and do this thing it's it's really fast like when i see my wife use her phone it really does look like what all the the phoning stories say which is like it's like that phone has no lock on it because when i see her phone you her user phone and when everything works the way it's supposed to i never see her unlock her phone i see her pick up her phone swipe and start using it
John:
That's what I see her do.
John:
I never see... I don't even notice the little lock animation thing.
John:
It just seems like she picks up her phone in August.
John:
You don't have a lock on that phone, right?
John:
That's how it's supposed to work.
John:
But in all those other scenarios where your face can't be over your phone, it's not like it works too slow or recognition fails.
John:
It's like...
John:
can't sorry can't i don't see a face anywhere around here so and then your fallback unfortunately is not touch id which i said that unfortunately but i've been thinking about this too a phone with both touch id and face id would be bad for reasons that we don't really have time to get into right now but when it's in all the positions that we've trained ourselves to be able to you know unlock and use with touch id
John:
you've either got to loom over your phone a little bit more or change your habits bring your phone a little bit more closer or don't leave it flat on the table or whatever um and i think this trade-off will be worth it but for now it seems uh i don't know i don't i don't know i i should have had my wife come on the show and see what she really thinks of it she's only used it for a short period of time but her only really strict complaints and these are things that could be fixing software is it doesn't work when she's laying down in bed because i think it just doesn't work sideways has that been your experience
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, it doesn't work in port in landscape.
Casey:
But when I am laying down and the phone is figuratively laying down, it doesn't work.
Casey:
And that drives me bananas because I use my phone like that a lot.
John:
Yeah, not... And she's doing it laying on her side, to be clear.
John:
So she's laying on her side on a bed and pulls the phone off her nightstand.
John:
And there's no reason it can't work like that.
John:
It should work fine.
John:
Like, distances are all fine, good view of the face, blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
Unless your face is squished into the pillow, maybe, I guess, and doesn't have a good angle inside of it.
John:
It feels like it should work like that.
John:
So that's one annoyance.
John:
And she did have some complaints about using it in the dark, but I...
John:
i think that's mostly about angle and distance because the phone doesn't care about the dark because face id is done entirely in ir and ir doesn't care about the dark uh that's my is that right am i getting that right yeah yeah and i will ir i would also like to build on that and say so when i'm in bed i i don't have my contact lenses in because i wear hard contacts because my eyes are really weird and
Casey:
And what I'll notice is in order to see well, I'll have the phone extremely close to my face, like uncomfortably for any normal person close to my face.
Casey:
And it's way too close for face ID.
Casey:
And that's kind of annoying too.
Casey:
Like not annoying enough that it didn't occur to me until you said something about it.
Casey:
But that's also a little frustrating.
Casey:
But I feel like I'm pooping all over Face ID.
Casey:
It is amazing.
Casey:
Truly, even as a consumer, it is amazing what's happening.
Casey:
And then once you layer on top of that, like John and I were both saying, how many computational things, just how much effort must this take to work?
Casey:
How can it possibly be working this quickly?
Casey:
Yeah.
John:
And battery power like, you know, it's like spraying your face with this eye and the IR flood illuminator and the dot thing.
John:
And then you're using the IR camera to pick up the dots and then you're processing them.
John:
It's like it's like being paralyzed by that first voice activated phone tree.
John:
You're like, what?
John:
But how how can this even work?
John:
And when it works, when I watch my wife use her phone and it works, it's like her phone does not have a lock on it.
John:
And from her experience, maybe I'm consciously making sure that it's got a view of my face.
John:
I'm hoping that will become, like Marco said, more or less second nature and we will have all adjusted our body posture to always make sure the camera can see us.
John:
And it's pretty forgiving.
John:
Like if you get the impression of like, oh, I have to be in just the right position.
John:
You don't like you just have to be remotely in the ballpark and it gets the job done.
John:
That's what's so amazing about it.
John:
Do you feel like.
John:
it couldn't possibly be even reading my face because I wasn't even, I wasn't even paying attention to like exactly what view it gets of my face.
John:
Like I'm just kind of using my phone normally.
John:
Like if you're, if you're in the ballpark of, of holding your phone and looking at it in any way, this is with attention on, I haven't tried to turn attention off.
John:
It is pretty magical.
John:
And in fact, I think the, I have, she's told me face ID has failed for her several times.
John:
Um,
John:
Mostly what I've seen happen is I've seen her miss the home swipe many more times than I've seen her fail face ID.
John:
I don't know if that means one is more likely than the other, or maybe you just go home more often, like you unlock it once, but you go home seven times during that session or whatever.
John:
But I will continue to survey her.
John:
This is bad because this is all secondhand to count because, again, I have never trained this thing on my face, and she'll probably never let me do that, so I'll just have to...
John:
live vicariously but you two will be the the real guinea pigs to see two weeks from now have you completely adjusted your entire body posture uh around uh face id or i mean here's the real thing what happens when face id doesn't work like you're laying down in bed or casey's got his phone really close to his face i do that too because my vision is bad not as bad as casey's but still pretty bad um
John:
the fallback is like okay i couldn't get face id to work and it's not just because like it was at the wrong angle like i'm not going to sit up on my bed to get face id to look the fallback is you have to type in your passcode right so the real test is pre face id i typed in my passcode this number of times per day post face id two weeks later a month later how many times per day do i type in my passcode i'm going to say that pre you know like i'm still pre face id with my touch id iphone 7
John:
the only time I type in my passcode is when it insists that I do so because like, it's either been 48 hours since I unlocked it or it's like an OS update or something.
John:
I don't think there is any time, even with wet hands, with wet hands, I will do the thing where you remove your thumb, put it down, remove your thumb, put it down, try it out.
John:
I will, I will do a surprising number of attempts at like wiping my finger or whatever.
John:
That will do anything to avoid typing in very long passcode.
John:
Right.
John:
Uh,
John:
and so i basically never type in my passcode but when face id fails if it fails for a reason that you know like is not there's no help like you don't want to sit up in bed the next thing you do is probably resign yourself to type in your passcode which means no more giant alphanumeric passcodes because you'll drive yourself insane because who wants to like when you're laying down sideways in bed and you're all groggy you do not want to type out a 17 digit alphanumeric punctuation capital and lowercase passcode that's super secure so you feel awesome nobody wants to do that
John:
So you'll either downgrade to a shorter numeric passcode or you'll really start to hate face ID because there is no other option.
John:
It's not like, well, face ID failed.
John:
I guess you can use touch ID.
John:
You can't like it's face ID or it's typing.
Casey:
Oh, I actually have a tangential question about this.
Casey:
So what is the best protocol for when somebody has grabbed my phone and looked at it, which is not unreasonable.
Casey:
Maybe I asked them to look at it or something like that, but Face ID has recognized them and
Casey:
and the phone is still on, and then they hand the phone to me, and then I enter my password.
Casey:
Is it that the other person's face is different enough that it's not going to train on their face?
Casey:
Do you know what I mean?
John:
Because my understanding is... Yeah, I had an item in the notes about that, because there was that video or whatever, where two siblings, they're not twins, but two siblings who look very alike,
John:
said hey look at this my brother whoever it was can unlock my phone with his face but we're not the same person right and what was happening in that scenario is it's one brother's phone and he's got it trained on his face and it works fine and the other brother tries to unlock it and it doesn't work because he's got a different face but then he types in his brother's passcode which he knows and
John:
and enters the phone and that happens a few times and so the theory goes what he's doing is essentially training like casey was saying he is training the phone like oh silly phone you said you couldn't recognize this face but because i immediately entered the passcode what i'm telling you phone is no no it's me it's me the owner of the phone so that face that you just tried to recognize that you said was not the right face it obviously was the right face because i just unlocked the phone
John:
I'm assuming, just like Casey said, that this training only happens if the face is close to the face that it knows, but not quite.
John:
So that if an entirely different person whose face is nothing like yours tries to use face ID fails, but then enters your code, which I've done with my iPhone many times because it always fails because my face has never succeeded in unlocking her phone.
John:
But I have unlocked her phone many, many times over the course of setting it up and playing with it and, you know, practicing my home gestures and all the other things that I do with her phone, right?
John:
I'm pretty sure that I am not messing up her training because my face is too different from her face and that the phone is not going to accept the fact that I unlocked after face ID failed as additional training data.
John:
I don't know that for a fact, but that seems like the logical thing to do, and Apple is a smart company.
John:
So I think both things are smart things to use, both to ignore my face because it's different, and also it's smart to train on that brother's face.
John:
So if you have a sibling who looks a lot like you, do not let them repeatedly pick up your phone and fail face ID and enter the code because it may eventually learn that this alternate face that's kind of like yours is also yours, and it just looks different from time to time.
John:
So don't do that.
Casey:
So L Brews from the chat has pulled this quote, which I think is from the Face ID security guide, which we'll put in the show notes.
Casey:
If Face ID fails to recognize you, but the match quality is higher than a certain threshold and you immediately follow the failure by entering your passcode, Face ID takes another capture.
Casey:
Oh, interesting.
Casey:
So that's only once the passcode's been entered.
Casey:
So at this point, it would be of me anyway.
John:
Yeah, yeah.
John:
You have to successfully enter the passcode.
John:
Like, if someone knows your passcode, like the sibling knew the passcode, yeah.
John:
And so this is saying it has to pass a threshold.
John:
So that's why I am not training my iPhone to recognize me.
Casey:
Right, but I'm on a different point.
Casey:
I had assumed that it took the...
Casey:
So the order of operations is it takes a picture of Aaron because she's the one that's trying to open the phone, says, you're not Casey.
Casey:
The phone is handed to me, and I enter the code.
Casey:
What I'm reading here is that it actually takes a second picture.
Casey:
I had assumed it was still working off that original picture of Aaron, but this says a face ID fails to recognize you, but the match quality is higher than a certain threshold.
Casey:
You immediately follow the failure by entering your passcode.
Casey:
Face ID takes another capture.
John:
and augments its enrolled face id data with a newly calculated mathematical representation yeah because you because it's facing your face for the new capture but if she knew your code and she entered your code it's still not going to pass the threshold it's not going to pass the threshold so the match you know it's higher than a certain hers is not within the threshold of learning of your face i'm assuming because it's just too different
Casey:
Yeah, I hear you.
Casey:
One of the other things that's been really great about Face ID is it has been surprisingly willing, almost uncomfortably willing to unlock when my face is occluded or otherwise messed with.
Casey:
And by that, I mean I often have a finger like on my chin or maybe I have a finger in my mouth because I'm biting my nails or doing something I shouldn't be doing.
Casey:
Or I went to a football game the day after we got the phones and I had like a hat on and I didn't have a hat on.
Casey:
I had a hat and a hood and then just a hood.
Casey:
And so now granted, a lot of this is over your face, but as in above my face.
John:
But my point is, and you got your weekend beard too, right?
Casey:
This might be a multi-month beard at this point, but it's going to go soon.
Casey:
Whenever we're really close to Sprigg's time of arrival, I'm going to shave it all off because Sprigg is going to meet me as I should be met, which is without hair on my face.
Marco:
Sprigg's eyes aren't going to work for a while.
Marco:
You know that, right?
Casey:
Well, there's that, too.
Casey:
There's that, too.
Casey:
But this is how it needs to be.
Marco:
You've played this game before.
Casey:
You know how this goes.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
But anyway, the point is...
Casey:
it did a really, really good job and continues to do a very good job of being willing to unlock when portions of my face are occluded.
Casey:
And so maybe I'm resting my hand on my chin and my fingers are kind of rolled up and in front of my mouth or something like that.
Casey:
It's done a very, very good job, surprisingly good job of rolling with that to the point that it almost feels like, and I bet this isn't true, but it almost feels like
Casey:
Maybe eyes or cheekbones are the things that matter most to Face ID because it's rare that I'll have my hand in front of my eyes or like up on my cheekbones or anything like that.
Casey:
But it is not unusual for me to have my hands in or around my mouth.
Casey:
And so I don't know if that's true, but it just feels like eyes and cheekbones matter a lot more than the mouth area, if you will.
John:
So on the topic of Erin saying that things just seem slower, what I thought she might have been getting at before you went off to describe the home multitasking thing, which I totally agree with, is the animations.
John:
And I realize I probably only say that because I run reduced motion and have for a really long time.
John:
So my iPhone 7 doesn't do...
John:
almost any animations everything is these silly crossfades right uh but here's the thing about the iphone 10 well first of all using in its in its like default out of the box thing the animations do not bother me as much as they did on the seven and i guess the six or whatever like and why don't they bother me like they're even more egregious even more like swoopy like things are flying in from here and going out to there
John:
I think they bother me less because the gesture I'm performing, for example, to go back to the home screen, swiping up from the bottom.
John:
matches with the idea of chucking the current app back into its little hidey home inside the icon you know what i mean like how it flies into the icon yeah yeah right and so i'm doing something that matches the gesture versus i press the button and everything went shrinky zoomy right they feel disconnected um i again i haven't it's not my phone i've just played with it a lot like but
John:
It doesn't bother me as much, but I'm like, okay, well, even though it doesn't bother me, if I got an iPhone 10, I'm sure I would turn on reduced motion.
John:
So let me go into settings and turn on reduced motion.
John:
I doubt either one of you have tried this, but if you put reduced motion on this phone,
John:
very strange things happen and there's not really a good solution to make them not strange you turn on reduced motion what happens is this you're in an app you do the home gesture to get back to home and it starts to make as you swipe up it starts to make the app that you're in kind of fly upwards and start heading back into its little icon home right but then
John:
And abruptly, once that animation has started, it switches to a crossfade.
John:
And I thought, oh, that's stupid.
John:
Why don't they just do the crossfade the whole time?
John:
But because of the way the multitasking gesture, like, you know, you can do it slow or whatever, like, I think it has to start the animation.
John:
Because if it didn't start the animation, like...
John:
So if it was going back to home screen, it could say, oh, I'll just wait until you cross the threshold of, oh, I see you're going to the home screen and I'll crossfade with doing no animation beforehand.
John:
But if you're going for the multitasking switcher, once it says, oh, they're not going to the home screen, this is slow enough for me to bring up the multitasking switcher.
John:
And then it's going to be like,
John:
oh crap i didn't do i haven't been doing any animations this whole time and they're activating the multitasking switcher quick catch up and make it look like they're animated up to the point where their thumb is and that would be weird too so if you turn on go turn it on on iphone 10 turn on reduce motion now and do the home gesture and just look at what it does it is a mess it is an animation mess it's half one animation cut
John:
interrupted by a crossfade and honestly i think if i had an iphone 10 i would not turn on reduced motion because that just it doesn't feel faster i get half an animation but that feels worse than like the full animation and i don't have a good solution it's not like apple did something dumb here i don't know what they can do to to fix this problem i think we just all have to use the animations and like it which i realized you two do anyway but i i haven't been so
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
I have an animation dilemma with the iPhone X. I think maybe, you know, in the same way that before iOS 7, we realized that we had kind of gone too far with skeuomorphism, I think we might be at that point with animations, where, like, the amount of...
Marco:
unnecessary and almost like overly exuberant animations that we have for common actions in ios 11 i think is a little excessive um like one of the weird things is like when you go to the home screen how your wallpaper kind of like slams up from beneath i guess like it's a very it looks very weird and jarring and i've never seen that one because it may not have a hundred percent black background but
John:
And I just realized why I wouldn't have seen it.
Marco:
I actually recently switched to 100% black background in part for that and in part because it just looks so awesome on the OLED screen.
John:
I've always had a black background.
John:
Weren't you not able to have a background in early days of iPhone OS?
Marco:
Yeah, it wasn't until I think iOS 4 that you could have a background at all.
John:
and it was and before that it was 100 black right yep yep so i think that's why i never changed once you could get a background i think i tried some backgrounds couldn't find any i liked them like well everything's been 100 black for so let me try that and and that's it and now i've been using 100 black and the great thing is in ios 11 you don't have to upload a black uh image like i've had to do for every version yeah they have them built in finally
John:
They have a solid color section and black is available to you.
John:
And, yeah, it does look great in OLED.
John:
But, no, I didn't notice the slamming.
John:
And so, like, it comes up from below, kind of.
Marco:
Yeah, it's almost as though you're falling onto your wallpaper.
Marco:
It's a very jarring animation.
Marco:
And I really don't like it.
Marco:
And, yeah, TIFF comes out on it, too.
Marco:
It's a very weird thing.
Marco:
Anyway, so I hope that we have...
Marco:
reach the point with animations now where we can start to pull back it's almost it's almost part of what i was saying last week about how like i wish apple would have like a maybe a more confident design in that like confident in the way that they don't they don't need to show off that like that they they know they're good and they don't need to show off how good they are to the world they can just be good right i feel like a lot of these animations now have gotten to the point where they are just showing off like this is a designer showing off and it's it's getting annoying right
John:
How do you do the multitasking gesture without any animations?
John:
That's what I'm stuck on.
John:
Like, if you do not change the way you get into the multitasking switcher, how do you do that with no animations?
John:
Because, like, you can do the home screen with no animations, quick swipe up from the bottom, and we cross right to the home screen, or we just bring the home screen up, right?
John:
But a slow swipe up from the bottom bringing you into multitasking, like...
John:
i don't know maybe that would feel kind of disconnected like what i get what you're saying about the animations going too far and again as someone who runs with reduce motion all the time i am not a fan of animation but i was surprised by how much i like the animations in the 10 because they were connected to things my fingers were doing and like twitterific and lots of other applications where they actually make the animation track your finger i don't know if the ios 11 ones are doing that on the iphone 10 but they feel like
John:
they're tracking your finger and that feels good that it doesn't feel like you are triggering animation it feels like you are moving things on the screen which is a big kind of like side swipes going from screens and like home screens on springboard right the reason that feels so good is you you don't feel like you are triggering the slide in animation you feel like you're moving the screen you feel like you're moving the icons with your finger and it's such a big difference and so i'm actually a pretty big fan of the animations maybe i wouldn't be if i didn't have a black background i'd seen that slam in
John:
And I think I would still prefer reduced motion if implemented like it is on the seven and earlier phones where it's just, you know, like you really are triggering animations and they're all crossfades.
John:
But I think there's something to be said for a UI that is so fundamentally based on swipey crap.
John:
Having that swipey crap make you feel like you're moving things on the screen rather than triggering an animation.
John:
I still prefer no animations at all, but honestly, with this many swipes, I don't know how you pull it off and don't make it feel disconnected.
John:
You're just drawing magic spells and hieroglyphics on a screen, and your magic incantations cause things to change, but there's no real connection between them.
John:
It's magic.
Marco:
Yeah, and I don't think it has to be dramatically like no animations ever again.
Marco:
I just think the animations need to be toned down.
Marco:
We've gone too far.
Marco:
They need to be brought back a little bit and not totally removed.
Marco:
So many of these things like multitasking and everything, yeah, they should be animated.
Marco:
And most of the things that are animated now should still be animated.
John:
it's just a question of what that animation is and how many other things are happening when it happens and how long does it take these things could all use some tweaking i think you know so and and some restraint yeah the home screen is probably the best example because what you want to happen is i want to go to the home screen but you don't need to see the home screen assemble itself like you know like like a deconstructed sandwich at a froofy restaurant assembling itself right like
John:
here comes the background and now the icons are falling onto it.
John:
Like, like it's assembly.
John:
Like I know what springboard looks like.
John:
Just, just show me that as if it's already constructed.
John:
Not as if every time I go back to the home screen is, it is rebuilt from its component pieces, like a weird CG transformer animation.
John:
So that's probably too far.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
All right.
Marco:
So let's get back on track and finish up our iPhone X review.
Marco:
We're running long.
Marco:
Casey, do you have any other... I have kind of like a miscellaneous section here.
Marco:
Do you have anything else to add?
Casey:
I will just say that I haven't had a lot of time using my phone regularly because I was traveling.
Casey:
And when I'm traveling, I always have a lot more...
Casey:
battery range anxiety than I normally do because it's oftentimes less convenient for me to charge.
Casey:
And oftentimes I'm out and away from my normal day-to-day life when I'm traveling, obviously, and I'm using my phone more.
Casey:
So for a lot of reasons, I get real battery anxiety when I'm traveling.
Casey:
And maybe what I'm about to say is just that anxiety manifesting itself.
Casey:
But I feel like on both our 7s and on the 10s,
Casey:
Battery life in iOS 11 is still not great.
Casey:
It's gotten better with 11.1, but it's still just not great, and that's frustrating.
Casey:
But as a quick summary of my thoughts, I really do like this phone quite a bit, and that screen is just so clearly the future.
Casey:
It is really, really great.
Casey:
And overall, I obviously have complaints.
Casey:
Nothing is so perfect, did you know, guys, that it can't be complained about, but it is a really great phone.
Casey:
So with that in mind, Marco, tell me your miscellaneous section.
Marco:
So first of all, on the battery, my theory with iOS 11, I think one of the big reasons why people are seeing such reduced battery life on such a wide scale is that iOS 11 allows photos to be uploaded to iCloud when you're not plugged in and when you're not on Wi-Fi.
Marco:
And by default, I'm pretty sure it lasts cellular data usage and also not plugged in usage.
Marco:
Whereas before, it would wait until the phone was charging and on Wi-Fi to do any kind of uploads.
Marco:
So if you're shooting pictures, which most people do all the time, now your battery life should be probably significantly worse.
Marco:
Also, encoding, HEAF, and HEVC are more processor intensive.
Marco:
So it seems like the combination of the iCloud photo uploads not being restricted by default anymore to a high power state and Wi-Fi and also the complexity of the new formats, I think that explains a lot of the worst battery life people are seeing in reality with iOS 11.
Marco:
Anyway, so that's my theory.
Marco:
Check the settings, though, for photo uploads if you want to conserve some more power.
Marco:
As for the battery life on the X, it's a little soon to tell for sure, but it seems like it is overall fairly similar to the battery life on my iPhone 7.
Marco:
It doesn't seem like it's dramatically better.
Marco:
um i kind of expected going to oled to bring more gain in that department maybe we'll see over time as as apps in the os maybe get darker with their themes overall because one of the things with oled is when it's showing dark content it's using less power than when it's showing light content unlike lcds uh so maybe it'll get better over time but i i did kind of expect oled to bring a bigger jump in battery life than what we actually got here um so oh well anyway battery life seems fine but not amazing
John:
Are you sure it's still not analyzing your photos?
Marco:
I don't know that.
Marco:
Probably not, but who knows.
Marco:
The setup experience, I did want to do a quick note on this.
Marco:
My phone immediately needed an update to iOS 11.1, which I thought was...
Marco:
fairly ungraceful that's that's the kind of thing that like you know anytime you get like a game console or pretty much any tech product from anybody else it doesn't usually immediately need a software update it kind of ruins the experience a little bit and just delays you getting things even more so that that kind of sucked it you don't usually see it from apple so it was noteworthy um
Marco:
On the other hand, though, the automatic migration from my old iPhone was amazing.
Marco:
It worked perfectly in all respects, except it didn't move my watch.
Marco:
Now, some people say the Apple Watch was moved for them in that process.
Marco:
Some people, it wasn't.
Marco:
It seems like it's inconsistent whether it works or not.
Marco:
It is seemingly supposed to do it.
Marco:
It just doesn't seemingly a good portion of the time.
Marco:
But with that one exception of the watch being moved...
Marco:
This is the first time I have not done iTunes backup method to transfer to a new phone.
Marco:
Every other time I've gotten a new phone, I've backed up Google into iTunes with a local encrypted backup using that checkbox so it saves my passwords, restored to the new phone, etc.
Marco:
This is the first time I didn't do that.
Marco:
And the new – with the combination of iCloud backups and with this new setup wizard thing where you put the phones near each other and they detect each other and offer to move it over, that was actually – I think it was faster than an iTunes backup and restore would have been.
Marco:
And it was way less effort, and it actually was a better copy of everything.
Marco:
Sometimes with iTunes, it gets weird with maybe it'll back up a bunch of old apps that you thought you deleted and then put them back on your new phone and stuff like that.
Marco:
There's occasional weirdness with iTunes backups, not to mention the fact that it takes up a giant amount of hard drive space, which is a problem in the age of SSDs.
Marco:
I think I'm going to stop doing those.
Marco:
I think I'm finally going to, after all this time, finally going to join the rest of the world and stop doing iTunes backups.
Marco:
Because the restore process on the phone without that was flawless.
Marco:
People have reported lots of problems in the past with iCloud restores taking way too long on iPhone day one.
Marco:
I haven't heard that this year.
Marco:
And I think whatever problems used to plague this don't seem to apply anymore.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
Good job, whoever did this at Apple.
Marco:
This is great.
Marco:
The new setup process, the migration process is awesome.
Marco:
And finally, we'll replace iTunes backups for me.
John:
It is way faster than it used to be.
John:
And I have a lot of experience with both of them because I always do iTunes for mine, but then iCloud for my family's, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
And so it was way faster than it has been in the past for the iCloud one.
John:
It did, like the iTunes backup does sometimes, my iCloud one was confused about what apps it was restoring and ended up restoring a bunch of apps that my wife had uninstalled, mostly because we share an Apple ID for purchases.
John:
Even though she's got her own, we have this legacy of when we only had one Apple ID.
John:
as many families probably do um and so it did the exact same thing as itunes about being confused about what she exactly she had installed for the most part it worked but the watch part it did ask about the watch but at the time we were doing it in the apple store it was asking about my watch because remember this is my phone right so i'm my process is all messed up like whatever fine i'm i'm fine that we're doing a weird thing here's my complaint about the process if you don't catch it in that moment
John:
i don't know how to transfer the watch without like resetting and restoring it and i feel like there should be an easy way after the initial setup process to say oh and by the way that at the time i did the setup i didn't have my watch but now i've got it or now everything like whatever i want to do the thing now you've got two phones i got an old phone and a new phone take the watch and move it from this phone to that phone if there's a way to do that i don't know it and so i had to do it the long way and the long way is crappy
John:
So that's my only real complaint about it.
John:
But I'm mostly with Marco that iCloud, if you've been avoiding iCloud things and always doing iTunes backups, I'm not going to stop doing iTunes backups because they currently go to my Synology and what the hell.
John:
I do them only like once a month anyway.
John:
But iCloud backups and restore have gotten way better.
John:
They're way faster.
John:
They're way more complete.
John:
There's less waiting around for apps to load themselves for like three days.
John:
It was good.
John:
I endorse it.
John:
The watch stuff seems to be better.
Casey:
the the i did the same transfer thing that marco did it was the same story right always do itunes backups encrypted this time i did not and the two things i noticed that bummed me out are and maybe it was user error maybe i did something wrong but the two things that bummed me out were uh it did not keep my wi-fi passwords those did not transfer again maybe i did something wrong somewhere mine did but hmm
Casey:
And then the other thing I noticed was because I do not use iCloud photo library, I only use one of the thing where it's like initial.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, thank you.
Casey:
It seemed like it just didn't get most of the pictures off of my old phone, which is fine because I can just put them in our main repository.
Casey:
But where an iTunes backup seems to have always included the pictures, which is, I think, part of the reason why it takes
Casey:
forever to finish uh it it did not seem to work with this like transfer migration assistant kind of thing oh and apparently it's icloud keychain according to the chat room that does wi-fi passwords yes yeah i do not
Marco:
that was yet another thing that like when it first came out was a complete mess and you shouldn't have used it when it first came out but then they've been improving it over time and now the combination of iCloud backups plus iCloud keychain means that you basically have the benefit that you had before with iTunes encrypted backups now you have it with iCloud backups in the cloud if you use both of these things and in my experience they've been flawless it's been great
John:
I know some people have complained about iCloud Keychain, and maybe it has been inconsistent, but I've been using it since day one, and I've always thought it has more or less fulfilled the purpose it's supposed to fulfill.
John:
Like, I've never regretted using iCloud Keychain.
John:
Worst case, maybe I'll feel like, oh, that should have been an iCloud Keychain, but it wasn't there.
John:
But that's not, like, if the 9,000 other passwords are there, then I'm good with it.
John:
And occasionally, like, it's like 17-level security to get iCloud backup onto things was...
John:
is occasionally annoying and i think it used to be more annoying than it is now but i i heartily endorse uh endorse iCloud keychain um i didn't even realize that's the magic that was bringing me the nice backup and restore just because i've always been using it but now now that i know that's the case i even more endorse like you should definitely use this because who wants to do a restore and then have to like re-sign into all your crap and lose all your saved website passwords and all that other stuff and
John:
As far as I can tell, with all the annoying hurdles that it makes me jump over, iCloud Keychain seems reasonably secure.
Marco:
The only thing that I did not like about the migration process, which I think was not actually part of the migration process, is that all of my settings and everything were carried over except one, the screen auto-lock duration.
Marco:
on the iphone 10 my screen auto lock which i believe i had set to five minutes which i think is the longest you can go without it being never screen auto lock was reset to the minimum of 30 seconds this seems intentional because this has never happened with any other migration that i've done um and let me tell you using an iphone with a 30 second auto lock sucks
Marco:
It's really, really annoying.
John:
You don't think that's part of the new attention thing, like feature nut bug with like, oh, we want everyone to experience our cool new attention thing, which is basically the screen will dim very aggressively to save your battery unless it notices that you're looking at it.
John:
That's the experience they're going for like, oh, we'll save your battery life.
John:
but also we'll be less annoying in terms of like if you're using your phone we won't dim it because we can tell you're looking at us because we have the face and attention you know apis and all that other stuff so that's what they're going for and that's probably why they would if this is not a bug assuming it's not a bug why they would do this on purpose is they want you to experience all this attention stuff but this is another example of where people will have to adjust their body postures because now people are complaining i put my phone flat on the table and
John:
and I like to glance at it, but then I look away for three seconds, and I look back, and it's already dimmed the screen.
John:
I'm like, wait a second.
John:
I was just using you.
John:
Normally, my iPhone, because of my strict timeout, would say, I'm going to leave my phone on at full brightness for X amount of time, so you can look away, go do something else, go eat a piece of food, then look back, and your screen will still be on.
John:
But the iPhone X is like, aha, I can tell you're not looking at me anymore.
John:
I'm going to dim my screen to the same power, and that's annoying people.
John:
So I think these are all things they can...
John:
either fix with software or that apparently we can all fix by changing how we use our phones.
Marco:
I mean, it was pretty clearly a choice to reset people's defaults to this new value.
Marco:
And you can go in and change it, but the default does appear to be the lowest, which is 30 seconds.
Marco:
And
Marco:
This is one of those things where I think you're partly right.
Marco:
It is nice that they can tell whether you're looking at it and they can dim it as a result or not dim it as a result.
Marco:
This was one of the biggest things that annoyed me about this.
Marco:
At first, I'm like, let me just live with this.
Marco:
The problem is you're then relying on unlocking the phone a lot more often.
Marco:
Then you're relying on Face ID being really super fast, which it isn't.
Marco:
It's moderately fast, but it's not really super fast.
Marco:
And so I feel like this emphasizes one of the phone's flaws, which is that Face ID is slower than Touch ID version 2.
Marco:
And it seems like they did this as a not-so-subtle trick to...
Marco:
to increase battery life in practice or to reduce oled burn-in which is potentially a big problem down the road i don't know it feels like kind of a cheap move to me like it feels like kind of like an unfair trick you know and if it works fine but i found in my first day of leaving it that way before i got annoyed and just went in and changed the setting back to five minutes i thought it was ridiculously annoying and
Marco:
And so I think it's a bad default.
Marco:
I think it's a bad assumption or a bad trick.
Marco:
And they should not be changing people's settings on migrations for this one fairly critical part of the way the system behaves.
Marco:
One thing I found that made it very annoying is I would unlock the phone and then maybe I would set it down on a desk or the counter for a few seconds.
Marco:
And then I want to go back to it and pick it back up again.
Marco:
and maybe maybe it's playing a podcast and i want the controls to still be on screen for a minute while i go do something with my hand and then go pick it back up again like it was very frequently turning off when i was not ready for that to happen yet um so i kind of give him a pass on changing the defaults like i understand the reasons and i feel like if there's some new feature of your phone like oh we have a way to tell whether you're looking at it
John:
and people won't see it because their defaults will be configured for phone without that feature the only way you're going to get people to give that feature a chance is by changing their defaults it could be considered a little bit user hostile for power users but for everybody else there's no way they would even notice that other feature now if that other feature worked the way they dreamed it did like the best of both worlds it will never dim while you're looking at it but it will dim immediately when you're not looking at it then it would have been a win but it sounds like there's still
John:
a couple of bumps in the road and it also sounds like this is an aspect of your life and me and probably also casey where we're all still using six shifts and that the reason you can get away with a five minute timeout is because you put your phone to sleep when you know you're done using it right like you're manually shifting you'll be like okay i'm not going to glance at you anymore and you hit the side button and it goes to sleep i know i do that i manually put my my timeout is very long and i don't worry about battery life because i control when i know if i am i going to look back at that phone now or am i done with it for now so i turn the screen off essentially
Marco:
Yeah, all right, maybe.
Marco:
But anyway, I found that an annoying default and I was extra annoyed that it overrode my previous setting.
Marco:
And so, yeah, I think that's a bad move or a bad trick.
Marco:
And I wish they would change that.
Marco:
But otherwise, yeah, otherwise I'm really enjoying this phone.
Marco:
And, you know, once I changed that setting, that helped a lot on that front.
Marco:
Yeah, I really like it.
Marco:
It is certainly taking time to get used to in the way that, as I mentioned earlier, how the top area of the screen is so hard to reach for me, like holding it one-handed.
Marco:
I am still doing the support pinky on the bottom, so basically holding the phone by the bottom half, which means that...
Marco:
And in my left hand, which means that I can use my thumb on my left hand to just barely reach the upper left ear next to the status bar.
Marco:
But I can't reach the upper right of the screen anymore.
Marco:
So that's a little bit annoying.
Marco:
And I feel like this is going to be an area – I kind of talked about this on Under the Radar this week –
Marco:
I feel like iOS has to now adopt to a new reality that's actually been building over the last couple years since we've had the Plus phones, where a lot of people can't reach the top of the screen very easily anymore.
Marco:
So iOS, I think, has to, and the built-in system apps and many other apps, have to reduce the dependence on putting frequently used buttons and things at the top of the screen.
Marco:
And this is some pretty fundamental iOS stuff that will have to change as a result of this, like navigation bars or edit buttons or done buttons or cancel buttons that are up in the top bars.
Marco:
That's a pretty common design pattern.
Marco:
Apps that have hamburger buttons in the upper left corner, stuff like that.
Marco:
This is going to be a major shift that all apps and the OS now have to do.
Marco:
So iOS 11 kind of half designed itself for this by having those giant navigation bar titles that push the first row of content down.
Marco:
I see why they did that now.
Marco:
That makes sense now.
Marco:
I don't think it looks very good, but it makes sense and it works well, even though it doesn't look great.
Marco:
It does work better on the iPhone X to have the content push down a little bit for that first row to be more accessible to your thumb.
Okay.
Marco:
But they have to do a lot more.
Marco:
And so I feel like iOS 11 is like a baby step towards accommodating the new reality of larger screen phones where we can't reach the top and bottom as easily as we used to.
Marco:
And I hope that iOS 12 and beyond go further in that direction because they need to.
John:
So the big text at the top, I don't mind the looks that much.
John:
And you're right, it makes much more sense in the context of taller phones like this.
John:
But one thing I noticed when I was in the Apple store hanging around waiting to pick up the phone and looking at all the iPhone Xs is...
John:
Two things.
John:
One, I was surprised at how many of them had non-default text size and I wondered if Apple had set that up or if people were just messing with the phones and set it up.
John:
Whatever the setting is for large text and stuff.
John:
I don't know if it's an accessibility or if it's the Zoom or whatever.
John:
And picking one up that's like that
John:
I was like, oh, this iPhone X, something looks weird about the screen.
John:
All the letters are really big.
John:
I'm like, oh, someone just changed it to be non-default.
John:
But even on the ones that were in standard size, because then I would change the size to be standard or what I thought was standard, and I'd be like, huh, the text looks kind of bigger here, too.
John:
And I might have just been fooled by the fact that the screen is bigger and that...
John:
The applications I was using were all Apple apps that had the big, chunky thing on it.
John:
And I think, in general, making text bigger and more legible on larger screen phones is a smart move.
John:
Because while we may want bigger screens to get more screen real estate, as we get older and as we get more Casey... Like, bigger text on a bigger phone, it becomes...
John:
that's really important like the whole reason you want a bigger phone is not so you can see more text it's so that the text on the phone can be bigger and bolder and easier to pick out and moving the os in the direction of having more bigger bolder text i know you're not like even in the regular thing the bold big bold text on top is really big
John:
it just makes it a lot more clear than it used to be.
John:
Where the heck are you and what are you looking at?
John:
And so I mostly endorse that direction, even if aesthetically sometimes it seems a little bit jarring, just because maybe it's because I'm getting older, but I like the idea of not being... It's a continuing move on the spectrum from incredibly precious iOS 7 that we would slowly, gradually be moving away from to become like...
John:
a more practical os that is more usable for actual people and but it looks less good if you were to like print it on a poster and treat it as like a beautiful you know typographic display of prowess and elegance but if you just have to read the text i kind of prefer the the chunkiness that we've got now
Casey:
we've spent a lot of time talking about the kind of gotchas and, and, and not oopsies, but you know, the, the things that I, I hadn't heard a whole lot about.
Casey:
So it sounds way more negative, or at least I think I sound way more negative than I intend.
Casey:
This phone is tremendous.
Casey:
And if you have the means, I highly suggest picking one up and that's a reference, John.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Do you think it blew the quote slightly?
John:
Um, but I, I couldn't exactly correct you.
John:
So I won't, um,
John:
So my impression, again, this is not my phone.
John:
I'm of two minds about it.
John:
One, all the things that I just talked about and complained about, on the one hand, make me feel like I'm kind of okay with waiting out this gen and seeing how things shake out for the next one because this changes a lot of stuff.
John:
And my sort of comfortable iPhone 7, it works great.
John:
I love my iPhone 7.
John:
I'm very comfortable with it.
John:
I don't have to change any of my habits using it.
John:
But on the other hand,
John:
the iphone 10 is like the most interesting and exciting new piece of technology i've had in a long time just because from a tech nerd perspective it's so fascinating what it's doing with all its different sensors even silly things like animoji that we still haven't talked about like and all the other third-party applications that are using it and then face id and and the dual cameras and everything it's an exciting tech gadget if you are into tech gadgets um
John:
I would highly recommend the iPhone 10, even if it is, quote unquote, a worse phone for you because you have to retrain your habits or whatever.
John:
It's interesting and exciting in a way that iOS devices haven't been in a long time.
John:
I'm trying to think of what the most recent one was.
John:
Maybe the iPhone 4 when it went in Retina, and maybe for me personally, like the iPad Pro 9.7, which was just this little packed-in powerhouse.
John:
But this is the most exciting iOS device in a really long time, if you are a tech nerd, which everyone may not be.
John:
If you're on the fence about this, I mean, and you haven't like tried it and you want to just kind of judge, it will force you to change some habits and things will be different and weird.
John:
But it is really cool and exciting.
John:
And you will have fun playing with it if you're the kind of person who just really appreciates tech for tech's sake.
John:
And I think in the end, this is also a very good phone.
John:
I will let my wife be the arbiter of that because she's the one using it every day.
John:
But I'm pretty sure she's not going to say forget this and go for an 8+.
John:
But, you know, I'll give you weekly updates for a little while just to let you know what she's thinking of it.
John:
Because she is not one who's like, oh, I'm just excited about the technology.
John:
She is not excited about the technology at all, right?
John:
So she is a good test for, I don't care about tech stuff.
John:
Is this a good phone or not?
John:
And she really liked her 6S+, other than it getting slow.
John:
So I think she's a good test case.
John:
So more to come on this.
Casey:
Really quickly, what you're saying about the iPhone X being just a cool gadget, I think the guys on Connected had some really great thoughts on this.
Casey:
And I think it was mostly Mike that was saying, you know, this is the first time in several years that I've been like really, really amped and excited to get a new phone in a way.
Casey:
We're always amped and excited.
Casey:
But you know what I mean?
Casey:
Like, this is the first, you know, new hardware where people are saying, oh, this is the new thing.
Casey:
Oh, is it good?
Casey:
Whereas, you know, in past years, it was, oh, is that the 7?
Casey:
Oh, is it cool?
Casey:
What makes it better again?
Casey:
You know, and it's not that anymore.
Casey:
And Connected did a really good segment on that.
Casey:
Anyway, Marco, closing thoughts?
Marco:
The funny thing is, in a couple of these interviews, the Apple executives have said that the iPhone X was originally supposed to come out next year, and they moved it up a year.
Marco:
Imagine if it didn't come out this year, like it was originally scheduled.
Marco:
Imagine if all we had this year was the iPhone 8.
Marco:
And the iPhone is a fine phone, but man, that would have been boring.
Marco:
That would have been a really, really boring year.
Marco:
And so I'm really glad we have this.
Marco:
But yeah, ultimately, with a lot of Apple progress in recent years, it seems like...
Marco:
it seems like we can't take like unqualified progress anymore it seems like every advancement comes with significant downsides or casey already said that you're trying to say nothing is so perfect no no one's ever said that before well i'm sure someone invented it just probably not you um anyway no like so often we've had to like
Marco:
swallow a bitter pill to get the new stuff.
Marco:
There's been some massive downside.
Marco:
And this still is the case with a lot of Apple's product lines, the laptops.
Marco:
But with this phone, I really thought that would be the case.
Marco:
I really thought there would be much bigger downsides.
Marco:
I really thought that Face ID would be more...
Marco:
more limited or would have more gotchas or more places where it wouldn't work right.
Marco:
I really thought that losing the home button or accepting the notch would be worse.
Marco:
And it mostly isn't.
Marco:
There isn't much downside to this with the one large exception of cost.
Marco:
That's a big one.
Marco:
But with the exception of that, which is often an Apple thing you have to accept, we got a really, really awesome...
Marco:
And notably new, as you said, like a new phone.
Marco:
Really something new here without significant downsides.
Marco:
And that's pretty awesome.
Marco:
And most of the small annoyances that I have with it are really small.
Marco:
Or things that could be pretty easily fixed with just some software updates or redesigning some of the software aspects of it.
Marco:
So overall, I'm really happy with it.
Marco:
And it's not like totally perfect, but it's pretty great.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I mean, I know we are not the first to say it, and this is not the first time we've said it tonight, but it really does feel like the phone of the future.
Casey:
It really, really does.
Casey:
And that's awesome.
Casey:
And the great thing is it's the phone of the present.
Yep.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Warby Parker, Squarespace, and Fracture.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Casey:
Because it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
Casey:
Oh, it was accidental.
Casey:
Accidental.
John:
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him Cause it was accidental, it was accidental And you can find the show notes at atp.fm
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-T-M-A-R-C-O-R-M-E-N-S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A-C-U-S-A
Casey:
So I have a brief story to tell.
Casey:
On the way to San Francisco, and on the way back actually, but each direction I spent time going through the just tremendous amount of footage I took of the Alfa Romeo because I'm trying to basically...
Casey:
cut out the pieces that I will then put together to make the movie you know what I mean so if I have like an in-car video that lasts 15 minutes maybe a minute and a half of that is potentially usable so I'm trying to amass all those like you know 30 second one minute three minute clips and so this way I'll know what I can build the video out of and so what that entails is going through and watching all of this video and
Casey:
So I flew direct from Dulles to San Francisco in back, and it wasn't until almost the very end of the flight to San Francisco that it occurred to me, I am a passenger on an airplane that has like a couple hundred other people in it.
Casey:
Now, granted, not all 200 or whatever other people were near me, but there were 10 or 15 people near-ish to me.
Casey:
and if you were one of those people and looked at me in my computer screen at any point for six hours straight i was watching movies of myself for six freaking hours can you imagine what you would think if you saw some moron watching movies of himself for six hours straight like how you were at you were doing it for the purposes of editing was there nothing on screen that made that well
Casey:
At first, I was doing some stuff in Final Cut Pro, but later what I was doing is I was watching these videos, and I'm sure that this is not necessary and that I could have just done it in Final Cut Pro, but this is the way I wanted to take care of it.
Casey:
I was watching the videos and then using FFmpeg to snip the beginning and end in order to get just the little clip I wanted, which is a hilariously slow thing to do on a MacBook Adorable.
Casey:
But nevertheless, that's what I was doing.
Casey:
I recognize that is not the most efficient way.
Casey:
I recognize that maybe if I do more of these, that I will laugh at how terrible an idea that was.
Casey:
But for this first one, that's what I wanted to do.
John:
Does it losslessly cut it at least?
Casey:
I don't think it's 100% lossless, but it's whatever.
John:
It's like virtually spotless, not 100% lossless.
John:
It's called lossy.
Casey:
It's fine.
Casey:
It's lossy.
Marco:
Were you on the Wi-Fi or was this offline?
Marco:
No, this was offline.
Marco:
How the hell did you use FFmpeg without being able to search the web for how to use it?
John:
Yeah, right.
John:
He's got a text file where he saved the commands, I guarantee.
Casey:
It's close.
Casey:
So, sir, I've gotten good enough with FFmpeg that most basic things that I would ever want to do, including trimming from, you know, specifying a start time and then specifying a duration.
Casey:
I know those off the top of my head now because I do them somewhat regularly for reasons I don't want to discuss on air, but I will tell you to later.
Casey:
You trim a lot of trucks?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Well, yes, actually.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Well, OK, so now I'm committed.
Casey:
It turns out that certain PBS television shows that your child may or may not enjoy.
Casey:
There's a new or actually two new episodes shown every single week.
Casey:
But they're two episodes in one file.
Casey:
So if one were to, I don't know, maybe hypothetically use a tool to download things from sites like YouTube and then get a single file on your local machine.
Casey:
Keep that episode.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And you should definitely keep it on the DL.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And you had one file on your local machine that you then needed to split into two files to, I don't know, hypothetically put into some sort of media management program.
Casey:
Anyway, you would need to know and use these FFmpeg commands.
Casey:
Point being, a lot of stuff I know offhand, but I also have a folder in my Apple Notes folder.
Casey:
repository that is just a you know five or ten different ffmpeg incantations and you know how to make those work so as an example i needed to twist a video 90 degrees because i had filmed it in portrait so to speak it was it was a gopro but it was the the footage i took of the back of the car so it was pointing at the exhaust
Casey:
And the way in which I was able to quickly mount the GoPro, I effectively filmed in portrait.
Casey:
And so I needed to, or well, I forget what it was.
Casey:
It was filmed in landscape, but the subject was portrait.
Casey:
You get the idea.
Casey:
The point is just that I needed to rotate the video.
Casey:
And so that I ended up looking up like when I got to the hotel or something like that and put an entry for that in my little repository of FFmpeg incantations.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
So anyway, but the point is, I bring all this story up just to make everyone laugh, because it occurred to me how self-obsessed and obnoxious, maybe not obnoxious, but ridiculous Maasai look, that I've spent now 12 straight hours effectively watching movies of myself, because who wouldn't want to watch movies of me?
Casey:
Am I right?
Marco:
If I was on that plane, if I saw you... You know that story that some famous artist, in order to prove his art ability, he drew a perfect circle freehand?
Marco:
Whatever that story was.
Marco:
Anyway, if I'm sitting next to you on a plane and I'm seeing you use FFMPEG without doing a web search...
Marco:
that like it's like oh my god this this person is a genius like i i bow down to your skill sir like this this is incredible i this i'm witnessing history here like i that to me would be the equivalent of the freehand circle thing like anything else you were doing i wouldn't even see i wouldn't even notice you were editing video of yourself for six hours i would just be like oh my god
Marco:
Did he just do FFMPEG without a Google search first?
Marco:
How?
Marco:
How did this work?
Marco:
It's really not that impressive, but I appreciate it, nevertheless.
John:
There is a man page, right?
Casey:
I mean, you don't need the internet to get... Have you looked at the man... Well... You need the internet.
Casey:
Also, let's remember that this is John Syracuse, who writes Pearl for a Living.
Casey:
So it wouldn't surprise me if you could handle the man page, but my brain is too feeble for the man page.
Casey:
I need examples, and I need...
Casey:
clear examples of like i want to trim a video what do i do rather than if you would like to specify a start location and a duration this is what you need to do you know like it's just the the man page is not not written in such a way that it's easy to understand yeah six hours you can read it all it's true i'm not sure you can