Casey Apple Pencil
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Hi, everybody.
We are live.
Hope you enjoyed your Fish New Year's Eve show.
Oh, yeah.
Did you stay up watching that show?
That was your New Year's Eve celebration?
I sure did.
In fact, the point of the live stream that the listeners have just heard was about the time that Trey and Mike were lifted into the air during a song and played the song like on rigging in the air wearing spacesuits surrounded by balloons.
You know, I really don't want to open this can of worms, so I would like to try to put this to bed as quickly as possible.
But let me just posit that maybe you shouldn't poke quite as much fun at Dave Matthews Band as you like to do.
Maybe you should think about pumping the brakes on that a little bit.
You are just upset that being a Phish fan is so much more fun than being a Dave Matthews fan.
Sure.
Any other pre-show banter you'd like to do?
I don't think so.
Happy New Year, everybody.
Yeah, Happy New Year.
The calendar has incremented over in the NS calendar, dot Gregorian calendar, dot standard calendar, shared calendar.
The year date unit has incremented to the next value.
Well, we hope.
Wasn't it like three or four years ago that that didn't happen or something happened with alarms because they used like the capital Y's instead of the lowercase Y's or whatever the hell it was.
I probably have that wrong.
There's been so many like humorous, comical and tragic date and time related bugs in iOS.
Hey, John, did you drive the Model 3 or did you solely ride in it?
No, I just let Tina drive it.
I figured I'd drive the Model S and, you know, it's very similar.
What were your interpretations and thoughts on the Model 3 as a passenger?
And could you perhaps channel Tina's thoughts for the purposes of the pre-show on what it was like to drive?
uh i mean they need more physical controls like that's a real thing it's just kind of you made that comment he actually john drove aaron's so i should fill the listeners in so uh the syracuse's uh and and us met at the underscores house which is vaguely central
between the three of us and by that i mean way closer to me than them but then the syracuse's but you know here we are and uh so we all got together for new year's um the armaments couldn't make it this year which was sad but no big deal and so john had the opportunity to drive aaron's aaron's volvo approximately 30 feet and uh you you rode to and from the airport in a model three and then tina drove the model three briefly basically around the block and
And you had commented on Aaron's car in the literally 30 feet that you drove it that it also does not have enough physical controls for you.
That was based on me being a passenger on a longer trip because as a passenger, I had the opportunity to do things like adjust the climate control.
And there's just nothing on that dashboard.
There's just a screen and like there's a little strip of buttons below it.
But the dial that I thought might do something having to do with climate seemed to only be volume.
And there was like –
playback into like it's just it's just a waste of they they have room for more buttons but they don't put them there i agree the climate control in particular in particular is frustrating yeah and so on the model three obviously is that taken to the extreme where you just got the screen and you know you've got two little balls in the steering wheel but beyond that this there should definitely be more physical particularly for things like air vents i don't want to go for a screen for that it's not like you're safe and it's like more costly it's not cheaper a lot of some things are cheaper if you put them on the screen because you don't have to have all these buttons and switches but having little actuator motors
that are controlled is more expensive than just having a little stick that I can move with my finger that directs the air.
So it's a little bit silly in that regard.
The doors are also silly on the Model 3.
Yeah, the first time when I test drove one, I got yelled at by the car for opening it wrong.
Because you used the mechanical, yep, but same thing with me.
So it's a bad design because obviously the affordance is telling me to use the handle that I'm not supposed to use.
And the reason it has it is because it has frameless window glass.
And unlike seemingly every other car with frameless window glass, the way it works in the Model 3 is when you open the door, it wants you to let the car slide the window down about an inch or half an inch and then open the door.
And when you close the door, it will slide the window glass up half an inch to tuck it under like the weather ceiling.
So what they want you to do when you open the door is from the inside is press a button.
And pressing the button gives the car a chance to do its little window thing and then pop the door open.
There is also a mechanical door open, which is like where you would think the handle was, a little thing that you pull on.
So if the electronics are bad or something, you can still get out of the car.
But if you use that mechanical thing, it yells at you because it's like, I didn't have a chance to roll the windows down.
You just basically tore them out of the weather stripping.
It's like, look, you want to have frameless windows, which I don't suggest because it's not great.
Make them work without any electronic trickery or make the mechanical door opening thing much less obvious because it looks like that's how you should get in and out of the car.
So that's just like needless complexity.
One more thing that can break like they...
I wouldn't say they fixed.
They changed the door handles to not be like the Model S, where now they are still flush, but to make them unflush, you would just use your finger to open them instead of like a sensor and a motor, which is cheaper and less problem-prone, but I didn't find particularly pleasing to use.
It's not bad, and you get used to it, but I don't know.
I thought it would be more...
...pleasing to use the handles than it actually was.
But anyway, they took all the complexity that there was in the door handles and they put it in the windows.
And by the way, for the record, the Model S also has frameless windows and has, at least on the interior, regular door handles.
And when you open it, like every other frameless window car I've ever seen, yeah, the window goes down like a half inch...
But it doesn't really matter.
You don't really notice it.
And then when you close it, it goes back up a half inch and, you know, goes into the weather seal.
But you can open it normally.
Like it's like they already solved this problem with the S and then they unsolved it with three.
It's like same thing like the like when the X came out, it's like, let's have gull wing doors, which caused them lots of problems because they were so complicated.
Like, you know, doors were solved a while ago and they had to go unsolve them.
And yeah, it seems like it's like Tesla's curse.
Like every vehicle they make, they take at least one major problem that like no one really asking kind of like Apple.
Nobody was really asking them to redesign and reinvent component X, Y, or Z, but they did it to be cool.
And that component ends up like having, you know, huge failure rates or being really annoying or unintuitive or anything.
And yeah, with the Model 3, I think the Model 3 might have a few of these things, but the weird door handles are definitely one.
Because the one way that you would expect and assume to open a car door from the inside, which lots of people have to do when it isn't their car, even when it is your car, it's like one of the first interactions you have with the car is the car yelling at you saying that you might have just hurt the car.
You know, it's also funny to me about this is that the girl that I dated in college, she had, I believe it was a 2001 325 coupe, which if memory serves also had frameless doors, which I actually do like, unlike John.
And it did that very dance.
Like you would go to open the handle and they would shimmy the window down just a smidge.
And then you would close the door, you know, if you were opening the door and then you would close the door and shimmy the window back up.
And it didn't have a problem in 2001.
Yeah.
But in the vein of in the vein of odd door situations, you know, my dad has a C7 Corvette and it has push button to open the door, both interior and exterior.
So where there would typically be a handle.
Well, there is a place for like your fingers to curl around a piece of the body to open the door.
But it's not an exterior piece.
It's kind of like inset within the door.
Well, anyways, you push a button in there.
kind of like what you would do for a tailgate in a lot of cars.
You know, there's like a little push button there and then you pull the door open.
But on the interior, there's also just a little push button, like where the grabby handle is to close the door.
And anytime I get in that car, despite having been in that car a handful of times now, I forget and fumble about trying to figure out
Where the hell was the handle to get me out of here?
And then there's like some god awful lever that you can pull somewhere to do what the Model 3 is doing and mechanically open the door.
But I don't know.
Of all the things that we needed innovation on in cars, I'm not sure door handles was really where I would have put my energy.
It doesn't seem like this is a problem that needs further solving.
As I've said on past shows, there is one aspect of this that is actually important for Tesla in that having a car that feels futuristic is part of their selling proposition.
So having one or two things where it's needlessly complicated but also reads as futuristic to both the buyer and the people they show off their car to makes some amount of sense.
I don't fault them for having features like that.
It's just that...
choosing which ones those are going to be and making sure that it's stuff that you can actually pull off is important.
Maybe I wouldn't do something as important as the door opening and closing with the X, but maybe that worked out.
For the featureless dashboard, I feel like that is less impressive than the other futuristic features.
more annoying long term like that kind of purity that kind of like we're gonna have no control just gonna be one big screen maybe it's an interesting design exercise but it's the wrong it's the wrong trade-off um riding in the car uh at first i thought uh i was glad that it had like the glass roof like it's not a sunroof but it's just a glass roof because that allows the roof to be very thin so so it's almost like
The entire car has a big sunroof that is always not open.
But, you know, like I looked at where the headliner was and I said if they had continued that headliner from the front of the car to the back, my hair would be hitting the car.
But then I realized I didn't have the seat in the all the way down position.
So I brought the seat to the all the way down position and I had even more headroom.
But with that seat in the all the way down position, it's like I'm in my 92 Civic again.
I'm practically sitting on the floor.
So it does feel a little bit tighter on the inside, but it's nice that I can get to a reasonable position by adjusting the seats.
um seemed it felt like it was pretty well put together with the doors in the trunk both of which i opened and everything uh otherwise the ride felt good uh i asked dave about it he said it felt a lot lighter and more nimble than the five which i can believe because it is light in the ass oh you're thinking bmw i called the five when i was in the car yes s and five are very similar shape yes
That is lighter than the S and it feels lighter than the S. When my wife was driving it around, she, you know, gave it some gas, as they say in the Exploding Dinosaurs business.
And it felt plenty quick to me.
I mean, you know, we were just on like...
Not on a major road, so it was basically all from zero to 40 miles an hour or whatever.
But in that sprint, it feels very fast.
Maybe I had less wine than an S during those acceleration runs.
Maybe I'm just getting used to it.
I think it does.
It sounds different, and I think it is quieter.
Yeah.
Yeah, no, it's a nice car.
And Casey's giant house on wheels is ridiculous.
It is so big and so just overblown.
But it's nice on the inside.
The dashboard is messed up.
It doesn't have a lot of physical controls.
We already covered that.
uh the tires are ridiculous the tires the tires do you mean the size of the wheels or the wheels and the tires it's got pirelli tires on an suv which is not right and the wheels what are those wheels like are they are they 25 inch wheels how big are they i believe they're 20s if i'm not mistaken that's stock by the way i didn't put any aftermarket anything the rubber stock the the wheels are stock everything on that car stock they are very ridiculous um
Yeah, that's fine.
Cool.
Volvo XC90.
John Syracuse says, it's fine.
It looks less white in person.
It's not white.
It's a freaking gray car.
Silvery gray.
It's a very light gray.
It is a very light gray, but whatever.
uh all right well fair enough well we should start the show properly with some follow-up and we can start by having john review something else so john what have you used in the last few days that you would like to tell us about i finally got to see the new ipad which i never went to the store to see despite saying i should really go to a store and see we actually tried one time but the apple store in our mall is closed for renovations and unlike the last time i did this at a different mall they didn't move like to a temporary location in the same mall so there just is no apple store in the mall so i actually had a planned
not a planned trip, but I said, oh, when we go to the mall for this thing, we should also look at the Apple store where it was closed.
But anyway, I finally got to see an iPad.
I got to see Casey's iPad, which is the 11-inch one, like literally his actual iPad when we were hanging out this weekend.
And it's nice.
It's sad.
I was so excited about the case.
Well, I guess you didn't have the case.
You've got the keyboard thing.
I was excited about the accessories, but now that I've seen them in person, I'm less excited about them because they seem kind of
thick although i don't like the keyboards anyway so maybe the non-keyboard accessories are nice i still haven't seen those but that was kind of disappointing uh casey stickers on his case are awful oh it's not the fact that there's stickers there they're not placed well like you've got one sticker you've got one sticker that you that looks like you were trying to center it but you have not centered it and that's terrible and then the layout of the other ones which are not intended to be centered but intended to be kind of like haphazard are not well placed so now you just live with that
Because they're stuck on there.
So enjoy your stickers.
I checked and Casey's iPad is not bent.
Oh, yeah.
I forgot about that.
Yeah.
So he grabs my iPad from like the couch or the kitchen table or something like that.
It's like the first thing he does.
Yeah.
And runs off with it and starts using it.
And then within like 30 seconds, I realized he has taken the case, the folio or whatever stupid word Apple uses for it.
takes the folio off smart keyboard folio yeah yeah so he takes a smart keyboard folio um he takes the folio off and i see him doing the ridiculous look that he made marco and i do which i hope you saw on the show art listeners from the last episode uh in looking peering down every every uh side of my ipad and oh boy did i feel vindicated when he confirmed my assessment that it was not at all bent
Yep.
And then I did the other.
I also tried to pick it up with one hand, which is very difficult, but I was able to do it eventually.
And then I did the other test, which I was very interested to try, checking whether it rocks when you put no case on it and you put it down on a presumably on a flat table with the camera down.
And everyone was saying, oh, with the camera down, I thought it would be rocking, but I was drawing on it with the pencil, and it didn't rock.
And even the last episode, Marco was speculating maybe they intentionally bend it slightly so it doesn't rock, and maybe that's why his has a bend or whatever.
I mean, maybe that's what they're going for, but I can tell you Casey's, which does not have a bend that I could perceive.
If you put it down with the camera bump down on a flat hard table, it rocks.
Of course it does.
How could it not?
There's a camera poking at it.
Does it rock a lot?
No, but you can both see it and feel it.
If you press down on one corner of this four corner thing, it rocks a little bit.
So I feel like that is a...
I feel refreshed knowing that there's not some magic going on somewhere because everyone was saying that this thing, this four-cornered thing that has a bulge in one corner only doesn't rock.
It totally does.
The reason people, I think, thought that it didn't rock is because the bulge for the camera, as compared to the length of the entire iPad, especially the really big iPad, but even the 11-inch,
is so small right so you it the rocking is barely perceptible but it is perceptible like it doesn't knock or bang or whatever but it moves slightly and i think it's fine um as we'll get to a moment casey now has a pencil uh it's got his name on it so in case he forgets who he is he can look at his pencil and it says casey apple pencil
Apple Pencil is just a product name.
That's not part of your name, Casey.
Don't get confused.
Oh, good, good, good.
I got very confused.
Thanks for the clarification.
Casey, Apple Pencil.
Seeing the inscription and Apple Pencil makes me think...
I don't really want the Apple Pencil part there.
I'd rather it just say Casey because now it says Casey Apple Pencil.
And you can't just read Casey.
You have to read Casey Apple Pencil.
And I don't like reading Casey Apple Pencil.
I just – anyway.
The pencil is really nice.
Whatever everyone says about it is true.
The matte finish is really nice as compared to the glossy one.
The weight felt good.
The flat side was fine.
The clipping on the magna thing is really cool.
uh as far as i could tell it worked like the other one the double tapping business i could take it or leave it uh what else to say about the ipad that's about it i didn't you know i didn't use it very long i did use the keyboard a little bit i don't like keyboards on my ipads but it felt okay you're missing out yeah i'm with marco you're missing out my wife really doesn't like the keyboard on the back of the thing like where you can feel the keys in the back i don't mind it that much but again i would i don't think i would get this with a keyboard
So, yeah, that's my one-month-late brief review of the new iPad.
It seems pretty good.
It rocks!
Raves John Syracuse.
Oh, man.
Yeah, I mean, I will say, like, I really, really think, like...
after whatever it's been you know two months three months of using this thing um the only complaints i really have about it are that i do keep covering up the face id camera and that the new design of the folios where it covers the back and attaches by the back does make it a way bulkier both the keyboard and the non-keyboard cover now we have what we have a non-keyboard cover in the family now because tiff has one
Both the keyboard cover and the non-keyboard cover are significantly bulkier feeling than previous smart covers because they cover the back.
And that's nice if you wanted rear coverage as a feature of protection for your iPad, but I've never cared about that.
I've never had rear protection on my iPads, and it's never been a problem.
They've never gotten smashed from the back or scratched or anything in my typical use, so...
I would like for future iPads to make those covers less bulky as an option the way they used to be because that is the one thing I don't really like about the new physical design.
Otherwise, everything else about the keyboard does seem to be an improvement overall, but it is substantially bulkier.
Is the rear cover thicker than the old rear cover?
I do have a rear cover on my current iPad Pro.
I have the one where the rear cover matches the smart cover on the front.
You just have to buy two things, right?
So is the non-keyboard cover for the current iPad with the rear cover, is that as thick as the keyboard rear cover or no?
um yes it like the rear covers between the two are seemingly identical it's only the keyboard side that is different and so that's why like actually i i think that the move this generation is if you're going to get a cover get the keyboard cover because it isn't actually that much bulkier than the non-keyboard cover and to have that the option of having a keyboard whenever you want it is really nice
agreed yeah i totally agree with you i don't know you still got the keys in the back issue i'd have to see it in person to see if i could deal with that trade-off well you do have that issue but but in reality i you know in in my actual use like i leave it in the keyboard almost all the time and if i'm not going to be using the keyboard i will usually just detach it completely and just hold the naked ipad and then marvel at how thin and light it is without the keyboard because it's so bulky with it
But in practice, I hardly ever fold the keyboard back on it anymore.
I just take the keyboard off if I'm not going to use it.
Yeah, I basically do the same thing.
It is rare I take the cover off, but I definitely do exactly that.
So I think, Marco, you and I are pretty much of the same brain on this.
Obviously, John deliberately took some of the wind out of my sails because I did receive an Apple Pencil since we last spoke.
And I mean, everything John said, I mostly agree with.
I've never had an Apple Pencil before, so this is new to me.
I do quite like using it on the iPad for drawing things.
I definitely don't draw...
Very often.
So I don't really – I'm glad I have it.
I'm glad it was a gift because I think it would have been a waste of $130 or whatever dollars it was had I paid for it myself.
And that is like the perfect gift in my eyes.
Something that you want but you really don't want to buy with your own money.
It must be very easy to shop for.
Well, I don't know.
I like stuff a lot.
So and I'm very cheap.
So I like to think I'm easy to shop for.
But who knows?
But anyway, but my parents bought it for me and I think they engraved it, which isn't a literal engraving.
It's just like, you know, it's printed on there.
It's not like etched in or anything.
It's like a screen print.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
They didn't grave it, I think, just because they thought it would be fun to do, I guess.
I don't really know why.
And that's why it says Casey on it.
As I said on Twitter when I received it, I was slightly fearful that my parents might have been in on the joke and it would have said Mike was right on it, which would have really ruined my holiday.
That would have been amazing.
It would have been amazing and terrible all at the same time.
So thank you, mom and dad, for not doing that.
I really enjoy using, what is the, I'm going to have to stall for time as I find it, the app where you can color that Mike had recommended.
Oh, there's a bunch.
That is extremely fun.
Yeah, what is the one that Mike recommended?
It is Pigment.
And Pigment is super fun with the pencil.
I also did just a teeny bit of retouching on a photograph using Pixelmator or Pixelmator.
And I did that with the pencil, which is really nice.
And Sketch Party TV, which I have had for years, but had completely forgotten about until the
Uh, and, and we were playing that a lot when we were at the underscores and that was tremendous fun.
And obviously with the Apple pencil is much, much, much better.
Um, that's not, wait, can you just like pass the iPad around with you multiple people?
Like you don't need multiple iPads or anything?
Correct.
So what we did was we had, you can do it either with, I think two iOS devices.
I think I'm not a hundred percent sure, but the way I've used it in the past is with an Apple TV.
So it does the kind of airplay where it's using the Apple TV as a second screen.
Oh, that's great.
And yeah, it's super great.
And I think it's only like five bucks.
They haven't sponsored this episode, but they basically should.
So have your people call our people.
But anyway, it's like Pictionary, super fun, really good, and great party game.
And we were doing that with the Apple Pencil, which was super awesome.
Additionally, we were using the Icon Factory and a friend of the show, Craig Hockenberry's app, Linnea, Linnea, Linnea.
I asked him how it was pronounced.
I think it's Linnea.
No, I asked him how it was pronounced, and then I think I just pronounced it improperly.
It's either Linnea or Linnea.
We'll just keep saying them both.
We'll just go back and forth.
Yeah, it's Linnea because it's from the Latin word for line.
L-I-N-E-E-U-H was his phonetic pronunciation.
But nobody knows how to pronounce Latin.
Yeah, well, there's that too.
But he speaks near fluent Italian, or did at some point.
That's true.
He is relatively closely qualified to it.
Exactly.
Anyway, that app is like... So I will characterize it probably improperly as...
A drawing app with a little bit of layering and Photoshop-y stuff on it.
Now, understand I know nothing about drawing and I know nothing about Photoshop, but Linnea is really great because, among other things, it has different templates, if you will.
So you can have lined pieces of paper.
There's a template for storyboarding, which I plan to do the next time I do a car review in 15 years now.
There's backgrounds or templates for mocking up iOS apps.
It's really, really cool.
And the layering UI works really, really well.
I can't say enough good things about this app.
But I bring this up in part because I wanted to mention that using that as pen and paper is really great with the Apple Pencil.
But John's daughter is a...
exceptionally good to my eye artist.
And so she took my iPad with permission for a while and drew a few different things on it.
And it was super fascinating watching her.
And I don't think she'd ever used this app before, but watching her use Linnea to create these really, to me, intricate drawings that were really, really pretty and
And shaded and colored really well.
And she was using layers to, you know, to add and remove stuff, which is exactly what layers are for.
I don't know.
It was just fascinating watching John's kid do this.
And it was really, really cool.
And those are easily the best drawings that will ever be made with that pencil during its lifetime.
Yeah, I got to say, I also have to do a shout out to Linnea.
Linnea?
Linnea, right?
Linnea?
Yeah, Linnea.
Anybody who has an iPad and an Apple Pencil, just buy this app.
Don't waffle about it.
Don't think about it.
Just buy it.
You will thank me.
I think it's like five or ten bucks.
It's really inexpensive and it's amazing software.
So what I like about it is I am not an artist like you.
I am not like a drawing artist at all.
But it is useful in the universe, in life, to occasionally draw something, to occasionally, you know, draw a diagram or, you know, annotate a photo or something, you know, or just do like a line drawing or something.
And it makes it really, really nice, even for people like us who are not artists.
So what I, so like I had Linnea installed on my iPad for, I don't know, most of the last two years since I've had an iPad Pro, three years, whatever it's been.
But because my pencil was never with me, because I had the old Apple Pencil, I almost never used it.
So I didn't really know how to use it.
But I knew I had it on my home screen for three years, even though I never used it.
I'm like, someday, I will be glad this is here.
And so within this first couple months of having the new iPad, I've already used it like four times.
And each time, like the first time I used it, I pasted into the chat here this tweet from the Playing for Fun account, Tiff and Mike's podcast about video games.
It's really good.
Everyone should listen.
playing for fun fm and anyway so the little wreaths in the corner of that image that have like the the playing for fun relay coin pixel art with the christmas wreath and bow added to it i drew that in linea
Tiff needed this to be redrawn in this style.
And I had just seen, they had just done an update days earlier, and I just read their blog post where they had this grid template mode.
You mentioned they had certain grids or whatever they are.
And they had one that if you squint right, you can make pixel art with it.
It isn't designed for that purpose, and there's some holes in the functionality, but you can do it.
And this was the first time I had used Linnea for more than 10 seconds.
Because I finally had a use for it.
I had a need for it.
And so it was like an Apple commercial.
I come over.
Tiff's in front of her computer, all frustrated with Photoshop.
I come over with my iPad in my arm.
I take the pencil off the top that was already there and fully charged.
And I open up this app that was this amazing, indie, inexpensive app that has all this functionality in it.
And this is literally the first time I've ever done anything really with the app.
I was able to figure out how to do that.
And I did that entire thing in like 10 minutes.
It was amazing.
Like Apple should have been filming that and made a commercial out of how inspiring it is.
Like that's how good it was.
It was amazing.
And I have since used it, I think two or three more times.
Like one time...
were doing some work on a house and so we had the architect over and I took the iPad out and was doodling and trying to draw on top of a photo and then trying to draw what I was thinking of how we should do things and so I took the pencil and I drew what I wanted and then
She took the pencil, we tapped a new layer, and she started drawing on her own layer with what she wanted.
And then Tiff took a pencil and drew on another layer with what she wanted.
It was amazing.
And to have all this functionality that it was just so incredibly intuitive.
And we are friends with Craig Hockenberry here, and they have not asked us to ever say anything about this app.
They're not sponsoring.
We're doing this completely on our own volition here.
it is that good.
Like it is just, it is the perfect sketching, doodling, illustrating app for the Apple pencil.
It is made specifically for the pencil.
It has, it had like day one support for all the, you know, like the double tap on the new pencil and everything.
Like you can customize that to be what you want it to be.
You can like switch between tools.
You can switch between eraser, you know, whatever you want it to be.
The ink engine seems very responsive.
Um,
Because I'm not an artist, I haven't used a lot of these apps, but I've seen Tiff use some of them, and some of them are kind of sluggish or choppy or just not very smooth.
Linnea is totally smooth and awesome.
It's a great app.
It doesn't feel like it was made by...
some like big company who mostly writes java software and they kind of crapped out this ipad app like no it was made by people who really know what they're doing who really love the the platform and who really get the platform and use it to its full advantage so it is a fantastic app very easy to use for casual people like me and uh and you could see from from their promo shots and everything like if you are a more talented person you can get amazing results out of it but you don't need to be a talented person to use it and that's
I can say that about very few iPad drawing apps, especially very few that are optimized for the Apple Pencil.
But this is one and I strongly, strongly recommend it.
Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly.
And again, Craig's a friend of ours, but we're saying this because we mean it, not because he's a friend of ours.
And the thing that I liked about it, just to put a bow on this not-sponsor-sponsor read, is that the UI was extremely intuitive, even for someone who has no idea what I'm doing.
I don't think I've ever owned Photoshop, and I don't think I've even ever pirated Photoshop, which might make me the only human alive.
That is not-
Maybe at some point.
You were a teenager in the 2000s.
How did you not pirate Photoshop?
That's my point.
So I vaguely understand what layers are for and how they work and so on and so forth.
But with Linnea, it's extraordinarily intuitive and really, really cool.
And you can use it just for note-taking and pencil and paper type stuff, which is great.
But we should move on.
Marco, how is your matte screen protector going?
So far, so good.
I've actually – so we heard from a few people, mostly what we heard because I had asked basically like do any matte finish screen protectors exist that don't have like the rainbow noise kind of like moiré looking pattern or whatever it is.
Like the refraction of the matte surface above the glass screen makes kind of like a rainbow noise look and it kind of –
It makes retina screens look kind of crappy, especially when displaying white content.
So I basically asked, does anybody know, does any matte screen protector exist that doesn't have this problem?
Kind of leaning towards, I wasn't sure that it could exist.
And most of the responses were, no, it doesn't exist, or it can't exist.
A few people recommended that I try tempered glass screen protectors.
And so I got a couple of brands.
So I got one coming, I think, tomorrow.
So I'll try that out, and I'll report back next week.
But
I still like it a lot and I've mostly stopped noticing the downsides of it.
Like I've mostly stopped noticing that weird rainbow noise effect most of the time I'm using it.
And so I'm just enjoying the nice finish of it.
So I'm kind of happy with it, honestly.
And it does indeed feel very good with the Apple Pencil.
um it is the um the paper like one the paper dot me i think paper like.com one of those um so it's fine uh i'm i'm still as happy with it as i was last week and but at the same time like if i can get one that doesn't have that rainbow noise i am certainly interested in trying out alternatives so i'm going to try out one of the glass ones see if it's actually any different or if it's any better or worse and uh go from there
You know, it just occurred to me I have some more pencil-related FU.
And through the magic of editing, maybe you'll just slide this in earlier.
But either way, one of the things that I noticed about the pencil is that I do not generally do the mic approach of manipulating the UI with the pencil.
So obviously, if I'm in a drawing app, I'll tap buttons and things like that with the pencil.
But if I'm just using the iPad, say, looking at, I don't know, TweetBot or something like that, I don't typically do that with pencil.
I typically do that with my finger.
However, there have been occasions where I've maybe selected text or maybe I am on a thread in Twitter and it's at Casey Liss, at Mark Warman, at Syracuse, at some random person, at some other random person, and I'm trying to tap on one of those usernames in order to figure out who this person is.
having a precise pointing device that works with the iPad is really nice because by no fault of tap bots who make tweet bot, when you have this list of all these different accounts, especially if they're like, you know, and it threw a new line.
So they're one on top of the other.
Maybe it's just me, but it's hard for me sometimes to, to, to tap on the exact account I want to hit.
And sometimes I'll grab the one below or to the right or to the left.
Well,
i don't ever have that problem with the pencil and goodness text selection if you're not going to do that with the keyboard say you're in like safari or something like that uh so you're selecting read only text that is even more incredible with the apple pencil and so for that i've really liked it and it made me think huh it would be really cool to have a really precise pointing device for this ipad i wonder what it would be like to have a touchpad oh god
so somehow i've now backed myself into kind of sort of wanting a touchpad or trackpad i should say i'm sorry on uh on an ipad which is something i think steve trouton smith has been barking barking up that tree for a while if i'm not mistaken oh yeah so yeah that's a thing that's a thing in my world now
The iPad started out with mostly no good input accessories.
They actually shipped that weird dock that held it in portrait mode from the beginning and had a keyboard.
That existed, but I'd never even seen one in real life.
I don't know anybody who ever bought one.
It wasn't really made to be used.
Heck, the first iPad didn't even really have any design accommodations for a case.
That's why that first iPad case was so horrendous.
The big rubber condom thing that went over it.
But over time, the iPad, despite everybody who is kind of like a tech commentator or like an iPad enthusiast or purist saying like, we don't need a keyboard, we don't need a stylus, and then over time, keyboard and stylus were both added and it turned out they're awesome.
And for a lot of people, that made the difference between the iPad being a really good, useful device for them more frequently and it not being.
I think trackpad support is one of those things where
At first, we're like, who needs that?
You have Tux.
You have your fingers.
It's not made for a mouse pointer, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
There's lots of arguments you can make for the trackpad not being necessary or being somehow against your religion.
But ultimately, adding better and more precise input devices to the iPad has helped the iPad tremendously.
Because while it is awesome to have something that you can detach from everything and just have a tablet and just use Tux for everything, that's great to have that option.
But what we also keep seeing from actual experience with these things and market demand is that if you give people ways to make it more like a laptop, they like that.
And some portion of those people will buy that.
And not only will you then have those extra accessory sales, but you will have more people using iPads more of the time because they're able to fit them into more places in their life.
So a trackpad is just continuing that process of the iPad slowly becoming more laptop-like.
I think it's only a matter of time.
Yeah, it really surprised me.
I don't know that I want a trackpad, but man, there are definitely times where I think it may not be so bad.
And that was a startling conclusion for me to come to.
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Oh.
We have had the extraordinary luck of having extremely interesting news happen just hours before the show.
And we are recording on a Wednesday evening.
And right around the end of trading, Apple froze trades on their stock and announced that they are altering their, I'm sorry, revising their guidance for Apple's fiscal 2019 first quarter, which ended on December 29th.
And I guess the TLDR on this is that they're expecting to earn a lot less revenue than they initially thought.
And from what I've understood from the initial response from this, the last time this happened was 2002 or thereabouts that they've said, oh, things are looking way different than we expected.
And
I don't know a lot about this.
I know that there are a lot of rules in the United States from the Security and Exchange Commission about when you need to report things, how you report them, and so on and so forth.
So I presume some of this was compulsory, but one way or another, Apple has made a formal statement, including a letter to investors written by Tim or signed by Tim anyway.
saying, hey, things are not looking near as rosy as we thought they would, and we have some plans to fix it, but whoa.
So that's kind of the quick summary.
Let's start with John.
Anything else you want to add, and what's your initial take on this?
It's easy to get lost in the details of the financial stuff here, but we tend not to cover earnings calls on this show and get lost in the business minutiae and all that.
But this is noteworthy for the reason you just said, that in general, Apple tends to give guidance, as they call it, to say, our next quarter, here's what we think we're going to do.
And they give ranges, but fairly...
narrow ranges say here's how much are we think our revenue is going to be here's how much you think our profit is going to be they give all this information for many many years traditionally apple would always beat its guidance they would say here's what we're going to do and they would always do a little bit more than it like so much so it was clear they were always low-balling because it looks so good like we told you we were going to do five widgets and we did seven widgets isn't that great and we're like wow they did seven and they said five um that went on for many many years eventually i don't know five years ago i'm so bad at measuring time
sometime in the semi-recent past, several years ago, they changed to say, we're not going to do that thing where we lowball our guidance anymore.
Now we're going to give you like actual guidance where we're going to give you a range of numbers.
It's going to be between five and seven.
And then when the time comes, we're probably going to get a six.
Right.
For all the numbers that we did.
And they've been doing that for many years.
And they changed their accounting.
And there's a whole bunch of details there.
Right.
So we've been in this.
The current period we're in is the period in which Apple says what they're going to do within a range.
And they mostly hit that range.
Occasionally, they're at the high end of the range.
Occasionally, it's lower in the range from usually low.
They're at the middle or high end of the range.
Every once in a while, they exceed the range by a little tiny bit, but not so much that you think they're low-balling everything.
And this event is noteworthy because they had to, again, I don't know the details, maybe they had to or they did.
Either way, they did announce that, remember that range we gave you?
yeah, we have to give you a new range.
We actually think it's going to be less than even the bottom end of our range, which has never happened, you know, in recent memory.
Again, we're going all the way back to 2002 the last time that happened.
It's ancient history.
And it's a very long document detailing basically if you have like an entire room of people, including like every tech podcast, come up with as many reasons as you could think of why Apple might not hit its revenue target.
like they're all in this document like you name it they could think of like they were scraping the bottom of the barrel for like also we had that thing where we let you replace your battery cheaply that couldn't have helped and they're right that couldn't help revenue numbers but like all right okay you know like the shortfall is like uh it's some astronomical number because all of apple's numbers are astronomical but it's like
you know billions of dollars right in absolute value percentage wise it's like five to ten percent depending on like they're like five percent off their uh their uh low end and like ten percent off their high end of the previous estimates right so percentage wise it's not like they have 50 drop something and it's apparently only revenue like all the other numbers they gave are correct but it's just you know revenue is the numbers that they're missing and
And they tried to more or less blame it all on China, which is probably easy to do, the iPhone in China specifically, which is probably easy to do because, again, the numbers are so big.
But without us knowing, and we probably won't know because they don't report unit sales anymore, without us knowing all the details, you can say they basically said, like, the entire shortfall could be accounted by the shortfall in China.
All right.
But that doesn't tell me whether non-China locations went up or down.
You know, is the U.S., which is basically the only thing that we know about, is the U.S.
the same?
If the world was just the U.S., would they have hit their numbers?
Would they have exceeded their numbers?
Right.
Or is it that U.S.
went down too, but China went down by more?
Or is, like, I don't know.
We don't know those kind of details, but we all know that they blamed it on everything they could think of to blame it on, including economic conditions in China, tariffs, trade, currency.
Like, I forget.
There's a huge list of things.
Yeah.
But yeah, that's the story.
And they did a little bit in saying, what are we going to do about it?
Like, that's the part I chose to put into the show notes.
Like, they're not going to, you know, they don't make announcements about future products and blah, blah, blah.
But they did say something, which I don't know if they have to say something, but they did said we can't change macroeconomic conditions, which is true.
But we this is Apple speaking are undertaking and accelerating other initiatives to improve our results.
So undertaking.
Obviously, they should always be undertaking initiatives to improve their results because that's what a company is.
They are accelerating those initiatives.
Right.
One such initiative is making it simple to trade in a phone in our stores, finance the purchase over time and get help transferring data to a new phone.
Making it simple to trade in phones, we saw that and we talked about it a show or two ago.
Marco pointed out, I think it was last year or maybe the show before, that Apple was making a serious push to tell you, hey, come to our stores and you can get a new iPhone for $400.
Asterisk, asterisk, only if you trade in one of the other phones.
They've been changing their homepage to have more urgent come-ons.
They've been sending more emails and spam push notifications.
Looking kind of desperate.
This is different than all the other times that everyone said, oh, iPhone sales might be bad because Apple's behavior, Apple itself was behaving differently.
There's always been stuff where they're like, oh, part supplier says iPhone orders are down and iPhone is doom and gloom.
Like there's tons of people who are motivated to say that about Apple.
And that's a lot of the reason why people are ignoring it.
But in this case, Apple's behavior was different.
And that's how you can kind of tell that things weren't going great.
All right.
So making it simple to trade in phones in our stores.
Was it hard to trade in phones?
I mean, they should have said upping the marketing budget telling people you can get a new phone for less than you think if you give us your old phone.
Finance purchase over time?
Great.
Buy your iPhone on a layaway plan because we know they cost as much as a house.
Get a mortgage.
Get a second mortgage for your phone.
Probably not going to really move the needle too much.
Get help transferring data is the one that pissed me off the most because I'm like, get help transferring data to the new phone?
How about you just make that easy enough that you don't need to go into a store to get help?
Like, is someone not buying an iPhone?
Like, I was going to get a new $1,000 iPhone, but it's so hard to transfer data.
It is kind of annoying to transfer data, but the solution is not to say...
We'll make it easier for you to get help transferring data.
Just make it better.
Like, ugh, I don't like that one.
And going through more of the litany of reasons, like, can you think of some other reasons Apple might not have made as much money?
Like, they were listening to things like...
customers adapting to a world with fewer carrier subsidies, which is a transition that we are at the tail end of at best.
That's probably true if you compare it to many years ago when subsidies did hide the cost of the iPhone, but you're really scraping the bottom of the barrel.
If you're going to throw that out to say, here's another reason why we might not have made as much money.
That is probably one of the reasons.
These are lots of reasons, but if you put them in a big pie chart, they'd be those little wedges that you can't fit the name in, right?
They just have to have the line going down to it.
Yeah.
And there's lots of, you know, lots of stuff in the China section are like coded language, basically blaming U.S.
government trade policies without calling them out by name.
Economic conditions in China, less traffic in stores in China, you know, just lots of reasons that.
you know expensive phones are not selling as well as they were in china now everyone in the u.s probably including us uh sees these results hey they're not they're not moving as much money through apple not as many people are giving money to apple not as many people there's not much money is coming from customers into apple that's what revenue is it's like customers gave this money to apple for their things it doesn't take into account how much it cost apple to make those things or anything like that it's just like people have money they give it to apple goes into the apple machine that's revenue um
And there's less of that.
And when we see that story, it fits right into our narrative that we've been talking about for the past six months or whatever, that Apple has been increasing the prices on its products slowly but surely because because they could.
You know, I forget what you know, we never knew the correct economic term and never looked it up.
But the idea is that if they increase the price of their products, whether it be Macs or iPhones or whatever, fewer people will buy them.
But will it be so much fewer that they will make less money?
Or will they actually make more money?
Because, you know, 5% fewer people will get them, but we'll sell it for 10% more.
And so we come out ahead.
And when you think you've saturated the market and sold as many iPhones as you're going to sell, increasingly the price of each iPhone sold...
is one way you can try to get more money out of people uh and the the narrative that fits with that and these results together is saying well they found the limit they found how much can you raise the price until it starts to it still starts to become a net loss they found the limit and
that may be true but it's hard to tell without knowing because again we're commenting from the perspective of the u.s market which is the only thing we really know and have any kind of intuitive feel for because we live in the u.s right and intuitively we have all sorts of anecdotal stories from people and you know that the phones are really expensive now we know people who aren't buying them and didn't upgrade because they're too expensive and so on and so forth but if all the shortfalls in china we have no idea what the heck is going on with china except for what we're told in these types of stories
Just to give you an example, Ben Thompson had a story last year in March explaining yet another reason why Apple might be in trouble in China.
And it had to do with the fact that iOS is not an important differentiator in China because the most important thing in China is not the operating system or the apps available, but one particular app that dominates massively, which is WeChat.
which is used by 900 million people, which is astronomical.
And, you know, iPhones run WeChat, but so do Android phones.
And so the iPhone has to sell itself based on the pizzazz of the particular form factor and hardware.
And if the pizzazz is gone, like from year to year, there's nothing keeping anyone on iOS.
It's like, well, WeChat is available on Android, too.
And that's the application that means the most to me and the only really important application.
So if Android phones look cool this year, I'll go to them.
The idea being that when Apple has a cool phone like the X, people will flock to it.
But when they have a less interesting phone like the XS, it's like, oh, it looks just like the X. I saw that already.
They don't have the platform lock-in that they have.
That makes sense to me, too.
But I have no idea if it's that factor, if it's the tariffs, if it's economic downturn in China in general, if it's because the phone prices are increased, if it's all those things combined.
But the bottom line is any kind of situation like this where Apple is doing worse than it expected to.
makes apple look bad not so much that their numbers are down but that they were surprised by it and had to revise their guidance that wall street hates it when they see uncertainty they would you know apple would have been punished if they said our revenue numbers are going to be lower uh they're going to be this amount and this amount is lower than you might have hoped but if they met that guidance people would think apple knows what they're doing they know exactly what numbers they're going to get when they announce numbers have to lower them makes everybody a little bit scared and so apple's stock price is being punished for that
But when things go badly like this, every part of Apple's product strategy is suddenly reopened for debate within the company.
So that whole thing about increasing the prices of your products slowly and putting less stuff in the box for that price, that's now more up for grabs than it used to be.
The idea of giving people minuscule amounts of iCloud storage, right?
You know, we need that service revenue or whatever.
That may be more, again, more up for grabs than it was before.
Because when things go badly, people are much more open to new ideas, right?
Ideas that would never be discussed before.
Like, why would we reduce our service revenue?
That's the most important part of our business.
It's growing so fast.
It went up 20%.
Blah, blah, blah.
Why would we give people more iCloud storage for free?
I'm hoping that this Christ-a-tunity makes that topic come up again at Apple and say, you know, we could – maybe we've passed the limit on the price of our phones.
Maybe we need to have a more affordable phone model.
Maybe we can keep our prices exactly the way they are but just make the perceived value higher.
by you know doing something different with the products and you know i don't know like everyone has their own pet peeves they think that you know this now apple will finally do the thing that i wanted them to do but they're gonna have to do something and the things they list are not gonna cut it making it simple to trade in phones and finance the purchase over time and get help transferring data none of those things are going to help this situation
So I hope they have much grander plans.
Unfortunately, Apple's a big ship and takes a long time to turn it.
So whatever plans they have, we're not going to see the results of for probably a year at this point, if at all.
But yeah, this is probably bad news for Apple, but I think good news for us, for consumers, because it's not like Apple's going out of business.
They're doing just fine, right?
They're making bazillions of dollars.
Everything will be great.
But I like to see them sort of on their heels a little bit because that's when real change can happen.
And as anyone who listens to this program knows, we think that some real change is overdue.
You covered everything pretty well, and I think the only thing I will add is what I've missed from Apple in recent years, besides good laptop keyboards and maybe some whimsy.
Do I need to get a bell for you?
It's coming to the point I need to get a bell for you.
It should be like a clack.
It should be a butterfly keyboard clack.
The pleasant sound they make.
Anyway, what Apple has really been missing is hustle.
I've mentioned this before.
It just seems like they're not trying as hard as they used to in certain areas.
It seems like they're coasting a lot.
And they're relying on the fact that they've been the best for so long in certain markets or that they have customers who will buy anything they make like us, who will buy anything they make, no matter how much they charge for it, will buy it all.
And it just seems like in a lot of areas they've been coasting for the last few years.
And yeah, sure, I'm sure we'll hear from people saying, the team's worked really hard.
That's great.
Good for you.
But ultimately, it feels like there's no hustle in certain areas.
Like, for instance, you know, the aforementioned laptops.
Like, the laptop line has not been very competitive recently.
And I don't mean just about price.
I mean the laptop line has not been very competitive recently for like three years in a lot of areas compared to competitors' laptops.
Like you look at what Microsoft is doing, what a lot of the PC makers are doing, sometimes even what Google's doing.
The laptops and like the PCs and like the things they're doing, they're hustling.
They're really trying hard.
They're moving fast.
They're making great hardware.
And yeah, it isn't always perfect.
And yeah, Apple's still ahead in certain areas.
But like they're trying really hard.
You look at what Apple's doing in the laptop line, you're like, are they trying really hard?
Is this the best they can do?
I don't think it is.
It doesn't feel like that.
And if it is, there's a problem.
If this is the best they can do, there's other problems that should be addressed.
But you look at some products and it just feels like there's not a lot of hustle.
Now, this isn't always true.
The iPad is clearly...
zooming ahead constantly, way ahead of even where it needs to be, and there's no one even in sight.
The hardware is doing great.
The software on the iPad is a little lacking, right?
The Mac OS is having a lot of problems recently.
I think this year might have some big changes there, so we'll see what happens there, but it just seems, again, Mac OS, there's no hustle there at all, and there hasn't been for quite a while.
iPad OS, it seems like there's no hustle there.
They're taking their sweet time doing even the smallest improvements to make it
more amenable to pro work and multitasking and everything else.
The iPhone, I think, does well, and they clearly focus a lot there.
I don't think they need too much more hustle in the iPhone area, but it does seem like their other product lines are kind of slow.
Again, whether or not they're actually taking their foot off the gas, I don't know.
We'll never know.
We'll hear reports from people on the inside saying it both ways.
We're going to hear from people saying, yeah, you know what?
Ever since some manager took over, then everything's been slow, and so-and-so ruined the company.
And we're also going to hear from people who are going to be like, you know, my team worked really hard on this, or I knew these people worked really hard, and they're doing everything they can.
It's limited resources.
So we don't know what to believe.
But what it looks like from their customers, from our point of view, looking at what Apple's doing and looking at what their competitors are doing in the meantime,
It sure seems like Apple has very little hustle in some key areas that a lot of us care about.
So I would love to see something light a fire under them.
Like John said, we do tend to have better output from Apple when they have some competition or some challenges.
And we haven't seen that feeling from them in a lot of these areas in a while.
So I'm hoping this is something to push in that direction a little bit.
And I guess we'll see what happens.
I wouldn't expect them to turn on a dime and to immediately change everything.
But to have them fail once in a while and to have something like this happen where they get egg on their face in a pretty big way for the financial results of their largest, most profitable product by a long shot, that's a pretty big failure.
I know they're not going to go out of business or anything, but pride-wise, that's a pretty big failure.
And they haven't had one of those in a long time, and I think they've really, really needed this because they've just gotten too complacent, and they're not pushing, they don't have their foot on the gas enough, and I really want to see that change.
And I hope this will nudge them in that direction.
See, I wouldn't describe it that way in terms of hustle and effort.
Like, I think they – this is going to sound terrible, but it's, like, actually vaguely true in the – you know, the work smarter, not harder thing.
Like, I think they work too hard in – like, they have too much hustle in certain areas.
It's kind of like when we were talking about the MacBook era that –
It's not that they're not trying to make a great product.
That's part of people throwing around that Steve Jobs quote.
I think, in fact, Marco, you retweeted somebody mentioning it like that you shouldn't chase profits.
Steve Jobs is something like that.
You shouldn't chase profits.
You should just try to make the best product you can make.
And if you make a really good product, profits will follow.
And everyone nods their heads like, yeah, I totally agree with that.
And everyone in Apple will say it or whatever.
But the thing that's not said, the unspoken, very important assumption in that statement is that
you the creator or that there exists or that you the creator have a way to measure the goodness of a product and that is where i think apple's falling down like they seem to have a tremendous amount of hustle into the minute details of fit and finish and uh you know object purity of the things they make and
But that doesn't actually make a good laptop, a good phone, a good whatever.
Like they're so obsessed with certain details and they're blinded to the fact that good product doesn't mean amazing tolerances, beautiful finish.
Like that's all part of a good product.
But there are other parts that make a good product and they're losing sight of those products by putting too much hustle into having the minimum number of screws and the lowest number of moving parts and
and incredibly small gaps around all the keys in their keyboard and other stuff like that, right?
Look at how stable these keys are.
They're so stable because we wanted that so badly.
I actually think key stability is a valid thing to apply to, but just so... Yeah, but at the expense of everything else.
No, but I'm saying that.
I think it's more valid than your thing.
But the fewest number of holes on the outside of it because simplicity is the ultimate sophistication, blah, blah, blah, right?
tremendous hustle as you would say tremendous effort in areas like that but not nearly as much effort to thinking about the you know other aspects of the product they think about the other aspects it's not like they're ignoring them right it's a balance right and so that gets back to the statement we just make great products it's premised on the idea which steve when steve jobs was around he just he also just assumed it's like well i know what's good right and
most of the time he did.
Occasionally he didn't.
The iPod Hi-Fi wasn't that great.
The Power Mac G4 Cube, not that great, even though it was super cool.
But that's the most important thing.
We'll just concentrate on making great products.
If you lose sight of, if your opinion of great product is different than your customer's opinion of great product, you start to have this kind of disconnect.
And I don't think it's because of lack of effort.
I think it's because of misdirected effort.
So you've got this whole company of very smart people working really, really hard,
on ever so slightly the wrong balance of things and you do that long enough you end up in a situation where you have products that are amazing in many regards but your customers find vaguely unsatisfying and you're increasing the price because to make a product as fine and as beautiful as insert current apple product here it costs more money to make and is in fact better in exactly the way the ways that you thought it would be better
It is nicer and more solid.
Even stuff like it has amazing battery life and you make the CPU.
There's many areas where they are excelling and it's worthwhile, but many areas where they are excelling and it is less worthwhile.
I think the phones, maybe it was just bad luck that they happen to be pressing up the prices on their phones at the same time that
a market that that's super important to them because it's the only place where they can have any substantial growth takes a downturn that's the worst time to have 1200 phones that suddenly become 1400 phones because of tariffs or whatever right but on the other hand it's kind of their own fault for abandoning the low end of the uh of the phone line and saying we're just going to sell old phones to fill that gap which is less satisfying to consumers because old phones just feel old because they've been seen before even if you just
put out a new phone that is no better than the old phones, you know, even though they can be, but looks and feels different and has a new name.
Like, just basics like that.
And we've talked about the laptop line and the Mac.
This is not about, this is just about the phone.
But I continue to think that it's not lack of effort, not lack of hustle.
It's a slight misbalance of the prioritization.
In the end, it's a crisis of taste.
It's like, how do you, you know, how do you tell when a product is good?
We're just going to make the best, we're just going to try to make a good product.
You better make sure that what you think is good is what everyone else thinks is good, right?
And that was another Steve Jobs video someone put up.
We just try to make the best products we can, and if consumers like them, we succeed.
If consumers don't, we don't.
In the end, it's kind of as simple as that.
I mean, there's more complexity to it, but if people liked the phones that Apple was putting out,
liked as in in their whole not just like oh if i gave you this phone for free would you like it but just here's a product here's a price here's everything about this phone what do you think of it and what consumers thought is we are not inclined to give you as much money as you thought we were going to give you for the phones that you are offering
And that is a time for Apple to look at what they are offering customers and say, what is it about what we're offering that they don't like?
Do they not like the phones?
Do they not like the price?
Do they not like the combination?
Do they not like these features?
Blah, blah, blah.
The answer is not that they had difficulty transferring the data.
And the answer is not that they wanted a layaway plan, for crying out loud.
Obviously, they're not going to tell us what they're really going to do.
But it's kind of a shame because things like the XR, I think, are a great new, previously unforeseen balance of features and price.
uh but maybe the 10s is not an unforeseen balance of features and price and is instead an extremely expensive phone that is not that much better than the old phone and maybe abandoning the se and abandoning the low end of the line to just hand me down phones is not a great strategy um i don't know so yeah i think we're going around circles here but anyway i just i just want to say that i don't think it's a lack of effort i think it's misdirected effort
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One of the things that I believe we've talked about on the show and made brief rounds through people like us a few years ago was, hey, retention is going to be a problem for Apple.
And we said this, I don't know exactly when, but I found a post from Gruber that he made about this back in 2013.
And it was interesting to me thinking about, you know, I don't know what it's like to be an Apple employee, but my assumption is that a lot of your compensation for being an employee is in the way of stock or stock options or stock grants or something like that.
So in other words,
Maybe you make $100,000 a year doing whatever it is you do at Apple, but you might get $50,000 or $100,000 or $200,000 worth of stock-related things every year.
And so a lot of your compensation is involved in Apple stock.
Well...
I looked earlier today and the stock was at $232 as recently as October.
And when I looked earlier today, it was at $157.
And by the time this makes it to you, I bet you it's going to be a lot lower because all this stuff happened after hours that we've been discussing.
So that makes me wonder, you know, if Apple stock –
has just taken a kind of big dump, then what does that mean for talent?
And a lot of times, from what I can tell from way out here in the East Coast, it seems like when this sort of thing happens, a lot of times a lot of people will leave and go to one of the other Silicon Valley darlings.
You know, you'll see, not immediately, but you'll see a bit of a quiet exodus to Facebook or maybe Tesla or something like that.
And I just got to thinking and I wondered what your guys' take was.
Do we think that this retention problem is still a thing?
Do we think it's related to the stock price?
And if their stock really does dive, does that create a crisis?
And that's probably too strong a word, but I don't know of a better one.
A crisis of retention and talent at Apple.
And then secondarily, where does this talent go?
Because Facebook is evil.
Tesla seems like it's an awful place to work.
Google hasn't been all that interesting lately, at least from what I can tell.
And I'm sure I'm going to get a bunch of email about this.
But I can't point to anything that Google's done lately that's been specifically interesting.
So where does the talent go?
Do they all just go to startups and hope for the best?
Where does this all go?
So, Marco, is there a problem here, do you think?
And if so, where are all these people going to go?
I mean, I'm not really very well qualified to enter this because I have never, well, at least not for a very long time, sought a job in Silicon Valley.
I haven't ever had a job there.
And I haven't really even had a job for nine years or something, eight years.
So it's hard.
I'm not really in the market.
So it's hard for me to say specifically in that market what's going on.
We have heard, though, that for multiple people on multiple occasions, we have heard that, yes, indeed, many Silicon Valley companies, Apple included, do base a lot of their competition on stock options.
And so if you're working there, and I've heard on a number of occasions, I don't –
I hope I'm not insulting anybody here.
I've heard that Apple is kind of cheap with the salaries relative to the competition.
They don't have the highest salaries in the Valley, which itself I think is dumb because I've heard of a lot of great people
very talented people who choose not to work at Apple for reasons, including that.
And that's stupid.
Like that's, that's an easy problem to fix.
They have the money to fix it.
They have plenty of the money to fix it.
Uh, that, that should not be a reason why somebody chooses not to work at Apple.
Uh,
Assuming that's true, because I have heard that on a number of occasions, then the stock really is a substantial part of people's compensation.
A lot of jobs will offer some degree of stock options, but unless it's an early-stage startup, those are not going to be worth a fortune.
They might be a nice bonus.
That's the much more common scenario.
When you have a scenario like that, you are...
tied to the stock price for retention on some level, a dip like this would hurt a little bit and some people might quit, but it wouldn't be a huge problem for you.
Whereas if you're relying on the stock options as a substantial part of the compensation, this becomes a larger problem.
So by making it a larger part of the compensation, you are basically taking more risk with your employees.
You are putting more of your personnel problem onto your stock price than you necessarily need to.
And that, I don't think, is a wise move for a company like Apple where...
even when Apple grows, I think most of the large growth is behind them, not in front of them.
They went through this awesome growth period.
I think that's mostly done.
I think everyone, including the stock market, seems to be agreeing with that now.
The potential upside for them, the money they could save by giving things as stock options instead of more salaries to people, I think most of that upside is behind them.
Now they're just left with all this risk.
I hope that what they do and maybe what they have been doing, I'm not sure.
I hope they are making the stock options less of a part of people's compensation and making up for that with higher salaries.
That's what I hope.
But I have pretty much no information on that subject, so I really can't say what they actually are doing.
And if you are an Apple employee, Marco, and you decide to leave, where are you going?
Again, I've never worked at any of these companies before.
I have visited the campuses of a few of them.
The biggest contrast for me was visiting Apple and then visiting Facebook.
I cannot possibly see how somebody who works at one of those places could go to the other one.
I just don't see it.
They're so insanely different in atmosphere, environment, the types of people you have, the types of work that you're doing, whether you're doing good things for the world or whether you're being the worst company in the universe.
There's a pretty huge difference between these two companies.
So...
To me, it was in no context.
I was in these two places, and I'm like, well, clearly, Apple, this is where the adults work.
Facebook, all the teenagers can go there.
That's great.
Here at Apple, this is where the adults get real work done.
That was the clear feeling between the two places.
When you add in places like Google, I don't know.
I've never visited Google.
Well, I visited their New York office, which is hilarious, but I don't think that would really count.
I don't know how much they're working for the same people
in a lot of areas.
Now, there are some areas where they are very competitive with their companies, where Apple has had problems getting and retaining talent.
One of the big areas there is services, and especially in the area of machine learning, Siri and related technologies, big data problems, things like the iCloud infrastructure kind of stuff.
Apple has historically had a lot of problems getting and retaining talent there and have lost a lot of those people to places like Google.
because they do more AI research type stuff that is higher prioritizing the company.
So Apple does have problems there, but I don't think those are usually money-related necessarily.
Those tend to be more like people who want a company that prioritizes their area of expertise higher than Apple does.
So I wouldn't expect that to affect that kind of hiring.
So ultimately...
Again, I am not anywhere near an expert on this.
But I think Apple can avoid these problems if they make stock options less a part of people's salaries and make up for it with actual money in the salaries.
So I know this question was about retention.
But in some respects, this is actually...
good for Apple's ability to hire.
Like Margaret just said, Apple has long since passed the part where you're going to get options and you're going to get rich off of them because they had their big growth period and now they're the biggest company in the world.
Probably the amount of growth that they're going to have in the future is not going to be
as great as it has been in the past.
So no one is getting hired on board to say, and guess what?
We're going to give you some options, and in a few years, they're going to be worth so much more than they are now.
Never mind that I don't know what the mix of options and RSUs and all that stuff is.
Like, they could just give you them...
give you shares and say well the shares are worth this much money so we're just giving you money it's another form of giving you money right that works fine as in and is you know you can trade that off with salary but the idea that you get hired and there's a big upside for you because whatever the stock price is now in a few years it'll be even higher well if they take a massive disproportionate somewhat irrational hit to their stock prices they probably are sure to do um
and it's sustained because let's say apple makes some changes to its business for the long-term success but in the short term just make wall street angry about them not making as much money or profit as they did before that actually makes it easier for apple to hire because apple can say we are massively undervalued now when you come on board we're going to give you options and no they're not going to go up by 3 000 but it's conceivable they could go up by 50 or 75 so
Whereas before, when their stock price was 232, the highest it's ever been or whatever, you hire someone on and say, and guess what?
Next year, our stock price would probably be best case, like 232 again, 230 something.
There's not a big growth story to be told there.
But if they're down in the dumps and if they have a reasonable story or if people think
like that Apple is undervalued, that it's too low, that this company makes so much money and has so much success, so much brand value, their stock price should not be this low.
And there's people who thought they were too low at 232 because their price derring ratio is always ridiculous as compared to some of their competitors, right?
Yeah.
But taking a huge hit because, like, this is the first bad news in, you know, multiple decades or whatever, is a time that it makes them easier for them to hire.
Now, retention, if you have a bunch of options and you're like, you can exercise these options at $200 and now the stock price is $140, you feel crappy, right?
But I have no idea what Apple's been doing in terms of giving people options versus giving people RSUs or whatever.
Because if they give people shares...
things that are just immediately redeemable for shares and not options, and you have those shares, you're sad because your shares went down.
But if you're in it for the long haul, you're like, well, we'll be back above 200 in a couple years.
You're not too bummed, so I don't think it's going to hurt your retention.
And we're hearing from people in the chat and stuff that Apple does just do RSUs and that kind of thing, not actual straight options.
And that's fine.
I think all this actually applies regardless.
Basically, you're tying a substantial part of your employees' compensation to the stock price of the company.
that you know however you do it that is the result but it's not but options are tying your compensation to the growth of the stock price whereas rcus you're just giving them instead of giving them money you're giving this over the other money that is variable but it's like it's not going to collapse to zero right so the variability of the stock price even if it goes down a little bit okay so we didn't actually give you as much money as you thought we did but if you hang in there a little bit it'll go up and it's not going to drop to one percent of what we gave you whereas options all you care about is the growth of the company and if you have
Anything less than – if you have 0% growth, we gave you nothing.
It's all about growth.
So options are much more applicable to a company on the trajectory, the big growth trajectory.
That's where you get really rich, where they give you what they thought was a small amount, but the stock price quintuples, and now you've got way more than you thought you did.
Yeah.
I don't know what their compensation structure is like.
And, you know, Apple, like reportedly Tesla, uh, similar companies like you should just be glad to even work here because we have high prestige and they do.
There is lots of prestige working for Apple.
There is lots of prestige working for Tesla or whatever, you know, company that has a good reputation.
And it's generally, you know, when you, when you say you work there, people are impressed.
Prestige is part of your compensation package, just like those stupid Falcon wing doors are part of the, uh, the futuristic compensation package you get when you buy a Tesla.
Um,
And to the degree that it becomes less impressive to work for Apple, they have to adjust for that.
But I think – in the end, I think the upside of being able to hire more based on being massively undervalued probably offsets any people who are sad because their RSUs are – their shares are worth less now than they were.
Because I think, to Marco's point about Apple being a company for adults –
Most people who are at Apple, I imagine, are in it for the long haul.
It's not that much of a revolving door company.
As much as we know so many people who left Apple and come back, they do it in waves of multiple years.
It's not like they work there for three months, then leave, then come back, then leave, then come back.
It's like, well, I worked at Apple for eight years, then I left and did some other thing for four years, then I went back to Apple for eight more years.
It's...
I think people probably don't like it that the price went down, but I think that Apple has long since stopped being a company where employees are obsessing over the stock price.
I hope so anyway.
One other angle that I hadn't considered until you just said the whole revolving door thing is that a lot of the people who left Apple –
like over the last decade, and a lot of them came back or whatever else.
A lot of that was because we had this booming app industry outside of Apple.
And when you work for Apple, you can't have apps on the side.
They don't allow side projects, really.
And so there was this whole world of the app store booming on the outside.
And all these people in Apple were like, hey, I can make apps.
I know all these frameworks and everything really well, and I know exactly what would make a good app, and I can make apps.
So maybe I should...
strike out on my own and see if i can make it as an app maker and many of them did for a while and then over the last few years as the app market has cooled and become much more challenging to succeed in many people have actually left that world and gone either to apple or gone back to apple who you know who were there before and that was i mean this is again this is anecdata but this i know a lot of people and i heard about a lot more who who had a similar pattern to that
And so maybe if Apple's stock price hit is the result of an overall cooling market out there that we're in for kind of some belt tightening all around and the entire financial market kind of cooling down a little bit.
That actually might be good for Apple's retention because a lot of people might retreat back into the safety of working there and people would be less tempted to leave who are already there because what's going on outside of Apple is less tempting than it is during like a big boom time.
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Josh A. writes, on the most recent episode of Reconcilable Differences, Merlin made passing reference to the seminal conversation on video game controllers pinching the harmonica, which is episode 49 of Hypercritical.
Having just received a Nintendo Switch, I was wondering if John could or had already discussed his opinions on the various permutations of controllers for it.
I'd heard several opinions that the Pro Controller is the, quote, best controller ever made, quote, which seems like a bold statement, although, says Josh, I really do like it.
John, what do you think?
Pro Controller is not the best controller ever made.
But to address the controller-ness of the Switch.
So the Switch is a television console.
It's also a portable console.
Portable consoles, historically and probably permanently, are in ergonomic compromise.
Because the whole point is they have to be portable.
You don't want them to be too big.
And also you don't want them to be too, like...
unwieldy like in difficult to shove into a bag or a case or something so they tend to be flat all right and they tend to be small uh and also in pretty much all the ones i've seen you are holding the entire device up while you use it so not only are you gripping a controller but you are also holding aloft the thing the entire time you play it so they can't be too heavy and that you have very limited options in how
you work the thing um the switch is very flat uh the switch is pretty heavy because it's got a really big screen uh but the switch has a mode where you can play it where you don't have to hold the device you can take the little whatever they call the joy cons you can take them off the side and put the little screen on a little kickstand and now you're not holding the screen you're just holding the little controllers but those little controllers were things that fit on the side of the flat portable device and so they're very flat and they're very small
And they're not as small as, you know, the Game Boy Micro or whatever, like Game Boy Advance Micro.
I think that's the smallest one they ever made.
But they're still small.
And so the main problem with the Nintendo Switch by itself with no other accessories, just with the Joy-Cons, is everything about them is small.
The joysticks are small.
The buttons are small.
The shoulder buttons are small.
The controllers themselves are small.
And whether you keep them on the thing and have to hold up the entire device by the small things or take them off and put the thing on a kickstand...
They're just small.
Probably good for little kid hands.
Not good for adult hands.
Ergonomically, for the most part, the Joy-Cons are very, very bad if you have large hands.
They're not impossible to use.
The quality of the controls on them is good.
The buttons are good.
The joystick is good.
But there's no getting around the fact that they're really small.
The fact that many games expect you to use them as D-pads makes them even worse because...
things on them are not positioned correctly for dpads.
They have to strike this compromise between being sensible to use vertically, and also when you turn them sideways, you can kind of squint and see it's kind of like a dpad, but on a dpad, you wouldn't put the buttons that close to the joystick.
The buttons are practically in the middle on one of the Joy-Cons, and the quote-unquote shoulder buttons are very awkward to hit, so they have those little attachments that make them slightly less awkward to hit, but those attachments make you feel like you're hitting a button that hits a button, because that's exactly what you're doing, and it is not a good feeling.
I find using the Joy-Con in a D-pad mode or in a horizontal mode to be basically painful.
I mean, I have RSI and everything, right?
But even just for regular people, it's awkward, and it is unresponsive.
The shoulder buttons are not as responsive, and if you take off that top thing and just put the shoulder buttons directly, they're like these little recess things.
Bottom line, the Joy-Cons are not good controllers.
They're okay for what they do.
It's amazing that they can be used in so many different ways, but they're not good.
So thumbs down for the Switch, ergonomically speaking, as a controller.
The Pro Controller, on the other hand, is where you do have room to make a thing that is not flat, that it can be a reasonable size.
Pro Controller is really nice.
the fact that it has four buttons that are exactly the same size and a perfectly uniform diamond pattern because that's i don't know geometrically pleasing that's not great i missed the octagonal surround that lets you know what the cardinal directions in the 45s were but i can see the case for omitting it for things like first person shooters where people like to have more free form control than that even though it's not as good for like a platform game or whatever
So the Pro Controller, it is a very good controller.
I don't think it's as good as the GameCube controller, but it is a high-quality controller, and it is miles better than trying to use the Joy-Cons.
Now, even though I've complained about the Switcher economically, bottom line is if you want to use something portable, like as a portable gaming console, and you don't have a table to put the thing up on, you have to hold the entire device in your hand.
If you're holding the entire device in your hand...
it gets the job done like it is i don't see how it could be better without fundamentally changing the switch because it is flat and it is this tall and i wouldn't want it to be any taller and i wouldn't want it to be any less flat than it is like it's already pushing up against that limit with the big thick shoulder pads so it's an understandable compromise but i don't like using it that way and they're not good controllers so that probably went on too long i probably got any longer but i'm cutting myself short
You know, when we were together, John, we played some Mario Kart and I could not agree with you more that using the Joy-Cons in horizontal mode is painful because the little, I don't know, bulges that are kind of used to help you grip them when they're in the normal mode attached to the Switch...
Those bulges end up being physically uncomfortable because you're bracing the Joy-Con against that bulge, which is then jamming into one of your fingers.
And it's just not fun.
Now, that being said, I mean, it's still an amazing device.
And I do love my Switch, even though I don't use it that terribly often.
And I think that I feel like I understand the compromises they made and they all made sense.
But yes, but the Joy-Cons, I don't mind when they're, you know, being used in their regular mode and vertical mode and portrait mode, if you will.
But in landscape, it's it's rough.
Marco, anything to add on that?
Not really.
I hate the Joy-Cons.
Like you guys, I never want to use them.
I never use the Switch portably because I don't like the screen.
It's both too small and also not a very nice screen.
And I really, really hate the feel of the Joy-Cons.
I'm the only person in the world who wants a Switch Plus, like a Switch Max.
I want a thicker, larger Switch that...
It basically has the grip of a Pro Controller, which would, of course, make it massive.
Nobody else except me would actually want such a thing.
And while they're there, they can make the screen really big because we're already making something that's basically the size of a Sega Genesis.
Yeah, I find the Switch ergonomics to be awful, unless you're using a Pro Controller and a TV, in which case, I love it.
So I'm not as much of a controller snob as John.
I don't know if anybody in the world is, but...
That's why we love him.
But I have had no problems with the Pro Controller really, except for the one small problem that there is no way to turn it off.
And so if you, for instance, if you need to transport Pro Controllers in a bag, every time a button is nudged, it will power itself on and try to connect to the switch.
So it is, or if you're just like, if you are moving pro controllers around, say like in a cabinet, they're all going to turn on and try to connect and try to activate and everything.
It's kind of annoying to not have a power switch on it.
Other than that, that is my only complaint.
Other than that, it's totally great.
I love it.
I love that it charges via USB-C.
I love, you know, the feel of it.
I have no complaints about any of the buttons or pads or sticks.
So it's pretty good.
I just want a power switch to turn it off.
Yeah, I agree wholeheartedly with what you said, Marco.
Anchor Oberoi writes, hey, these new AirPods should still be coming at some point or another.
Will they use USB-C or Lightning or any chance for the new AirPods to just have Qi charging standard?
And related, when do you think if ever the iPhone makes a leap to USB-C?
For me, I would be very surprised to see the iPhone or AirPods move to USB-C anytime soon.
That being said, as I collect more and more devices, including the Switch and the Pro controllers, as Marco just mentioned, including my newest GoPro, including my iPad, my MacBook, all of those things are on USB-C.
And I'm kind of really liking having the one USB-C connector for everything.
So I am ready for my new USB-C overlords.
I just don't think they're ready for me yet.
But John, when do you think we're going to USB-C, if ever, on AirPods or phones?
AirPods are weird because the only pattern that can be discerned with Apple's use of USB-C thus far has been that they're going from big devices down the scale.
So the smallest device that has USB-C, not counting the Apple TV, full-fledged device with a screen, is the iPads.
And only recently on the super-duper pro ones, right?
Yeah.
So would they skip over all the middle things and go to one of their smallest things, the tiny little AirPod case?
There's no reason the AirPods have to have Lightning or USB-C.
The case has plenty of room for both.
There's no size considerations.
USB-C chargers are all over Apple's products, but so are Lightning things are all over their most popular product, phones.
The arguments for the phone, for the thinness, and the screen and everything...
like i'm having trouble thinking i mean i'm gonna say no just because like inertia and assuming the airpods were designed a long time ago even though they have you know the new airpods they aren't even released yet i'm assuming it's just gonna be lighting because the existing ones are lightning and i'm and these ones are probably designed shortly after the existing ones with just the addition of the the wireless charging
But there's no reason why they couldn't have USB-C.
So I think actually, surprisingly, AirPods are a candidate to move to USB-C before the phone.
There's lots of reasons to stick with lightning on their most popular product, both the thinnest reasons and also because you don't rock the boat like it's such a popular product.
You don't want to do anything to perturb customers who have tons of lightning cables all around.
But if I had to make a prediction, the next set of AirPods that come out will have a port on them.
That port will be lightning, regardless of their wireless charging situation.
And the phone, I think we've had whole shows where we talked about that, but I don't expect the next phone to be USB-C.
the AirPods case should always have the same port that the iPhone has because you're going to want to charge your AirPods when you have your phone with you sometimes.
And you're going to, like, if the AirPods are USB-C and the phone is lightning, you could be out somewhere using your phone, like on a plane or something, and not have a USB-C charger available to you or easily reached.
And then, you know, you would have to have two different chargers if you...
traveled with an iPhone and AirPods.
That's ridiculous.
You know, we already have enough different charges.
We don't need a reason there.
So I think the, for, you know, wherever possible, the AirPods should charge the same way the phone does.
That being said, I think both should move to USB-C.
I would love to see that because we already have so much of the rest of the world moving to it.
Now...
since I'm pushing pretty hard into USB-C for my travel setup especially, because it's just so nice to have fewer cables and fewer types of connectors and everything.
Everyone wants that, right?
Everybody wants the one cable that can do it all, the one charger, the one battery, whatever else.
And I have all that with USB-C now.
So now, devices I have that are micro-USB or even Lightning,
are weird to me those are like oh i need to get the special cable out to charge my lightning things you know like that's it feels it feels bad it feels like the past and it feels like you know unnecessary friction so the more things that can move to usbc the better and i just i hope we someday can reach the all usbc future before like usbd comes out and we have to change it all again like i just want i just want like two years where it's stable and where everything supports usbc
And I think the main question I have about it, about whether Apple would actually do it or not, is not about MFI licensing of lightning connectors or anything like that.
I'm sure that makes them a lot of money, but I'm sure it pales in comparison to a 2% dip in iPhone sales, for instance.
I'm sure it's not enough money for them to make major product decisions around it.
I am a little concerned.
The reason the USB-C port can fit on the iPad, and the iPad is way thinner than the iPhone, so it isn't an issue of thickness at the case edge, but there is an issue of how thick can the device be and have a screen that goes above a USB-C port.
Because on the iPad, it doesn't.
On an iPad, the USB-C port is basically the depth inside the case of the screen bezel.
So I don't think there's any point in there, or at least not a major point, where the screen is actually going over the USB-C port's internal volume.
On the phone, the margins are a lot narrower.
And so there isn't enough room on a phone to have a USB-C port that the screen doesn't at least partially go over top of.
So I'm a little concerned that maybe that might preclude it.
I mean, I'm sure you can make the phone... There is some thickness for which that would work.
I don't know if Apple's willing to ship a phone that's that thick, but I do really want this product.
I really want an iPhone...
Y and YS and YS Max that has the industrial design of the new iPad, basically.
But it would probably still have... It would be like a hybrid.
It would still have a notch.
It would still have the thinner iPhone margins of the X series, but would be the straight sides and USB-C.
I would love this product.
This is like my dream iPhone.
I don't know if they're actually able to make that or if they're planning on making that.
That would be nice.
But...
That's what I hope.
And if they did that, then I would expect an AirPods update that would also have USB-C because, again, it just makes sense for AirPods and iPhone to have the same charging plug no matter what it is.
I don't think AirPods would go Qi only because I don't think a Qi coil can fit on the back of AirPods.
And I don't see them making the case significantly larger just for that reason.
So there goes that.
Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head with the point about wanting to charge with the same cable that charges the phone.
I think you're absolutely right.
And so I think these will move in lockstep.
Oh, God, I just thought they would probably make us pronounce Y11.
Oh, God, I hope not.
It's the iPhone 11.
It's spelled iPhone Y. It's YS, but it's 11S.
It's the iPhone Ys.
Y is not the Roman numeral for 11, you know.
So that wouldn't stop Apple's marketing department.
Yeah, yeah.
All right.
No and no and then donada, which I think is translated to I do not understand anything.
Right.
In Brazil, Volkswagen is launching a small hatchback featuring Beats Audio, an example of quote unquote Apple selling parts for car manufacturers.
What's in the steel for Apple?
I think money, obviously.
I don't read too much into this.
To me, this is the Beats unit doing the sort of thing that you would expect Beats to do if they were still independent.
So I don't personally see this as that big a deal.
I find it slightly interesting that it's happening in Brazil uniquely.
Apparently, this is in the Novo Polo Volkswagen, or I should say the Volkswagen Novo Polo.
But yeah, I don't read that much into this.
John, am I crazy or is this not a big deal?
I don't even know if there are any Beats hardware.
It's probably just like, you know, who knows who actually makes the audio system of the thing.
It's got the word Beats on it, but I doubt there's any actual Apple engineering that goes into this.
So it's just yet another case of random branding of semi-premium options in cars.
And, you know, Beats is weird because it's one of those companies that Apple acquired, but they got to keep its own brand.
But the Beats brand is not on my personal radar for much of anything.
So I have no idea how popular they are around the world.
Maybe they're big in Brazil or maybe this is just yet another one of those weird card options that comes and goes.
I don't think this is significant.
Yeah, I mean, it's pretty common in the world of audio brands for...
brands that have like a lot of consumer recognition like beats or like bows or harman kardon to license their name to put onto some other thing cars computers fridges who knows but like it like i think actually was beats remember for a while hp laptops would advertise they had some brand names audio in them i think it was actually beats this is before apple bought them um but like this there's a long history of of companies doing stuff like this and
it's almost always like a really shallow marketing deal.
Like they're like, maybe they have like an EQ that boosts the bass all the time and gives it like the beat signature sound.
And maybe beats had to go approve the car and make sure it sounds like beats or something.
But like, that's again, this is a very common thing in the audio marketing world.
And it's, it's not really anything noteworthy.
Yep.
Agreed.
Anyway, thanks to our sponsors this week, Hover, Eero, and Linode, and we will talk to you next week.
Now the show is over.
They didn't even mean to begin because it was accidental.
Oh, it was accidental.
John didn't do any research, Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, cause it was accidental, it was accidental, and you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
It's accidental.
They didn't mean to.
I started using HomeKit for the first time.
You know, it's funny you bring that up.
Me too.
Did I already talk about this on the show?
I don't think I did.
I don't think so.
But we have a single Wemo switch that – or not switch.
I keep calling it a switch.
It's a plug.
Oh, you mentioned an analog.
That's where it was.
That's what it was.
Okay.
Yeah.
I actually want to get one of those.
I keep bookmarking links when people say, oh, you should get this one.
But then someone says, oh, the WeMo plug that everyone recommends only works on 2.4 gigahertz wireless and has some problems.
So if you find one that's good, let me know because I got some plugs I want to try out.
I have like six of those things.
They're great.
I mean, the WeMo app is hilarious garbage, but they all are.
All the apps for smart home things are hilarious garbage.
The good thing is that you don't really need to use the app beyond setup.
You configure it and then
you control it either via HomeKit or via Amazon Alexa or via automation tools.
Can you control it through both?
Yeah, you can actually.
The older generation, you can't or you need a bridge.
I decided a bridge costs like $40 that you can make all the old ones do HomeKit, but...
throughout the like black friday season i scored a few deals where i got them for like 15 bucks each so i just replaced all the old outlets with new ones it was like it was like 15 or more to just get all new ones i'm like all right i'll just do that and not need the stupid bridge forever yeah so what you want is like the white rectangle ones uh those wemo outlets those are the ones that you want not the older were you in the slack where somebody said uh 2.4 gigahertz only and doesn't work well with uh multi uh node systems like euro yes but i haven't had that problem personally
I mean, I have a multi-node system.
So one thing I do, so my system, it's a ubiquitous system, it is an era, but I have it set up so that I have a smart home devices network that only broadcasts from one of the APs.
And this is admittedly an overwrought solution that might not be necessary, but I had some issues in the past that I don't know would still be issues today that were fixed by doing that.
So I set them all up on that.
It's only a 2.4 GHz network, so I avoid that problem too.
And all the smart home things are on that.
And it's not like super subnetted off or anything.
It's not like a fancy separation from the main network.
It's just like a second SSID being broadcast by the wireless access point that they connect to to basically control and limit that to avoid problems.
But these are indeed then controllable via the Alexa cylinder and also by HomeKit.
And also you can set up automation rules in either HomeKit and or the Wemo app.
So if you don't want to deal with certain things in HomeKit or whatever, you can do it in the Wemo app.
You can set up rules.
And it even has some limited intelligence about things like sunset and sunrise, stuff like that.
So it's been fine.
I've used these switches for years, and they've been totally fine.
We keep buying more whenever we have a need.
It's nice.
For Christmas, we put our Christmas tree on one of these, and we could say, hey, cylinder, turn on Christmas, and turn on the Christmas tree.
It's just fun stuff like that.
It's nice at the end of the night to say, turn off everything and have everything turn off when you go upstairs.
But yeah, it's been fine.
And so anyway, I did want to talk briefly about HomeKit.
Not enough to make it a full topic, but basically...
I have finally set up HomeKit.
I finally did it right where I actually moved things out of default room and gave them real names and set up a few scenes so I could ask Siri to turn on bedroom lights or goodnight and have it shut everything off.
And it's not bad.
I've got to say, from the HomePod, it is the fastest thing the HomePod can do.
I complained last week that Siri is just too slow on the HomePod.
It takes forever to respond to things like start a timer so long that you think maybe it didn't hear you, and you start to say it again, and then it says, okay, here's your timer.
But HomeKit stuff is way faster.
I don't know if it's doing it locally or what, but it's way faster.
And then it's also nice to be able to also take my phone in my pocket and just hold the button down and say, turn on outside lights and have my outside lights go on and stuff like that.
So it's nice having it be in multiple places.
There are a few things about HomeKit that are a little bit weird that I'm not used to.
It doesn't appear to be possible to create groups that span multiple rooms and have things in them that are in multiple groups.
I guess scenes are what I'm supposed to use for that, but if I want to create a group called everything, I need two scenes, one to turn them on and one to turn them off, I guess.
I'm still learning all this stuff, so I could be wrong.
But there are certain things about it that are a little bit odd with some of the restrictions.
But the scenes are pretty nice.
They're pretty powerful.
It's nice to be able to set different colors on the hue bulbs and different brightness levels and have something that can turn certain things on but turn certain things off as part of the scene.
So there are powers of it that...
the other systems don't have or that aren't as easy in the other systems the only problem I have with it for the most part is that certain things like Siri tries to be too smart about and I can't get them to work so for like two or three years we've had two lamps with smart outlets in our living room and we've called those to the Alexa cylinder we've called those lamps so we can say hey cylinder turn on lamps
I cannot get the HomeKit to respond to that same command in the same way.
I think Siri is trying to take over lamps and it turns on all the things it knows about that are lights.
And that's not what I want.
You just have to speak it in quotes so it knows it's not a keyword.
So yeah, there's some things like that where I'm going to have to change the name of some things to make Siri less smart about it so it does what I actually want it to do.
and I still as nice as it is to have Siri so quickly responding to things and as nice as it is to have the microphone that's always in my pocket that I can always just pick up and use anywhere in the house and to have the wonderful pickups of the HomePod like it's wonderful long range pickup for that those are all really really nice but you know Siri is still kind of like my kind of dim assistant from California who talks too much and
It's just kind of annoying sometimes.
Like, it gives such long responses to things that I don't want at all.
Like, if you tell your cylinder from Amazon to turn off something, it says, okay.
Or you can even configure it to have the little short, like, doo-doo kind of sound, and that's it, right?
but siri it's like okay i've turned off all those things for you have a good night and happy new year hey while you're upstairs do you want me to you know maybe order some pizza for you or you know hey you know how's you enjoying the weather up there is it nice yeah i hope you have a good day it's like oh my god please stop talking but thank you you did what i wanted thank you that's enough you aren't a real human i don't want to have a conversation with you you don't need to be that polite to me i would just want you to say okay that's it done that's it
So all the extra cuteness and commentary I could really do without.
And if Apple insists on having it in there, I really wish there was just a setting to turn it off.
But otherwise, I'm actually enjoying HomeKit.
I'm trying to use it more to kind of get myself in that world.
The rest of my family still uses the Amazon cylinder for everything.
But I'm trying to use the HomePod and Siri and HomeKit exclusively.
And it's not incredibly easy at times, but for the most part, I'm getting into it, and I finally have an appreciation for this system that I think, like we've heard from our friends for a while, that HomeKit has finally gotten good in recent years.
And I think that's true.
I think HomeKit's finally arrived.
It's finally good.
I just got an Amazon cylinder, by the way.
So now I've got all the systems.
Achievement unlocked.
What was the impetus for that?
It was Yankee Swap.
That's what I got in the Yankee Swap at work.
Was it a full-blown cylinder or the dot?
No, just the dot.
It's a Yankee swap.
What do you expect?
But no, it's there.
I'm already fighting with it because I had the thing for 15 minutes before I was Googling for disable indicator light echo dot.
Of course you were.
It's the original dot, not the new fancy one, but the original dot.
It's got the giant ring of lights, and I wanted that light to go away.
No, it's good because then you have it as a big volume knob.
no i don't i don't like the light uh the answer is you can't disable the light so just in case you were wondering but you know what one one big advantage of that is like you always know whether it is hearing you like that's the one i really don't like with the home pod that unless you're standing right on top of it you can't tell if it's hearing what you're saying but you know the but the echo is like they have that big led ring on top and you can see it from anywhere in the room you could see is it hearing me right now and that's a very valuable bit of feedback that the home pod really needs
Yeah, but it's a little bit aggressive.
Like, it's getting to the point where I was considering Googling how to disable the feature.
Like, when you have notifications or messages, it goes, like, yellow.
Oh, turn that off.
And there's a feature I didn't even know existed, right?
So I could disable that feature, I suppose, to say, please stop telling me about notifications.
Like, when an Amazon package arrived, it just solid yellow the whole time.
Right.
And so I come in and the solid yellow thing and it lets me know that there's something that it wants to tell me.
But I'm not really into that feature.
Like I can tell a package arrived.
I don't need the little thing to be lit up.
So I'm almost at the point where I'm asking disable that merely to just get it to turn off the light.
I wish I could just tell it.
don't turn on your light ever.
Unless I'm talking to you, maybe I would accept it as a feedback to let you know that you heard me.
But if I have not spoken to you, do not turn on any of your lights because they're pretty bright.
So, you know, but anyway, it was free.
Well, you know, free for the cost of me throwing in something into the Yankee swap.
So now I've got all the things, and that's why I was looking for outlet things, because I've got some lights that I want to control, and I will have literally three devices that I can talk to to control those lights.
Maybe I'll connect it up to all of them, and they can all compete to see who controls the lights first.
It is cool to say to your watch, hey, dingus, turn off the Christmas tree and have the Christmas tree turn itself off.
Like that's no different really than using the person in the tube or anything like that.
But it's just something magical about doing that via your watch.
I do think that's quite neat.
I have more practical needs in that I have just floor lamps that are not connected to a switch.
So every time I want to turn them on and off, I have to walk over to the corner of the room and turn on the lamp and then I have to walk over the other side of the room and turn it like by touching them.
So it's actually a practical concern.
Yeah.
That's like, well, you know, it would be nice if I could say something.
The other problem is I have some recess lights that an outlet's not going to help with.
I would actually need like a smart switch or something.
Or smart light bulbs.
There are smart Wemo switches.
I don't know if they're HomeKit compatible yet.
I think they might be.
But there are Wemo wall switches.
I haven't installed them, but some people in the family have and they seem to work well.
It's really nice.
It seems extravagant to install small Wi-Fi devices to let you voice control two lamps in a room so you don't have to walk across the room and touch two lamps.
But when you do that every day,
it's actually a really nice little quality life improvement to just be able to speak into the air.
Hey thing, turn off everything.
And they just go off and yeah, you save 10 steps and you know, it isn't a big deal once, but when you do it every day and you're saving 10 steps every day, like that adds up.
And it's just like, it's just a nice little thing.
It's just, it's just pleasant.
I think any things in my life that make me take 10 more steps every day, not 10 fewer steps.
Yeah, but that should be steps you want to take.
Yeah, yeah.
Exciting, exciting steps.
Yeah.
Quality of steps.
These are low-quality steps.
QoS.