The Load-Bearing Finger
John:
You guys are so sleepy.
John:
Casey's got to work on the whole getting ready to not have any sleep thing.
John:
But lately, Marco's been the one saying he's all sleepy.
Marco:
Yeah, well, my kid's in school now, so now I'm waking up like an hour earlier, so I'm closer to Casey's schedule.
Marco:
I know, you already complained about your early wake-up time.
John:
It's so bad.
John:
It is horrible.
Casey:
Then you go back home.
Casey:
It's funny to me that when I complained and moaned for the first year and a half of this show, it was, oh, get over it.
Casey:
You're fine.
Casey:
Now that the king is having to get up early, suddenly we all have to go to bed.
John:
We should have a month where not only does he have to get up early, but get dressed up in nice clothes and not come back to his house after he drops his son off.
John:
Go to another building where you have to, like, not smell bad and have already eaten and be dressed nice.
John:
I go to a parking lot.
Casey:
And then talk about parking lots afterwards.
John:
uh what do you wear to work john do you wear do you have to wear khakis or can you wear like jeans i only have one set of clothes and you've seen them all that's what that's what i wear i'm not as bad as marco yet or not as good as marker yet i should say because he's he's he's already achieved my ultimate goal which is to you know not have to worry about clothes and just have an outfit i have not achieved that but i would like to but basically i have a small set of clothes and you've seen them all that's what i wear to work
Casey:
Okay, so jeans and like a polo shirt.
John:
It's not a polo shirt.
John:
You know what they are.
John:
They're horizontal stripe rugby shirts.
John:
That's all I own.
Casey:
Whatever.
Casey:
Same difference.
Casey:
They're James May shirts.
John:
Yeah, I guess they kind of are.
Marco:
No, I mean, I will not dispute the value of having a uniform.
Marco:
It doesn't really matter what the uniform is.
John:
Yep.
John:
No, I envy you.
John:
i kind of do have a uniform just has more variety but the problem is all my uniforms the sleeves shrink and then i have to like that's otherwise i would use them until i disintegrated like you know like my running shorts that are 15 years old that i still have i just i feel like i i i mean i am not a fashion conscious kind of guy but i feel like i would get bored wearing the same everyone agrees that you are the best dressed of all of us casey so if you're looking to hear then but it's it's
Casey:
I'm not fishing for compliments.
Casey:
It may be true, but I'm not fishing for compliments.
Casey:
I'm just saying that I don't think of myself as having any fashion sense yet.
John:
Everything's relative.
John:
Among me and Marco, you have a lot of fashion sense.
Casey:
Oh, yeah.
Casey:
Well, I guess that's true.
Casey:
But I mean, regardless of fashion sense, I just feel like looking down and seeing the exact same uniform every day would get really boring.
John:
You don't look down.
John:
Marco doesn't care what he's wearing.
John:
I don't care what I'm wearing.
John:
Yeah.
Marco:
that's exactly it we just want we just want not to be pointed at and laughed at yeah like we find something that lets us ignore this for for the rest of our lives or at least for the next year or two until these shirts all disintegrate i guess no yeah casey you definitely represent humanity in this show normal normal humanity and let's not let's not talk up normal humanity too much normal humanity has lots of downsides
John:
Did either one of you two actually read any of the follow-up before we begin?
Casey:
No.
Casey:
I at least skimmed all of it.
John:
Great.
John:
All right.
John:
Well, so I've also skimmed it.
John:
We should just publish the show notes in the chat room and they can do follow-up.
John:
Because none of us have looked at it.
John:
I put most of it there.
Casey:
Okay.
Casey:
Would we like to start with a friend of the show, Jason Snell's correction about the iPhone six is CPUs.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
So basically we said last show, I said last show, someone said, I think it was me.
Marco:
Someone said last show that the iPhone six plus had a slightly higher clock CPU than the six.
Marco:
Similar to the difference between the iPad air and the retina iPad mini where the air is like, you know, 10% faster or something like that.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
Turns out that is, I think, completely wrong, or at least like people have we've seen things all over the place here.
Marco:
We've seen some benchmarks showing that the six is faster than the six plus by some little amount like that.
Marco:
We've seen some benchmarks saying they're the same.
Marco:
We've seen some benchmarks saying the six plus is faster than the six.
Marco:
So Jason Snell posted a follow up thing.
Marco:
He had originally said the six plus was faster.
Marco:
He, I think, then has corrected it and said, actually, that was, you know, mismeasured or whatever.
Marco:
And it's wrong.
Marco:
I don't think we know quite what's going on here yet, do we?
Marco:
But, I mean, there's a lot of things it could be.
Marco:
There's things like dynamic clock speeds happening where, you know, there could be throttling for thermal reasons.
Marco:
Apple said it shouldn't happen, that it can maintain the full speed all the time, but we don't actually, you know, we don't know what kind of conditions some of these benchmarks were done in, so maybe it's like, you know, extreme conditions or in warm environments, who knows.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
Regardless, there doesn't appear to be a clear difference between the two that's actually reliable.
Marco:
So there's occasionally a small difference, but it kind of flip-flops as to which direction it goes.
Marco:
And so I think it's more likely to be chalked up to testing conditions or benchmarks mismeasuring things than actual differences in the CPU clock speeds.
John:
Right.
John:
Wouldn't it be nice if Apple just published them or at the very least that there was like you kind of like an Intel CPU, like read off some registers and find out the clock speed or like this is all guesswork because it's all kind of get this benchmark app to run.
John:
And like, well, it does this benchmark app accurately test the speed of this particular CPU or.
John:
Yeah, I don't like this guesswork business.
John:
But anyway, last show I had mentioned that Jason had said conclusively the exact clock speeds and he's now recanted.
John:
And so we're back to just not knowing.
John:
And we as far as anyone knows, they look like they're probably about the same, but we'll see.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then we, of course, have a ton of follow up about the Apple Watch.
Casey:
And one of the most popular bits of follow up.
Casey:
Let me back up.
Casey:
Actually, there are two popular bits of follow up people saying either we are insane or we're right on the money for saying that the watches will be expensive.
Casey:
And we'll talk about that more in a moment.
Casey:
And people theorizing how you can justify the purchase procedure of buying a $10,000 or $20,000 or $30,000 Apple Watch and what you would do once that piece of electronics gets sold.
Casey:
And the really frustrating thing about what you would do is that a lot of people...
Casey:
have sent in feedback saying, hey, if you have 18 karat gold, it stands to reason you could, you know, melt that down or otherwise recycle it.
Casey:
And so perhaps you'll lease the Apple Watch or maybe there'll be a trade-in program or something like that.
Casey:
And this is really annoying because during the last episode, I thought to myself, you know, I wonder if you could just like trade in your watch and then you could get a new one.
Casey:
And then during the time that you two were talking and I was reasoning through this in my head, I decided, no, that's a stupid idea.
Casey:
I shouldn't share it.
Casey:
And then
Casey:
Like 20 people sent it in.
Casey:
So the moral of the story is I should trust my instincts.
John:
I thought what I was actually said.
John:
In fact, I thought all the ideas that had been sent to us by email and Twitter were actually mentioned offhand in the show.
John:
But it's obvious that the audience wants to hear more discussion of these things because many people offered...
John:
uh elaborate theories of how apple was going to make this work so we we just like mentioned one or two things offhand but every there's people want to hear expansions on these so i figure it's worth discussing although you skip the the actually the first uh item in the fall right before this is someone who has worked in the jewelry industry for 20 years
John:
says that over 5x markups on fashion and jewelry is normal.
John:
So in case people wanted to put a number on, what are these crazy margins that we're talking about?
John:
What kind of complete disconnect between the cost of goods and the products?
John:
More than 5x is routine.
Yep.
Casey:
And so one of the examples of these theories regarding how you could handle upgrading or whatever, this was sent in by Phil Compton.
Casey:
Apple could have two easy ways to handle the rapid obsolescence of the Apple Watch.
Casey:
One, upgradability, and two, trade-ins.
Casey:
The upgradability would, of course, need to be done at an Apple store, but they should be able to keep movements within a set of specifications that could allow easy upgrading of the internals of one generation to a newer one.
Casey:
I assume they would always be making the watch smaller, so although the same adapter may be needed to fill the space, each new gen should fit in the next.
Casey:
And actually, the genesis of my theory last episode that I never shared, so now it sounds like I fabricated it in order to sound smart, was they made a lot of...
Casey:
Relatively speaking, a lot of mention of what is it, the S1?
Casey:
What is powering this thing?
Marco:
Yeah, the S1 is their marketing name for the entire computer in a little tiny case.
Casey:
Exactly.
Marco:
It isn't all on one chip, but it's a whole bunch of components in some kind of case that is most likely more for water resistance than anything else.
Casey:
Yeah, but it made me think, you know, if you keep the pinouts of that case and the physical shape of that case the same, even if the internals get considerably better, maybe that's the way you upgrade it.
Casey:
Is there some mechanism by which they can get in there and replace the S1 and put in an S2 that externally looks identical and operates identical from an interface perspective, but internally is twice the clock speed or what have you?
Casey:
This all falls down, though, if displays get a lot better,
Casey:
And or – well, if the displays get a lot better and have different sizes or different pinouts.
Casey:
And John, I'm waiting for you to blow a hole in my theory.
John:
Well, so here's the deal with the upgradability.
John:
This is definitely one of the things that many different people suggested.
John:
They suggested that there was a part of the watch that would become obsolete and there was a part that would not come obsolete.
John:
As I said, the gold case or whatever –
John:
that should be fine.
John:
And presumably that's where most of the cost is.
John:
You could swap out those internal stuff.
John:
They probably cost less than the band.
John:
They're probably, you know, 50 bucks for the last one or whatever it is.
John:
Um,
John:
Here's the thing with that in in Apple's history and we'll get to this if we actually do get to the iPhone 6 plus bending Apple has always chosen when they had a choice between keep it the same thickness and increase battery life or make it thinner They always just make it thinner And that's when we're mentioning I'm ready for the the iPhone 4s form factor of this watch We all assume that this is the first Apple watch and just like the first Apple phone
John:
I'm going to call it the Apple phone.
John:
I'm going to switch it around.
John:
Instead of mistakenly saying Apple Watch, I'm going to say Apple Phone from now on.
John:
Thanks a lot, guys.
John:
Apple Touch.
John:
We all assume that they're going to make the watch thinner when they can.
John:
They're not going to say, you know what?
John:
Let's keep the Apple Watch case exactly the same size and every year just make the battery a little bit bigger and make the other components smaller or something or have the S1 be swappable in and out and that's the way we'll do upgrades or whatever like that.
John:
This gets back to the product cycles on the watch.
John:
Do we think they're going to come out with a new watch every year, every two years, every five years?
John:
I think they'll do a new one every year.
John:
If they do a new one every year, will they try to make it thinner or will they keep it the same size and make the battery thicker?
John:
This all goes towards upgradability.
John:
Never mind that Apple really is not big on upgradability, period.
John:
Not with their Macs, not with their iPhones, not with their iPods.
John:
Those days have long gone.
John:
Like my first Mac that I ever got was motherboard upgraded from a Mac 128K to a Mac Plus, something officially Apple used to sell and do.
John:
The current Apple is a long way away from that.
John:
So I have a hard time believing, unless there's some really good financial reason having to do with the way watches are normally sold, that Apple would ever do something like this
John:
both because i just cannot see them keeping the the case the same over long periods and because they just want you to buy a new one now i'm not willing to rule it out entirely simply because everything we know about how apple sales technology has to be re-evaluated in terms of well this isn't really technology this is fashion so maybe they need a new plan and i don't know enough about fashion to know if there's any precedent for this in like the watch world of replacing the movements inside your thing and keeping the gold band or something like that but
John:
Right now, it seems to me that the upgrading thing is one of those things that nerds would like Apple to do, kind of like replaceable batteries, or can you just motherboard upgrade my Mac Pro to a new Mac Pro instead of having me buy a new one?
John:
And the answer from Apple is no, we cannot.
John:
We will not.
John:
You'll just buy a new one or just use this one.
John:
So I'm giving the...
John:
upgrading thing technically feasible yes 100 technically feasible but i don't think it's something that uh that apple is going to do i'm giving that a a maybe like a thumbs down if i had to pick one and i've had to put a percentage by it i'm gonna go like 80 against
Marco:
Yeah, I would also bet strongly against it, not only for all the reasons you mentioned, but even if you ignore the fact that they would probably almost certainly make less money over time doing it that way, I don't think they would want to constrain themselves and their future changes to the watch by a commitment, whether they said it or whether it's just been implied by past performance.
Marco:
to keep the upgrades available so you know look at look at the massive uh poop fit that the world threw when they changed the dock connector into the lightning connector and that was like 10 years right yeah 10 10 years with the same connector i think it was yeah and people people are still insanely upset and thinking apple did it just to make more money like that is a common a very very common opinion of that change is apple just did it to make more money to make everyone buy new cables and accessories
Marco:
If they ever made the watch upgradable, the expectation to keep it upgradable in the future would be so high that they would suffer such severe reputation damage and have so many angry people every time they made a backwards incompatible change.
Marco:
And so that would...
Marco:
that would either cause a bunch of poop fits from their customers on a regular basis, like every few years whenever they make a breaking change, or it would constrain them from, oh, well, we'd like to make this change in next year's version, but that would break compatibility with upgrades.
Marco:
And so we kind of can't or shouldn't do that.
Marco:
And I don't see Apple ever wanting to be constrained that way in the design of such an important product in their lineup.
John:
So who does upgradability benefit?
John:
That's the real question you're like.
John:
What are the benefits of upgradability?
John:
Is it a benefit to Apple?
John:
Is it a benefit to consumers?
John:
I think most people coming in from the consumer's perspective is, hey, if I spend... They're imagining for the case of... For the sake of argument, that they have enough money to buy the super expensive Apple Watch.
John:
And then they're further imagining that despite having all that money, they also don't want to spend that money again anytime soon.
John:
So they would like to protect their investment in this Apple Watch by saying, I spent $1,200 on this stainless steel Apple Watch with stainless steel band.
John:
Now the new one is out and has a faster processor or it uses less power.
John:
I don't want to spend all that money again.
John:
And it's the same thing.
John:
People want upgrade prices for everything.
John:
And if I told you how much my upgrade for my 128K that I didn't pay, obviously my parents did too.
John:
Plus was you'd probably die.
John:
And today's money is probably like three grand or something.
John:
But anyway, they assume that the upgrade will cost less money than buying the entire thing outright again.
John:
So that is a consumer benefit to say...
John:
I bought this thing once.
John:
The better thing is out, but I don't want to buy the better thing.
John:
I want you to take as much as you can for my current thing and just swap out the parts that are not good for the better parts to save money.
John:
That doesn't benefit Apple at all.
John:
As Marco was saying before, is this going to make Apple more money?
John:
No, this is not going to make Apple more money.
John:
Overall, the average selling price of their watches will go down if people can do these upgrades.
John:
It does benefit consumers, but does it benefit consumers in a way that Apple feels like we should do this because it will make the experience better for consumers?
John:
I don't even think if you had to pretend you're a...
John:
You know, magnanimous Apple and say, well, we'd like to do that, but we feel replacing the parts does not give the cohesive experience of the we've designed the Apple Watch to as an entire device.
John:
And it's a balanced system where everything works together.
John:
And if you would just take the insides out of the Apple, you know, there's all sorts of crazy BS.
John:
reasons you come but but some of them have some merit and like oh look are they designing a product or are they designing serious parts that you can assemble into a product like can you just take the s1 out and put the s2 in and suddenly your watch gets faster and it takes less power yeah maybe for a generation or two but like marco said at a certain point you have to have a breaking design change or you just want to you're going to say you can do things in fashion and just make it the same all the time fashion has to change so
John:
I think this is mostly a tech nerd fantasy having to do with people who probably would never drop that much money on a watch anyway, even if they could afford it because they would feel like it's a waste, but then can put themselves into that position and say, but if I did do that, I would still have my instincts that think it's a ridiculous expense, but I would want the new thing anyway, but I wouldn't want to pay for it.
John:
And it's a weird...
John:
i don't i don't think this actual character casey can bring out the user story uh index cards i don't think this actual this actual character that that needs upgrade ability for the watch to be a viable thing exists i think it's just a sort of a fantasy we're spinning out right now now the second item on this thing trade-ins is an entirely different thing and i think that is way more plausible because apple already does that with with stuff they have now they will you know take your old stuff most of them just take it and recycle it but like
John:
Give me your old thing for a discount on the new thing that I entirely see as being plausible, especially if it's made of precious metals.
John:
That's different than upgradability.
Marco:
Yeah, I think the recycling or trade-in approach is way more likely because they already do it for certain things.
Marco:
You're right about that.
Marco:
They already do it.
Marco:
And it just makes more sense.
Marco:
It avoids all of the issues of the upgradability kind of constraining their options and people's expectations thereof.
Marco:
It avoids all of that.
Marco:
And it sounds environmentally friendly and it seems economically somewhat responsible if you want to upgrade and you can get a good amount of money for your stainless steel one or whatever.
John:
The gold one you're going to get serious money for because that's, you know, the metal itself is innately valuable.
John:
Apple can take it and melt it down and recycle it into new Apple watches and they will give you good money.
John:
They won't just give you like 50 bucks or like saved you the recycling cost.
John:
They will give you good money for a gold trade in.
Casey:
You know, what I'm thinking about, and this is taking just a half step backwards, is a lot of us will spend somewhere between $500 and $1,000 every year or every other year on a new phone.
Casey:
And just for the sake of conversation, let's say it's every year.
Casey:
And let's say it's an even $1,000 to make the math easy.
Casey:
And let's say an average salary in the U.S.
Casey:
is $50,000.
Casey:
Again, just for the sake of making the math easy.
Casey:
So if you get a new phone, which is $1,000, and you have a $50,000 salary, that's 2% of your, what is it, gross salary is $1,000.
Casey:
So if you make $1.5 million, which granted is an unbelievable shed load of money, then $30,000 is 2% of it.
Casey:
And so what I'm driving at is, even if an Apple Watch is $30,000,
Casey:
If you're making a million and a half, as probably more people in at least the United States do than I care to admit to myself, then getting a new $30,000 watch every couple of years, it's the same as one of us getting a new iPhone every year or two.
Casey:
Everything is relative.
Casey:
And although the market is surely smaller than the millions upon millions upon millions of iPhones that are sold annually –
Casey:
It's still not a bad setup, especially since I would assume the markup, as we spoke about earlier, is just tremendous.
John:
Yeah, it's worth reiterating again that we keep concentrating on the high end just because this type of product is different for Apple, this type of fashion product where the price is so crazily out of whack.
John:
But they're, you know, volume wise, they're going to sell Apple hopes tons of the cheap one.
John:
And so such a small it'll be like the Mac Pro.
John:
Such a small number of these expensive watches are going to be sold that I doubt.
John:
First of all, I doubt Apple will break it down for us because they never do.
John:
But I think we can probably, you know, or a steady or somebody will do the math and try to say it's reasonable to assume that percentage wise, you know, 90 percent of Apple Watch is sold with the cheap one and then 10 percent with the super expensive one.
John:
And yeah, you do make a lot of money.
John:
But like, really, this is that's the thing about this.
John:
This type of market is Apple wants to go all the way up to the top.
John:
and the top is really high and it's i i maybe it's about exactly i would love to see the breakdown of like how many mac pros are sold versus how many uh you know of the reasonably priced max i think it'll be even more extreme with this expensive watch we're just obsessing over because it's just a such a novelty and we just can't figure out how it's going to work within apple's current business and uh customers and the way they sell things and everything else
Marco:
Our first sponsor this week is a new sponsor, but they aren't new to me.
Marco:
It is Mobilux.
Casey:
Oh, all right.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
M-O-B-E-L-U-X, Mobilux.
Marco:
Mobilux is a product team for hire.
Marco:
Since 2008, they've been designing and building apps for iOS, Android, and the web with an emphasis on shipping awesome mobile experiences.
Marco:
So I've actually known these guys for a while.
Marco:
So let me give you some of the stuff they've done here.
Marco:
Uh, Mobilux developed the Precision iOS 8 interface for Circa News 3, which just shipped today.
Marco:
Circa, you guys know this app, right?
Marco:
The Circa app.
Marco:
It's really popular.
Casey:
I've heard of it.
Casey:
I have not tried it yet.
Marco:
Yeah, it's very, very popular.
Marco:
Well, anyway, Mobilux did their, uh, did their new interface for the version that shipped today, which is huge.
Marco:
They also designed and built the responsive web platform logo and identity for our friends at need.
Marco:
The, uh, you know, need edition.com.
Marco:
Those people need, uh, they, Mobilux built a lot of that for them.
Marco:
They built the logo, the identity of the web platform, uh,
Marco:
whole bunch of stuff for need um they also make their own products uh they just ship one called best dish which is an ongoing user judge competition that celebrates and rewards the best dishes around town and across the country uh they just launched it in dc you can see that too mobilux can help with everything from identity design to building full stack ios social networks they also have one of their own products uh called elixir uh elixir um and it's a
Marco:
It's kind of like Instagram for drinks.
Marco:
That's pretty cool.
Marco:
That's my very quick description of it.
Marco:
Mobilux, you know, so they have their own products.
Marco:
You can hire them.
Marco:
In the hiring capacity, they've worked with many great companies, including iHome, Uniqlo, Marvel, and even Tumblr, which is where I know them from initially.
Marco:
They've built everything from firmware delivery systems to award-winning recipe apps.
Marco:
They do everything top to bottom.
Marco:
Now, the reason I know them from Tumblr is because the original Tumblr app for iPhone...
Marco:
We didn't actually have an iPhone app for a while at Tumblr.
Marco:
We were too busy to make one, and we didn't have enough staff to just hire or just have someone else do it.
Marco:
Mobilux actually made one.
Marco:
It was called Tumblaret, and there were a few out there by other people, but theirs was by far the best.
Marco:
So Tumblr just bought it, and we paid them for years to maintain it for us and upgrade it and everything, and they were great.
Marco:
So that's how I know them.
Marco:
And then when it came time for me to need someone to build my Instapaper app for Android,
Marco:
I went directly to them because I knew them.
Marco:
I knew them for a while.
Marco:
I knew they were good people because they really are.
Marco:
I would not have trusted that app to just anybody.
Marco:
You know how much I love working with other people.
Marco:
So I went to Mobalux knowing that it would be a good fit because I already had worked with them before.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
They're just really good and really easy to work with.
Marco:
So they built the Instapaper app for Android, and I had to do almost nothing.
Marco:
I didn't even give them source code.
Marco:
I didn't even give them assets.
Marco:
They even just pulled assets out of my iPhone app for me when they needed stuff, or they made their own because they have designers there.
Marco:
I gave them almost nothing to work with except some very loose API documentation, and they made the whole app, and they didn't have to bug me for anything.
Marco:
It's so easy to work with them.
Marco:
Anyway, for more info about Mobilux or to get them involved with your next product, check them out at mobilux.com.
Marco:
That's M-O-B-E-L-U-X dot com.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our friends at Mobilux for sponsoring.
Marco:
Really, I cannot recommend them enough.
Casey:
All right, let's keep talking about Apple Watch.
Marco:
Oh, do we have to?
Casey:
Yes, we do.
Casey:
It isn't even out yet.
Casey:
I know, but that doesn't stop us.
Casey:
I mean, come on.
Casey:
We've got several more months of this.
Casey:
We have months of follow-up.
Casey:
It's never going to end.
Casey:
Another thing that we had a lot of discussion about was how do you sell a $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 watch in an existing Apple store?
Casey:
And an anonymous Apple employee wrote in to say,
Casey:
Many existing Apple stores have private business briefing rooms with the entire product line not tethered to tables.
Casey:
They exist as a space for Apple to meet with businesses and discuss deals and how to integrate Apple.
Casey:
These spaces are a perfect place to showcase high-end watches to customers who would like a private area away from the crowds.
Casey:
All I really want to know is how do I get that kind of access?
John:
You got to buy Mac Pros, Casey.
John:
Oh, you are evil.
John:
That's all about.
Casey:
You are evil.
Casey:
Well played, but you're evil.
Casey:
Our local Apple store just moved a few spots down in the local mall.
Casey:
And now it's actually about the right size for the area in which we live.
Casey:
But goodness, before it moved, it was like a locker room in there, no matter what time of day you went in.
Casey:
So I did not know this was a thing, but apparently this is a thing.
Casey:
And I'm assuming if you're coming in looking like the kind of gentleman or woman who is going to buy a $30,000 watch.
John:
It's not about how you look.
John:
You were just asked, I would like to see the Apple Watch edition.
John:
They say, well, you'll have to come to the back with us.
John:
As Marco said last show, I think it's clear that Apple's stores are due for a...
John:
Exactly.
John:
Exactly.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
There was a tweet from Scott McIntyre.
Casey:
He noted something that I had not realized, that the Apple Watch Edition, which is a terrible name, but it's the expensive Apple Watch.
Marco:
Which do you think is worse, the Apple Watch Edition edition or the Ferrari LaFerrari?
Casey:
The LaFerrari, but only by a shade.
John:
No, I think the Apple Watch Edition is worse because the Ferrari is way better than that watch, and you can forgive a lot.
John:
You can forgive a lot for a Ferrari.
Marco:
And it isn't just a Camry with a gold coating.
Casey:
Yeah, exactly.
Casey:
No, it's just a Fiat with a gold coating, right?
Casey:
Do they still own Fiat?
Marco:
No, no.
Marco:
um or fiat uh federico's gonna kill me anyway uh so by the way just while we're on the topic of federico sorry to interrupt that's right i thought it was interesting uh so there's these rumors that there's going to be a 12 inch uh quote ipad pro coming out like possibly next spring or something um and i'm not sure i believe that but assuming that even if it does
Marco:
on a recent episode of what's the new prompt is called connected i always forget the names all right so the new prompt called connected um a recent episode of that federico mentioned in passing he's like he said he wouldn't buy that ipad pro and i was thinking like if this thing is real if federico vitici does not want to buy an ipad pro who will
Marco:
I would.
John:
Really?
John:
iPad Pro is my thing.
John:
How long have I been talking about iPad Pro?
John:
Since, like, before the iPad was released.
John:
Yeah, that was me saying all that stuff.
John:
What was the past episodes?
John:
Yes, I will buy a gigantic iPad.
John:
Why?
John:
It's got to be right now, obviously.
John:
why the way i use my ipad is not as a you know i use it like a magazine i like large format magazines i didn't like it when edge magazines shrink to the smaller shrunk to the smaller format i think next gen also shrunk always know magazines going downhill when they shrink to the wired magazine i like that big format too i want big not not 27 inch you know but like a 12 inch i think that's fine
John:
And I want it to be faster and have multitasking and do split screen and do all sorts of awesome stuff like that.
John:
We talked about this, don't you remember?
Casey:
I do, but I think I've tried to force myself to forget that you want an iPad that in almost no way resembles an iPad.
John:
No, it's still a big screen that you hold in your hand and it resembles an iPad in all ways, except it's slightly bigger.
John:
That's it.
John:
And of course, it's faster inside and has more RAM and blah, blah, blah, blah.
John:
But it totally resembles an iPad.
Casey:
Mm hmm.
Casey:
Anyway, did we even finish this tweet?
Casey:
I didn't even get through finishing a tweet.
John:
No, Scott McIntyre was saying the digital crown matches the strap.
John:
And yes, I knew that.
John:
I thought everybody knew that.
John:
But he was offering it as an idea of saying, well, that means maybe the.
John:
The straps aren't interchangeable.
John:
Like they showed in the video, the straps coming in and out.
John:
It's a major selling point of the watch.
John:
I can't believe some people are still going, well, you can't swap it now because the little digital crown is color-coded.
John:
So what?
John:
So what?
John:
If the little crown is red, can you only get red bands?
John:
No, you use black ones, you can use white ones.
John:
I don't know anything about fashion, but I know that.
John:
It's all right, right?
Casey:
Look at the cases for the iPhone 5C.
Casey:
You know, half the point of all these different colors was that you can mix and match them.
Casey:
Remember...
Casey:
I think it was Schiller had talked about, Oh, you can have, you know, a blue phone with a red case for this mood and a, and a white case for that mood or something like that.
Casey:
I forget exactly what he said, but, but you're exactly right that it would, they were talking about flipping things up and deliberately getting clashing colors to be in.
Casey:
So everyone can be their own special snowflake.
John:
And if you don't want that, buy it.
John:
Get one with a neutral color.
John:
Get one with a black crown because I'm sure they're all for that.
John:
I think the only color crowns I saw was like a maroonish red that went with like the dark red band and then a black one.
John:
But yeah, the fact that the crowns match does not mean that these straps are not going to be interchangeable.
John:
They're totally interchangeable.
Casey:
All right, moving on.
Casey:
This was my addition to the follow-up.
Casey:
Speaking of a friend of the show, Jason Snell, I was reading his Apple Watch Edition review.
Casey:
Should we just call this the Apple Watch Apple, like the Ferrari, LaFerrari?
Casey:
So anyways, he said in his review, yes, there's a special box.
Casey:
It's covered in leather.
Casey:
Inside is a magnetic charging cradle.
Casey:
And on the back of the box base is a slot into which you plug a lightning connector.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
The Apple Watch Edition is so fancy that the box is its own accessory.
Casey:
And I bring that up for a couple reasons.
Casey:
Firstly, I didn't know that that was a thing.
Casey:
And secondly, how...
Casey:
What?
Casey:
How is that?
Casey:
How is that something that Apple considers the right thing to do?
Casey:
And if you're going to stand here and tell me that, oh, a $10,000 watch is way too expensive, look at what they're doing for the freaking box.
John:
I wonder, does that mean it doesn't come with a charging cable?
John:
Yeah, I can understand.
John:
It's basically a dock.
John:
Remember when the iPhones used to come with docks?
John:
I think the original came with a dock, did it?
John:
I don't remember.
Casey:
I think that's right.
John:
Well, anyway, they used to sell docks.
John:
But this seems like if you buy the Apple Watch Edition, it comes with essentially a dock, which also happens to be the box, which is a nice place for you to put the watch when you're not using it, which also charges it.
John:
But I'm sure Apple will sell the little charging doohickey thing for all the regular people who don't buy the Edition Edition.
John:
And so, you know, it's all the same charging amongst all the boxes.
John:
But yeah, this type of luxury thing of like, how can we make this...
John:
as fancy as possible and they do that with all their products like the boxes are so beautiful and you open them up but it's all disposable stuff you throw away the cardboard box you throw away the little plastic pieces that you peel off and everything this i assume you won't throw away because it's an actual accessory
Casey:
What else is in here?
Casey:
Oh, a lot of feedback about chip and pin.
Casey:
You want to cover this, John, because I'm going to stumble all over it.
John:
Yeah, I don't, I still don't understand it all.
John:
So we are getting glimpses of what payment is like in the rest of the world from individual people's emails.
John:
So if, if these people are wrong, I'm sure people write in and tell us, uh,
John:
so martin gordon wrote in to say that he thinks it's worth clarifying that the u.s won't be getting chip and pin anytime soon instead we're moving over to the nastier chip and signature our credit cards will come with chips but we won't be issued a pin nor will be will we be required to enter a pin during a transaction so that's kind of crappy we'll have chips in our cards but we'll have still have to sign our name on a piece of paper for transactions that require that type of thing uh it doesn't surprise me but that's if this is true it uh is disappointing
John:
Tom Phillips says chip and pin is so 2004 over the last year or so in the UK.
John:
We've had the introduction of contactless debit and credit cards colloquially called just contactless.
John:
You pay a chip enabled terminals or dedicated contactless points for anything under 20 pounds.
John:
And I have no idea how much that is in real money.
Oh.
John:
So he's saying if Apple Pay were to arrive in the UK or Europe, I do wonder whether it would succeed.
John:
Our payment system isn't as archaic as the US.
John:
With contactless becoming relatively well-established and popular, are the benefits of Apple Pay attracted enough to get people to switch?
John:
I'm leaning towards no.
John:
So this gets back to Tim Cook's big thing about it's not just that you get to wave a doohickey in front of a thing to pay for your stuff.
John:
It's that you get to not have to bring your wallet with you.
John:
You don't have to bring, oh, I got to remember my phone, my car keys, and my wallet.
John:
Yeah.
John:
If you want to go out and you want to have a way to pay for things, you can just bring your phone.
John:
And I guess you just hope the battery doesn't run out before the bar tab comes at the end of the night.
John:
Anyway, he's right.
John:
Apple Pay is a lot easier to sell at sort of the dawning of contactless payment here in the U.S.
John:
than it is in other countries where contactless is already well established.
John:
Yeah, I don't know how Apple's going to do there.
John:
And it seemed like all the deals Apple announced with the people who are accepting payments, with the exception of like McDonald's and stuff, was international.
John:
But a lot of the other stores looked like they were U.S.
John:
only.
John:
So since we live in the U.S., you know, we'd probably be fine if it just revolutionized payment in the U.S.
John:
because everything here is so horrible.
John:
But yeah, I don't know how well it's going to do in other countries.
John:
uh some more apple pay dave copeland wrote in to say uh in the u.s the fraud policy of the banks heavily favor the card holder a card holder card holder can pretty easily have charges removed by calling the bank who issued the charge in the uk and europe the banks are not so lenient with the card holders and it's much more difficult to have charges removed that's why chip and pin is so prevalent across the pond and that's why waiter brings the charging device to you rather than whisking your card away to the back so that's another you know differences in the different payment environments of who
John:
uh who accepts the uh who deals with uh fraud if if something goes wrong who has to pay for it in the us we're all used to this is one good thing about the us i guess from a consumer's perspective sort of kind of is that if someone steals your credit card and makes a bunch of bogus charges with it or some sort of fraud happens we all just assume oh i'll call the credit card company and they'll just take care of it like the credit card company just eats all that because they make so much more money having huge interest rates on everyone who doesn't pay their bills on time which is why they still make tons of money in the us but
John:
And so they're totally willing to eat all those other charges.
John:
We just had yet another one of our credit cards stolen online.
John:
couple weeks back and we just like oh no big deal yeah they bought a bunch of stuff but we know we're not gonna have to pay for that well apparently in other countries it's not that way and so there is a demand to be more secure and not just have you know here here you go waiter take my credit card walk away with it i don't care what if you go if you skim it or buy something with it online or whatever i'm just gonna have those charges reversed and they'll send me a new card and i won't have to pay for any of it but that's not true in other countries so they have much more secure payment systems that's interesting
John:
And his final point is something I've learned firsthand at one of the first e-commerce sites I made, I guess, about 10 years ago now, 12 years ago, a long time ago, is that a lot of these things you see on websites and in payment processing things like the CVV code where you have to enter those little three digit number to pay for something with the credit card.
John:
or signatures or anything like that, that's entirely at the discretion of the person of the company selling something.
John:
So when you do credit card transactions online, you send the information to the payment processor and they send you back a score that says, here's how trustworthy this is.
John:
And you can decide I'm going to go forward with scores of, you know, above whatever value.
John:
So they'll send you back something like, well, you know,
John:
The card has a middle name, but they didn't enter middle name.
John:
And the street address doesn't quite match, but everything else in the address matches.
John:
Do you want to proceed with this transaction?
John:
If you say yes, the relationship between the business and the credit card processor, there's some relationship there over who covers what percent of fraud or whatever.
John:
So it's up to it's up to the merchant basically to decide how how, you know, how flexible do you want to be?
John:
And I could say, as someone who's implemented this, you you tend to be motivated highly to be very flexible, believe it or not, because if you are super picky and like, well, their address says, you know, one, two, three main street and the credit card address on file has one, two, three main ST.
John:
And ST is not the same as street, and our processor is too stupid to figure that out, and so it doesn't give it a perfect score or match on that.
John:
Do we want to go forward?
John:
If you only went forward on, like, the highest possible score, you would never make any money because you would never accept anyone's credit cards.
John:
You know, they got the zip code almost right, or they got it right, but they didn't add, like, the plus four on the end of it.
John:
Do you want to go forward?
John:
Everything lowers your score if you're not exactly right.
John:
And so...
John:
You have to decide what risk you're willing to tolerate.
John:
And usually you're willing to go forward, even if they miss tons of stuff.
John:
Like if they're slightly off on their address, don't quite get the name right, didn't enter the zip code, but the card number is right and don't have a CVV.
John:
He's like, just go forward because 99% of the time it'll be fine.
John:
And the other percentage of the time you just eat that and it'll work out.
John:
So that's something else to keep in mind with all of this secure payment type stuff.
John:
Individual that's why that's why I imagine I don't know this to be the case, but that's why I imagine a lot of places now don't require you to sign your name anymore is because the risk environment has changed.
John:
They said, look, we're not getting any additional security from having somebody scribble something on a piece of paper for their five dollar credit card purchase.
John:
We'll just, you know, swipe the card and let's go.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Do you want to tell me about streamlined Apple Watch shape ideas?
John:
Yeah, that was in there from last week.
John:
I'm trying to remember what I was thinking of.
John:
I know the broad topic was, remember on the first Apple Watch show, I was saying I was disappointed that it looked like a little lunchbox on your wrist, just like a little rectangle with straps coming out of it.
John:
do something to blend the the strap into the main part of the watch in a way that was like forward thinking like well now it's got to be a big chunky thing in your wrist but five years from now won't be quite as chunky and it's best to go with an aesthetic that will seem natural then but they didn't they didn't try to mask that at all
John:
And there were lots of ideas from listeners about what they could do with a more streamlined shape.
John:
If they had a sort of a taper from the big, thick part with the battery in the screen to the strap, they could still have removable straps.
John:
The straps would just have to incorporate that taper somehow or whatever.
John:
But people were full of ideas of what they could do with that extra volume.
John:
One of the most popular ideas is, why don't they fill that place with battery?
John:
Those little wedges that lead from the fat part to the thin part, that's just another opportunity to shove battery in there.
John:
uh i don't like that idea because one i don't like the idea of having battery wrapped around my wrist because lithium ion batteries can get very hot and uh catch fire and stuff and i guess that's also true of the one that's inside the watch but that's inside metal and i feel a little bit better about that and two i don't think lithium ion batteries take very kindly to being bent which means that the taper would have to be stiff and once you make once you make the taper stiff
John:
then the number of different wrists that it can fit on is drastically altered.
John:
It's bad enough that you've got the stiff little rectangular part.
John:
If you made little wings hanging off of the thing that were also stiff because they contained battery, then they would sit very awkwardly on people with either make it so it sits okay on people with very large wrists, but then it looks ridiculous on people with small or vice versa.
John:
That, I think, is a non-starter.
John:
If they made the taper, I don't think there's anything useful you can do with that taper.
John:
other than maybe put some sensors in it if you wanted to have like the pulse sensors off centered or something else in there or like shove an accelerometer in there but i don't think you can use it for battery and i don't think you can make it stiff and anyway that's not the direction apple went in but i think that's all i was thinking of with this uh one line follow-up item
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Uh, and I would say, so they sent me, they sent me a set.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
Um, I would say Harry's blades are, are very comparable in the shave quality to a Gillette fusion, non pro glide blades.
Marco:
Uh, they don't really have an equivalent to the pro, to the pro glide strip, but I'm a, I was a big fan of Gillette fusion before.
Marco:
And I would say Harry's blades are just as good, if not better for the shave.
Marco:
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Marco:
Now, the best price I found on Amazon for Gillette Fusion Blades right before the show, I took a look to make sure.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
So that is slightly less than half the price of the Fusions.
Marco:
And if you go do your own comparisons, you will see the Harry's Blades are roughly half the price of high-end other blades from other companies.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
It kind of calls back to old-school shaving designs without being overly romantic about it.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
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Casey:
Okay, so we got a lot of feedback, well, I thought, about the casing of the text watch.
Casey:
What?
Casey:
Are we still talking about the watch?
Casey:
Yes.
Casey:
Hey, John insists that we got to do all this follow-up.
John:
Not that long.
John:
This is a quickie.
John:
Robert Thompson brought up something I thought was funny.
John:
Like, we were talking about the small caps thing with the watch.
John:
And I said, well, you know, with the little Apple logo in front of it, and it's kind of silly.
John:
You know, we just write it out, Apple Watch, but they always use the little symbol.
John:
And when they do it in slides, like, well, we've got a precedent with Apple TV where they show the little Apple logo.
John:
And I'm like, well, of course, TV is always capitalized.
John:
It's, you know, short for television or whatever.
John:
But Robert Thompson points out that when they do Apple TV, and I'd forgotten about this, they do lowercase TV.
John:
So, so much for that theory.
John:
They do the little apple and then the lowercase T with a little curl on the bottom.
John:
And anyway, there's no rhyme or reason to this.
John:
Or so we thought until Jim sent us something that said...
John:
references a classic vocabulary with the all caps like omega rolex tag or tog i don't know and that other thing that starts with a b that i'm not going to pronounce apparently they do all uppercase in their uh name brand things on their watches as well so maybe apple's trying to go with that and again i think it's crazy to do that and just use the word watch it is like a silly parody of like rolex omega also watch
Marco:
All right, let me explain this to everybody.
Marco:
Apple TV is lowercased in the marketing logo where it's the Apple logo followed by lowercase TV because somebody thought it looked good at the time.
Marco:
Apple Watch, when it's spelled in the marketing way with the Apple logo followed by the all small caps watch, is that way because somebody thought it looked good that way.
Marco:
Most likely because it's printed very small on the watch and it's very small lettering looks great when it's in small caps.
Marco:
That is why it's that way.
Marco:
It is marketing reasons only.
Marco:
It doesn't matter.
John:
You think they're going to put the little Apple logo on the watch next to the word watch?
John:
Like Apple logo watch?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Didn't they already show that they are doing that?
John:
I don't know.
John:
I know they put it up on the slide when they introduced it, but I didn't know they were going to have it on the watch itself.
Marco:
We've seen pictures of the
Marco:
back in the video and stuff i'm pretty sure that does it doesn't matter either way it doesn't matter they thought it looked good that's why it's there there was not i guarantee you there was no thought put into oh well it's different from the way we capitalize apple tv i guarantee you no one brought that up and no one cares you can change the capitalization and you can change whether you put a little apple logo but it's going to be hard to change the name and the name is still watch
John:
And I guess the name is still TV, too.
John:
Apple TV somehow sounds better to me than Apple.
John:
Maybe I'll just get used to it.
John:
I feel like I still have not gotten used to MacBook, so I think I'm going to hold a grudge against this one.
Marco:
MacBook is permanently awkward.
Marco:
I'll give you that.
Marco:
PowerBook was such a great name, and MacBook was so awkward.
Marco:
I also, for whatever it's worth, I did think Apple TV at first was extremely awkward, and then I got used to it and didn't care anymore.
Marco:
But I also don't talk about it that much, because who cares?
Marco:
It's the Apple TV.
John:
Yeah.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
And then, John, would you like to defend yourself regarding iWatch?
John:
No, I keep making that mistake.
John:
I'm not doing it on purpose.
John:
I'm trying to get better.
Casey:
So in the follow-up, Nathan Watkins Jr.
Casey:
sent us that Microsoft paid the NFL $400 million to use the Surface, and a couple of commentators still called them iPads.
Casey:
And so I assumed that you had placed that in the follow-up strictly to defend your erroneous
John:
Oh, no.
John:
That's an interesting story.
John:
We're talking about watch being a generic term, but no name that you pick can be defended against whatever the term is for Kleenex, where the name brand becomes genericized into me.
John:
Do you have a Kleenex for me?
John:
Or...
John:
God forbid if you live in the South and someone says, do you want a Coke?
John:
And they say, yeah, what kind?
John:
Oh, give me a Sprite.
John:
I know.
John:
Anyway, anything can be genericized.
John:
Anything.
John:
You are not defended against that by picking watch, by picking iPad.
John:
Little tablet-y things are so defined by the iPad product in the same way, I guess, tissues are so defined by the Kleenex brand that the commentators in these NFL programs couldn't help but say, oh, look at those guys in the sidelines holding iPads.
John:
They're not.
John:
They're Microsoft Surface tablets.
John:
But iPad is the word that is the placeholder in lots of people's minds for a tablet thing, even more so than I think iPhone is for smartphone, because that I think this, you know, Android sells more than the iPhone and it wasn't that far behind.
John:
But Apple was so far ahead in the tablets, but they were only a company that made any tablet that anyone cared about at all that was worth a damn at all for so long.
John:
Like it was a year, two years.
John:
before i guess the amazon tablets came out or whatever that in the public consciousness if you were holding a thing that looked like a disembodied screen it was an ipad so now poor microsoft pays 400 million dollars to get the surface into the hands of all these nfl people and the commentators just call them ipads in the same way they might call a tissue kleenex even though it's not kleenex brand
John:
So I feel bad for Microsoft here.
John:
But my main point in putting this in is that no name you pick, even if it's a name you totally make up like iPad or, you know, or Kleenex or anything else, you're always at risk of being genericized.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
And then another piece of follow up that I put in a while back.
Casey:
There's more.
Casey:
I know.
Casey:
No.
Casey:
Hey, I was trying to curb it, but we're almost done.
John:
We'll have plenty of time for this stuff.
Casey:
The king told us he decreed that we will do all of the FU.
Casey:
Anyway, so I, like everyone else, hate the if Steve were alive.
Casey:
I can't think of the word I'm looking for, but retort, I guess, for lack of a better word.
Casey:
True.
Casey:
But trope.
Casey:
Thank you.
Casey:
That is a much better word for it.
Casey:
But somebody posted a little while ago a really, really, really great write-up about how the Apple keynote announcing the 6, the 6 Plus, the watch was...
Casey:
perhaps would have gone differently had Steve done it in the typical Steve style.
Casey:
And if the whole if Steve were alive thing also really turns you off, just forget that and just read this page, which we'll put in the show notes, just as a general alternative approach to the keynote.
Casey:
And there were certainly some like –
Casey:
maybe not factual things, but there were some little idiosyncrasies about this that I didn't totally care for.
Casey:
But overall, I do think that this approach to the keynote just sounded better in principle to me than the keynote we got.
Casey:
And I don't know if either of you two read this or had any thoughts about it, but I definitely think it's worth those of you listening to read it at your convenience because it was very good.
Marco:
Yeah, I read it.
Marco:
It's on Jiggity.com, and apparently this was written by a person named Jong Moon Kim, and I apologize if I mispronounce that.
Marco:
I saw this being spread around, and I thought, as probably many listeners thought when he first saw this, I thought, oh, God, it's going to be somebody complaining that Tim isn't Steve, basically.
Marco:
And for some reason, I eventually read it against my better judgment.
Marco:
And it really did surprise me with it.
Marco:
You know, I thought for sure, again, like I said, I thought it was going to be just complaints that Tim is not Steve and because Tim, Tim can't be Steve and he's not trying to be Steve.
Marco:
He's trying to be Tim.
Marco:
And that's, I think, for the best.
Marco:
But because I think we've seen over time from other tech companies, people who try to imitate Steve Jobs' presentation style always fail and it's really painful.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
If you've seen when Zuckerberg did it, Jeff Bezos tries to do it, God knows everybody from Samsung tries to do it.
Marco:
It's painful.
Marco:
And if you just try to be yourself, it's a much better idea.
Marco:
Anyway, so...
Marco:
I read this and there was a lot in there that I was like, you know, actually, that's a really good point.
Marco:
Why didn't they do it that way?
Marco:
Or, yeah, that would have actually been better.
Marco:
And they plausibly could have done that.
Marco:
And the main focus of it, I think, is like... And we've seen other people talk about this too.
Marco:
Our friend Ben Thompson talked about this a lot as well.
Marco:
We've seen...
Marco:
In the presentation, Tim basically introduces the watch not by saying, here's why this is necessary, but just by showing it.
Marco:
Just being like, here's this thing we built.
Marco:
It's really cool.
Marco:
Look.
Marco:
And there it is.
Marco:
And there's the planet.
Marco:
And the sun rises above the planet.
Marco:
And then this watch comes in.
Marco:
And it's like a watch spaceship.
Marco:
And you see all the cool light reflecting off of it.
Marco:
And then you see watches spinning around for five minutes.
Marco:
And then Johnny Ives in his white world talking about it.
Marco:
And it just really...
Marco:
It assumes, like the presumption of the video was, this is really cool and you need to buy it.
Marco:
And here's why it's so cool.
Marco:
And this is going to be really big.
Marco:
As opposed to the way Steve would usually introduce new product categories, like the way he did with first the iPod and then...
Marco:
The iPhone, of course, and the iPad.
Marco:
He would introduce it kind of first by saying why it needs to exist, why we need to want it, and then showing it to us.
Marco:
And then saying, you know, given all of the things I just said on why you should want this and why this device needs to exist, here it is.
Marco:
And...
Marco:
tim really didn't do that with the apple watch introduction i almost said i watch tim didn't really do that he just showed it and said here it is and we're kind of left to our own devices to figure out well okay this thing is cool and it looks cool but why do we want to wear a watch especially for the many of us for whom we haven't been wearing watches since we got cell phones because cell phones made watches unnecessary for almost everybody except for fashion reasons and even then it's not that common
Marco:
and especially among younger people so he didn't do that so i i think there is a lot of valid criticism to be made about the way this was introduced in the presentation and uh and this article on jiggity.com was really good i thought it was you know okay at parts it was like a little bit over the top a little bit contrived but overall i'd say it was very good and way better than i expected from the premise
Casey:
Completely agree.
John:
I didn't really like this article.
John:
I think what it leaned on a lot of is two things.
John:
One, the fact that we all miss Steve Jobs.
John:
And it leaned on that.
John:
It's like, hey, wouldn't it be great if this guy was still alive?
John:
Yes, it would.
John:
And two...
John:
It played fast and loose with the actual things that they were announcing.
John:
It made Apple announce things that Apple didn't actually announce.
John:
And boy, wouldn't it be cool if Apple had said X, Y and Z and did X, Y and Z. I agree that Steve Jobs would have presented this better than Tim Cook.
John:
I don't think anyone would disagree that Steve Jobs is a better presenter.
John:
The root of it is most likely in the particulars of the person in that Steve Jobs was excited about different things than Tim Cook is excited about for the product.
John:
I think Tim Cook really is excited about the watch.
John:
He's putting his two hands in the air and shaking his fist.
John:
I really believe he is excited, but he's excited about different aspects of the product.
John:
And Steve Jobs was excited about the same aspects of the product that we're excited about.
John:
cool technology, ways to change your life with technology, particular small features, the little genie going in and out of the dock.
John:
All the things we want about Steve Jobs also would not, but Tim is excited about different stuff.
John:
So Tim is a less relatable presenter.
John:
The main value of this article is providing, so what Marco got at it, is there was no one there explaining to us in the way that Steve Jobs felt like it was necessary to explain to us
John:
why we're doing this tim tries to explain why or has other people come on stage to do it but they speak in it it's more kind of like they speak in generalities or in sort of corporate speak or in big picture speak where steve jobs would break it down at a much more primal level and say here's the problem here's what we thought about this we thought about that and here's our solution and we think you're going to use it for this
John:
And there's been good Steve Jobs presentation, bad ones.
John:
So the reason I like this article is like, wouldn't it be great if this guy you really love is still alive and he he announced things in a super dramatic way and also announced some cooler things than were announced.
John:
And that I feel like is just it's cheating.
John:
You know, this is not this article is not a guideline for how Apple can do better presentations unless they can do cooler things and resurrect Steve Jobs.
John:
So.
John:
I would have rather seen this article be, I mean, I have yet to see the article that says if Steve Jobs was alive, X, Y, and Z that I've liked, and this continues that trend.
John:
This article would have been better explaining what was wrong with Tim Cook's presentation, and you can compare it to successful presentations by Steve Jobs.
John:
But I think if this actual presentation happened the way they said, it would be overblown for what they actually announced, you know.
Marco:
our personal universe company apple if apple said that on stage even it was steve jobs it would be ridiculous so yeah did not like it as much as you guys did but no i mean that's you know it was not perfect but i think it did it did make a lot of very good points and it did it did show a lot of things that apple could have done plausibly and differently and and they chose not to
John:
I mean, it also depends on, like, the context.
John:
Like, I think the couple, I mean, was it this most recent?
John:
Probably, like, this most recent WWDC, I thought, was not a Steve Jobs-style presentation, but was really good.
John:
Like, this is the type of stuff that Steve Jobs wouldn't have known how to describe in an interesting way.
John:
all the the new language the development tools the the showing the new versions of the os all that software and developer tool stuff was presented by people who knew about it in a style that is different than steve jobs's style and i thought it was one of the better wwc keynotes for the audience that it was given to maybe not to the press or whatever but for a room full of developers everybody was just you know was jazzed everyone had something to be jazzed about
John:
in that uh wwc presentation i think i've only been to what four of them in person or whatever i think that was extremely successful compared to the last jobs w obviously he was in very bad health there but he just didn't have the type of stuff to announce that he likes to announce so the watch one was definitely in steve jobs's wheelhouse but there are other presentations that that are in the current apple's wheelhouse
Marco:
Yeah, it was very clear.
Marco:
Steve Jobs was always very bad at hiding when he didn't feel that strongly about something.
Marco:
He was very bad at hiding that.
Marco:
I think Tim Cook has kind of a different problem, which is Tim Cook is really excited about certain things, and either he doesn't understand that he needs to kind of lead us to that point before just telling us how excited he is, or he doesn't know how to lead us to that point.
John:
Or he's excited about things that we're not.
John:
I bet if he presented to the organization of people who manage supply chains, whatever their name is, he would be super excited about the details of those things.
John:
He's excited about different things.
John:
I don't want to say he wants to talk about finance or supply chains or making deals or...
John:
Like to give an example, if we ever get to it, the Charlie Rose interview and the interviews that Tim Cook has given show the things that he's excited about.
John:
They just don't happen to be the same things as Steve Jobs is excited about.
John:
He's just a different person.
John:
Like Pavon in the chat room said that that article struck him as Steve Jobs fan fiction.
John:
I think that is a reasonable approximation of what it is.
John:
And if you like Steve Jobs fan fiction, then that's a good example of it.
John:
But I was not in the mood for Steve Jobs fan fiction.
Marco:
I would say that... Let's jump to the Tim Cook-Charlie Rose interview because we're talking about it anyway.
Marco:
That was, first of all, very good.
Marco:
It took me a second.
Marco:
I ended up downloading it from somewhere and watching it with QuickTime Player at like 1.5x because Tim Cook is not a fast speaker and it got a little bit slow at times.
Marco:
So I had to get through it twice before I really appreciated it because the first time I just kept zoning out.
Marco:
Switch to other tabs and do other things and oh, that's right, that's playing in the background.
Marco:
uh anyway so once i paid attention to it it really is quite good it it does show like it shows tim getting slightly at ease here and there and and you could tell like the real tim is coming out when he's slightly off the cuff and you can tell he doesn't really go off the cuff ever like and this is probably as far as he ever gets
Marco:
Because he's a very controlled person in public.
Marco:
You could tell he says things very deliberately, very thoughtfully.
Marco:
But just seeing that little bit more of his personality in this was, I think, extremely positive and interesting.
Marco:
And I want to see more of the Tim Cook that we saw on Charlie Rose.
Marco:
I think he should let more of that come out because what we saw there...
Marco:
was Tim really caring very strongly about certain things like privacy, where, like, he came out so hard on privacy, and we'll talk about that too, I guess.
Marco:
Like, Tim is not just some boring paper pusher.
Marco:
He is a very strongly principled guy, and he feels very strongly about certain things, and...
Marco:
I feel like so far he has not let a lot of that out, possibly because he didn't think it was the right time, because there were so many eyes on him, everyone looking for him to mess up or do something to indicate that he's not fit for the job or whatever.
Marco:
So maybe he's been going into it slowly.
Marco:
But the Tim Cook that we saw in Charlie Rose, I would like to see more from.
John:
Did you read that, was it a Bloomberg interview?
John:
There was some lengthy interview with him.
Marco:
I haven't gotten to it yet.
Marco:
What was with those covers, by the way?
Marco:
What was that?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Like, those were real?
John:
Yeah, I thought they were fake for the first several tweets, too.
John:
And then a series of tweets came in with everyone being flabbergasted.
John:
They were real, and I joined them in their surprise about that.
Marco:
In their flabbergastedness.
John:
I had forgot that was a paper magazine that had a cover.
John:
I thought it was just online anyway.
John:
But I think it was Bloomberg.
John:
I'll try to find the link for the show notes.
John:
There was an interview.
John:
There was like a condensed version of what I thought were the most revealing parts of the Charlie Rose interview.
John:
And it gets at what what Tim Cook really cares about beyond the things beyond, obviously, his job, which is managing a big company and CEOs.
John:
CEOs usually tend not to talk to the public about aspects of their job because who cares about other except for other CEOs?
John:
That's why I was saying if.
John:
Tim Cook was talking to a group of other CEOs or other people who have similar jobs managing large organizations.
John:
He would have a lot of interesting things to say to them, but not to consumers.
John:
And then there's a technology part which Tim Cook appreciates and understands, but is not a geek about like Steve Jobs was.
John:
Right.
John:
He's not obsessed with one particular software feature or one particular hardware feature and just marveling over it and everything.
John:
You can tell that.
John:
When you're the CEO, you can imbue the company with some aspects of your personality.
John:
And like Margaret was saying, Tim Cook has been hesitant to do that thus far, kind of like just being the sort of guy behind the scenes like he has been for so long.
John:
But I think maybe in the Mac Pro world.
John:
what was that 2011 or 2012 that's when his personality started to come out a little bit more where he was starting to become willing to use apple the company as a vehicle to achieve goals that are personally important to him and those goals as expressed on charlie rosen and his interviews are about the environment privacy and human rights and diversity
John:
uh topics that have very little to do with apple watches or imax or anything like that but now he is finally coming out and saying i'm the leader of the biggest company in the united states maybe the biggest company in the world i have tremendous power i want to use that power to achieve things that are important to me because i think they're good ideas they're not the goals of the company apple is not turning into you know an organization that just deals with the environment and human rights and privacy but
John:
In the course of doing the things that Apple does, making great products that make people's lives better, that they really love and blah, blah, blah, blah, all that stuff.
John:
They can also do these things.
John:
And part of that is him going on shows and saying, here's what we really care about.
John:
Like the diversity report.
John:
I was talking in the text interview about that diversity report they put up.
John:
I think we mentioned on the show saying what percentage of Apple's employees are what.
John:
age what what race what gender all this other stuff and tim cook uh saying that internally there was friction about like should we publish this because we look terrible like our diversity numbers are not good should we even publish this and tim cook made the decision apparently over the objections of other people like no
John:
where we have to walk the walk i care about diversity if we're not doing a good job we want to be transparent about that we're going to put out this thing and write in the thing that they published just you know tim cook saying a little text and things says we are not happy with these numbers how often do you see a gigantic company publish something that they know will essentially make them look bad and admit in plain language right in the thing this report shows that we are not achieving our goal as you know as well as i want to we're not happy with this we're going to try to do better but here's what it is anyway
John:
So that's what's fascinating to me is that now the biggest company in the world is being run by somebody who cares about things and is willing to put his money in his company where his mouth is on them, like with their whole data center, trying to run an entire data center off renewable energy.
John:
despite the fact that it adds tremendous complication and cost, I'm sure.
John:
And they're doing the same thing with a crazy spaceship type of thing.
John:
Like, yeah, we have enough money.
John:
We can just throw a data center up there and we can just pay for electricity.
John:
We'll be fine.
John:
But can we build gigantic solar farms in North Carolina to do it?
John:
You're just making it harder for yourself.
John:
You're just like, it doesn't make business sense, right?
John:
That's like when those people came up in the shareholder meeting and Tim Cook practically shouted the guy down and said, look, if you're looking for someone who's just going to make decisions based on return on investment, get out of the stock.
John:
I'm, you know, tough luck, right?
John:
That's the real Tim Cook.
John:
And...
John:
We don't relate to it as much because like, oh, I like to Steve Jobs.
John:
He was totally into like the pixels and the cool edges and the designs.
John:
And Johnny Ive likes, you know, carving things with diamonds or whatever.
John:
Well, Tim Cook cares about privacy, human rights in the environment and overall health.
John:
And those topics, although they may not be tech nerdy, it's refreshing to see them sort of bravely and boldly both express and acted on by someone with as much power and money as Tim Cook.
Marco:
And I think what Tim is doing is not only interesting and progressive from a social and environmental perspective, it's also just good business.
Marco:
He's not going to do anything that's going to really damage Apple's business.
Marco:
He's smarter than that.
Marco:
Everything he does is carefully measured.
Marco:
He knows what he's getting into, and he's doing it because he has probably decided it's worth it and that it will be a net gain for the company.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
When you're as big as Apple, as they know, as we all know, you get people attacking you for all sorts of crazy stuff.
Marco:
And some of it is fair and some of it isn't.
Marco:
And it is very important for Apple to maintain its reputation.
Marco:
especially going into fashion.
Marco:
But, you know, it's very important for them to not be known as the company that has all these, like, you know, labor abuses in China and not be known as the company that's destroying the environment with all the data centers and everything else, like, and not be known as the company that sells all your data to advertisers.
Marco:
Like, it is very important for Apple to maintain these images, to, you know, to...
Marco:
to address the issues that are coming up in technology.
Marco:
So a few years ago, those issues were environmental.
Marco:
Today, they're diversity.
Marco:
These issues are coming up, and they're being talked about, and accusations are being thrown around.
Marco:
What are you doing about it?
Marco:
What are you doing about it?
Marco:
Your company's the problem.
Marco:
Your company's the problem.
Marco:
Tim Cook is getting ahead of these things when he can, or at least responding to them when he needs to.
Marco:
And that, I think, serves Apple well overall.
Marco:
You know, releasing a diversity report and saying, I'm not happy with this and we're trying to do better than this.
Marco:
that is smart it is it is both socially responsible and good business and i think that again it's what we're seeing from tim cook all over the place he does things that are smart and good business and and he you know because you know the the roi thing on this stock like he was it was it was addressing a question about environmental stuff and making things accessible by the blind and everything and it's like
Marco:
That is not costing Apple a meaningful amount.
Marco:
It is not making them a severely less profitable company and certainly is not making them an unprofitable company to care about things like this.
Marco:
It isn't harming their business meaningfully.
Marco:
And shouting down some guy in a shareholder meeting probably helped their business because that was reported everywhere as, look how good this guy is.
Marco:
He has things under control and he's principled.
Marco:
He does things that help.
John:
I was trying to find the exact thing in that interview with him, but it was a similar question from the interviewer about whether there's some tension between you and the other people in your organization about what the company should do.
John:
And the question put Tim Cook in the role of someone who wanted to just go ahead with something.
John:
I think it was maybe like, what if Johnny Ives said it's not good enough, but you said, well, we've got to ship something now.
John:
And Tim Cook, maybe it was a different question, but anyway, Tim Cook's answer made the point that
John:
He's not a short term CEO.
John:
He's not looking for we got to make our numbers next quarter.
John:
And that's what you were getting at, Marco, with like these things look like, oh, you're being so brave or whatever.
John:
But they also happen to be in the long run better for the company, better for the planet, better for everybody.
John:
Everybody is just that there's so much thinking, especially in large corporations.
John:
Like, I don't care what's good in the long run.
John:
Just make your money now.
John:
Get it while the getting is good and forget about long term consequences.
John:
And the right decision, if you're if your time window is longer than a year or two, the right decision is to care about renewable energy, to care about diversity, to care about the working conditions in China and all that other stuff.
John:
Right.
John:
Those are actually not only the right thing to do, but better for the company.
John:
In the same way that Apple has proven, like if we just care, if we pay attention to the products, we don't make a million products to try to sell into every little market category.
John:
Some people want a hardware keyboard.
John:
Some people don't.
John:
Some people want a big computer.
John:
Some people want a small.
John:
Like we have to fill every single little thing.
John:
No, they have a small number of products.
John:
They make them as good as they can.
John:
They diversify as needed.
John:
But they're not like all those other companies that like HP.
John:
You just will make a product for every single person, every single purpose.
John:
We just got to get the money now.
John:
Get it, get it, get it.
John:
Long term, that's not good.
John:
Long term, Apple says focus on the product, make a few products really awesome.
John:
Don't get into businesses where just for the hell of it, like one of the things that we're talking about is all the different kinds of products that Apple researched and decided not to make.
John:
Short term, that looks dumb.
John:
It seems like a waste of money.
John:
long term apple has proven proven that it's a winning strategy so all these things that tim cook does and the apple the company does are always focused on the long term and to to people so focused on the short term it seems like they're making the wrong call but it is actually the the right thing to do and also the thing that will make apple successful years and years down the line you know whether investors care about that because they want to get in and out of the stock because the average
John:
what is the average time a stock is held now these days is like less than a year when you know i think it's a few minutes well we're not talking about high frequency trading but yeah it's just a different mindset and it is the correct mindset and it's kind of a that's nice that's fine for merlin type of situation where it's like well if you're apple you can afford to have that thing but it's the reverse if you have that attitude that's your only chance of ever becoming a company like apple
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Marco:
The valet transfer service.
Marco:
No, I know.
Marco:
That's probably a joke.
Marco:
Anyway, they also have volume discounts.
Marco:
This is a relatively new thing.
Marco:
If you have 10 or more domain names, they now give you discounts on renewals.
Marco:
The more domains you have, the less you need to pay for renewals.
Marco:
So check that out as well.
Marco:
They have custom email addresses, all sorts of stuff.
Marco:
Everything you'd expect from a registrar, they have it and it's good.
Marco:
I highly recommend Hover.
Marco:
I use them myself.
Marco:
They are great.
Marco:
So anyway, go to hover.com and use offer code WHITECARSLOL for 10% off your first order.
Marco:
Once again, thank you very much to Hover for sponsoring our show.
Marco:
Don't forget promo code WHITECARSLOL for 10% off.
Casey:
Marco and I both received our new iPhone 6s on this past Friday.
Casey:
We are recording on Wednesday night.
Casey:
I've had a couple of work days with the iPhone 6 that I ordered.
Casey:
To recap, I ordered a iPhone 6 Space Gray 64 gig like pretty much everyone on Twitter.
Casey:
And I don't know what to think.
Casey:
It is too big.
John:
What, the 4.7 is too big?
Casey:
It's too big.
John:
I played with one this week, and I've got to say I disagree.
John:
I was pleasantly surprised at how not big the small one felt.
Casey:
So I think the problem is that I like using my iPhone one-handed quite a lot.
Casey:
You could make a legitimate argument that I don't need to most times, but nevertheless, I tend to use my phone one-handed.
Casey:
And so because of that, when I hold my phone the way I'm used to, which is my pinky covering the
Casey:
lightning port as kind of like the weight bearing the load bearing finger if you will my ring and middle fingers on the left this is my right hand ring and fiddle finger middle fingers on the left hand side of the phone my pointer finger basically on the apple logo and then my my right thumb doing all the operating i can only get about two-thirds up the screen you're holding it wrong casey
John:
You're totally, I don't know how you're doing that.
John:
Because it's what I'm used to.
John:
I actually got to watch you more closely next time I see you.
John:
That seems like the most precarious way to hold this thing.
John:
Like, I don't have my iPod Touch with me, but I did the reach test on the iPhone 6 to see what I could reach with my normal grip.
John:
And I thought this was everybody's normal grip.
John:
But hearing you just describe that, that is not the way I hold the phone.
John:
I have with the corner sort of nestled in the palm of my hand.
John:
I can reach everywhere across the face of the 6 with my thumb except for the farthest corner.
John:
And the farthest corner, I'm like maybe half an inch at most I'm missing from it.
John:
This is without me shimmying or moving my palm at all.
John:
Just palm anchored in my all four fingers wrapped on one side of the phone.
John:
The other corner of the phone nestled into my palm and my thumb sweeping the thing.
John:
I can reach the top right corner.
John:
I can reach the bottom left corner.
John:
I can reach the bottom right corner.
John:
Top left.
John:
I can't quite reach.
John:
I would have to adjust my grip.
John:
but that's more than I thought I would be able to reach.
John:
I was envisioning me not be able to reach any corners except for the one closest to my palm.
John:
You with the balancing on the pinky with your pointer finger on the Apple logo, I don't know what you're doing.
John:
Put all four fingers on the side, especially now that they have the power button on the side, you can hit it with your thumb.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And to be honest, I think you're probably right that I just need to give up several years of habit and adjust.
Casey:
And that's reasonable.
John:
But it'll be more secure.
John:
But I'm saying this other grip, even with the five size thing, that grip is better for that one is you're less likely to drop it.
Casey:
No, I'm less likely to drop it because I have my pinky blocking it from being dropped.
John:
No, you're just making this little balance cradle.
John:
Someone jostles your hand, it'll go flipping out of the thing because you're not actually gripping it.
John:
You're just sort of balancing it on it.
John:
It's like sheet music sitting on one of those sheet music stands.
John:
If someone bumps into it, it's going to go tumbling off.
John:
Mine I'm actually holding in my hand.
Marco:
No, in Casey's defense, it sounds like the same way as Casey, and it is a quite secure hold.
Marco:
If you just hold it with your thumb pad, whatever that's called, on one side, and then all four fingers on the other side across the middle, then it can slide up and down.
Marco:
Whereas if you just take the pinky and you bring it down on the bottom, then you're anchoring the bottom right corner.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Exactly.
John:
It's not moving anywhere.
John:
I can't go down because it's literally in the palm of my hand.
John:
It can't go up because I'm gripping with all four fingers and the side of my hand.
John:
I have it in a vice grip.
John:
I don't have to daintily hold it and have it sort of nestled in a holster shaped like my hand.
John:
I'm actually holding it.
Casey:
So anyway, I'm sure I'm also causing antenna issues as well because I'm holding it wrong.
Casey:
Anyway, if you leave aside the one-handed use, which I still haven't come to grips with, be that my fault, be it the phone's fault, one way or another, I haven't come to grips with one-handed use.
Casey:
But nevertheless, the screen itself
Casey:
I do like.
Casey:
I do like it being a little bigger.
Casey:
I do think it looks better, although that must be in my head because the 4.7-inch screen is pretty much identical to the 5S screen, isn't it?
John:
No, no.
John:
It has better viewing angles, better color depth.
John:
And what about that curved glass?
John:
I love the curved edges in the curved glass.
John:
Love it.
Casey:
So here's the thing about the curved glass.
Casey:
When I first got my phone,
Casey:
and i did not have a case for it yet i really liked the curved glass and the most awesome part about the curved glass to me was the swipe from the left edge to the right which is a back gesture and also an unlock gesture although obviously you don't use that too terribly often with touch id it makes that gesture so much nicer than it was on the squared off 5s but
Casey:
I had an Apple leather case for my 5S, and it was far and away the best case I've ever used on any phone.
Casey:
I had had bumpers before.
Casey:
I occasionally would use battery cases if I'm at a conference.
Casey:
And I loved the leather case in the 5S, so I got one for the 6.
Casey:
And the problem with the Apple leather case for the 6 is that the way it mounts, it kind of...
Casey:
It covers up the nice bit of the curved edge of the glass and just kind of ruins that feel.
John:
Yeah, I am worried about cases on the curved thing.
John:
That's what I was thinking about when I was holding it.
John:
How are you going to put a case on this and preserve the things that are good about it?
John:
I don't know.
Marco:
They don't really work.
Marco:
I actually got to hold Casey's phone and I had the exact same problem with it.
Marco:
It's like once you have the case on it, it really does ruin that curve.
Casey:
And so I don't know what to do because I am enough of a klutz that I often bang my phone into things because I'm not paying attention to what I'm doing.
Casey:
Knock on, well, there's no wood nearby, but knock on glass.
Casey:
knock on bent aluminum yeah exactly knock on bent aluminum i haven't dropped a phone ever to the point that the screen shatters but i'm so scared especially since the the back in the sides of this thing are so darn slippery slippery or slippy or whatever i'm so scared i'm gonna drop it especially since i can't anchor it on my pinky ahem just grip it you won't drop it if you grip it yeah did you buy the did you buy the extra insurance i did not it's like 50 bucks right it's 70 or 80 isn't it now
John:
I'll probably buy it just because it's still cheaper than getting it.
John:
I don't trust myself not to drop it.
John:
We've got it on my wife's phones.
John:
Of course, that means she hasn't dropped them, but I just feel better buying it in the grand scheme of things.
John:
I worry less about it.
Marco:
See, my policy on that is I stopped buying AppleCare and various protection plans and warranties a few years ago.
Marco:
And my current policy is the first time I really need one and regret not having bought one, I'll start buying them again.
Marco:
So far, it hasn't happened.
Marco:
I'm coming out way ahead.
Casey:
Yeah, I tend to agree with you, but remind me of that when I take the case off this thing and drop it.
John:
I don't buy it on my Macs.
John:
I've never really bought it on my Macs because I always assume they're not going to be in a harsh environment.
John:
But once I'm carrying something around, I have dropped my iPod Touch many, many times.
John:
It just so happens it hasn't broken.
John:
I do have a case on it.
John:
If I can find a case...
John:
that i like for the six assuming i buy one that is like this tpu uh belkin case i have on my ipod uh touches i really like this case and this case totally annihilate the curve but if if the edges feel like this ipod touch case was does it's got it feels like the 5c it's like a little bathtub like a squared off bathtub
John:
I would be fine.
John:
I would be fine with that.
John:
I like how the 5C feels as well.
John:
I think the 6 is great.
John:
Without a case, I'll have to see what it's like with cases.
John:
But anyway, the result of my trying the 6 in person is that I think the 6 is not too ridiculous.
John:
And now all I'm doing is just waiting for the October event to see if there's any iPod Touch action happening there.
Casey:
So are you implying that if there is no new iPod Touch, you're going to finally get an iPhone?
Casey:
Probably.
Marco:
Wow, this is big.
Marco:
I'm so happy.
Marco:
I'm guessing if there's a new iPod Touch, it would not have these bigger screens.
Marco:
I'm guessing it would be like, you know, basically a 5S or less.
Marco:
Because, I think we've discussed this already, but yeah, I think the bigger screens really require that hardware display scaler, which is probably only in the A8.
John:
Well, I don't mean the Plus.
John:
I just mean the 6 size.
John:
No, I know.
John:
Same thing.
John:
It also has a scaler.
John:
Put an A7 and it doesn't have a scaler in that one, does it?
John:
Yep, sure does.
John:
It's not scaling up anything.
John:
It's just a higher resolution.
Marco:
It scales up the apps when they aren't made for the screen.
Marco:
oh well yeah but the display that's only for apps that aren't updated for the 6 right yeah but either way i'm pretty sure the scaler is there and and i'm pretty sure that they would not have a device with that size screen in this day and age without that scaler which probably means and they also probably wouldn't make like a custom part for the ipod touch since nobody buys them they made a big deal about the scaler but my ipad 3 you can run you run doubled iphone apps on the ipad for years it's fine
Marco:
I'm guessing they're not going to do it until they can put an A8 in it.
John:
Well, all I'm saying is like this, not the big size, because that one, that's, I think you would need the A8 in there to do that.
John:
But for the other size, that would make a great iPod touch.
John:
Like that size screen for, you know, for the kids thing where you don't want to give your kid a phone, but you want them to be able to play iOS games.
John:
It's thin, it's got a bigger screen.
John:
It's a total win for an iPod.
John:
If they still feel like an iPod touch is the thing they want to make, I think that size is a natural fit.
John:
The bigger size, not so much.
Casey:
That's an interesting point.
Casey:
I agree with you.
Casey:
To come back to the iPhones and to get toward the 6+, a couple other quick thoughts about the 6.
Casey:
The Apple leather case no longer covers the bottom of the phone, which looks a little...
Casey:
but is actually kind of convenient because there's no real headphone cutout anymore that you have to worry about.
Casey:
And additionally, there's no lightning port cutout anymore because I found that, I think it was the Amazon lightning cables were too thick at the head in order to get into the little cutout for the lightning port on the 5S case.
Casey:
So I do kind of like that.
Casey:
And I do love the feel of the Apple leather cases, and it makes the protruding lens not be an issue anymore.
Casey:
But I don't know, sitting here now, I love, I think the phone looks good.
Casey:
I like having a little bit more real estate, more than I thought I would, in fact.
Casey:
However, every time I pick up Erin's phone, and she's staying with the 5S by her own choice, I think to myself, well, the first thought is, holy crap, this is tiny.
Casey:
The second thought I have is, my goodness, it feels so much better in my hand.
Casey:
Now, what do you think, Marco?
Marco?
Marco:
Well, first of all, let me address the cosmetic angle.
Marco:
Both of our friends, CGP Grey on the most recent episode of Hello Internet, which I highly recommend.
Marco:
It's a fantastic podcast.
Marco:
I'll put that in the show notes.
Marco:
CGP Grey went on a nice rant in the last episode of Hello Internet where he basically said he can't believe how unbelievably ugly the iPhone 6 is.
Casey:
Really?
Marco:
And also our friend Virginia Roberts.
Marco:
I wrote a blog post, I believe it was, the other day.
Marco:
We'll put that in the show notes as well.
Marco:
making some similar complaints about the appearance of it.
Marco:
So CGP Grey's main complaints were the rounded glass, first of all, and I think Virginia complained about it too.
Marco:
The rounded glass, I think they are right.
Marco:
It doesn't look as good.
Marco:
If you see the way the light reflects off of it, it does almost look like a plastic covering.
Marco:
It does not look as good.
Marco:
However, I think it feels so much better that I think it's worth it.
John:
i think it looks good too like i the ugliest phone design is the 5 and 5s design and if i had to maybe the 3gs comes close but i really didn't like the 5 5s design i thought it was just terrible in all ways it could be just super boring sharp edges no no interest whereas the curved glass like i that the whole thing is that it's curved but it's actually made of glass you know i mean apple's not the first one to do this tons the tons so the android people don't write in yes we are aware of
John:
Many, many Android phones have had curved glass and all sorts of curves in every different direction.
John:
This is the first Apple one.
John:
Fine.
John:
I'm just saying I like it.
John:
I liked it when it was on the Android phones.
John:
I like it when it was on other phones.
John:
I like it when it's on Apple's phones.
John:
It's because it's glass and it's hard and it's not some squishy little thing.
John:
And especially the joint that it makes with the rest of the thing.
John:
It, you know, tight panel gaps, Lexus, the relentless pursuit of perfection, ball bearings, accidental neutral.
John:
Anyway, all that stuff.
John:
I think it all it reflects well in the device.
John:
I can understand some people being annoyed by the antenna lines on the back.
Marco:
Yeah, that was that was the other thing like and both great.
Marco:
Definitely.
Marco:
I think Virginia did as well.
Marco:
I think the antenna lines are indeed ugly.
Marco:
I think the backs of these phones are a little ugly.
Marco:
I wouldn't say it's as severe as what Gray seemed to think.
Marco:
I do think, though, those antenna bands are indeed ugly, and I wish they didn't have them.
Marco:
However, I will also say that I have noticed significantly improved Wi-Fi reception from the 5S.
Marco:
There are a number of areas in and around my house where I used to be right on the edge and sometimes would drop the connection with Wi-Fi.
Marco:
and the uh with with every previous phone up to the 5s and then the 6 that i've had for the last few days has not had that problem like in those same areas it has like two uh arcs of wi-fi reception and holds connections just fine and is able to transfer data just fine um so whatever it's worth the wi-fi is definitely better reception in this current design and whether it's due to something about something that requires the bands who knows uh i i don't like the bands but
Marco:
If that's what it takes to get good Wi-Fi reception on edge areas of my house, I'll take them.
John:
Well, see, with the bands, they have the same decision.
John:
First of all, metal is not radio transparent, and they want to have metal for it.
John:
They have the plastic one.
John:
The 5C, I think, is great.
John:
It looks great, but they obviously want to have a metal one, but you can't have the antennas.
John:
You have to have something plastic or some other material that the radio waves can get out of.
John:
So they decided, we know we have to have a plastic part.
John:
We don't want to make plastic panels top and bottom.
John:
We don't want to make glass panels top and bottom.
John:
We don't want to do all those other things we've done before.
John:
We can't shove it all through a little glass Apple logo.
John:
We have to have these plastic parts.
John:
What can we do to make them attractive?
John:
And what they've done with them is, like the curved glass interfacing with the aluminum, they're showing off their ability to manufacture to tolerances by making the plastic exactly flush with the metal behind it.
John:
If those stripes were like slightly indented or you could catch your fingernails on them, or if they ever become that way, like after, you know, a month or two months or a year of use, if they start to get all uneven and they expand and contract at different rates or become warped or whatever, that will ruin the effect.
John:
But, you know, these iPhone 6s that we've all seen that are brand new from the factory...
John:
I think them showing off again, like panel gaps.
John:
They're like, look, it is like one seamless material.
John:
Isn't that amazing?
John:
I agree that from a distance looking at it, it's like, why are those ugly stripes all over it?
John:
But in the details close up, I appreciate the craftsmanship demonstrated.
John:
Like it's kind of like when you do, I forget what it's called, like wood inlays where you, someone, we don't have woodworkers in the chat room.
John:
Anyway, like where you do, where you cut out pieces of wood to precisely fit inside next to other pieces of wood and you polish all together.
John:
So it looks like one continuous piece of wood.
John:
that's kind of what they've done they've got antenna inlays they're not ornamental they're fairly straightforward but i think that it's it's a i think it's a nice look for a necessary evil i would i again i think the 4s design is still the best one because it took necessarily evil and incorporated into the design by making the entire back glass the entire front glass we all know what the problems with that were but as a piece of sculpture the 4s wins but as something i hold in my hand and probably won't ever see the back of i like the six
Marco:
Yeah, honestly, I think, you know, I totally agree with some of the concerns that it is indeed harder to reach things on the 6th.
Marco:
Like, you know, going from the 4S to the 5, certain things on screen were hard to reach, especially like if you hold it on the bottom, and most of us do, the upper corners became much harder to reach.
Marco:
um with the new one the 4.7 uh and the 5.5 that that it takes it in bigger directions you know it it even more things are now harder to reach without like an awkward re-grip or reach over kind of thing um no question that part is worse however um i think overall overall the six feels way better in the hand even with the awkward reaching needs
Casey:
Now, have you noticed improved battery life?
Casey:
Because granted, these are new devices, and Stephen Hackett took me to task on that.
Casey:
And naturally, any new battery is going to feel a little better or feel like it lasts longer than an older battery.
Casey:
But that being said, and I'm making up numbers here, but when I got done with an average workday with my 5S, I would be at something around 30% or 40%.
Casey:
I don't have the battery percentage on my 5S.
Casey:
On my status bars, this is all just visually, but I feel like I'm coming home from an average day at work with 10 or 20% more battery power remaining on my 6 than I ever did on my 5S.
Casey:
And I was curious, Marco, if you seem to have noticed similar results or if perhaps I'm just crazy.
Marco:
I guess it's better.
Marco:
I don't have a regular schedule, so every day I treat my phone weirdly differently.
Marco:
Yeah, I don't know.
Marco:
I think it's close enough.
Marco:
You're not talking about twice as long.
Casey:
No, no, no, no.
Marco:
You're talking about maybe 20% longer.
Marco:
I think it's close enough that it's within the realm of everyday variances of how it's being used or the age of the battery being one year newer or things like that.
Marco:
I don't think we can draw a big conclusion from that.
John:
Fair enough.
John:
That's the biggest one with batteries is when you get a new device, your old one has at least a one year old battery.
John:
Right.
John:
That it's always if you had just simply gotten a new version of the phone you already had, you'd be like, wow, this battery is better.
John:
That's just a fact of life with lithium ion batteries.
John:
It's even more severe in laptops when you only get a new one like every four years.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And it's even it's even bigger than the hey, I just installed a new version of the OS and it feels faster.
John:
But it's just because I rebooted because the battery thing is real measurable difference, even just from a year old battery.
John:
Use your phone every day.
John:
Yes.
John:
The new battery is always such a nice big win.
John:
I mean, I see it.
John:
Even we got my son an iPod touch and like, how old is this iPod touch now?
John:
Three years old.
John:
It's got two years old, whatever it is.
John:
When he got a brand new one, his battery is way better than mine.
John:
And I should have just given him my old one, but I didn't.
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
So let's, well, any other thoughts about the six?
Casey:
And then I'd like to talk about the six plus.
Marco:
Well, I think something that might bridge the two is software thoughts, like what it's like to use apps that are just bigger.
Marco:
So, you know, Casey, you and I have used the six now for, you know, about a week or whatever, a little less than a week.
Marco:
It's weird because, you know, obviously a lot of apps aren't updated yet, which is unfortunate because they really do look awful when they're not updated.
Marco:
And I really...
Marco:
i i hope developers listening to this if you thought that an update was something that you had to like maybe kind of casually get to and you haven't really and you haven't even submitted it yet i know there's a long submission queue so feel you know if you're stuck in the submission queue this does not apply to you um but if if you're a developer who's like oh well we'll get to it sometime soon you should reconsider that position you should really get on that because uh not a non-updated apps really do look awful
Marco:
And most importantly, they don't work very well if you ever bring up the keyboard because the keyboard is scaled also, which means that everything on the keyboard is slightly differently sized than the native keyboards in every other app on the phone.
Marco:
And so you make tons of typos because it's slightly off from what you're used to.
Marco:
So definitely get your apps updated as soon as you can.
Marco:
Anyway, for apps that have been updated, including all the built-in ones and a handful of third-party ones,
Marco:
i think it's kind of like you know so on ios it's like every window is always maximized uh or whatever os 10 calls zoomed well it's different it on ios it's like every window is always maximized the way maximized means on windows everything's always full screen edge to edge unless we get that crazy ipad resizing apps thing but we'll see about that
Marco:
And so when you get a bigger screen, you know, you don't just have you don't have more room to put apps side by side or anything.
Marco:
All the apps just get larger.
Marco:
They get more space.
Marco:
And so some of the apps, I think, are suffering from not knowing how to use the space very well.
Marco:
It's, you know, like even looking at something like mail, like I even this isn't even I'm not even talking about the six plus even just on the six.
Marco:
I'm having this problem with mail.
Marco:
where it just kind of looks like they don't know what to do with the space yet.
Marco:
It looks like you've maximized a window on a new, bigger monitor, and everything's just spread out more, and it isn't proportionally scaled.
Marco:
It's like your accidental overcast app for iPad.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
You know, it's a little less severe than that, but it is that same kind of effect where it's like this was clearly designed for a differently sized screen and it's just being scaled up to this new one.
Marco:
But it was obviously designed for a smaller screen and it kind of looks ridiculous.
Marco:
To an extent, I'm getting that feeling all over the place with the 6.
Marco:
The 6 Plus, I would imagine, is probably worse.
Marco:
I did end up getting both.
Marco:
My 6 Plus just arrived a few hours ago, so I haven't had a lot of time to spend with it.
Marco:
The reason I got both is for developer purposes.
Marco:
You know, I think we developers have been lucky in all previous years for developing for the iPhone or iPad in that we've never really had to buy extra ones.
Marco:
Forgive me if I gave this rant last week.
Marco:
I forgot, but...
Marco:
I at least gave it on Twitter.
Marco:
You know, we've never had to buy extra phones.
Marco:
If you're an Android developer, this sounds ridiculous because Android developers generally have to buy extra phones beyond the ones they would normally get from themselves just because you need more stuff to test on.
Marco:
iOS people, if you just bought a new iPhone every year or two, you were mostly okay.
Marco:
This was the first time I really felt like I had to buy an extra one because the 6 and 6 Plus are very different from each other, not to mention all previous iPhones.
Marco:
I think if you're a developer, it's very clear, both from just looking at the sales numbers, even though they're combined, looking around, seeing what is selling.
Marco:
I asked a guy in the Apple store today, what roughly is the sales mix between the two?
Marco:
And he said, well, you know, they're getting a lot fewer of the six pluses.
Marco:
So they're selling more sixes.
Marco:
But if they had them both in stock, they'd probably be selling about equally because there's so many people asking for the six plus.
Marco:
So I think this is very clear, like...
Marco:
We're not going to have one of these being the massive majority winner over the other one.
Marco:
We're going to see... I think both of these are going to be major selling devices.
Marco:
And it's important for developers to be able to test on both of them because they're different.
Marco:
The 6 Plus is not just the 6 but bigger.
Marco:
It has different size classes.
Marco:
It displays miniature iPad interfaces and landscape.
Marco:
It has a scaler and it runs at 3x.
Marco:
The entire screen runs differently and...
Marco:
The way you hold it is different.
Marco:
The ergonomics are different.
Marco:
Where you should put controls might be different.
Marco:
These are very different devices from each other and from past ones.
Marco:
And so I think it's important for developers to have both.
Marco:
So what I did was I got my regular AT&T one for the small one.
Marco:
And the big one, I got an unlocked one at full price in the same capacity, same color, black 64, so that I could swap the sim into it.
Marco:
And so what I'm going to actually do is I'm going to switch to the big one for like a week or two here or there, just so I can get a feel for what it's like to use one so I have some idea of what I should be developing on it.
Marco:
Like, where should controls go?
Marco:
How should things work?
Marco:
Like...
Marco:
I think it's important for developers to familiarize ourselves with both of these devices because they're huge, not in size.
Marco:
Well, that too, but they're going to be huge in sales and influence.
Marco:
Anyway, all that being said, I think the six plus is going to have this problem even more of having apps just kind of be scaled up and not like in this, in like the old unupdated way, but even after you update your apps, like, okay, you make your app run in this, in this bounding rectangle and,
Marco:
It's still not really redesigned for it until you do something special for it.
Marco:
And I think it's going to be a while before developers and Apple with its own apps really know how to use this space well enough.
Marco:
I think... And so in combination with what I said last week, where I think in a world where the Apple Watch is commonplace...
Marco:
I think the five plus or the six plus will make more sense because a bigger phone is harder to take in and out of your pocket or wherever it happens to be stored.
Marco:
If you have a watch to check notifications and to do minor actions on, you don't need to take it out of your pocket as much.
Marco:
So I think next year and in future years, the six plus line or the large size line will be more compelling for more people because it's mostly sitting in your pocket and you're glancing the watch all day and then you're using it when you have two hands available.
Marco:
This year, I think it'll be very successful, but a lot of geese like us won't be switching to it.
Marco:
That being said...
Marco:
Again, it's going to be big.
Marco:
And I think it's going to take us a year or two to even figure out how to use the space.
Casey:
I think you're right.
Casey:
We actually saw each other, Marco and I, this past weekend.
Casey:
And I had gotten a few friends together over the weekend.
Casey:
And one of my friends, Phil, actually had gotten his 6 Plus that Friday, this past Friday.
Casey:
And so I got to play with this iPhone 6 Plus for a little while.
Casey:
And my initial impressions about it were, firstly, oh my God, enormous.
Casey:
Secondly, it just felt to me a little bit wrong.
Casey:
The 6 still feels like a phone to me.
Casey:
Granted, I just spent a little while earlier telling you I do think it's a little too big.
Casey:
But maybe over time I'll adjust.
Casey:
The 6 Plus is indisputably freaking huge.
Casey:
And huge to the point that I almost, I think, mentally associate it more as a very small iPad than I do a very large iPhone.
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
I think if the iPad was the better selling device, they might have called this the iPad Nano.
Casey:
I agree.
Casey:
I agree completely.
Casey:
I did briefly use it in landscape mode in mail where it had the split view going on.
Casey:
And I actually really, really liked that.
Casey:
And I really thought that was really nice to have that extra bit of context as you're going through your email.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
And so presumably that would apply to many other apps that will eventually support these split views.
Casey:
But overall, it just felt completely wrong to me.
Casey:
And even if I was bumping into battery issues constantly like Mike Hurley is –
Casey:
I would be hard-pressed to want to carry something that large all the time.
Casey:
To me, I have my phone when I'm on the go, and I have my iPad when I don't need to create a lot of things, but I want something with a little more breathing room.
Casey:
iPad mini, I should say.
Casey:
And I have my laptop if I really need to sit down and do work.
Casey:
I don't personally see where a 6 Plus fits in my life, but...
Casey:
I mean, apparently a bunch of people do think so.
Casey:
But man, it's just so big.
John:
You know, the more I think about the 6+, which I still haven't even seen in person, but the more I think about it in the abstract, the more I relate it to my beloved still, but similarly troubled iPad 3, in that...
John:
it just seems like a compromised device the 3x resolution scaled down i know some people say that you can't tell and it doesn't matter and it looks great and blah blah blah but i'm pretty sure i will be able to tell uh and even if i can't tell it's just such an awkward like what am i gaining out of that like 400 dpi fine but rendering it 3x and scaling down that's not gaining me anything right that is not
John:
it's making the hardware work harder, render at a higher resolution, and then taking away, it's throwing away a lot of that information when it scales it down.
John:
I don't know if they just couldn't hit the target.
John:
You know, they couldn't get screens at the actual resolution.
John:
3X bothers me because I don't care if screen resolutions are multiples of 16, but I do care that they're evenly divisible.
John:
And I guess, well, you're supposed to be moving away from pixel perfect design.
John:
Who cares or whatever?
John:
Like why, why make that compromise if you don't have to?
John:
because they can't do to 4x that's why it's 3x because 4x is too much they can't even do native 3x so they do 3x and scale down just the whole thing seems like a transition point towards something else because we had 1x and we had 2x and it was a clear like we waited a while to get 2x when we got it it was a clean win 3x scaled down is not a clean win bigger 2x
John:
fine 4x which we're not there yet fine but this just seems like a way station in between where we are now and where we might like to be um or maybe we could just decide that the 2x is enough and there's not any benefit to going to 4 or 3x scale down but just the plus as a as a hardware device mostly defined by its screen because it's mostly just one big screen i don't like it
Marco:
I think your opinion might change if you see one.
Marco:
You know, academically, I get your points about how the scaling is kind of gross.
Marco:
No question.
Marco:
But in person, it doesn't really matter.
Marco:
And the screen just looks really, really good.
John:
You don't see the hairline shimmering when you scroll?
John:
Single native pixel lines, basically hairlines, scroll with them.
John:
You can see them shimmer, I think.
Marco:
Yeah, I'll check.
Marco:
So far, I haven't noticed that.
Marco:
Now that I brought it to your attention.
Marco:
Oh, yeah, there it is.
Marco:
You have to be scrolling a table view extremely slowly to see it and looking for it.
John:
It's not so much.
John:
It's really in the idea that this hardware is compromised.
John:
It's because they couldn't do 4X, but they didn't want to just do 2X that size because they wanted to get higher DPI.
John:
So this is the compromise.
John:
In the same way that I sit there and just wait and don't buy any new hardware until the hardware comes out that I want, right?
John:
Uh, I just often never, well, with the iPad, I waited until they had a retina model.
John:
And even that I got compromised because it's the very first retina one.
John:
And if I cared about like 3d performance or whatever, I would be, which I don't, but even just things like scrolling or whatever, like wait, wait for the thing that you want.
John:
And I didn't buy an iPad, despite the fact that I knew I would love one until it went retina.
John:
And I don't regret that decision.
John:
I'm sitting here with this 2008 Mac pro not buying a new one until it's just the right thing.
John:
And in that sort of mindset, the,
John:
The plus is not the one.
John:
I know where they're going.
John:
They're not there yet.
John:
This is a transitional fossil.
John:
It will come and go.
John:
We will forget that it ever existed.
John:
And the correct one that is a better fit between CPU, GPU, screen, and resolution.
John:
3X, I don't think I'll ever be happy with that.
Marco:
I don't... Well, the 3X itself, like, if it was native to the panel, I don't think that would be a problem.
Marco:
But, I mean, first of all, I think you're holding it to too high of a standard.
Marco:
You know, like, the way... Oh, yeah.
John:
Regular people don't care.
John:
This is just me personally.
John:
No one else has these values.
John:
I totally understand that.
Marco:
Like, if your phone is subsidized by your carrier and you can get a new one every year for... Or every two years for, like, 300 bucks, you don't have to worry about, like, you know, your Mac Pro decision is, am I going to be okay using this computer for the next five years?
Marco:
Your phone decision is, am I going to be okay using this computer for the next one to two years?
John:
It's esoteric.
John:
I just have specific demands of the hardware.
John:
Regular people can't even tell Retina versus not Retina.
John:
This is totally irrelevant.
John:
I'm talking about me personally.
John:
When I look at the arc of the hardware, if you are a hardware aficionado, there are certain machines that are just like, that was just the right time, just the right combination of all the parts were in harmony.
John:
No part was unnecessarily compromised by being in a transition between...
John:
an old one and a new one, right?
John:
Like the retina screen.
John:
Like they didn't do much with the screen.
John:
They didn't change the resolution.
John:
They didn't change the size until they could go retina.
John:
And that was just such a big leap, such a clean win.
John:
And they could have done compromises in between by tweaking the resolution, increasing the DPI, but they didn't.
John:
this 3x one just smells to me like we couldn't do 4x uh you know we had to do 3x but we couldn't even get a screen that did that so we had to do 3x scaled down and here's your device and maybe the only hope this gives me is that maybe it means a plus size uh ipod touch actually is in the works because
John:
If you're going to give a kid something to play games on or watch video on in the back of the car and you don't want to give them an iPad, a plus size iPod touch would be great.
John:
And maybe it's like, well, we could have had the super high end screen on the iPhone six plus if we added another 50 bucks.
John:
But we knew we were going to use the exact same screen in the plus size iPod touch.
John:
And so we had to go with this crazy compromise.
John:
But I don't know.
John:
I'm just making excuses for them now.
John:
It does not.
John:
It offends me on a tech nerd hardware level.
John:
None of this has anything to do with how successful the product will be in the market.
Marco:
I think also, you know, you're calling this a compromised device, you know, similar to the iPad 3.
Marco:
And I think by that, let me know if this is fair.
Marco:
I think you're saying, like, design compromises had to result in something mediocre.
Marco:
Is that a fair characterization?
John:
Not just mediocre, but like Gruber said, again, this is all academic because I haven't seen it, but he saw, like, a couple animations that looked like they might have stuttered a little more on the Plus.
John:
That's something that a consumer could notice, that it is smoother on the 6, but even though this is the more expensive model.
Marco:
See, I think the compromises on this are a lot less significant and less obvious than what you might be thinking.
Marco:
Like, the 3X divide... Again, I think you're... I see what you're saying about how it's offending you, like, on a nerd level.
Marco:
That I get.
Marco:
I think the overall device, looking at it... I'm holding one in my hand now.
Marco:
Looking at this device, like...
Marco:
I think this is, rather than saying it's a compromised device, I would say it's more like the 17-inch PowerBook.
Marco:
Remember that?
Marco:
Or a MacBook Pro?
John:
That was also compromised by the ridiculous keyboard floating in the giant sea of aluminum.
John:
Of course you'd have a problem with that.
John:
They use the same keyboard on the 13-inch Mac PowerBook and the 12-inch PowerBook.
John:
They called it a feature.
Marco:
I think I called it a feature, too.
John:
Tim Cook called it a feature because part sharing, but it was just ridiculous.
Marco:
No, it was nice to be consistent with your finger field.
John:
Consistently.
John:
Let's standardize on the worst keyboard.
Casey:
Oh, John, are you ever happy?
John:
Anyway.
John:
The 6 Plus does benefit from having, I would assume, exactly the same fit and finish and cool design and curved corners and everything.
John:
All the things that I said I like about the 6, this has them too.
John:
It's just bigger.
John:
I'm not saying the hardware.
John:
It's just the balance of the internals and the screen seems off to me.
Marco:
I think, like the 17-inch power book, people are going to love this thing.
Marco:
And maybe not all people.
Marco:
Maybe not even the majority.
Marco:
We'll see.
Marco:
I think the majority... I don't think I might go for this.
John:
Either way, it's... Regular people don't care about any of these things I just said.
John:
This is
John:
totally immaterial i might as well just been babbling all they care is it's a bigger screen and for them it's price you know do i want a hundred dollars more for the bigger one as i said i think the six will be the more popular model it's so hard to tell now because the six pluses are so incredibly supply constrained that they're always sold out everywhere and that could fool fool people into thinking that they are the more popular model but they're not it's like the gold iphones sure yeah but i i think like you know if if they made a retina 17 inch macbook pro today
Marco:
for my next for my next laptop i might buy that because i'm almost always limited on what i can do on my laptop by the screen space and yes it has the scaling modes but they make things really tiny and it's hard to see i i would almost certainly buy a 17 inch retina macbook pro if one was available
Marco:
The 17-inch old MacBook Pro and PowerBook, it didn't sell well as far as I know, but it sold because if that was your only computer and if you only had a laptop and you were a power user and portability was a little bit less important than screen space and being able to use as much screen space as you could in one thing because you had to be very productive on just the laptop screen with no external monitor.
Marco:
If those were your needs, that was a fantastic computer.
Marco:
And those were, granted, edge case needs, but that was a really great solution to it.
Marco:
Now, I think there's a parallel to draw between that and your iPhone being your only mobile device, if you don't have a tablet, and possibly your primary or only computer, if you don't even have a PC or you don't use one anymore or you hardly ever use one.
Marco:
So many people use their phones as their only or primary computer these days.
Marco:
It does make sense to have a big screen, to basically have as big of a screen as you can tolerate carrying around and using in your hand because so many things on a computer are better on big screens.
Marco:
And so I think from that point of view, this actually isn't a compromised device.
Marco:
It's simply another option for people for whom this is their primary computer.
John:
I think it's a compromised implementation of a device that everyone knows that there's a demand for, which is a big honking phone.
John:
I'm saying, except that a big honking phone, it's two levels of compromise.
John:
One category is big honking phone.
John:
You're consciously choosing a happy medium between all the other devices that you're not going to get because you're just going to have one phone.
John:
Fine.
John:
Fine.
John:
Once you've established that that's the type of thing we want to make, how do you make a really good, big, honking phone?
John:
And the answer is not, render it 3X and scale down to HD.
John:
With a GPU that can barely handle it.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Honestly, I think in the back of my mind, there's like a 40% chance or so that I'm actually, during my trial of this thing, I'm actually going to like it better and switch to it full-time.
Marco:
Because I'm exactly the kind of user who would like this.
Marco:
Like, I...
John:
If you like a big phone, you're like, I'm not saying, you know, again, that category of thing.
John:
If it turns out that you want a big phone, this is this is the only big iPhone.
John:
So a really big iPhone.
John:
So this is your only choice.
John:
And it's fine.
John:
Like, it's just not just it just bothers me.
John:
Like what it looks like is something that if they if they had their choice, they would have done it differently, but couldn't for reasons of parts availability or, you know, just like something didn't work out.
John:
What it seems like to me.
Marco:
Yeah, and again, that's fair.
Marco:
I just think in real-world use, it doesn't really matter.
John:
No, it doesn't.
John:
It just bothers me.
John:
I mean, again, my iPad 3 is exactly the same deal.
John:
It gets too hot, it's big, and it's thick.
John:
It's got the 30-pin connector.
John:
The GPU can barely handle the screen res.
John:
I mean, I was happy with it because I was holding out for as long as I possibly could to get a Retina screen.
John:
And Retina versus non-Retina, it was totally worth it.
John:
But I also recognize that of all the Retina iPads, this one is the bad one.
John:
It's the one where you just barely do Retina.
John:
The 4 came out so quickly after.
John:
The 4 has Lightning port, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Anyway, that's many, many parallels.
John:
And I say this as, like, I'm still using my iPad 3, and this is part of Apple's curse that, like...
John:
I've not seen a reason so far.
John:
I'm going to replace it with an Air eventually, too, but I've watched generations of iPads come and go, and every time I've said, you know what?
John:
My iPad is still pretty darn good.
John:
That screen looks good.
John:
I use it when I'm on my couch and in my bed, and it's just fine, and I can go two or three years without getting a new iPad, and I bet Apple hates that, but that is a testament to the longevity of even the worst retina iPad they have ever made.
John:
It was a compromised device, and I actually kind of like it when it gets warm because my hands are always cold, so maybe that's not it.
Marco:
well like to me like on a personal level for a minute um i think i would say now in retrospect now you know having seen both the ipad air and now big phones i would say the ipad mini is kind of a compromised device the non-retina one let's just get rid of that entirely well that one yeah
Marco:
i wish oh god i hope they stop selling that next month so we can stop supporting a5 chips anytime soon the ipad mini doesn't fit in most pockets unless you unless you carry a significantly larger bag or a big jacket um you know the ipad mini it's it's not always with you like a phone it is also not as spacious and feel as the full-size ipad even though i know it's the same resolution but the full-size ipad is just much nicer it also the full-size ipad is just a higher-end device you know the the retina mini
Marco:
And because it's unsubsidized like all the iPads, it really is a very low-end device.
Marco:
It is similar to the iPod Touch in the quality of components that it will probably usually end up getting.
Marco:
I think the current one was a fluke in that it had the same A7 as the big one and the same capabilities.
Marco:
I think it even had the same cameras and everything.
Marco:
It was just a slightly clocked lower and lower quality screen.
Marco:
Well, looking at the iPad Air now, and having owned now the Retina Mini, I think if I buy another iPad, well, of course I'm going to buy another iPad at some point, whatever iPad I buy next, I'm almost certain I'm going to get the full-sized one.
Marco:
Because I think the full-sized iPad...
Marco:
is a better iPad.
Marco:
To serve an iPad-like role for the kind of things I would use it for, which is not bringing it around as my portable device anymore, but as a small tablet in the house.
Marco:
like a small tablet to be next to my bed or next to the couch, you know, browse the internet at, you know, on, on furniture.
Marco:
It's great for that.
Marco:
I think for portable use, the big phones are just going to eat its lunch because they're just so much better at portable use.
Marco:
They're so much smaller.
Marco:
They are always with you.
Marco:
They have better cameras and they're higher end devices.
Marco:
There's way, way more profit in them so they can afford to have better components, better cameras, like all this stuff like they're,
Marco:
And they're always going to be higher-end devices.
Marco:
And they're always going to have cell plans because you already have a cell plan.
Marco:
Like, you don't have to worry about getting the cellular iPad and having a separate plan or pulling it with your existing one.
Marco:
Like, it's just such a more compelling argument for portable use to have just a little bit bigger phone.
Marco:
And then to have no iPad.
Marco:
And then have the iPad, if you're going to have an iPad at all, have it be the in-your-house portable casual tablet.
Marco:
In which case, the tending size, I think, is better than the Mini.
Casey:
You know, my brain knows that you're right, but God do I love my Retina iPad mini.
Casey:
And I, having had a third generation iPad, and that's Aaron's iPad now, I just don't see myself ever wanting to go to a big iPad again.
Casey:
But, you know, to each their own, that's what makes the world go round.
John:
When the 12-inch comes out, the 10-inch one will be the smallest, so that's what you'll get.
Casey:
Maybe.
Casey:
We'll see.
John:
Can we bend some iPhones now, finally?
Casey:
Oh, my God.
Casey:
We're over two hours.
Casey:
Are we really going to keep going?
Marco:
We'll do it in the after show.
Marco:
Thanks a lot to our three sponsors this week, Mobilux, Harry's, and Hover.
Marco:
And we will see you next week.
Marco:
Now the show is over.
Marco:
They didn't even mean to begin.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
Marco:
John didn't do any research.
Marco:
Marco and Casey wouldn't let him.
Marco:
Cause it was accidental.
Marco:
Oh, it was accidental.
John:
And you can find the show notes at atp.fm.
Marco:
And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
Casey:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-E-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Casey:
It's accidental, they didn't mean to.
Casey:
All right, so you're bending your iPhone already?
Marco:
You haven't even gotten one yet.
John:
No, the bent iPhones thing, this reminds me so much of our, you know, the quartz screen and testing it and scratching with glass and stuff like that.
John:
And I'm only going to slam this one video because it's the only one I saw, but it was the one featured on time.com that everyone linked to of the guy bending.
John:
Did you guys see this?
John:
The guy bending his iPhone 6 Plus?
Mm-hmm.
John:
Well, so it's one part.
John:
If you're going to make a video of this, obviously you're sacrificing a piece of hardware.
John:
You're like, I'm going to see.
John:
It's kind of like that guy was doing with the screen.
John:
I'm going to stab it with a knife.
John:
I'm going to do this.
John:
It's like a torture test to see what can this device stand up to.
John:
If you're going to go through all this trouble and destroy a multi-hundred-dollar device, it's like the USB connector.
What?
John:
Wouldn't you spend some time, since it's such a big deal, like this connector is going to be using a million devices, this video is going to cost me hundreds of dollars.
John:
Let me think for five minutes about how much value can I get out of this device, of bending this device.
John:
How much value can I get out of stabbing the screen with a knife?
John:
And I think you would have to say, like, you just bending the thing or submitting it to a stress test, or even if you had, like, a really complicated, you know, Dr. Drang metal stressing machine, there would be, like, digital readout showing how much force and where the fulcrum is and all this other stuff.
John:
You have to compare it to something.
John:
Otherwise, we have no idea if it's better or worse than the other ones.
John:
You have to bend the 5S.
John:
You can't just do it in isolation.
John:
So he takes the phone and he bends it and it's really hard and it bends.
John:
So what does that tell me?
John:
You just bent your phone for hundreds of dollars.
John:
You didn't tell me
John:
Well, I've been to 5S and it was harder.
John:
It was easier.
John:
It was like, we assume that maybe it's easier.
John:
Again, Dr. Durant can tell us exactly the equations.
John:
How much more leverage do you get on a longer phone?
John:
And every extra millimeter gives you X amount of force depending on where you put the fulcrum.
John:
You have to compare it.
John:
You have to say, stab this screen with a knife.
John:
Stab the old screen with a knife.
John:
One is harder.
John:
It's just basics.
John:
I'm not asking them to be scientists here.
John:
But if you're going to destroy a phone, the main thing we want to know is...
John:
Is this big giant phone more susceptible to bending than the old phones?
John:
Don't just assume that because you can bend the new phone, you have therefore imparted that information that like, okay, well, we bent the new phone and the story is about the new phone, therefore the new phone is worse.
John:
No, bend the old phone too.
John:
It's so incredibly painful.
John:
but as for bending it uh the only interesting information out of the bending was one it looked really hard to bend uh and two it bent uh as the guy pointed out in the video it bent in the weak spot in the side where the volume buttons come through because that's the part the little you know semicircular curve is the most weak because it's got you know the it's it's got holes in it or whatever um all that said
John:
I completely believe the story that someone had an iPhone 6 Plus in the front pocket of their pants and that they ended up bending it.
John:
And the reason I believe that is because cloth is very strong, surprisingly strong, especially to the strength of, you know, like pulling on it.
John:
It's not going to tear apart.
John:
That's why we make pants out of cloth, right?
John:
They don't fall out, rip apart when you wear them.
John:
Uh, so it can, and, you know, big, a big man's thighs, plus a bunch of really tight fitting dress pants, plus a phone in a pocket.
John:
I can totally see them imparting enough, enough force on a large phone to bend it.
John:
Uh, but it's still, that doesn't, you know, that doesn't answer any of my questions, which are, is this a problem unique to the six plus, or could, would he also have bent, uh,
John:
uh any of the past models would he also have bent an ipad mini who knows we don't know so i feel like this story is still an open question uh if the ipad is more susceptible of bending because it is larger and because you get more leverage on it
John:
maybe a little bit of this responsibility can go into apple and that if you're making a device slightly larger people still might try to use it like an old device by putting it in their pocket because hey i put my old phone in my pocket this is a little bit bigger this fits in my pocket i'll do that too whereas i think no one was ever trying to shove ipad minis into their pockets and if they did they would be just as bendy or even more bendy because you get even more leverage on it
John:
Anyway, I don't think this is as big a non-story as everyone else does, but first of all, don't put your devices in your pockets.
John:
I think when Tiff was on the show, I couldn't believe that she put it in her pocket, but even she said, well, I take it out before I sit down.
John:
Don't sit on your devices.
John:
Don't put it on the front pocket of your pants because...
John:
Just because I think it is possible to put it in the front pocket of your pants and bend it, you should still feel that.
John:
Like you still have feeling in your leg.
John:
The amount of force you need to impart on these metal things to bend them is substantial.
John:
And when you feel that happening in your front pocket, go, oh my God, I get like, I put my tiny little iPod touch in my front pocket.
John:
Sometimes when I sit down on a couch, I feel a little bit of tension in the pocket.
John:
Oh, I get right back up.
John:
You know, just don't do that.
John:
Don't think it's indestructible.
Marco:
I disagree with your statement that people should not put their devices in their pockets.
John:
Yeah, but the six plus like it's not so much that you put don't put in your pocket, but like like for your back pocket, like no one's no one's putting like their their phone in their back pocket and sitting down on concrete.
John:
Right.
John:
uh my very limited understanding of these matters is that a lot of women do precisely that because their front pockets simply aren't large enough to handle even a 5s i mean but you'll crack the screen like just from like plopping your butt down on something there's not enough cushion between the glass screen especially if you have no case and the thin back pocket of your pants and the concrete you'll end up chipping the glass on the screen well you put you put the screen side towards the butt or the leg it's screen side in
John:
What kind of gadget owner are you?
John:
Well, see, here's the thing with putting the screen side in.
John:
If you try to do that in your front pocket and you got that little fake pocket where the iPod Nano goes, there's a little metal thing poking out of that.
John:
So if you put the screen in and when you go into that pocket, you will be putting that metal thing against your screen.
Marco:
Well, that's why your left pocket is made for devices, because the little change pocket thing is always only on the right side.
John:
yeah but that's only for lefties i agree with john no you guys are wrong well anyway like putting in your pocket is like you can have in your pocket as long as you don't get that feeling like oh my god i'm now crushing the thing that's in my pocket right because you know you that feeling when you when you sit down with it in your in your pocket the wrong way or it's in your like when you're standing up it's fine when you start putting it under tension like you're gonna feel that you if you put enough force with your pants pockets on a device to bend it you will feel that happening
John:
And if you feel it happening, going, oh, it's fine.
John:
I'm sure it's indestructible.
John:
Nothing will happen to it.
John:
That's on you.
John:
But this gets back to what we just talked about with the watch.
John:
If Apple had made the iPhone 6 Plus two millimeters thicker and strengthened it so it was heavier and got better battery life, would people have thought that was a worse device or a better device?
Casey:
I think a better device.
John:
personally but that's not what apple wants as you've said several times well yeah exactly the other the other angle is well the why do they keep making it thinner because you don't get too radically thinner in one big jump you have to get there by little increments and if you don't keep getting thinner every year you're never going to get to the end point and someone else will and you'll be screwed and so i i understand apple's philosophy behind this i just think there's room in their product line for one device that doesn't make the same trade-offs i think overall they still need to keep going thinner uh because that's that's
John:
That's making progress.
John:
And I think that's moving towards something that is radically better.
John:
But along that path, there are allowed to be bumps.
John:
And if I was going to make a bump, I would make it with the big honking iPhone 6 Plus.
Marco:
We are moving towards a world... This is the first year where there's been more than one new iPhone.
Marco:
The 5C, I don't think, counts.
Marco:
This is the first year where there's been more than one radically new iPhone.
Marco:
And so, if there's going to be... Obviously, the only new iPhone of the year is not going to be some big, thick battery monster.
Marco:
But there is room in the lineup, as you said, for multiple entries.
Marco:
And if they had, say, a third entry, and it was...
Marco:
A 6++ 99 where it had an extra battery capacity in the back, that would be fine.
Marco:
That said, we all keep saying, oh yeah, we'd love if they made it a little thicker and had more battery.
Marco:
Battery twice as big or whatever.
Marco:
But I'm not entirely sure that is what we would actually want.
Marco:
We haven't held a device like that.
Marco:
We don't know.
Marco:
Batteries are so freaking heavy.
Marco:
that we don't know how that would actually feel apple has most likely tried this they have labs they try lots of things they've probably tried that you know let's see how big we can make the battery and balance the thickness and i don't think they're balancing it that way i think they have their design goals are based on thinner than last year as thin or thinner than last year i think it killed them to do the three with the with the extra humpback
Marco:
no and that's i agree and i think jason snell also had a good point on his new show what is it called i gotta remember the name of these things upgrade yes on upgrade episode i believe episode one um he was talking about how like it seems like apple has like a like a like a target battery life and they don't really feel the need to give more battery life than roughly what we have now
John:
Well, it's a minimum, like it has to be as thin as last year or thinner, and it has to get as good battery life or better and or better and or thinner are always good.
John:
But if you can't, you know, if you can't meet those goals, like it's like a barrier, you can't be below that.
John:
And again, they had to compromise for the first retina iPad, make it a little bit thicker than the two.
John:
And that was awful for them.
John:
But you got to do what you got to do.
John:
The thickness mostly has to do with battery life, but the weight, what you were getting at, Margo, is the key point.
John:
As someone points out in the chat room, the HTC One M8 is two millimeter thickers, and he says that it still bends.
John:
That's why I mentioned not just making it thicker to put in more room for the battery, but also being willing to make it heavier.
John:
And what do you do with the heavier?
John:
You put heavier strengthening materials in there.
John:
But the bottom line is all these things are bendable.
John:
They're made of aluminum and glass, aluminum bends.
John:
It does not spring back like plastic does.
John:
Plastic shatters or breaks apart.
John:
So like,
John:
You have to just not apply enough force on these things to bend them.
John:
I can take my iPad, put half on half off the table, and lean on one end of it and break it.
John:
Or bend it, or damage it in some way.
John:
And that's why I think pockets and the pocketability of this becomes a factor, or at the very least, awareness of what's in your pocket and what forces are being applied to it in your pocket.
John:
Just because it can kind of barely fit in your pocket, and then you sit down on concrete, and you feel a bunch of clunks, or you feel that stretching in your pockets.
John:
Don't ignore that feeling.
John:
It's not...
John:
They're not made of adamantium or unobtainium or any other made-up metal that's indestructible.
John:
They can bend and they can break.
John:
I mean, we know they can break when they drop them.
John:
We know we try to avoid dropping them.
John:
We know they can bend when you apply lots of force to them.
John:
Don't put them in a pocket that's going to apply a lot of force to it.
Marco:
Yeah, I think it's important to keep in mind two major factors whenever anyone brings up a problem with the new iPhone, which happens every year.
Marco:
Number one is you have to ask yourself, does this happen to every phone?
Marco:
Is this a problem with every cell phone that comes out?
Marco:
And therefore, it's kind of probably unavoidable or at least somewhat reasonable.
Marco:
Number two, you have to consider that when the new iPhone comes out,
Marco:
If you can show a flaw with it, you will get tons of attention.
Marco:
You will get tons of page views.
Marco:
You will get tons of ad money from those page views.
Marco:
You have a lot to gain by pointing out a major flaw in the new iPhone.
Marco:
And this will happen every year.
Marco:
And people will always try to figure out what that flaw might be.
Marco:
First, it was the antenna thing on the iPhone 4.
John:
The antenna was a much more solid case than bending, though, because the antenna was like, you don't need a weird use case.
John:
I can just show you that like that.
John:
And again, it gets with like, well, so that's fine.
John:
But show me with other phones, which is essentially what Apple did when they did their video.
John:
They didn't just say, hey, here's all the videos where here's my iPhone.
John:
Then let me wrap my hands around it in a crazy way.
John:
And look, it gets no signal.
John:
It's like, OK, well, then show me either last year's iPhone or previous ones.
John:
And some videos eventually did do that.
John:
But that's the key.
John:
Like.
John:
If you can just do something and say, isn't this bad, you have to compare it to something that we either are familiar with or find acceptable, which is why, you know, no one complained about bending with every single other iOS device before.
John:
Maybe all the previous iOS devices were more bendable than the current range.
John:
We don't know because that comparison hasn't been made.
John:
All people care about is, well, I can bend this one if I try real hard.
John:
Well, try to bend all the other ones or don't bother telling me anything.
John:
But bending is crazy.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
Find other giant phones like, you know, try to bend the Samsung ones.
Marco:
Try to bend the HTC ones.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So a couple of people, they built like they built someone bent an S4 and you can see it sort of comes apart to the seams because it's not, you know, just plastic.
John:
And then eventually the screen cracks because the plastic allows more bending than the aluminum does.
John:
And once you bend the glass a certain amount, it shatters.
John:
You know, you're right that it's all just sensationalism.
John:
You know, this is the from being the highest profile, not the most popular in terms of sale, but certainly the most popular in terms of like what people care about.
John:
Celebrity, essentially the iPhone, iOS devices are the celebrity devices.
John:
Yeah, that you're going to get a lot of interest in any story.
John:
that show something bad about them.
John:
But as a consumer, there is an actual consumer angle here and the consumers want to know, is this something I should care about or is it just one of those things?
John:
And the way you do that is by saying, how does it compare to products that I previously owned that I am familiar with?
John:
And the best way to do that is to compare it to previous iPhones.
John:
or previous iPads or something like that to say, is it better, worse, or the same?
John:
Because that gives consumers actual information.
John:
And then they can choose to ignore it or not, not based on the whole idea of like, oh, everyone always complains about Apple stuff, and so I should not pay attention to this.
John:
Or, oh, that darn Apple, they're always doing bad things, so this is terrible.
John:
Let me know.
John:
Is it worse than a 5S, better than a 5S, or the same as a 5S?
John:
That gives me information.
John:
Then I can say, this person did this comprehensive test that compared it against all these other things, and it turns out that the iPhones are no worse or better than any of the other ones.
John:
Then I know I can ignore the story, but I haven't seen that story yet.
John:
I can ignore it because I'm not going to stick these things in my pocket and sit down with them, but if that's the type of thing that you do, you should be looking for a story that tells you whether this is a concern or not.
Casey:
So, titles.
Marco:
I like the load-bearing finger.
Casey:
That is pretty good, actually.
Casey:
Where is that?
John:
I like your holding around Casey better than the load-bearing finger, which is because I disagree with Casey's holding technique.
Casey:
But I think he's right.
John:
No, it's not.
Casey:
You know, it's funny to me that both of you are the self-declared official arbiters of everything, of all the things.
Marco:
You're just realizing this now?
Marco:
No, I'm not.
John:
We're evaluating your holding technique based on the things that you would measure a holding technique on.
John:
One of them is comfort.
John:
One of them has to be security.
John:
There's criteria.
John:
We're not just arbitrarily saying because you do it, it's bad.
John:
The way you evaluate anything, what qualities of a way that you hold a phone are important when considering which way of holding a phone is better than another.
Casey:
I don't even know what to say right now.
Casey:
Isn't that the way you evaluate anything?
John:
It is.
John:
Whether you know it or not, you do.
John:
Again, to get back to the invisible spreadsheet, that should be the title of one of our episodes.
John:
There is a spreadsheet.
John:
It may be invisible to you.
John:
You may not have control over all the columns and numbers.
John:
You may not be even aware that they exist, but they do.