Non-Beta Data
I was thinking the Mac Pro design speculation.
That could be pretty much any time before WBDC, probably.
Every time.
Every day is Mac Pro speculation day.
Oh, f*** me.
I was thinking, too, we probably have done too much Mac Pro stuff recently, so we could use it a few weeks break from that.
Oh, thank God.
Disagree.
We should start with follow-up.
Peter Van Broekhoven has some thoughts about Apple's hesitation to do battery replacements.
And he writes in that one of the reasons that they really don't like to do battery replacements is that if they can't get the battery out cleanly, then they'll replace the whole phone, but they'll do it for the cost of just that battery replacement.
So...
um he said he had an older phone i think he said like a 5s or something like that that he still was running on the original battery went to the apple store um he asked them to replace the battery they botched it and so he got himself a brand new 5s for 90 whatever dollars or 30 whatever the cost is now uh and that that explains to me anyway why they're super reticent to to be doing battery replacements unless they're really sure it's necessary
yeah and that you know even if you're willing to pay like oh you know just take my money i'm willing to pay for the battery replacement it's like yeah but this battery replacement could change from even from an 80 bill with the old price into something that costs apple you know several hundred dollars to give you basically a brand new phone because they couldn't get the battery out but it could be argued well aval it's your own stupid fault for making phones that you can't get the batteries out of without destroying them so maybe the next time you design a phone
make it easier to get the battery in and out and they probably have because he's talking about a 5s and there's been many phones since then and so designing designing phones for serviceability is i think something that apple has been i think it's probably like an arc like the first ones were probably reasonably serviceable just because they were simpler and then they probably got a lot less serviceable as they got thinner and more complicated and i feel like now they're going the opposite direction of
yeah we want to make them thin and compact but also try to do the best we can for serviceability so really apple is you know they're just making problems for themselves if they continue to make things that are always glued together and have little ribbon connectors that are all taped and glued on with adhesives that age and everything like that's that's their own fault so i feel like they have to either just eat this cost or do better about making serviceable phones because they're the ones servicing them
Moving on, we have some news about iOS 11.3, which we'll talk about later.
But one of the things that's come out over the last week is that 11.3 will let users turn off the battery performance throttling.
And I don't really understand this.
Like, if the choice is your phone spontaneously dying or just being very slow, I'll go with very slow.
But I say this from the position of not really had a phone that's gotten this performance throttling.
So maybe I don't really understand that.
how unbelievably unbearable the throttling is.
But regardless, 11.3 will add new features to show the battery health and recommend if a battery needs to be serviced.
That'll be found in Settings Battery and are available for the iPhone 6 and later.
Furthermore, users can now see if the power management feature that dynamically manages maximum performance to prevent unexpected shutdowns, which was introduced in 10.2.1, is on and they can choose whether or not to turn it off.
This feature can be found in Settings Battery as well and is also available from the 6 and up.
Yeah, so this is not a great fix to this problem or solution to this need to users.
It is possible that they needed to do it this way to have that off switch for some kind of legal or lawsuit or regulatory compliance reason.
They've gotten a lot of crap for this from a lot of different places, a lot of different countries.
But just as a user experience...
Having a switch to let your phone randomly shut down seems very un-Apple-like and not a great experience.
But ultimately, I think, and it seems like this is very much a like, you know, Steve Jobs, you're holding your iPhone 4 wrong kind of response from Apple.
You want a free bumper?
Fine.
Take a free bumper.
We've heard it from a lot of people.
Why don't you just give everybody a case?
Okay, great.
Let's give everybody a case.
Yeah, like, their general response and tone with this is not good.
That interview Tim Cook gave... I think it's better than the Steve Jobs tone, don't you think?
Because he was actually pretty obnoxious and snarky.
And everything, every communication I've seen about this has been fairly magnanimous and understanding.
The feature itself may seem snarky, but I don't think the communication has been Steve Jobs level, you want a bumper, fine, here's a free bumper.
I thought the Tim Cook quote about it in that interview a few days ago was pretty bad.
Oh, people not understanding yet.
Tim Cook had a couple of statements in the media.
Honestly, Tim Cook should not talk to the media.
Honestly, I'm serious.
He does not come off well in these kind of interviews whenever he's asked anything of substance.
It does not come off well.
Well, usually his problem is that he's just bland and doesn't say anything, right?
So that's, but this is a rare case where he showed a little bit of teeth and was like, I just think maybe people just didn't really understand or weren't paying attention.
It was just such BS.
Like that's why he should not open his mouth.
But most of the time it's merely what he says has no new information and it's just kind of platitudes, right?
So the platitudes one isn't harmful.
And I think maybe that's actually a good way to communicate with the people in those venues, but it's not like Apple fans, you know, it's just like whoever's watching, you know,
cnn or whatever or whatever you know news network he's on at that moment i think that's a fine communication that it's boring we're not interested in it and he's not gonna say anything new uh the snark shows a little personality but not when he's you know off base but i think that the strangest bit of communication this actually started in follow-up as a story about tim's communication and changed into now that we have the actual release notes for the 11.3 beta and
into you know more concrete story but the the original story was tim cook was on a news show and yeah he did his normal platitudes that he normally does just sort of saying speaking in generalities about stuff that uh close apple followers already knew but then he mentioned something about being able to turn off the battery throttling and that's not what apple's press release said like way back when when they talked about this the press release said oh we're going to have new battery information and you know all this stuff but didn't say anything about being able to turn it off so it's like
Is he like misremembering what they plan to do?
Maybe they talked about having an off switch and he's just misremembering.
It's like, no, he's much more controlled than that.
But then he's like essentially breaking Apple news on a random cable news channel.
Like he pre-announced Apple.
features of the ios 11 3 beta like a couple days ahead of time which is weird for apple uh so the original story was going to be was is he misremembering or is this a thing they're going to do but now the story is tim cook is breaking news about apple on cable news shows which is weird well i mean i i think that's his prerogative
Oh, yeah, no, it's totally up, but it's definitely a change.
It makes me wonder, like, is that like the new version of the controlled leak to the Wall Street Journal where they just send Tim out and tell him to say that?
I mean, this is not the first time that an Apple executive has, like, broken some news in an interview like this.
That seems pretty clearly planned that way.
I mean, minor news is not big news, but still.
Honestly, that is minor news.
I mean, the big news was the problem at all.
How they're solving it in these various ways is fairly small news.
But I do think, though, just going back to the actual feature and solution here, I don't think this is quite enough.
What this is basically saying is, if this is happening to you, we will now display that in this settings battery panel that nobody ever knows about or goes to.
And we'll display it there, and so you'll be able to check there to see if it's happening.
That's not good enough, because most people will never think to check there or won't know how to check there.
They just think, my phone is slow, I need to buy a new one.
So really, I think users need to be notified in some way...
when their phone reaches a state in which the setting is turned on for them.
And I tweeted this earlier.
A lot of people misunderstood.
I wasn't clear enough.
I'm not saying that every time the CPU gets throttled, they should get another notification.
That would be a lot of dialogue boxes.
Yeah.
What I'm saying is that at some point, when your phone has reached some kind of metric as measured by the battery or whatever, at some point, this setting gets turned on for you without you knowing.
That needs to be a user notification when that happens.
and it might be like to be clear we don't know that that's not happened just the release notes just say that there's a setting for all we know there is a notification and there is a battery indicator in the status bar those things could both be true they just you know might not merit mentioning here so the only way unfortunately the only way we'll be able to find out unless there's a way you can do this in simulator is for someone to have a phone that's on the threshold between like
They'll go to the battery setting screen and let's say, oh, I'm right on the border of where it's going to yell at me if they show some kind of bar graph or something.
And then just abuse the phone until it crosses that threshold and see if you get an alert of any kind.
And in a surprising stroke of good news for John, your ancient cheese grater is running El Cap, is it not?
It is.
And you got a little present recently.
Tell me about this.
I didn't get it because I haven't installed it, but Meltdown Inspector fixes have been backported all the way back to El Capitan and Sierra, and of course High Sierra, which is standard.
What they usually do is they backport it to a few recent versions.
If you're much farther back than that, you don't get the fix.
i almost don't want to install the fix just so i can get that extra speed which i so desperately need in my 10 year old computer yeah this will push you over the edge yeah but i haven't i haven't installed yet but anyway uh in case you're wondering uh yes the the fix is backported i already have the safari update which i feel like is you know maybe just as important because the main vector through which unknown software runs on my computer is probably the web browser
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Oh.
So we got some news over the last few days.
We've gotten some news about iOS 11.3, but we're going to talk about that a little later.
But perhaps more interestingly, he says with little confidence, the HomePod has been officially, officially announced.
It will start shipping on February 9th.
The pre-orders will open, or I guess it's not really pre-orders.
It doesn't matter.
Anyway, the orders will open this coming Friday, which at this point may have already happened by the time you're listening to this.
And we don't really know a whole heck of a lot else.
So this is the kind of product that theoretically I should be excited about.
Many of us, I think, should be excited about this.
But it just seems like it's had such a clumsy release cycle and we know so little about it that it's really hard to get excited about it because...
It seems like it's coming out late, and some key features are not launching yet.
They're coming later this year or whatever.
And we still don't really know much about it.
There's still no reviews.
There's been no hands-on or anything.
There was a very brief press demo last summer at WWDC when they announced it, but it was extremely limited.
There was no speech.
It was just music playback.
So...
there's some really big question marks about this product that we just don't know yet.
Now, we could listen back to this in a few weeks when people have this, and it's amazing.
And we could listen back to anything we say now and be like, lol, they were so wrong, we were so wrong, I can't believe we all thought this product would be weird or suck.
It could turn out amazing.
We don't know yet.
But it's just weird that there's this...
product that i think a lot of us thought would be a major product launch that is kind of just like stumbling out the door in in this clumsy fashion and it's going to launch incomplete in its state on launch day there are so many missing features and limitations that i think the potential market for it is not going to be that big now over time as they lift these limitations we'll see you know it's probably going to get popular eventually
It might not, but I think the chances are more likely than not that it will work long term.
It's just weird that it's launching in such a clumsy fashion and in such an incomplete state.
And I still question why it had to be announced last summer.
I don't question it that much because this is a market that Apple is late to.
It's other competitors.
Amazon Echo was obviously the first let's all talk to our cylinder.
And it was out there for a while before Google launched its clone.
Yeah.
And now Google's been out for a while.
And finally, Apple handles.
And those are the big three tech companies.
And Apple took the longest to decide, yes, we're going to make a cylinder that you talk to that connects to our streaming music service.
And so everyone else has a big head start on them.
Everyone else was shipping.
uh a couple of companies have had multiple revisions of multiple products and diversify their product lines even google has a big one and a little one now and an even bigger one that sounds fancy right so other companies have not just done the product for longer but have had more revisions and this is a case where it just seemed to me that apple i mean apple is very often late to market right but in this case apple it seemed like it felt self-conscious like
we're late but we want you to know that we are we do want to compete in an arc but we're not ready yet so they had to like pre-announce it now i think they pre they didn't expect it to be this late right so you make your bet you're like oh we can announce this now we think it'll be ready you know not that long from now like within the window of like reasonableness but obviously they they've missed that window and it's pretty darn late at this point and you know how can it be late if they never told you exactly when it would be available just in terms of you know
practically speaking if you have a such a limited pre-announcement of a product and then say nothing about it for like six months it's that's not good timing it's not good pr you want to get people interested about a product and slowly dole out news building up to a launch not show people barely anything and then don't say anything about it for many many months that's that's just bad pr so that's why that's why we say it feels like it's late that if you had a choice that's not how you do a pr rollout so
Why did they announce it so early?
To me, my read on that is they felt pressure to get their foot in the market ASAP, put their quarter on the video game machine or whatever.
I've got next, right?
We're going to be there and not just like in a vague way, but here's the actual thing we're going to ship.
It looks like this.
It sounds like this.
It probably does other things, but don't ask us now.
Right.
And they had an opportunity to announce that.
And so they did.
And I think that is, you know, it's a sign.
It's an acknowledgement.
Right.
that apple agrees with us that they are behind and late in this market versus a more confident apple that could say yeah other people have done stuff but we think all the solutions they've done are crappy and we don't feel any pressure to tell you that we're going to enter this market we're going to show you our awesome thing when we're ready to see it doesn't matter how late we are
That's the other strategy they could have taken, and they have with many other things, but not with this.
With this one, they said, we really feel like we need to tell you that we're going to be in this market with this thing.
So that is not a confident move.
That doesn't project confidence anyway.
And what they had to demo was not like they didn't have anything to say or demo that knocked our socks off either.
So it was...
Kind of weird.
And now that they're going to roll this thing out, it's like a major new product line that will end up rolling out without Apple ever having gone up on a stage and told us all the things that this product can do.
Because they went up on a stage and told us very limited things about this product.
specifically about the audio, but not much else.
And then many, many months pass.
And then here's the product, right?
And people will get, you know, reviews.
I'm sure there'll be reviews coming out of the thing around lunchtime or whatever, but never did Apple go up in any side of special press presentation or anything and say, let's just run down everything about this.
They do with all the phones, with all the iPads, even with most of the Macs.
Here's all the features.
Here's all the specs.
Here's all the things about this thing.
Here's what it can do.
They never did that for this product, which is weird.
Um, even something like a hobby product like the Apple TV, they went up on stage and said, here's Apple TV.
You know, this is what it does.
This is what it looks like.
This is how much it costs.
It runs, you know, macOS 10.4 inside.
Don't tell anybody.
Um, it's, uh, macOS 10, 10.4.
I know too many tens.
Um,
they didn't do that this product at all so yeah i'm kind of the same mind of marco this could be awesome and everybody could love it and in particular if i'm trying to think of how ways that this product could be awesome that we are underestimating right now is potentially uh just the hardware that the stuff that apple has shown they've shown like oh it's got speakers and microphones and blah blah blah um
And their engineering in regards to audio and sound quality in recent years has been awesome.
They've dramatically improved the speakers in most of their products that have speakers.
Including the phones.
Yeah, including the phones.
They've really done a lot in the areas of audio and speaker engineering recently.
Yeah.
I have full confidence in their proclamations that it is going to sound amazing, that it is going to be super advanced in the way it measures a room and bounce the sound off of walls.
I bet it will sound amazing.
But that is just one aspect of this product.
And there are so many other ones that either sound kind of bad or that are just giant question marks.
Yeah, and like the thing about this product is I'm trying to think of, you know, it does this track with like the Apple TV.
The thing about the Apple TV is they didn't get the hardware right for a long time.
They took the wrong approach, the wrong OS, the wrong size.
You know, the really early one was like a little bit too early.
The puck, I think they hit on with everybody else, the better size and price for this kind of a product.
Then they took too long to come up with 4K.
But now that they've settled down, like,
Hardware-wise, it's reasonable, especially now that they have frame rate matching more on that in a little bit.
With this product, I feel like
It's possible that they have more or less gotten the hardware right on the first try, that the sound output looks impressive and, you know, can justify the price because it's got a lot of little speakers and a lot of hardware to be able to do all the magic to make it sound good.
I think it also has a lot of microphones and it hopefully does a good job with them, which is the other important part of this hardware.
uh it's taking a clear stand about what it's supposed to be you know not having a screen of any kind it's basically speakers and a microphone the software side is where we we know they have gaps because here's the features that they they sort of talked about but aren't even going to ship until later but it is possible that apple can essentially slowly catch up without actually revising this hardware but merely by shipping regular software updates to make this thing more and more capable and improving siri and all the other stuff behind the scenes like in other words
Do you think after the ships, there will be some kind of pressing need for a revised HomePod?
I think this hardware could potentially last a long time.
They just have to update the software.
So that's it's not ideal.
Right.
But it does mean that if they can sell these things and then improve them over time, they can build up some loyalty by people.
I bought this product and it was limited and now it gets better and better as I use it.
And a year from now, they could be selling the quote unquote exact same HomePod.
And it could be a way better product than it is now.
Because I don't think that there's some essential hardware feature that this doesn't have.
And especially if the audio is really good, it could, you know, certainly will have better sound than like the $100 things like an Echo or a cheap Google Home.
Maybe it'll even have better sound than an even more expensive Sonos.
It's just a matter of them getting their software story together.
and they can do that not at their leisure but they can do that without revising this product you know essentially so i was gonna get one i don't know i was just about to say like i'm sure knowing me i will end up buying one because this is the moment as always i say oh i don't really think it's interesting if you have to because we all have cylinders but you so you're cylinderless so you need to we'll cover the whole ecosystem mark of amazon i'll have google and you'll have apple
Also, until I have a way to interact with it as a developer, I don't think I'm going to buy one.
Because there's not a place in my life where this makes sense right now.
And of course, that might change.
But right now, given its current limitations, one of the big things is...
Yeah, maybe you can replace your TV's speakers with it.
Well, you can't have a stereo pair yet, right?
Because AirPlay 2, which we'll get to in a little while, AirPlay 2 is not yet shipping.
So one of the things you can't do is have a stereo pair of these things acting as two stereo speakers.
So that rules out a lot of that already.
And it also...
there's no line in like the only way you can receive audio is either via Siri playing things from Apple music or via airplay.
And right now we just airplay one, which has some limitations and everything, but, and one limitation, by the way, is a fixed two second latency.
Uh,
So even if you do some kind of crazy thing where you have something beaming other audio like from your other home theater components via some kind of AirPlay bridge to this thing, the latency would be too high even for TVs to compensate for it.
So there's basically no good way to get the rest of your audio from your TV to this.
The Apple TV can allegedly AirPlay 2 and use it as speakers.
And that's probably going to be nice for AirPlay 2 when that comes out.
That's going to be low latency and everything.
So you could do it if the only input to your TV, if the only source of sound that you want to hear from this is an Apple TV, you could theoretically have that kind of setup.
But if you have anything else, a game console, other streaming boxes, a DVD player, a Blu-ray player, if you have anything else...
that you want to plug into this, you're out of luck.
A Sonos Connect bridge, maybe.
Do people use the competing devices?
Because I would never think about playing my TV through this.
I also wouldn't think about playing my TV through an Amazon Echo or through a Google Home, even the big speaker one.
I also wouldn't play my TV through any of the little Sonos things.
Yes, Sonos makes a soundbar that I'd play my TV through.
Sonos makes a soundbar, and the soundbar can also use the little Sonos speakers as satellite speakers.
And people do that.
So Sonos has solutions to this.
And Amazon and Google Home, I feel like the kind of speakers that they sell in volume don't really lend themselves to this.
They're too small.
But it doesn't really matter because they're more made for a kitchen or a counter or something like that.
But if you're going to have a larger and more expensive speaker that focuses on sound quality, one of the big places you'd put it is for your TV.
Like, you'd replace the speakers for your TV.
This isn't that much bigger, though.
It's not.
Like, I'd say it's in between.
I don't even think it's as big as the Google big speaker, whatever they call that one, the big rectangular Google one.
I think it's smaller than that.
Yeah.
I'm trying to recall seeing a WWDC, and I think I was struck by how much smaller it was than I thought.
Certainly bigger than an Echo, and also bigger than the traditional little Google Home thing.
Not the mini, but the regular size one.
The air freshener.
But I don't think it's as big as...
the Sonos Play 5.
I don't know.
When Casey gets this, we'll ask him to measure.
Mm-hmm.
But regardless, so like, for the market they're selling to, which is sound quality and middle, kind of the middle of the price range there, I think a lot of people would want it to be that home theater role and it can't do that.
So...
Again, that limits the market.
It also limits the market that it only supports Apple Music and not other streaming services so far.
And other streaming services can AirPlay to it, but so far they won't be able to do Siri.
And now I kind of wonder if I'm ever going to get Overcast Siri intents because anything that would enable Overcast would also enable Spotify.
And maybe they don't want that for the HomePod.
Maybe they want to sell the HomePod only for Apple Music and lock that together to boost the sales of Apple Music.
Yeah.
We talked about this before with the cylinders and stuff, but this is like the omnivorous box TV problem all over again.
What consumers want is a speaker, like some kind of speaker thing that they buy that they can talk to that can also play any audio from anywhere, right?
And nobody offers that.
It's all a bunch of islands, you know.
Some of them come close.
Like, I think the Sonos can play a lot of stuff, but can it do Apple Music by voice command?
I don't know.
Yes.
Oh, wait, no.
It can do Apple Music.
I don't think it can do it by voice command yet.
Yeah.
It's a weird integration.
The Sonos product has weird limits.
Yeah.
But Sonos is getting closer because Sonos doesn't have a dog in the streaming service fight.
So like, whatever, we'll play Amazon service.
We'll play Google Play Music.
We'll play Apple Music if all those companies will let us.
But everybody else has their own preferred streaming service and is at varying degrees restrictive, you know, or they're not letting each other play in each other's stuff.
So it's not like you can just pick the speaker you like best.
and say, oh, I'm just going to pick this speaker because it looks the best and it sounds the best, which would be good for Apple.
If Apple's going to compete on audio, they could say, look, we have the best sounding speaker, the best balance of speaker performance and price.
$350 for something that sounds better than a $500 Sonos.
Buy it.
But if it also comes with, oh, but the only things you can hear over it are this very, very limited set of things we allow you to hear.
No, no.
Like you said, no line in and stuff like that.
Although, honestly, I still think that it's not an intended purpose for this thing to be a TV speaker, but a stereo speaker like, hey, this is the sound system for my small apartment and I could play my music on it.
That's the thing.
Like if they're going to promote it as as audio quality.
You can't connect, like, a CD player or... You can't even connect your record player to it.
Yeah, like, honestly, people would... If this is truly going to appeal to people who can drop $350 on a speaker who wants something cool and nice and hip for a part of their home that isn't their TV, a lot of people would want to connect a vinyl player to it.
Like, or people want to connect other... You're still doing vinyl player.
I can't tell you if you're doing it as a joke.
I think you're not.
Sorry, a turn player.
Turn table.
Oh, my God.
Marco...
This week at Marco's Vinyl Arc.
They don't have corners, so the arc... Anyway, so... You know, people want to connect other components to something, to really good speakers.
Sure, not all people, but like...
What I'm saying is basically this market is being limited by the limitations of this device, I think, pretty severely.
I think this device is very boxed in right now with its limitations.
It's appealing to people who like to listen to streaming music via voice, but only Apple Music.
And the voice service is probably going to be a little bit iffy because that's how Siri has been.
So it's going to be probably a mediocre voice service.
It's not going to have a lot of integrations with other things that we tend to use these for, like various smart home devices and everything.
You'll have some, but it's not going to have as much as an Echo or things like that.
It's not going to have almost any third-party services that can integrate with it.
Anything you ask it to do that is not playing music is probably going to fail mysteriously in weird ways because that's how Siri tends to operate.
even if you get it just for Apple music or for air playing stuff to it, which is going to be clumsy for the next six months or so, it has, this is for people who are okay spending that amount of money on it, who don't already have other kinds of, um, you know, speakers that are, that also sound good and who don't want a stereo pair because it can't stereo pair yet.
So it's like you care about sound quality, but not enough to have a stereo pair.
And so it's just, again, it's just more and more boxing in, boxing it in, boxing it in, boxing it in.
So yeah,
I think it's going to start out pretty slowly.
And maybe in a year, it'll have all these features and it'll be much better.
And maybe there'll be another model that's a different price or a different size or something that would expand the market a little bit more.
But I think it's going to have a really slow start.
Yeah, some of the other Apple-specific features are like, all right, so granted, we don't have a lot of third-party stuff, but what can it do that no other device can do aside from, you know, obviously very tight integration with Apple Music and, of course, Siri.
Handing off your phone call to the HomePod is apparently something else you can do, obviously from your iPhone only, but if you're on a phone call that you start on your iPhone and you come into the house and you want to hand it off to the iPod,
For a speakerphone conversation, which I think is a good application of a good speaker and a good set of microphones.
So you can wander around, talk and pace like an important executive as you discuss things.
That's something other devices don't have.
And of course, they're playing up the privacy angle of like, we're not going to upload every single thing you say to our servers and keep it there forever and all that business.
and they do try to tout that anyone can talk to it and that it can play things from Apple Music even if you're not there, which is something so absurd that I wouldn't even think about it until Apple reassured me that it's not the case.
Like, oh, I guess they could have done that.
Boy, that would have been dumb, but they're not.
Well, but there is a big question mark on that, though.
It can play Apple Music when you're not there, but apparently it does a lot of the Siri processing on the phone, on the phone that's paired to it, and it's only one person's phone, of course.
So the question is, how much can it do if that phone, like, suppose the phone that's paired to it is your spouse's phone, and your spouse leaves the house.
How much does this function?
We don't know.
Yeah, there's also the question that a lot of people had of people like me who are not yet in the streaming music world, but who have their own music collections.
So I have my music collection on my phone, which consists of things ripped from CDs plus things purchased from iTunes.
My wife has her collection.
My kids have their collections.
I have my giant fish collection.
Right.
What if you want to play something from one of those collections that doesn't exist on Apple Music?
Is there any mechanism for that?
I think your only option is to airplay it from iTunes or your phone, but the HomePod can't call it up via voice.
Right, but Apple, in my case, since I'm an iTunes match subscriber, Apple has all of my music in the cloud, and it knows it belongs to me, but I'm pretty sure the HomePod has no idea that I'm talking to it.
That feature is only recently.
No, you're in the services division.
That's the world of walls and silos.
Your iTunes match silo is over there rotting in the corner with really big, thick walls nobody can get into, so they built this new silo over here for Apple Music and other stuff, and God knows what's going to be next.
Don't expect any of this stuff to talk to each other.
yeah so but you know we don't know what all the limitations are but it seems like there's a lot of them but i still keep coming back to if they got the hardware right and of all all the speakers and the microphones are all great there's no reason they can't knock down these limitations one by one and eventually have a competitive product and i keep comparing it to apple tv because they didn't have the choice with apple tv they got the hardware so wrong in the beginning it took them a long time to get it right uh
and now i feel like they're finally at the you know the the fat part of the curve of the apple tv where they can start knocking down the software features and you know becoming competitive yes they're premium price but now they have some you know they have 4k support they have you know features that video files care about like the frame rate matching they have an application ecosystem um you know they're they're improving in that area and this this home pod
like best case scenario, it launches, it sounds really good, but it's super limited and not a lot of people buy it.
And then over the course of the next year, all they do is make the software better.
And, you know, it, it's, it might take a while.
Like how long did it take, you know, Google home just, I think last year or so got the feature where it understands that there are different people talking to it and it can understand who that person is.
Uh,
Hopefully it won't take Apple as long as it took Google to do that.
But I see potential as long as the hardware is right.
But all that said, I'm not running out to buy this hardware.
Only Casey is.
A lot of people are going to wait until they have the complete story and not just buy it based on the promise.
As they should.
So I've been thinking about this a little bit over the last couple of days since this news is broken.
And
I am not ordering a HomePod immediately.
I will probably, knowing me, order one not too long after immediately because the FOMO will get to me.
But I think the thing that appeals to me in principle is that I do trust Apple to make really clever and good choices with regard to audio fidelity.
And...
Although I am perfectly happy listening to music or podcasts on speakers that are truly and utterly terrible, that doesn't mean I don't also appreciate some really, really great speakers as well.
And what I have in our home theater is not great.
It is sufficient.
I don't even know what it is.
It was like a Denon, Denon, whatever it's called, like home theater in a box from probably 10 plus years ago.
It is sufficient.
But I have no doubt that one or particularly a pair of HomePods would be considerably better sounding.
And that would be appealing to me.
But knowing that I won't be able to play Spotify easily without Airplane, to Marco's point.
knowing I won't be able to say, hey, dingus, can you play me such and such song by such and such artist without being an Apple Music subscriber, which I'm not.
Like all of these things make it not terribly appealing.
And I don't also I don't have anything connected to HomeKit right now.
I have several devices that I could connect to HomeKit via $50 bridges, but I have nothing that's natively connecting to HomeKit at the moment.
So I have a few.
You're missing nothing.
okay fair enough um i i don't really sitting here now and this is when we'll play this back you know mark will do the in like three weeks when i say i just bought one but sitting here now i don't really see i don't really see any draw other than just getting a really great set of speakers and that does that definitely you know intrigues me and it's definitely interesting but i have a d i have a sufficient set of speakers that's
zero dollars because we bought them 10 years ago actually i think they were a gift but anyways they you know we already have them i don't know that one 350 speaker is going to sound better than enough better to justify it than our quote-unquote free speakers that we have now so i'm curious to see what people like real world people say after these are in the wild but i don't know i think the reviews would have to be pretty stellar for me to start saying oh wow i really screwed up on this one as with every other apple product i need one
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We have some news, as I've been alluding to for a while, for iOS 11.3.
So in a slightly surprising move, Apple has made a kind of sort of PR site.
It's actually just a news article, but it's almost like a mini site about iOS 11.3.
So the headline is major updates to ARKit messages and more coming this spring.
And they start off by telling us we're getting a lion animoji.
We're getting a dragon.
We're getting a skull.
And I thought there was one other.
What am I forgetting?
Is the dragon an animoji?
This is my problem of not knowing what the plural of animoji.
Including new animoji.
Does that mean more than one?
Four new.
iOS 11.3 includes four new animoji, giving iPhone 10 users the ability to express themselves as lion, bear, dragon, or skull.
Oh, I see it later in the later section.
The line is up top.
I see.
Okay.
Yeah, that's the most important new feature as far as I'm aware for most people.
I know you're probably snarking.
And the thing is, I actually really do still like Animoji.
But that being said, I haven't sent or received an Animoji in like a month or two.
Just like knowing that they exist.
Yeah, yeah, they're cute.
They're cute in their little Animoji drawer.
They're waiting for me if I need them.
No, I don't know.
I was thinking about it even before this announcement that I really do think it's cute and clever, but I don't often find myself in a position that A, it's not socially awkward to create and send one, and B, that I even think to do it in the first place.
I really do think it's a good idea.
I don't fault them for the idea, and I like that they're adding more Animoji.
And in fact, I think I tweeted a while back that it would be cool if they had like seasonal ones like you could only do Santa when it's Christmas time or something along those lines.
But then it goes back in the Disney vault.
You're a terrible person.
Yeah, seriously.
No, I mean, I hate the Disney vault, but I do think it would be kind of cool.
But anyways, I'm not using Animoji in that kind of it's a little bit sad.
That's a new audience for your Animoji.
Yeah.
He does get a kick out of them.
Actually, just the other day, he asked me if I could show him the video of the fox singing, which is, I think, the Bohemian Rhapsody video that had come out, like one of the first karaoke ones.
He really likes watching that.
And so he had had me pull that up on YouTube just a day or two ago.
But anyway, also new in 11.3, ARKit, which apparently is now understanding what a vertical surface is, which, no snark, I guess is a big deal.
I don't really use ARKit for anything.
That's actually, like, being able to recognize vertical surfaces in addition to horizontal and having some other improvements in the kind of surfaces they can recognize and how...
um it just it broadens the applications of it basically like before it's like all right finds find a big flat table or the floor or something and then you can do this cool thing and now you can do cool things with walls and other like so like it just it broadens the possible applications you can make and it improves because it's existing excuse me applications um or it gives them the chance to be improved and there's other improvements to ARKit too but I'm not really qualified to recognize what's good about them but it's it's significantly improved
But I think the main story around ARKit is that ARKit was their first try at this, and it was pretty impressive out of the gate.
We all tried it, and it worked, I think, better than most of us had any right to expect, especially if you have tried any of the previous sort of academic-type things and seen what they can do.
a commercial product that ran on everybody's phones that works surprisingly well and it hasn't been that long and they've significantly enhanced it so i feel like the ar kit team is doing well their their initial release was good and they're not waiting they're not even waiting to wwc for new features like this because like marcus said i think walls is a significant new feature and there have been like applications unlike perhaps animoji which maybe you'll get bored by
the the applications that you would think you could build with ar kit like a thing to try furniture in your room like ikea has an app like that and guess what it does what they say it does surprisingly well for a thing that just runs on your phone and doesn't require this crazy rig with five cameras slapped together by some phd student so i'm very impressed with ar kit and i'm impressed that they keep getting better
Alright, what else is in this?
Messages, things?
Messages and iCloud is back!
Yeah, this is unexpected.
Yeah, but very unexpected, but very welcome, assuming that it works.
I haven't actually tried it yet.
Have you guys?
No.
Is it actually in this beta?
Some things aren't in this beta.
I think it is in the beta.
Oh, no, the battery's not in this beta.
Yeah, the battery's not in this beta.
The Messenger's on iCloud, I think... I know it's prompting people to enable it, so I think it is in the beta, but it's... Like, for me, personally, I'm not going to have much use for this until it also works with my Mac.
You know, so, like, that's the big question mark for me.
And also, like, if there's any...
hint that it doesn't quite work, that it isn't fully baked yet, then I might be afraid to turn it on for a little while.
But they did take so long to do it that I'm confident that they were probably really conservative about this because it's so important to get that right.
So it's probably going to work fine.
Yeah, but word of warning to everybody, when you're running beta software, this is the reason I have a whole set of other Apple IDs that are not my Apple IDs from when I was doing Mac OS X reviews.
When you're running betas and there's some feature that has cloud integration that especially if it wants to like take some existing set of data and like bring it to the cloud or convert it from one cloud backend to another.
they're betas like they're not done they might have bugs but that's your non-beta data right like that's your real messages and stuff so if you don't want your non-beta data to be potentially hosed and you can't restore that like like if something goes wrong with the phone you can restore the phone back to an old version you can't restore your data in the i in iCloud back to an old version
Yeah, especially get scrambled or deleted or hosed in some way.
So be very careful.
Like, I know you're probably excited, like, oh, I want to try out this new feature or whatever.
But beta is not done.
And yeah, so whenever I would test beta OS and do reviews, whole separate world of data, which it was free to completely hose.
And sometimes it did.
And sometimes I had to wipe all my data and reenter a bunch of fake data for it or whatever.
um so beware but anyway it looks like that feature is back after basically entirely disappearing from their website now it's back and like marco it really doesn't fulfill its promise for me until it has a mac equivalent which i'm assuming it will eventually but i'm i'm glad it's not waiting until ios 12 put it that way
But what does it buy me, these messages in the cloud?
Because I still sort of get everything coming in kind of obnoxiously.
You know what I mean?
Like when I start a Mac... You're a lucky person.
Yeah, I mean, so basically what it buys you is...
it should, in theory, first of all, it should fix a lot of the inconsistencies people see.
So it's syncing the messages with iCloud rather than depending on this crazy key generation sharing thing between different computers.
The way it works security-wise is really complicated and pretty impressive, but unfortunately creates a lot of
bugs in practice that cause people to have things like messages appearing on all but one device or messages appearing in different orders on different devices and things like that.
This should, if done correctly and if done well, this should make your messages the same on all your devices.
And it also brings additional...
benefits of things like if you set up a brand new Mac from scratch, for instance, and you log into iMessage, you don't get all the old messages.
Also, if you delete a conversation somewhere, like if you get spam and you delete it in one place, it doesn't get deleted on all the other devices.
You have to delete conversations in every place separately.
So there's a lot of big and small benefits to this if it works correctly and completely.
That is a big if.
but if they can pull it off the benefits are pretty big yeah and like what i think of this is aligning messages with the mental model i've always had in my head about messages that there is one conversation that i participate in from different devices but it's always one conversation right in the same way that our show notes document
It's one show notes document.
I can edit it on my phone.
I can edit it on my iPad.
I can edit it on my Mac at work.
I can edit it on my Mac at home.
And you guys can all do the same from whatever devices you have.
But wherever I go, the document looks like a document.
That's how I, my mental model of iMessage conversations.
I'm conversing with the person and no matter where I converse with them, the conversation is the conversation.
So it's jarring to me.
It would be jarring to me like the new Mac setup to set up a new Mac and not see that conversation at all.
Or to go to my Mac at work and not see a bunch of messages that I had sent previously on my phone because my Mac was asleep during that time and they didn't propagate or whatever.
Now, people who don't have these problems and everything's in sync, if you limit the number of places you converse.
uh and and or if your message if your devices are always online at the same time to accept the propagations and all the propagations work then maybe you won't notice that um but i i think that's the mental model most people have that it is that it is a conversation and it's the same conversation everywhere so that's the promise of this one one more feature by the way that apple touts is actually the first bullet point on their little screen is free up space on your iphone by keeping photos and other attachments in icloud
which right now, like you'd be surprised at how much space your messages thing takes up.
If you go to this, you know, because people send you videos and they send you photos and you don't want to delete things because they're cute.
And maybe sometimes you save them to your photo library or whatever.
And one of the prompts for the,
the iowa storage screen like hey if you want to save up some space you can delete small messages be like oh i don't want to delete all that stuff well now apparently it will take the big attachments and put them in iCloud and i guess only when you scroll back to them will it download them on demand or something so anything to freeze up space on our phone by using cloud storage that we're already paying for is good so that's another
potential advantages.
That doesn't speak to the mental model, but it's good.
That's a huge advantage in practice.
Lots of people have massive multi-gig message archives that are just sitting there taking up space in their phone that they don't want to delete.
The upside of this is, great, you'll have this option, iCloud, to store these things in to free up space in your phone so you won't be always running out of space.
The downside is...
Apple's still pretty stingy with iCloud storage.
So you're going to need one of the paid plans and possibly even one of the larger plans.
So that is going to make this hurt for a lot of people.
But I think at this point, if you want a good experience using Apple devices, you're going to have to just factor in the price of a small to mid-sized iCloud storage plan, at least.
When you're deciding whether to have an iPhone...
just plan for this because in reality, you're going to need something beyond the free five megabytes of space they give you.
And that was a joke, not a misremembering the unit.
It feels like five megabytes.
It does, right?
It might as well be.
It might as well be five kilobytes.
In this day and age, with the amount of stuff that's stored in iCloud, that is kind of insulting.
But at this point, I'm also...
I've given up on trying to wish and hope that Apple's going to raise the free limit on iCloud and make the plans all bigger and super price competitive.
No, they're not going to.
They're making a ton of money the way it is now.
They're not going to change that.
So, oh well, factor it in as the cost of having these devices that if you're going to have this and you want the full experience of having the luxury of iCloud doing all these things for you and doing backups and everything else, you're going to have to pay for an iCloud plan, and that's just part of it.
And by the way, one of my tips for general happiness of using iOS things is, like, and this is a problem a lot of people have, like, I'm not paying for iCloud storage, which I understand.
It's expensive.
As Marco said, it's not as competitive as it should be, and they should give you more, and it should be cheaper.
But in the grand scheme of things, it doesn't cost that much money to get more storage, and it will, like...
the the amount of the amount of improvement to your computing life that you'll get for ten dollars a month of actually just paying for iCloud storage it's well worth the ten dollars a month right well as far as I'm concerned well worth it because I hate having to deal with storage problems and running out of room and trying to manage things and like
especially for things like photos, if you use the photos in the clouds feature, you're not going to delete your photos.
What are you going to do when you run out of storage?
You're just going to complain and grind your teeth.
It's like, just pay for the storage.
I know it's bad.
And with the family plan, by the way, now that you can pay for storage for your whole family, if you have a family and they all have devices, the family plan is another good way to
Not have to have stupid individual bills for your kid's iCloud backup and your other kid's iCloud backup and your spouse's iCloud backup.
Now you can do one bill, and that will further encourage you to get the big plan for the whole family.
And yes, it costs money, but...
$10 a month for someone who can afford Apple devices is not that much.
It will really improve your life.
And I think it's just mostly a mental barrier.
Like, you know, people just don't want to pay for it in the same way they don't want to pay for applications.
But overcome that hurdle.
I would put it this way, you know, for like people who do tech support for their families.
Just buy your parents.
Don't tell them you're doing it, but just buy them.
Pay them the $10 a month.
Secretly pay for their storage plan.
That is another great investment of your money.
The amount of aggravation you have doing tech support and your parents if you just secretly pay for the one terabyte storage plan and put them in a family together and pay for their storage plan...
enable iCloud backup on all their devices, just don't even tell them.
Just pay for it all.
Just do it yourself.
It will improve everybody's life.
Oh, yeah.
We always advise people doing that on their parents' computers to install Backblaze or your cloud backup of choice.
And just pay for it for them.
Yeah, just do it for them.
Pay for it because you as the young adult probably don't care.
The old people won't pay for it.
And so it's like...
they need this you know that they don't so you just pay for it so on computers that's backblaze on their phones and ipads it's icloud storage yeah your your parents who have retired on their astronomical pensions that no longer exist for any generation after them who are taking vacations to hawaii and living in luxury and buying fancy cars will never pay ten dollars a month what am i getting for that money
I have to pay for storage?
No thanks.
I don't need backups.
It doesn't make sense, but that's the mindset.
So, you know, since you're the one doing tech support, just pay for their $10 a month.
They carried you for nine months in their body, right?
So it's the least you can do.
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All right, what else in 11.3?
iBooks is no more.
It's just plain books.
It's not no more yet.
They just renamed it.
I mean, this is the most substantial iBooks update in years.
I think they did something recently.
I know they updated iBooks author, I think, recently.
But yeah, iBooks was the second thing to get the iBook author.
uh name after the old computer and now it's got its eyes stripped away joining what is it joining uh music what are the other generic ones
Well, numbers, I guess, maybe pages, the generically named applications.
Now it's just called books.
And as Jason Snell said on Twitter, I wonder if there's some other hardware product Apple could use the iBook name for.
What he's referring to, of course, is iOS laptops, which we talked about last show.
And yeah, that would be a good use.
And it would be like the iBook name coming back home to a laptop form factor, but not a Mac.
so we'll see i think that would be cool that i don't i don't know how likely that is but that that would be a really cool fun reason for this i think it might be confusing because it seems like ibook is still kind of in living memory so to speak of the potential consumers and like to have someone who previously owned an ibook buy a new ibook and have it not be a mac might be strange but anyway this this change is completely explicable by apple's drive to name all of its products like marco's products like the magazine
no one product i named that way one i know you're right it is only one but it looms larger doesn't it doesn't seem like it seems it seems so significant what are the what are the other apple ones i can't think of we got you got uh you got numbers pages uh music books movie tunes oh that hasn't happened yet
iMovie is an interesting one because you can't just rip off the i because that's just called movie yeah exactly it doesn't really make any sense all right so what's going on in mac os 10.13.4 probably a bunch of stuff but the only thing that poked out at me is the the uh the long uh foreshadowed
end of 32-bit, which is not happening in 10.13.4, but the foreshadowing continues.
Preparing for the end of 32-bit, as Apple says.
I think this is in their release notes.
To prepare for a future release of macOS in which 32-bit software will no longer run without compromise.
What does that mean?
It doesn't say we'll no longer run.
Not we'll no longer run without compromises.
We'll no longer run without compromise.
Starting a macOS High Sierra 1013.4, a user is notified at the launch of an app that depends on 30-bit software.
The alert appears only once per app.
So this is kind of like on iOS 2.
Like for a while, 32-bit applications would pop up a dialogue that says this may slow down your phone or is not optimized or had some message like that.
Yeah, yeah.
That would translate to if you knew what it was talking about, that is a 32 bit app.
And then eventually on iOS, like, yeah, no, those aren't going to launch anymore.
This, this application needs to be updated for blah, blah, blah.
Right.
Um, so the fun thing about 10, 13, four is that if you're a developer, you can reboot your Mac with the boot arg minus no 32 exec.
And it will stop all 32-bit processes from launching, right?
So then you can try to use your app.
Like you think your app is clean and it's 64-bit clean.
It doesn't require any 32-bit frameworks, doesn't invoke any 32-bit commands, doesn't do anything 32-bit.
Fine.
Reboot your Mac in this developer mode that will forbid any 32-bit stuff from running.
And you'll see if it's broken.
Of course, this is a developer mode for people who are developing applications.
Users should not do this because half the stuff that you use from day to day will probably be broken, including parts of the OS that
or other things that are command line programs that have 32-bit parts.
Put it this way.
I bet there is a surprising amount of 32-bit software lurking in everybody's Mac at this point.
But this is the only way you get to a 64-bit clean world.
Apple doesn't say what future version.
of mac os that where 32-bit software will no longer run and it also doesn't explain what compromise they're talking about because if they had just said will no longer run i'd be like oh that's just what happened in ios 32-bit stuff no longer runs fair enough right but compromise makes me think there's going to be some kind of way to still run 32-bit stuff just because it seems like apple doesn't have as much faith in the
Apple developer or the Mac developer community to bring everything to 64-bit.
Like there's just not enough of them and they're just not motivated enough to bring everything.
So there will always be this really long tail of stragglers where in iOS they're like, look, we're going 64-bit.
If you don't care enough about your app to port it, fine.
There's a thousand other apps that'll take your place.
We don't care.
But on the Mac, I don't know if that's the case.
So I'm very interested to see what the compromise is and how they managed to run 32 bit stuff in an OS that more or less doesn't support it.
They could use some kind of VM thing, some kind of weird hypervisor thing.
Who knows?
But, you know, my guess is it's the it's 1014.
We'll find out the answer to that question.
To go back a step, I forgot to mention that Health Records is also new in 11.3.
I think that completely slipped my mind.
Yeah, it's not clear how that works.
Like, I see the screen and it seems cool, but how does it work?
Yeah, that's what I was curious about, too.
And I didn't know if I just hadn't read the right documentation yet or something.
But the thought of having all of my health records from all of my different health professionals all in one spot, all for me to be able to see, that genuinely sounds really awesome.
But...
Color me a little skeptical that that'll actually be what ends up happening.
Because, I mean, look at Apple Pay, which is a seemingly odd analogy to use.
But, like, I feel like in America it's pulling teeth to get a retailer to use Apple Pay.
And that's to give them money.
And here it's like, what is going to encourage anyone, insurance companies or doctors or whomever, to share medical records?
I mean, yeah, there are records in theory, since it's our bodies, etc., etc.
But...
I don't know.
I don't see any real incentive to get health providers or insurance companies or whatever to provide this information to us.
Well, there have been government incentives to make them adopt some of the things that would make them potentially closer to supporting this type of feature, but... Not anytime soon there won't be.
If there's one thing that's true in the... No, there has been in the past, like the whole meaningful use thing in past years was to try to get medical...
businesses in the u.s to adopt uh electronic health record stuff like who knows how effective it was but anyway um there's one thing that's true about health care in the u.s is that getting all of your medical anything anywhere is basically impossible so it was like i would love to have all my medical stop stop right there
whatever the rest of that sentence is unless you are very very lucky it's not going to happen it's hard enough to get any of your medical right but like so if you are astronomically lucky and all of your health records happen to be at the tiny subset of medical institutions and providers that are participating in this program yes you could have all of your medical records in this thing but chances are very very good
that some of your medical records will not be participating in this and so it's just an adoption problem so i i like to see apple tackling this and they're trying to do it in a sort of you know agnostic way using standard protocols for interchange so it's not like some apple proprietary thing where
apple has to convince everybody to adopt some standard it's just that getting all of any of medical things in the u.s do anything is very difficult because it's a very diverse shall we say environment um of providers and technology expertise and motivation and financial incentive to support something like this all right then john in the gifts just keep coming for you you have el capitan fixes that you're choosing not to install and tv os 11.3 has a new gift for you does it not
It's not really good for me because even though I have an older Apple TV, it's not hooked up to a television set that I think can even do 24 frames per second.
It's hooked up to a crappy TV, like a bedroom TV.
Anyway, the one change that is most interesting to me in tvOS 11.3, which is currently in beta, is frame rate matching, which was previously only supported on the Apple TV 4K, is now supported on the one that looks exactly like the Apple TV 4K but isn't because it doesn't have slots in the bottom.
Hey, that's mine.
Yeah.
so now you get that feature too i don't i also don't know if you have a television that can do 24 frames per second probably not almost sure i do not yeah but that was the question before is like why isn't this supported is it some kind of hardware limitation no they just didn't get around to it with software and now they're getting around to it so thumbs up for that
All right, let's do some Ask ATP.
Some guy I've never heard of, Todd Vaziri, writes, with your iPhone X experience, are there any signs that Apple intends to unify 3D touch and a long press to give the same result?
Or do you feel that they have every intention of keeping these two gestures separate and distinctive?
I haven't looked at gesture recognizers in a while, and nor have I really fiddled with 3D Touch APIs.
But as far as I can tell, just as a user, it seems to me that it's pretty clearly going to be kept separate.
But I don't know, Marco, have you been looking through these APIs more recently?
Do you have any thoughts on this?
I don't have any thoughts.
I don't think it's going to be touched in any meaningful way.
I think it's going to stay the way it is now, which is basically like, you know, most things are 3D touch or nothing.
And occasionally, one of the app developers, either Apple or third party, will have some good idea.
Oh, you know, we should make this available with long press eventually.
And then eventually somebody does it, but...
you know, it's probably going to always be, you know, 3D touch first.
Kind of like how the clear all notifications thing.
Remember, it wasn't that 3D touch first and then eventually they added long press.
It's probably going to be like that kind of pattern.
I'm just like, 3D touch is first.
Long press if somebody gets to it.
But do you think like, I think part of this question is like, are the, do the APIs make it look like there will ever be a way to like, you know, coalesce them in terms of you'd write an application to handle one kind of event and both of those things that happen on the screen could funnel into one kind of event or do you think it will make the APIs still reflect the fact that they are entirely separate?
entirely separate i mean you could write something like in your app that would you know respond to either one right and you could you could write some kind of reusable component to make that easier to do but as far as i could tell apple has not moved in that direction at all i could be wrong i could have missed something but i don't think so yeah i don't think so either i just like my impression from the outside not looking at the guys but just looking at how they're used is that uh
I would go so far as to say that Apple thinks there actually is an important distinction between 3D touch and long press that should be meaningful in the UI.
And cases where they merely say long press is just an affordance for people who have devices without 3D touch are kind of in the minority.
It seems like...
especially as 3d touch spreads to more and more devices or at least phones anyway because they don't have it on ipads um the 3d touch is a different thing than long press and it may still be an optional thing like oh if you happen to have a device that can afford you can get this feature but that is not it's not the same thing as long press despite the fact that a lot of people like wish it was that it was just a more convenient long rest and and using a phone from my perspective it feels different to me i wouldn't want it to be just an alternate way to do long press because
It just feels so very different.
So I think I'm mostly on the same page with Apple here, despite the fact that it is somewhat confusing to have to explain to people.
I don't think they're interchangeable.
They don't feel interchangeable to me.
I tend to agree.
Alex writes, what is AirPlay 2 and why is it so hard for both developers and Apple to implement it?
So I guess, Marco, jump in whenever you're ready.
But AirPlay 2, is it supposed to be other than multi-room stuff, which you can't really do with AirPlay 1 unless you're using iTunes on a Mac?
Yeah.
Is it supposed to be kind of self-sufficient where it's more like a Google Chromecast sort of scenario where you just tell it, hey, go play this thing over there and it does it all by itself?
Or is that completely wrong?
That's about halfway wrong.
So basically, the way AirPlay 1 worked was
was kind of like... It's not that different from how Bluetooth audio works, just done over Wi-Fi.
It is what they call basically a real-time protocol.
It's just a stream.
You stream audio to the AirPlay One device.
There is a fixed latency that all AirPlay One devices have of two seconds.
And everything goes over that same stream of that same latency.
Audio gets streamed at that rate.
Commands like play, pause, or seek get streamed at that rate.
That's why with an AirPlay speaker, if you hit pause in your phone, it takes two seconds before it actually pauses.
And so it was a simpler protocol.
It was launched forever ago.
And, you know, back then things had to be simpler for just technical practicality reasons.
So AirPlay 1, very simple protocol.
What you're alluding to, Casey, how Sonos and the Google Cast protocols usually work is basically like the speaker in those cases or like the Casted 2 device is
is controlling and playing whatever the media is itself.
It isn't having a device send it a stream of media in most cases.
The Sonos speaker or Google Chromecast or whatever is given a URL and say, play the file here.
And the client applications are basically giving it commands whenever they feel like it of, okay, pause it now, play this thing instead or whatever else.
But the advantage of a system like that is your phone or whatever is streaming the audio from or causing the audio to be streamed is not actually really involved in the real-time playback.
So, like, the example that is often given is, like,
If you go out and take out the trash during a party and your phone is what's telling Sonos to play this playlist, when you leave your house's Wi-Fi for 30 seconds, the music isn't going to stop.
It's going to keep playing because your phone is simply giving it commands sometimes when you tell it to.
It isn't streaming the audio itself.
The device for Sonos and Google Class or whatever is getting the audio itself over the network and only just doing what your phone tells it to when it's time to make changes.
um airplay never worked that way airplay was always being real-time streamed from the source device to the speaker um question the home pod uh literature or whatever pr literature makes that claim about it that uh
That it's just pulling the music from Apple Music, not pulling it from your phone.
But it doesn't currently support AirPlay 2.
Yes.
So there's a few different things here.
So that, what the HomePod is doing with Apple Music, first of all, I believe that applies only to Apple Music.
And that is because the HomePod does appear, from what they're saying, to be a native Apple Music client.
In the sense that you can ask it to play something from Apple Music.
I don't know if your phone is involved in the Siri request itself.
Yeah.
But once it is playing, it does sound like it can just keep playing without your phone's presence.
So that is a separate thing.
That's not involving AirPlay 2, though.
So what AirPlay 2 does is kind of just a halfway point between these or kind of like a better AirPlay 1.
So what it lets you do is buffer...
for much larger chunks of data and what apple said in the wwdc session about it they said basically think minutes instead of seconds and it lets you buffer faster than real time so you know airplay one was a fixed two second latency everywhere the streaming device supplied the audio in real time the playing device played it in real time there's a two second buffer on the playing device
AirPlay 2 the streaming device is asked to supply the audio as fast as it can faster than real time until the buffer fills up and so your AirPlay 2 client program that's playing media has to be able to feed the buffer a lot like you know five minutes or ten minutes or whatever it is of future audio and then the playing device maintains that buffer and plays it in real time and notifies you of you know what point it has reached in playback and
So this changes a bunch of things.
This is a really big foundational change to how this works.
There are a number of big advantages.
So number one is that scenario of taking out the garbage during a party.
As long as you're not taking like 20 minutes outside to take the garbage out, in which case I would say you have to think about your home layout.
That's too much of a trip.
um you know it should be fine you should get back inside in time for that you know minutes long buffer the um to to not have to underrun itself um also you know in in as we talk about during euro ads like a lot of times like places in your house are kind of wi-fi dead zones and so same problem with those like there's lots of like common scenarios where like if you're airplane anybody who's ever done airplay has you know you know this because this has probably happened to you at some point where like
You know, the person with the phone is walking around somewhere and drops out of range for a second and the music stops or skips or whatever.
Also, another big advantage of this, of breaking it out of that fixed latency model, is that commands to change, so play, pause, seek commands, those can happen faster than that two-second buffer.
Those can happen basically as quickly as the device receives and processes them.
So like any other Wi-Fi command in your house.
So it can be really fast.
So way faster, way more responsive play-out controls, as well as that long, super long buffer.
It's also...
AirPlay One did support multi-room audio in some way.
I'm not familiar with the details of how it coordinated it, but I think only iTunes on the Mac could ever really officially be the source for that.
There was never a way for it to have an iOS device as the source of multi-room audio with AirPlay One.
AirPlay 2, that is now possible.
You can now do multi-room audio with the iOS device as the source of that.
So that's another big change.
I don't really know what has changed about the protocol to allow that, but I'm sure there's a good reason.
Also, because the playback buffering and the media supply has been separated from the command interface of play-pause...
you can now have multiple devices in your house being able to control the play pause type controls of a stream that's playing from not them.
So like you and your spouse can both have play pause control over the music playing from only one of your phones to the AirPlay 2 speaker.
So also, you know, fun stuff.
There's also separation now of phone call status from AirPlay.
So you can, for instance, take a phone call on your phone that is AirPlaying music to a speaker and the music continues to play back on that speaker while you're on the phone call.
That didn't happen before.
And so this is all a lot of major changes.
And this is, I think, one of the reasons why this is taking so long and why AirPlay 2 seems to be the big delay for the HomePod.
Yeah.
This is tons of new iOS APIs, tons of new background processes and changes to fundamental things in iOS to make all this happen.
Also on the device side, on the speaker side,
You now have this, you know, long buffering mechanism, and that's much more complex than before.
You know, I'm sure Apple has some kind of component or library or something that they will sell manufacturers to make this easier on them to, you know, to kind of automate this for them or be like a drop in component or something.
But it's more complex than AirPlay 1 was by a lot.
And even AirPlay 1, the client implementations tended to suck that weren't Apple's.
There was one AirPlay chip that every AirPlay speaker used, and it sucked.
It was unreliable, and it was terrible.
So I'm guessing the delay in the speaker availability is because this is more complex and maybe the industry was caught off guard a little bit.
Who knows?
Maybe Apple hasn't actually really finished it yet and they're just not saying that.
But either way, it's a complex protocol.
And then on the software side, on the iOS side, and probably the HomePod side, this is complex.
I ran into some of this complexity when I started looking at these APIs for Overcast.
And the main complexity here is
streaming the music to the buffer is now disconnected from what timestamp or even like what track is actually playing at that moment.
Because you can read ahead by so far.
Like before, with the old AirPlay 1 model...
Whatever function in your app supplied the audio to the output stream could notify the app as that happened.
You're now at timestamp one.
You're now at timestamp two.
And as soon as it played through a track, it can say this track has finished playing.
You're now playing this next track.
Now, it can buffer so far ahead of real time that the production of the audio in your app, the thing that is supplying the audio, has to be a separate thing entirely from what parts of your app manage what timestamp it's playing at and what track is currently playing.
And they've moved all that out now to this new, like, synchronizer object that you need.
So, like, none of this is, like, difficult to deal with, but it's different.
It's a major change from the way it used to work.
And there's also other things, like, for instance, if you... If your app has, like, a concept of, like, a playlist and...
an item that is coming up is changed, say the user deletes an entry in a playlist or reorders a playlist, and that part has already been buffered, you now have to tell the buffer thing, oh, and everything after this timestamp is now different.
Reload it.
So there's all sorts of big and small changes like that needed to adopt this kind of model.
And none of them are difficult or impossible.
It's just a lot of things to deal with.
It's a lot of change, a lot of potential for new bugs or not realizing that old bugs were really bugs.
Even doing it for Overcast is a pretty major undertaking that I'm nowhere near done with.
I've only done the early stages of it and now I've put it on the back burner because now I know that it's not going to be imminent.
I have more pressing things I want to do.
But
It's a big change to audio applications and to the systems in iOS that manage them.
So I think there's very, very good justification for AirPlay 2 to be late and for Apple to be running behind.
I think they should have probably anticipated it better and planned for it better, but oh well.
All this is just to say that technically speaking, this is a nice improvement.
It is also a really big job.
So it's totally reasonable for it to be harder than they might have predicted or taking longer than they predicted.
You can have a fun class of bugs.
You could have a bug, based on what you described, where the speaker is playing a song...
but but your your player application on your phone indicates that it's playing a different song so like you know it goes to the next track like if you didn't do that synchronization thing that you said oh by the way they've deleted something your phone will say i'm happily playing song a and you'll be hearing a totally different song come through the speaker you'll be like this thing is totally broken how does that even happen well now we know how it happens
yeah or like as it starts buffering if you didn't do the timestamp you know change of how it reports what time you're playing until then like you can have it if you watch your time thing in the app you start playing to a speaker and your time starts racing ahead by like 10 minutes all of a sudden but you're not hearing it that fast like there's so many or like it races to the end and deletes the file because it's how it's played already gone like there's there's a lot of potential for big and small bugs here
In your application, if they change the playback speed midstream, you have to invalidate everything that you previously uploaded at the other speed.
Oh, that's interesting.
Yep.
Or if they toggle off smart speed.
Yep.
Anything.
Or if you just seek.
I don't think it actually does in the current protocol.
I'm not sure it actually does seeking.
Anyway, and one concern I have, too, is this stuff is all so early and so complex and such a big undertaking that
I'm not sure I want to devote a whole bunch of time to changing my entire audio engine to support this before I know that the API is solid.
And given that Apple is delaying their own AirPlay 2 stuff, I'm kind of worried that maybe the API is not done yet or not baked yet.
So there's another reason why I've kind of paused my work on this for now.
Yeah, it could end up like crashing your application in scenarios where the person's not even using AirPlay 2 just because of how you had to rejigger the internals, which is not a great thing to happen.
All right.
What are we in the middle of?
We're in the middle of Ask ATP, right?
Yep.
Okay.
Andrew Lim Penning writes, could John please detail his method for reading extremely long softcover books without ruining the spine?
Where the hell did this even come from?
When did you talk about this?
Some other podcast that I'm on that Andrew apparently listens to, I discuss this.
I think you two should know about it, too, in the long history of...
weird things that i have anyway i i when i was younger i had a lot of books like paper books before i got on the ebook bandwagon and i had a lot of paperback books when i was younger um and some of them are really thick because i'm a big stephen king fan and his books are long and eventually i got into books as a thing that you can buy like it's a sort of
a physical object in addition to the words that they contain.
In fact, I'm still like that.
I read e-books mostly, but I still like physical books.
Often I will buy a physical book, but still read the e-book.
Anyway, I got a lot of soft covers, and I like them.
I got a lot of series.
They had cool spines.
I'd put them up on my shelf, arrange them.
They look nice.
Pretty soon after getting my first collection of paperbacks, I decided I didn't like how the books looked when the spines were broken.
If you opened a paperback really wide...
The nice printed spine on it will get a big white, you know, crease or crack on it.
And if you read the book, eventually you have cracks going up and down the whole spine.
Anyone who has had a big, thick paperback book knows about this.
So I didn't like that.
So eventually I decided I'm going to read all my softcover books, no matter how thick they are, without breaking the spine.
And that's what this question is about.
How do you do that?
Unfortunately for Andrew, the answer is exactly how you would think you do that.
You don't open the book really wide.
You support the spine with your fingers behind it and you open it a crack and you'd be like, how are you going to read an entire literally 800 page book peeking into this tiny crevice to read the text out of the, you know, like...
oh my word it you know there is no secret the secret you know like the technique is put your fingers on the back of the spine so you can feel what's happening at the back of that spine and open it as wide as you can before it creases and just be really really careful and i don't think that's a particularly fun way to read i think people should buy ebooks because they're way better than paper books but paper books are beautiful so you should still buy them and collect them and display them
So how do you use an iPhone without scratching it?
Well, you keep it in a small felt pouch and you take it in and out of that pouch every single time you use it and you never actually touch it.
Well done, sir.
Not every single time.
Only when you're out of the house.
Only when you're out of the house.
In the house and it's not in the pouch ever.
Well, yeah.
What could possibly be more convenient than that?
The pouch is awesome.
Here's the thing about the pouch.
I originally started doing it for the reason you noted, for scratchability, but I have come to appreciate the fingerprint.
I don't ever have to clean off my phone screen, which is apparently things a lot of people have to do, or their phone screens look disgusting, because every time it goes in and out of my pouch, it gets cleaned.
Of course.
And when it stays in there and it rubs around like it's a microfiber thing, it is always cleaning my phone screen.
It's nice.
So a year of using my Jet Black iPhone 7, and you know how much it ever mattered how scratched it was?
Not at all.
You know how much I ever noticed?
Zero.
That's the back.
I'm talking about the front.
Actually, you know what?
I have a case on it, so I don't care about the back.
I actually do have a small problem with the iPhone X. I'm getting scratches on my screen.
Really?
On the fronts?
Yeah.
Why?
From what?
I don't know.
Like, they're not like deep scratches, but, you know, when the light hits a certain angle, you can see them.
And I think I heard from a few other people that they were having a similar issue.
Like, I've never had iPhone screen scratches that were noticeable.
I'm getting scratches on my iPhone X, like, already.
So I don't know.
I don't know what's up.
Are they, like, micro, like, very micro scratches?
Like, maybe they're just scratches in the sort of oleophobic whatever coating and not, like, actually in the glass?
Maybe.
I mean, again, they don't look deep.
You can't see them at all angles.
If you turn the screen off, they're pretty noticeable.
That's interesting.
Anyway, I don't have any on mine.
Pouch.
Pouch is not the answer, John.
It's an answer.
It may not be the answer, but it is an answer.
It is an answer.
I will concede it is an answer.
And the back of my jet black iPhone 7, I'm sure, is pristine underneath my leather case.
Good for it.
I'm sure that's going to really matter long term.
Yeah, I've already decided that I'm not, speaking of keeping phones pristine, I'm not going to give any of my kids this iPhone 7.
like i i handed down my iphone 6 and you know god knows what my son is doing to it but the 7 i'm like no no we'll buy you like an iphone se used or something but we're not you're not getting my 7 i spent all this time keeping it pristine like this is this the iphone my iphone 7 i think is in the category of like my se 30 and my 2008 mac pro i really like this phone i mean granted i've only had two iphones but this is by far my favorite um like there's nothing about it that
is bad even the lack of the headphone port like i've you know i think the iphone 7 is great and i'm now appreciating it as my last like pre iphone 10 notch error of apple phone you know yeah it honestly like you know as as we talked about it in our iphone 7 exit interview segment i like looking back on it like i don't want to go back to it because i like the 10 too much but that really was a great phone like they really it was it was a great phone
And the 8 is great, too, and everything, but it's overshadowed by the 10.
And I didn't get the 8, right?
So I've got the 7, and this is my phone that hit the sweet spot of the culmination of a long evolution of a particular phone factor before Apple took a hard left turn into iPhone X land.
Also, the 8 doesn't have the jet black finish, and that, to me, was a critical part of why the 7 was so awesome, because it so dramatically improved and changed the feel of the phone.
It gave that awesome, caseless grip.
that i miss i you know the iphone 10 is better than like the previous aluminum ones uh but it's still not as good as the iphone 7 in grip but i like the rest of it so i'm keeping it i guess even though my screen is scratched anyway thanks to our sponsors this week casper betterment and src and we will talk to you next week
Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, oh it was accidental.
And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental.
Accidental.
They did it.
i uh i really i do this every year i guess this is my my lose weight kind of uh new year's resolution even though it's not a resolution it's just something i i remind myself of every year and every year you know january comes around i remind myself you know what
You should really be less negative, Casey, on the internet and stop complaining and moaning about things, which I don't think I do overwhelmingly, but I do probably more than I should.
And then something like this happens.
I see a news report saying BMW is going to charge $80 a year for a subscription to CarPlay.
$80 for a subscription to CarPlay.
That involves no cloud services or anything like that of any sort.
It's just $80 for them to not cut you off for the thing in your car.
yeah what what huh why there's a number of angles to this so like a few people asked when this first came out like well do we know like is apple charging them yearly and we don't have a firm answer on that but
Apparently, somebody heard from some carmaker that Apple does not charge fees for CarPlay, and there certainly is not an annual fee.
Apple did say so, according to Gruber.
This is what he said on his website.
Gruber says, I've now received the following clarification from Apple.
There is no fee for OEMs for either MFI or CarPlay integration.
There never has been, and to my knowledge, there are no plans to this change.
There is no royalty costs or ongoing costs.
The only cost to automakers are those necessary to create the hardware.
This includes an authentication chip.
All right, that's good.
Okay, so anyway, so that rules that out.
But anyway, so this does solve a problem.
I don't think it solves it in the right way, but there is a problem that...
BMWs, as you know, Casey, from having bought them, especially having bought them used, certain options like this, they're options at purchase when the car is new, and you can't have them later.
CarPlay, there's not much reason... It's like a $300 option normally before this thing.
There's not a lot of reason that they had to charge $300 extra.
They're just doing it because they can.
Because cars like this, luxury cars especially...
They charge money for every little thing.
Anything.
They've offered for years now, they've offered wireless phone charging where they just put basically a Qi charger in the armrest and they charge you like $700 or some obscene thing for that.
That's just the game here.
When you're buying a high-end car like this, many of the brands will nickel and dime you to death over stuff that does not cost them that much to add, but they have a captive audience.
It's just like buying a beer at a baseball stadium.
It's a captive audience.
You're already spending a lot of money.
They know that they can get more out of people if they do this.
So, you know, that I don't really fault them for charging separately for this.
I think it's a crappy luxury experience that not every BMW has CarPlay.
Like a lot of other manufacturers, all of their cars now have CarPlay or all of certain model lines have it.
BMW is not doing that.
That creates a problem if you're looking for a used one, and this is a fairly minor feature distinction.
So if you're looking at used BMWs, or if you have acquired a used BMW, it might be difficult to find one that has CarPlay, or you might not know until you actually go visit one at a dealer whether the one you're looking at has CarPlay or not.
There is a problem that they are now solving that now you can add CarPlay.
So I think you can actually like if a car was sold without it and you go buy it used and you want it, I think you can add it by starting to pay this fee.
That's not a great solution to that problem.
There are way better solutions.
Honestly, a well-spec BMW costs over $40,000 most of the time.
You can throw in CarPlay at no additional charge.
This is the kind of thing... The brakes aren't optional.
The air conditioning now comes standard.
I think CarPlay is really very quickly becoming one of those features where...
People just expect that.
It's weird if you don't have it on a nice car these days.
So they should really include it on all the cars and not charge you this dumb fee.
One of the analogies I heard was like in cheap to mid-price hotels, the Wi-Fi is free, but in fancy hotels, they charge you for it.
That is definitely not true.
They charge you for it at every hotel.
No, I've heard that saying before, and I have experienced some of that where...
The main places I've seen free Wi-Fi are not in the fanciest hotels, but kind of in the mid-tier ones.
But once you get fancy, they're like, well, you're already paying so much for the room anyway.
We'll just add this charge on for the Wi-Fi.
Yeah.
Well, and also, like, you know, see also iCloud storage plans, like what we talked about earlier.
This is a captive audience, right?
Like, iCloud Storage sells not because it's a great deal, but because you kind of want it.
It makes the experience way better.
And what else are you going to do?
Like, this is all system integration stuff.
And it's like, if you want this experience in the native first-party way that works with everything, you're probably going to have to pay whatever they want for it.
CarPlay on BMWs is the same thing.
Like, you're going to have to pay whatever they want for it, basically.
So...
i think the solution here is to stop buying bmws yeah exactly bmw has the problem of like uh they do have competitors like maybe there's no competitor for carplay for you know i want integration with my iphone in such and such a way but you can buy another luxury car that has carplay that doesn't charge you this much and one of the points i've seen from people talking about this in terms of pricing it's like well if you get a three-year lease and it's 80 bucks it's still cheaper than a 300 up front option
which is kind of true, and in the grand scheme of things, given how much they charge for the different paint color, it's like an additional $2,500 or whatever.
If you add it all up, the number of absurd things you're going to pay way more for for the life of this BMW that you'll happily pay for because you want the sparkly red paint or whatever dwarfs this CarPlay thing, but the CarPlay thing just feels punitive because everyone else is giving it to you for free, and there's not even...
a hint of a justifiable reason for it to be an ongoing eternal payment and so it just annoys people so i think bmw will this is what will either happen either bmw will reverse this or every other luxury car maker will do the same thing it's true
uh it's true it's just i don't know it's just so frustrating because i i know like in my brain that this is a completely unsurprising thing for a luxury car manufacturer to do like the things that bmw charges for like up until recently and maybe still to this day they they had a tremendous upcharge for for xenon headlamps or high intensity discharge headlamps i guess they're leds now in all likelihood but for
Years when high intensity discharge headlamps were a thing, BMWs would still have that as an option.
Like my generation, the early 2010s.
Oh, yeah.
My three series that was that generation, I didn't get the HIDs.
They were too expensive.
Right, exactly.
And I will see them constantly to this day.
And you can tell, you know, what is HIDs and what doesn't.
But that seemed preposterous to me.
Like, I'm not saying that it shouldn't necessarily be paid for, but come on, it's an option?
Really?
Like, you're buying a BMW, you're buying a Mercedes, you're buying an Acura, whatever the case may be.
Like, that should just be part of the car.
And
I don't know.
This just seems like such a preposterous, absurd thing to nickel and dime people over.
And it's not as bad as Porsche, from what I understand, who I guess is the kings and queens of nickel and diming.
But it's just gross.
And I think BMW has been heading more and more this way over time.
And it just grosses me out.
And here again, I just I don't know what car I should get if I get a new car because I'm screwed no matter what.
What happened to the ultimate driving machine?
They don't even use that slogan anymore.
I love that slogan.
I mean, to be fair, every BMW owner has always had this progression with the company, and it just rolls into different times.
Every BMW owner for the history of BMW has always said, whatever happened to the BMW that made my first car?
Now the ones they make today are crap.
Whatever happened to the MacBook Pros with better keyboards?
Am I right, Marco?
Well, it's a little bit different when the failure rate changes so dramatically.
Who was it?
I think Kieran Healy or maybe it was him or someone else tweeted a picture of an old power book.
And all I could think of looking at that is like, look at the travel on those keys.
Full-size keyboard keys.
It was before they even started really flattening them out.
They look like just full-size mechanical keyboard keycaps, practically.
Yeah.
They probably have more travel than the total thickness of the current MacBook Pro line.
Probably.