The World of Moving
John:
I'm on now my third pair of pad thingies for my headphones.
John:
And the first, you know, I had the ones that they came with, and then I replaced them with ones that were basically identical, and they lasted about the same amount of time, and they were starting to get cruddy again.
John:
So when I bought new ones this time, I decided to branch out and try some different ones.
John:
So I got replacements that are the same as the previous ones.
John:
I also got leather replacements, which is what I'm wearing now, and I also got velour replacements.
John:
Ooh.
John:
And I wore the leather ones for, I think, a couple of podcasts now.
John:
And I think they're going to last longer because they're leather, right?
John:
But I'm not sure they're any more comfortable.
John:
In fact, they may be less comfortable because the paddy things are bigger and there's not as much room for my ears inside them because the ear cups on these headphones are not really that big.
John:
So I'm wondering if, uh, I should switch to velour, but I didn't want to, I don't know if these, if I take these off, they're going to be mangled or whatever, but Marco, do you have any opinion on what is the best ear cup material in terms of durability and comfort?
Marco:
tons yeah um so first of all what which headphones please don't tell me the 7506 it's the crappy sony ones that you hate oh the 7506 damn it if they ever broke i might replace them but they don't they're the worst so first of all you just said they don't have a lot of room for your ears that's true they're kind of small you can get more comfortable headphones that have roomier ear cups the the 7506 ear cups are pretty small pretty shallow in particular um so that is something you can change with better headphones and
John:
Shallow, you mean like sticking out from my head shallow?
John:
Because my complaint is that they're narrow as in they're not very wide.
John:
They can't fit my entire ear in them very well.
Marco:
They have that problem as well.
Marco:
They are narrow and they are shallow.
John:
All right, so stop bashing out my headphones and just tell me ear cuff material.
John:
That's my question that I asked about it.
Marco:
The 7506 was a great headphone for a long time.
Marco:
There are way better ones available now.
Marco:
And it's so incredibly overrated because it has a past of being widely used, but it is not a modern at all headphone in so many ways.
Marco:
And people who say it's neutral are wrong.
Marco:
Look at it.
Marco:
It's not neutral.
Marco:
Look at measurements.
Marco:
It's totally not.
Marco:
But anyway, for ear cut material, you're basically facing a few different – keep in mind when you say things like leather, it's not real leather.
Marco:
It's just vinyl that is made to look like leather.
John:
These might be real leather.
Marco:
I didn't look, but they might be.
Marco:
It's conceivable.
Marco:
Generally speaking, the material that forms the squishy part of the pad, like the inner foam ring or whatever it is,
Marco:
That is usually much more important to comfort than the outside material.
Marco:
There are lots of different foams.
Marco:
There's like memory foam ear pads you can get.
Marco:
There's different qualities and densities and everything else.
Marco:
But the foam is usually a much more significant part of the comfort than the actual material itself, which makes it hard to –
Marco:
shop for different pads or compare things without actually just buying them and trying them because you don't really know between different like aftermarket pads or even first party ones you know kind of what you're getting there that being said typically leather is or the fake leather that they that they say is leather that's usually the best material and
Marco:
as like an all-arounder uh the downside is that it does tend to get slightly more sweaty than uh than like a more like cloth like velour like alternative the upside is that it's more isolating for sound the leather um because what makes it more sweaty is that it sticks to your head better and there's not a whole bunch of tiny little gaps that sound can get in and out of
Marco:
So this is not a large difference in sound isolation, but it is a difference.
Marco:
So it's worth noting for podcast usage, you have now these two conflicting values here.
Marco:
Like, you don't want sound delete because you don't want bleed on your track from the other people talking.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
You also don't want to be too hot when you're sitting there for two and a half hours in the summertime in your own air-conditioned room doing a podcast.
Marco:
So it's up to you which one you pick, but I think there's a very good reason why almost all studio headphones choose the leather-like pad finish because it just seals better and is generally, I think, a little bit more comfortable for long periods except for the heat issue.
John:
The thing I was worried about with the velour was sound leakage.
John:
Do you find that that's actually a thing that you can notice and measure, that the velour have more leakage than the leather?
Marco:
It is a measurable thing.
Marco:
One of the other things that is often noticeable with velour alternatives to various pads is that you get a little bit less bass response.
Marco:
And that's because it is not forming as good of a seal.
Marco:
And it's noticeable that on a lot of headphones, including probably my favorite mainstream podcasting headphones, the Beyerdynamic DT770, that comes in a bunch of different pads, the memory foam leather pads are significantly more isolating for podcasting use, and the bass is stronger in those than the Velour ones.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It is definitely a thing.
Marco:
Again, this is not a huge difference.
Marco:
It's nothing like the difference between open-backed versus closed-backed headphones.
Marco:
That's a much more significant difference.
Marco:
But there is a small difference with whether you choose velour pads or leather pads.
Marco:
And leather is the more isolating and more bass-heavy of the two.
John:
Just for completeness sake, because I know you want to and because I will actually add it to a notes document that I have on stuff like this.
John:
Just tell me the headphones that I should buy instead of these.
John:
So if someday I decide to, I'll already have.
John:
And keep in mind that I'm prioritizing comfort and I find these headphones to be comfortable, which is why I've never replaced them.
John:
But you just said that ear cups are too small.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
But they're smallish, but like podcasting for three hours does not make my ears hurt.
John:
It makes my ears sweaty, but we've already covered that that's just, you know, a consequence of sound isolation.
John:
But it doesn't make my ears hurt.
John:
It's just like, eh, I can do with room ear ones.
John:
And in particular, the leather ear pads are a little bit like the paddy part is thicker, so it makes the hole in the middle a little smaller.
John:
Again, it doesn't hurt, but I feel less roomy as they did with the default ones, which I still have a pair of.
John:
But anyway, what is your recommendation?
John:
It's complicated.
John:
I already told you my requirement.
John:
It's not complicated.
John:
You should have whatever your most comfortable ones are that you think would be good for podcasting.
Casey:
I don't care about sound quality.
Casey:
What you need, John, is you need what Marco either bought for me or made me buy, which is what he described earlier, which is the Bear Dynamic DT770 Pro.
Casey:
And the one that I have is 32 ohm.
John:
Oh, it can't require an amp.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
John:
I plug these things into my microphone.
Casey:
Yep, 32 ohm.
Casey:
It's fine on the USB Pre 2.
Casey:
I can't speak for your microphone, but it is reasonably comfortable.
Casey:
They sound really good, I think.
Casey:
And this is a topic that we may explore someday, sometime, but not tonight.
Casey:
But I think...
Casey:
I think that I prefer a comparatively boomier headphone than Marco.
Casey:
really good in my perspective for music, but they do tend to be a little tinny.
Casey:
However, for podcasting, I think they're, they're excellent.
Casey:
I cannot recommend them enough and they're not extraordinarily expensive.
Casey:
They're like 150 bucks, which is not cheap, but not that much more than what you got already.
John:
I read too many Marco headphone reviews when I can spell bare dynamic correctly on the first try.
Yeah.
Marco:
So yes, what you want for your preferences for no amp and general comfort for podcasting, you want the DT770 32-ohm.
Marco:
It has Pro in the name somewhere.
Marco:
I don't know.
Marco:
Anyway, that's what you want.
Marco:
It's currently $160 on Amazon.
Marco:
That's about where it usually hovers.
Marco:
I will say there are two other considerations, three other considerations for the listeners.
Marco:
Number one is these are not neutral-sounding headphones.
Marco:
You have to know that going in.
Marco:
they have kind of like what people would call like a v-shaped sound like if you look at an equalizer it kind of forms a v like the the bass and treble are slightly boosted from neutral so it's a fun sound it makes music sound good but the bass and treble will be a little bit higher than than like a flat response um although you know it's complicated nobody actually wants a flat response it sounds terrible but anyway that being said um
Marco:
Other things to consider are, with this particular headphone, most of the sizes, although not the 32, come with velour pads.
Marco:
The 32 comes with fake leather pads.
Marco:
The 250-ohm one, if you have the power to drive it, I actually prefer that one because it has a coiled cable.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
Misty, I don't think I would like that.
John:
Oh, no.
John:
I have the coil cable, and I like that.
Marco:
Yeah, for a while I thought that coiled cables were bad, and then I switched to straight cables.
Marco:
And the problem with straight cables is that you have all this excess cable flopping around as you're podcasting.
Marco:
The coiled cable is actually more convenient, even though it seems like it would be clumsier.
Marco:
But in practice, a coiled cable is more convenient when you are wearing headphones at your desk, and you don't want to have this big, long cable flopping around.
Marco:
Obviously, for portable use, you don't want that.
Marco:
For portable use, it's way too big on a wheelie.
Marco:
But if this is for a desk...
Marco:
Coiled cables are actually usually better in practice.
Marco:
And in this model, only the 250 ohm, as far as I know, comes with that.
Marco:
Oh, that's crappy.
Marco:
And then I need an amp for that?
Marco:
Not, I mean, if you want to really crank up the volume and blast out your ears with music from like an iMac, maybe.
Marco:
But it's not super hard to drive.
Marco:
So I would consider trying that first.
Marco:
The downside of that is that... So it's called the same thing?
Marco:
770?
Marco:
770 Pro, 250 ohm.
Marco:
it's like it's like macbook pro parentheses 2012 yeah exactly okay yeah it's like ten dollars more um those come with velour pads so try that you can easily get aftermarket now the the real pro move is they have a higher-end model called the dt 1770 and i think it's a terrible headphone except
Marco:
The 1770 comes with, as a second pair of pads, something that has the item number EDT1770.
Marco:
This is a memory foam pad from Beardynamic for these headphones, and it fits the 770 as well.
Marco:
It's the same shape case.
Marco:
They've been making the same shape of headphones forever.
Marco:
And the combination of the 770 with the EDT 1770 memory foam pad is the best combination because then you have slightly improved sound, way more improved comfort, slightly improved bass and isolation.
Marco:
So if you can get those, they're hard to find in the U.S.
Marco:
They're easier to find from like Amazon Germany.
Marco:
They usually stock them for like $30, and sometimes you can get them to ship them to the U.S.,
Marco:
But if you can get the EDT 1770 pads and put them on the DT 770 Pro 250 ohm headphone, that is the best podcasting headphone.
Marco:
35 34 euros that's like not cheap isn't for i mean for you know for an oem replacement headphone pad that's not that you know it's yeah it's a pair of pads it's trust me that combination is what you want and these pads are such a pain in the butt to actually put on because they're so tight around the but like you know john's probably done a million times with his so he knows but like it's it's not a fun process to swap out the headphone pads but that combination is the best
Casey:
All right.
Casey:
Do we want to actually get started because we have a few things to talk about tonight?
Marco:
Oh, yeah.
Marco:
There was an Apple event.
Casey:
Indeed.
Casey:
So as with the last couple of weeks, we need to start by talking about St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Casey:
This month, Relay FM and associated people and properties like us and like this, we are doing our darndest to raise money for St.
Casey:
Jude Children's Research Hospital.
Casey:
So what is St.
Casey:
Jude?
Casey:
It is, guess what, a children's research hospital where they –
Casey:
have children who are sick with various forms of cancer come in into Memphis, Tennessee, where they're located and get treated for free.
Casey:
The families never have to pay a dime.
Casey:
This is near and dear to our hearts because of our dear friends, Stephen Hackett and his family.
Casey:
Their eldest had been diagnosed with a pretty rare form of cancer when he was just six months old.
Casey:
And he is, what, 10, 11, something like that now?
Casey:
And that is expressly because of the work that St.
Casey:
Jude did and the literally millions of dollars of treatment that they got for free.
Casey:
Now, in order to provide that treatment for free, that means that money needs to come from somewhere.
Casey:
And hey, guess what?
Casey:
That's you.
Casey:
So if you have even a couple of dollars to scrape together, especially if, as Marco likes to point out and will probably repeat, if you're, I don't know, spending a few hundred or a few thousand dollars on Apple products these days, maybe you can throw...
Casey:
at least a little in the direction of St.
Casey:
Jude.
Casey:
So please go to stjude.org slash ATP.
Casey:
That's stjude.org slash ATP and throw them a little bit of money or a lot if you can.
Casey:
And speaking of a lot of money, there's been a new development.
Casey:
John, can you tell me about this?
John:
So in the grand tradition of our listeners making fun of Casey for his typo, trying to enter the name to which his contribution would be attributed, we have a new champion.
John:
I think this means according to Casey's rules last week that this is Casey's new favorite listener.
John:
Is that right, Casey?
Casey:
I think that's right.
John:
I think that's correct.
John:
Sorry, James Neal.
Marco:
You are now the second champion.
John:
favorite listener of Casey.
Marco:
I think anybody who achieves the top of that list at any time is one of Casey's favorite listeners.
John:
Actually, that's very true.
John:
But somebody, now here's what they did.
John:
We said last time, look, if you just go $1 over, you'll be the top of the leaderboard, right?
John:
And the previous total was $6,669, $68, right?
John:
So they could have done $6,669, nice, and gotten to the top of the
John:
But they didn't.
John:
Doug is obviously a huge fan of the original line of PowerPC Macintosh computers.
John:
And he contributed $7,100.
John:
Picking the middle of the road there.
John:
It's not the $8,100, which was the big expensive one.
John:
It's not the $6,100, which was the pizza box.
John:
It's the $7,100.
John:
And the name that Doug put, he wrote in, Doug for Stephen Starr Mike.
John:
Well done.
John:
Nice.
John:
Well done.
Marco:
Very, very nice.
John:
So great job, Doug.
John:
You knocked off that possible hockey player to just put plain old Doug.
John:
PowerPC 7100.
John:
PowerMac 7100.
John:
Good job.
John:
But it does make it harder for everybody else because now if you just do $1 over, he did a big jump there.
John:
So now you've got to do...
John:
$7,101.
John:
And don't think time has run out because Relay is having their podcast-a-thon on September 18th.
Casey:
That's right.
Casey:
So as you're listening to this, it will probably be tomorrow.
Casey:
It is Friday the 18th.
Casey:
And shoot, I don't have what time it starts.
Casey:
I want to say it's 2 in the afternoon.
John:
It's 2 p.m.
John:
to 8 p.m.
John:
U.S.
John:
Eastern Time, I believe.
John:
Um, they're shooting for their goal to reach, uh, $315,000.
John:
So please give any amount that you can give $1, $5, $10, whatever you can possibly afford.
John:
Uh, and if there's one other person out there who like Casey's favorite listener, Doug has a whole bunch of money and says, you know what?
John:
I'm going to help save kids with cancer.
John:
Go for it.
John:
$7,101.
John:
The leaderboard could be yours.
Casey:
Yep, yep.
Casey:
And Doug, if you're listening to this and want to email me a picture of your receipt or something, so I know because you didn't specify which Doug you are.
Casey:
You just said Doug for Steve and Star Mike.
Casey:
So if you can prove to me that you are the one and only Doug, I will send you a smattering of ATP stickers that are not otherwise for sale.
Casey:
So please reach out if you can.
Casey:
But no matter what, stjude.org slash ATP.
Casey:
Please throw a little money their way if you can.
John:
all right we got some follow-up that i don't care about but i'm told we have to do so john take it away yeah the only we have tons of follow-up but we're not going to do it all this week because we got a lot of apple event stuff that too the only two follow-up items i wanted to touch on are playstation related because today there were some exciting playstation announcements so last time we talked about the xbox series s which was a a lower powered version of the xbox series x and it was only two hundred ninety nine dollars
Marco:
And this is different from the Xbox One X and Xbox One S, which are different from the Xbox One, which are different from the first Xbox.
John:
I still do not have a name to call the new crop of Xboxes.
John:
I don't know what you call them collectively.
John:
The PlayStation 5 is easy.
John:
They're just the PlayStation 5, and it comes in two versions.
John:
It's the PlayStation 5, just plain PlayStation 5, and then there's the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition, which comes without the optical drive.
John:
We talked about that before.
John:
But the Xbox, you just call them the Xbox Serieses.
John:
How about the series series?
John:
Oh, God.
John:
It's very confusing.
John:
Anyway, Sony had a little reveal today, and they announced their pricing and ship date and order date for their computers, for their consoles.
John:
PlayStation 5 is exactly the same price as the Xbox Series X, $499.
John:
So the top-of-the-line consoles from Sony and Microsoft is exactly the same price.
John:
That was a relief for everybody because people were afraid the PlayStation 5 was going to cost $600.
John:
But no, they exactly matched.
John:
Here's where it gets super interesting.
John:
The PlayStation 5 Digital Edition, which is the PlayStation 5 without the optical drive.
John:
We talked about last time when I made the Arrested Development joke that many people didn't get, but a lot of people did.
John:
What could an optical drive cost?
John:
Honestly, you know, at wholesale prices...
John:
For Sony, putting in even a 4K, you know, Ultra HD, whatever, Blu-ray player, that's not really an expensive part.
John:
And all of these sort of decoding guts are already there.
John:
You're already paying for them.
John:
The PlayStation has the power to do all that, right?
John:
So it's really just the mechanism, the thing that spins your optical disc and reads it with a laser, right?
John:
And we're like, well, maybe the digital edition will be more expensive if maybe it has like tons more storage and the SSD is twice as big.
John:
So it will be the more expensive model.
John:
That would have been ridiculous, but I would have been excited about that.
John:
But if it's less expensive, how much less expensive could it be?
John:
If they if they just take off the price of the parts, it'll be like 20 bucks cheaper or something or 30 bucks cheaper.
John:
Right.
John:
Why would they make it any cheaper?
John:
Right.
John:
Like they're just cutting into their own margins.
John:
Well, the PlayStation 5 Digital Edition is $399, $100 less than the PlayStation 5.
John:
And I'm pretty sure that in no universe does that optical drive cost Sony $100 to put in there.
John:
Maybe I'm wrong.
John:
Maybe someone would come and say, you don't understand the special delithium crystal inside the Ultra HD Blu-ray player is very difficult to mine from asteroids or whatever.
John:
And that's why it's expensive.
John:
That was a Star Trek reference, John.
John:
I'd like my credit, please.
John:
But it seems like that Sony has aggressively priced the digitalization.
John:
And here's why.
John:
And here's why the matchup is interesting.
John:
We talked about how the Xbox Series S is attractive because it's $299.
John:
And that is a great entry price for a next generation Xbox console.
John:
But it's less powerful than the Xbox Series S.
John:
It has half the onboard storage in its SSD, and it can't do 4K.
John:
It only does 1440p.
John:
Everything else about it is the same.
John:
It plays the same games, and everything just plays them at lower resolution.
John:
So if you have a 4K TV, the Xbox Series S will be playing them at 1440p and then just upscaling them to 4K.
John:
And also doesn't have an optical drive, yada, yada, right?
John:
So half the SSD space is a big deal because it doesn't have an optical drive and you can't play it 4K, right?
John:
But hey, it's so cheap.
John:
The PlayStation 5 Digital Edition loses nothing over the regular PlayStation 5 when it comes to playing the games.
John:
The only thing it doesn't have is an optical drive.
John:
And that's only used to copy the game off of the optical drive onto the SSD.
John:
After that, the optical drive is pointless.
John:
And I suppose, yes, you could use it as a movie player or whatever.
John:
But anyway...
John:
the playstation 5 digital edition plays everything at 4k has all the same features as the playstation 5 and it's a hundred dollars less so now if you're looking at this it's not so easy to say well the xbox is cheaper but the playstation you know maybe i like the games for it or better you know like yes it is a hundred dollars cheaper but that's not the good xbox the playstation 5 digital edition i would say is the good playstation 5 because who wants optical discs
John:
It has the same SSD space.
John:
It has the same power, the same resolution, same ports on the back of it, same everything for $100 less.
Casey:
So what you're saying is they're including marginally less in the box and giving considerably more savings to the customer.
John:
And more importantly, you don't have to make this decision at purchase time of like, am I OK with not having 4K?
John:
Right.
John:
Am I OK with having half the storage space?
John:
You don't have any sort of these tradeoff decisions.
John:
Literally, the only decision is, do I care about an optical drive or not?
John:
And if you don't, don't get it.
John:
Because like I said, the only purpose of that optical drive is if you want to use it as a Blu-ray player, which some people do.
John:
Fine.
John:
Then you get, you know, you can use it as a Blu-ray player.
John:
And if you just want to buy physical games for whatever reason and stick them in there and it'll just copy them off of the optical disc onto the SSD because you can't play games off the optical disc.
John:
You play everything off the SSD like all modern consoles, right?
John:
So the optical, this is just a way to get the bits from the game maker to you.
John:
And, you know, I hate that.
John:
I don't use optical at all, right?
John:
So you have the choice, but you don't have to make any trade-offs about performance or storage.
John:
Whereas the Xbox series, whatever, you have to say, do I want the good one that has twice the storage and plays in 4K?
John:
Or do you want the bad one that has half the storage and plays in 1440p?
John:
And that's another $100 decision.
John:
So I guess what it comes down to is if the market for next generation consoles really is price sensitive, the Xbox could come out ahead because...
John:
You know, it's $100 cheaper just to get in on the ground floor and it can play all the same games.
John:
And maybe you don't care about 4K because who cares about 4K and it upscales anyway and you'll never notice.
John:
Right.
John:
But if gamers are the typical spec driven gamers, they're going to look at the Series S as the sort of.
John:
lesser product it's it's weaker it's not as powerful which historically has been poison in the sort of you know specification driven world especially of next generation launch consoles where everyone cares about is powerful as you know what you know before there's any games for it that anyone cares about it they just want to compare specs right but it's so cute
John:
yeah i mean yeah that's that's the second thing so this will be interesting at the launch date um it's launching on november 12th which is two days after the xbox and pre-orders begin tomorrow as we record this so pre-orders begin september 17th at selected retailers but they won't tell you what those retailers are so tomorrow will be fun game spot uh already accidentally put up their order page and then quickly took it down or something
John:
I'm going to try to pre-order.
John:
And as for things being cute, now that we have the official specs of the PS5, we can confirm what I mentioned in the last show, that PS5 is huge LOL.
John:
It is the biggest console you've ever seen.
John:
There's a good article link in the show notes showing the sort of width, height, and depth as compared to a bunch of other consoles that you may recall being very large, including the original Xbox.
John:
The PS5 dwarfs them all.
John:
It is massive.
Marco:
We were sponsored this week by Stripe.
Marco:
Now, in June, we launched ATP memberships, and this is all powered entirely by Stripe checkout and the Stripe billing portal.
Marco:
This is super easy for you as the customers buying it, and it's even easier for us as developers.
Marco:
Now, we talked about it then, and we even joked that they didn't sponsor the episode.
Marco:
Well, now they're sponsoring one.
Marco:
So they recently relaunched Stripe Checkout with a bunch of updates and new features.
Marco:
And these days, there's a whole lot of complexity and high customer expectations to implementing good payments.
Marco:
You want people to be able to pay easily from their phones or from any device they're on.
Marco:
You want to support all different payment methods around the world.
Marco:
There are certain complicated authentication mechanisms like 3D Secure that you probably need to support as well.
Marco:
The BACS or Bax Direct Debit or Ideal, which a lot of European customers prefer.
Marco:
There's all sorts of stuff around the world that you need to deal with.
Marco:
And Stripe Checkout includes all of this right out of the box.
Marco:
It's a pre-built hosted payment page optimized for easy payment and high conversion rates.
Marco:
There's all sorts of new features always being added.
Marco:
They recently added address autocomplete, coupon code support.
Marco:
You can, of course, customize Stripe checkout with your own branding, your own logo and colors.
Marco:
They support customers all around the world with 135 different currencies, all automatically localized with languages and currency support to wherever your customers are.
Marco:
And it'll automatically surface whatever payment methods your customers will probably prefer or their devices support.
Marco:
So for instance, it automatically detects Google Pay or Apple Pay, or depending on the region, it'll offer different bank methods.
Marco:
You can use checkout for one-time payments, or you can do what we do and use it for subscriptions.
Marco:
It's super easy.
Marco:
We also have the Stripe customer billing portal, which allows you to do all sorts of stuff that I'm so happy I didn't have to build, like changing an expired credit card, or dealing with a payment failure, or managing whether your subscription will renew at the end of the month or not.
Marco:
All of this is taken care of with the Stripe billing portal.
Marco:
They have a great roadmap over there too.
Marco:
They're always rolling out new features.
Marco:
Card validation logic just rolled out.
Marco:
And if you had to do this on your own before, which I have before, it's so much code.
Marco:
It's so complicated.
Marco:
It's so much easier to use Stripe checkout.
Marco:
It took us like two days to build the entire system with all the customer support, all the payment support, everything.
Marco:
They have great API, great documentations, and we just saved tons of time.
Marco:
Check it out at Stripe.com slash checkout.
Marco:
Learn more there if you need to build any kind of payment system.
Marco:
Stripe.com slash checkout.
Marco:
Stripe built checkout so you don't have to.
Casey:
So there was an event this week as we record this.
Casey:
It was just not last night.
Casey:
It was just yesterday.
Casey:
We have an Apple event.
Casey:
And do we want to cover any of the meta stuff, meta stuff, whatever you want to say?
Casey:
Meta?
Casey:
Meta, meta.
Casey:
Do you want to cover that first, affluent affluent, or do you want to just jump right into the devices?
John:
I think we can just jump straight into the news, because from a meta perspective, this is very much like their other COVID time presentations, where it's a well-produced video that features the Apple campus and has people standing in nice places and saying things.
Marco:
Well, I will say one small note here that I noticed, like...
Marco:
It was nice to see, like, you know, hi, this is Tim, like, you know, in his natural habitat.
Marco:
But it kept transitioning between, like, Tim and Jeff Williams and their boring presenters.
Marco:
Like, let's be honest.
Marco:
Like, whatever personality they might have in their private lives does not come through on these videos.
Marco:
And so I was kind of disappointed every time they would transition between them and they would breeze by Federighi.
Marco:
And I'm like, oh, no, no, have him talk.
Marco:
Have him talk.
Marco:
Oh, he's gone.
Marco:
It was like a tease.
Marco:
Like, oh, I want to hear from Craig.
Marco:
He's a good presenter.
Marco:
He's entertaining.
Marco:
You know, he makes dad jokes.
Marco:
I want to hear.
Marco:
And no, no, he's not.
Marco:
He's not in this one, really.
Marco:
He's just, you know, Craig is basically a prop that they breeze by sometimes.
Marco:
And I was kind of disappointed by that.
John:
Yeah, well, I mean, they have always mostly stuck to the idea that the person presenting is someone who is directly responsible for the thing they're presenting.
John:
They don't just pick people.
John:
Oh, well, you don't have anything to do with this, but you're a good presenter.
John:
So Craig is a good presenter, but he only gets to present the things that he's intimately involved with.
John:
And it would be kind of unfair to let the people who are good presenters hog the limelight.
John:
You know what I mean?
John:
So it just so happens that this event was...
Marco:
uh a bunch of stuff presented by people who are not greg so i guess you all just had to live with that now the good thing is they're they're trying to pull from the the ranks of the organizations that create these products not just have the same person do it all the time but and many of their other presenters were very good i thought um but yeah i just like i i'm just i'm so bored by tim and jeff williams because they're just not like charismatic presenters at all and but fortunately the other presenters who weren't them were i think were very good
Casey:
Yeah, you know, another thing I was thinking about, I didn't take a count when this was going on, but I feel like at least between, you know, men and women and some modicum of diversity, it's gotten so much better than it has been in the past.
Casey:
And to the point that I didn't feel like I had to count, you know, how many men versus how many women.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
I didn't look at tucked versus untucked, which is everyone's favorite comical thing to keep track of.
Casey:
But yeah, I think it's worth noting that they seem to be doing considerably better with all flavors of diversity, not just gender.
Casey:
And it's not the obvious glaring thing it was just a couple of years ago.
Casey:
And I think that should be applauded as well.
Casey:
And it's been like that for a little while now.
John:
Well, you should probably have counted because as with all these things, you know, what was the –
John:
the famous study of like when they had men and women talking to each other and, uh, when the, uh, talking at a group and when the men estimated that the women had been talking 50% of the time, they had actually been talking 20% of the time.
Casey:
No, that's fair.
John:
That's fair.
John:
Or the other, the other cliche is, but you know, when you're used to privilege, equality feels like oppression, right?
John:
When you're used to just being a bunch of white guys, he's like, Oh, I saw one or two nonwhite guys.
John:
That's about 50%.
John:
It's actually not 50%.
John:
And that's why it is still important for us, for someone to at least, uh,
John:
still be counting and not being like, yeah, they're fine, right?
John:
They weren't all white guys.
John:
Everything's good.
John:
It's like, not quite.
Marco:
And it's also worth pointing out that like, while diversity seems to be improving both in the presentations and in the like kind of medium to high ranks of the company, the highest ranks of the company are still incredibly non-diverse.
John:
And even in the presentation, if you go back and actually count, it's like, well, you know, it was still over 50% white guys, but that still felt like it was, you know, better.
John:
What I'm saying is it's not mission accomplished.
John:
So Apple continues to make very slow progress in this area.
John:
We applaud their progress, and we're cheering them on to do better.
Casey:
Fair enough.
Casey:
All right, so Apple Watch Series 6.
Casey:
You know, I came into this...
Casey:
Feeling like I don't think I want to upgrade.
Casey:
I believe we talked about last week that the battery on my 40 millimeter cellular Apple Watch Series 5 has really been hurting more so than I remember any of my other Apple Watches a year in.
Casey:
It is not unusual for me to get a 10% power warning at mid-afternoon, which is very odd.
Casey:
I can't tell if it's just that the software has convinced itself that the battery is in worse shape than it really is.
Casey:
Because I'll say, I don't want to go into low power mode.
Casey:
Just continue on until you die.
Casey:
And it'll last another couple hours afterwards.
Casey:
So I think, I don't know, maybe something's a little wrong there.
Casey:
But nevertheless, outside of the battery problems, I don't feel like there's anything...
Casey:
I don't think there's anything I really want my Apple Watch to do that it isn't already doing.
Casey:
And then they said, oh, we have an oxygen sensor on the new one.
Casey:
And I said, oh, maybe I am buying one of these after all.
Casey:
So the Apple Watch Series 6, it has the S6 system on a chip, which is 20% faster.
Casey:
It's lower power than the Series 5.
Casey:
It includes the U1 chip and ultra wideband.
Casey:
Why would we care about this?
Casey:
I guess we don't right now, right?
Yeah.
John:
Well, the little press release says you can use it to open your car door with the car key thing.
John:
I mean, I think it makes perfect sense.
John:
I might care about it on the watch even more than the phone, because the whole deal with ultra wideband is like, I can tell when things are near me in a way that is not as long range as something like Wi-Fi, but is directional.
John:
It's perfect for a wristwatch, I feel like.
John:
Now, we don't know what the applications are going to be other than the car key thing that Apple's already announced, but...
John:
I think it's great that it's in a watch.
John:
I think it potentially has more use there than a phone because the watch is always on your wrist and easy to put near stuff.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well, and also not only can the watch tell what's near it, but other things can tell when they're near the watch.
Marco:
So you can imagine like if future Macs have ultra wide band chips in them, for instance, then that like the watch unlock thing could probably work faster and better and more precisely and more securely.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Uh, like there's, there's all sorts of little benefits like that.
Marco:
Not to mention the fact that like, if we ever, if you know, whenever these like, you know, air tags, uh, allegedly finally launched, like you could do things like find my watch, you know, like from the phone.
Marco:
Uh, and possibly even when, when it's in like low power mode or stuff like that, like in case you drop your watch in the couch cushion or something like that.
Marco:
So who knows?
John:
Or like find your Apple TV remote with your watch by waving your watch around and hearing it beep.
John:
Uh, yeah.
Marco:
yeah so ultra wideband it's one of those things that it's going to be a really cool thing once it's commonplace it's going to be kind of like you know when bluetooth first came out like when bluetooth first came out it was in a handful of things and it wasn't very widely used and then you kind of went to sleep for a few years woke up and bluetooth is everywhere and now it's so ubiquitous that lots of fun useful things can be made you know based on that that's how ultra wideband i think will play out like
Marco:
Right now, we've all had phones – well, not all of us.
Marco:
All of us stupid early upgraders who set money on fire have had phones for a year now that has this technology that has been mostly used for nothing or slightly cooler airdrop.
Marco:
But that's been about it so far.
Marco:
But in three to five years from now, when everything has ultra-wide been in it that's been made for the last few years –
Marco:
really cool stuff will become possible and we will start it.
Marco:
Like, I think we'll almost like, it'll almost be taking it for granted at that point.
Marco:
Like, Oh yeah, of course this is in all of our recent stuff.
John:
Yeah.
John:
And this is another instance where it's actually good that Apple has been sticking this in products even before it's quote unquote ready with a killer app feature because Tim Cook loves to sell the same products forever.
John:
So, yes, please put it in the Series 6, put it in the iPhone 11, because that Series 6 is eventually going to be like the low end phone in a couple of years.
John:
And we'll keep selling these iPhone 11s under a new name, you know, or whatever like it.
John:
That hardware lives for a long time.
John:
Not only does it live for a long time with users, but Apple keeps selling it.
John:
So if you ever want to get to that Bluetooth thing where everything has it, you have to start selling it in the high-end stuff before it's really ready.
John:
So that by the time it is ready, every single watch you buy has a U1 and every single iPhone you buy has a U1.
John:
So I'm glad this hardware is rolling out.
Casey:
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.
Casey:
I actually especially thought your point, Marco, about computer unlock.
Casey:
That's an excellent point that I hadn't considered yet.
Casey:
So like we talked about a minute ago, it has a blood oxygen sensor.
Casey:
And I am not a doctor.
Casey:
Let me make that extremely plain up front.
Casey:
But we were talking in the Relay Slack about like, OK, what does a blood oxygen sensor really do?
Casey:
So I'm going to take a stab at it.
Casey:
And one of you guys just interrupt me when you're ready.
Casey:
But
Casey:
As a general measure of your cardiovascular health, you can look at how much blood there is, how much blood there is in your oxygen, how much oxygen there is in your blood in order to see whether or not your heart and your lungs, and again, broadly, your cardiovascular health, whether or not things are working the way you expect.
Casey:
And my limited understanding is that there's a very narrow range of what's
Casey:
And if you see yourself falling below that range, that can be a real problem.
Casey:
And it's something that's worth getting checked out.
Casey:
And something that's been really relevant lately is that sometimes people who are infected with COVID-19 and who are getting sick from COVID-19 don't actively feel bad.
Casey:
But yet, if you look at their blood oxygen readings, they're falling dangerously low to the point that it's a real, real problem and you need to get help immediately.
Casey:
And so, you know, early on when this was all happening, we got like a $50 discount.
Casey:
blood oxygen pulse ox meter from amazon and it seems to work acceptably i wouldn't say it's particularly great but it seems to get the job done and i try to use that like once or twice a day just to have like some amount of historical data that god forbid i can show a doctor and say look here's the way it usually is you know you tell me if this is
Casey:
If whatever I am now is bad or whatever.
Casey:
So having a blood oxygen meter on the watch that you can either call up and say, please take my measurement now, or that we'll be doing it kind of latent in the background from time to time.
Casey:
I think that's super awesome in general, because again, it's a very good measure of just how healthy you are.
Casey:
But given what's going around these days, it is extremely relevant.
Casey:
And so...
Casey:
The combination of a potential new battery – well, I shouldn't say potential.
Casey:
There is a new battery in a new Apple Watch.
Casey:
And the thought of a blood oxygen sensor has gotten me – well, I mean I'm justifying it straight up Marco style right now.
Casey:
But I am telling myself between the blood oxygen sensor and the new battery that I just – I have to have it.
Casey:
It has to happen to me, Marco.
Casey:
There's no choice.
John:
I don't think you need to be checking your blood oxygenation twice a day.
John:
That seems excessive to me.
John:
But if you are inclined to that kind of obsessive checking, hey, yeah, get an Apple Watch and then you don't have to worry about it.
John:
It's just checking for you all the time or as far as you know, it's checking for you all the time.
John:
Either way.
John:
But yeah, like Apple has been very cagey about the blood oxygen sensor.
John:
If you watch all their material of not trying to pitch it as any particular health benefit.
John:
It's not a quote unquote medical device.
John:
And there's all sorts of laws around this.
John:
it's just a thing that you can use to measure something about your body.
John:
And it hasn't even been certified by whatever such and such as like accurate medical tool that you use for such and such a purpose.
John:
So they just say, look, this is an attribute of your body and this watch will measure it and tell you about it.
John:
Uh, and, uh,
John:
The COVID angle, Apple doesn't come out and mention anything about it, but it does exist.
John:
You can get a pulse oximeter really cheaply from Walmart for $15 or something.
John:
There's actually a really good YouTube video that I should have found for show notes already that explains how a pulse oximeter works.
John:
It's on technology connections.
John:
Oh, there you go.
John:
Yeah, it's very, very clever, extremely inexpensive.
John:
And so it's not some of this amazing technology this watch has.
John:
It's just nice that something attached to your body that already does a bunch of health measurements has added this to the mix.
John:
So good feature.
John:
And apparently it will make Casey happy and make him stop sticking his finger into a little pinchy thing.
Marco:
That's true.
Marco:
Normally, the justification, the way that we would justify buying this thing that we don't need that's like $400 to $600 probably, the way we justify it as well, it would be nice if the whole family had these so that way we could tell if we get COVID.
Marco:
Not only is that not necessary because inexpensive pulse oximeters are all over the place and work fine, but you already even have one.
Sure.
Marco:
Which makes us even better.
John:
And if you're trying to detect COVID, checking your blood oxygenation may not be the very best way to do that.
Casey:
It's one way.
Casey:
It's a tool in the tool chest.
John:
Yes, it is.
John:
Yes, it is.
John:
It is a measurement that you can take for sure.
Marco:
So yeah, so this, you know, Apple did not develop this fall's products in response to COVID.
Marco:
It's, you know, their development cycles are longer than that for most of the hardware.
Marco:
And so, you know, anything that helps COVID, like having a new iPad that has Touch ID, like that's coincidental.
Marco:
That's not like they didn't do that in response to COVID or because of COVID.
Marco:
That being said, it's hard to come up with a better thing the Apple Watch could have added this year than
Marco:
coincidentally than a blood oxygen sensor for this purpose.
John:
Unless it takes a tiny sample of your blood and does a COVID test on it.
Marco:
Right, yeah.
John:
They don't have that technology yet.
Marco:
Yeah, exactly.
Marco:
And there's lots of other things that the Apple Watch could do as a medical or fitness sensor.
Marco:
uh that would be beneficial to people but most of them are much more complicated and haven't quite been worked out yet like for instance a blood glucose sensor for diabetics would be incredible yes but so far i don't think people have really devised reliable through the skin uh ways to do that yet um so that's like they keep i i think apple has been doing a lot of research in that area and and other companies have have as well but i don't think that kind of thing is ready yet but whereas
John:
blood oxygen concentration is doable fairly easily from above the skin and so that's something that you know it made it makes total sense why they added it and if apple ever comes up with it with a reliable non-invasive blood glucose test it doesn't have to be in the apple watch people wear that literally anywhere on their body like the the market for doing that is incredibly huge and it's
John:
you know if apple came up with a breakthrough there even if it had to be worn someplace other than your wrist they would probably ship it um but as for the apple watch specifically it's going to be limited to things that you can measure from someone's wrist because people aren't going to take the watch and strap it around their chest or you know around their neck or you know in their armpit or like it kind of has to do stuff from the wrist so
John:
There is a point of diminishing returns of things that we can measure.
John:
And I think it has to be non-invasive, obviously.
John:
It has to just sit there on your wrist like a watch and occasionally do stuff.
John:
And it's kind of amazing the number of things it can do just by shining lights through your skin and or arm hair on your wrist, right?
John:
But yeah, I do hope Apple comes up with a breakthrough technology for helping people with diabetes and so on and so forth, but just watching it.
Marco:
But that being said, like, I, I think first of all, another big reason to upgrade to this watch, if you're looking for more Casey is that the lights change from green to red, that's just cooler.
Marco:
Like whenever you, whenever you like pop it off and it's still like measuring your workout stuff and you see the green lights, like green lights are not cool.
Marco:
Red lights are cool.
Marco:
So that's one, one big reason, but like, you know, in all seriousness, like on the medical stuff, um,
Marco:
when i when i heard that it was pulse ox i'm like okay great that's that's nice but then when i heard it was like a 15 second long test that you have to initiate i was like oh that's not that great but then they said it also takes periodic background readings that and i think that is kind of the apple watch um mode of of how it really makes a difference and how it can really catch some some helpful things for people is like
Marco:
If you just get one of those $30 things from the drugstore to measure your pulse, your oxygen, how often are you going to do that?
Marco:
If you're Casey, you're going to say you're going to do it twice a day.
Marco:
You're going to actually do it once a day.
Marco:
If you're a normal person, you're going to do it once ever and then forget to do it ever again.
Marco:
And so –
Marco:
Honestly, the big value here is not that they did something that you can get a $40 thing to do anywhere.
Marco:
The big value is they did something in this thing that's going to be constantly or periodically giving you readings all the time without you taking any action.
Marco:
So it's like the difference between a manual backup and time machine or Backblaze.
Marco:
It's like automatic backups are way better because you won't ever do it yourself really.
Marco:
This is the kind of thing for health readings.
Marco:
They do the same thing with the various heart rate monitoring they do.
Marco:
It's one thing to be able to take an EKG or whatever or to be able to monitor your heart rate when you ask for it.
Marco:
It's a much more valuable thing to be periodically monitoring that all the time to develop a baseline so you know, like, and it knows what is normal.
Marco:
And then if it starts getting readings that are outside of your normal baseline, it can alert you to that.
Marco:
without having to wait for you to take another test manually or remember to do a thing or to know what your baseline even is.
Marco:
So that's where the value really is to this stuff.
Marco:
It's not that you can take an oxygen reading if you want to.
Marco:
It's that this thing's going to always be taking oxygen readings, and it can tell you if something deviates from the norm.
John:
And the fact that it has so many different sensors plays into this.
John:
Like, so to give a heart rate example, it periodically measures your heart rate.
John:
It also knows whether you're moving or not because it's on your wrist, right?
John:
So if your heart rate goes up, but your wrist is moving back and forth like you're running, that seems normal.
John:
But if you're sitting on your couch and your heart rate goes up, that would be a scenario where the watch can alert and say, you're just sitting there on the couch and your heart rate is going way up.
John:
So something's probably wrong, right?
John:
Similarly with the blood oxygenation,
John:
you know it has an altimeter so if you're at the top of a really high mountain and your blood is less oxygenated not that it's not going to warn you about it because you do need that oxygen in your blood it's very important but at least it has some correlation in terms of learning thresholds and everything to say well if it goes down a tiny bit but you're at the top of mount everest it's like this is still within reasonable parameters because the person's at you know really high altitude or something right so
John:
Those are the type of things where the fact that this is a tiny computer with tons of different sensors that's always attached to you, make it able to make smarter decisions than you personally with the $15 thing you brought from Walmart that you left at home anyway.
Casey:
Yeah, no, I agree with everything you guys said.
Casey:
And yeah, there's a brighter always on display, up to two and a half times brighter, which they cited, particularly in sunlight.
Casey:
That's going to be really nice.
Casey:
One of the kind of quiet themes of yesterday's event was colors, which I was really excited to see.
Casey:
I have, what do they call, what is the official name for the 11 Pro green?
Casey:
It's like four screen, midnight green, something like that.
Casey:
Anyways, I have one of those.
Casey:
Space green.
Casey:
Space green.
Casey:
I'm not the biggest green fan, generally speaking, but I love the way this thing looks.
Casey:
Well, the back of it, the front of it is scratched so badly, I cannot even begin to describe it.
Casey:
I don't know what has happened to my phone this year, but oof, it's bad.
Casey:
Anyway, but yeah, there's all new colors.
Casey:
There's a blue that looks really, really good.
Casey:
I don't know if I want to get a blue one because I feel like that limits – like I don't know anything about fashion obviously.
Casey:
But I feel like that limits my options a little bit.
Casey:
So I think I might just stick with the traditional like silvery look.
Casey:
But there's a blue one that looks great, a red one.
Casey:
Graphite replaces black.
Casey:
Although I guess there's space black in the Hermes line.
Casey:
And the titanium – is it titanium edition and no ceramic?
Casey:
Is titanium not the addition?
Casey:
I never pay attention.
John:
There is a titanium edition.
John:
There is no more ceramic.
John:
Correct.
Marco:
The ceramic continues its pattern of basically taking every other year off.
Marco:
Gotcha.
Casey:
I think we had mentioned earlier there's continuous altimeter, so it's always taking altitude readings.
Casey:
There's new faces.
Casey:
I know at least some of them are on watchOS 7 because I did install that earlier today.
Casey:
Like the stripe face is on watchOS 7, so even on my existing Series 5, you can use the stripe face.
Casey:
But they mentioned a few others.
Casey:
Marco, you would know this better than me.
Casey:
And I know that you were really excited about all these new watch faces because they're pretty much flawless, right?
Marco:
In general, I'm fairly pleased with the introduction of the Apple Watch Series 6 and the Apple Watch SE.
Marco:
This part of the presentation, I was fairly happy with.
Marco:
I'm happy with the direction they're going in general, and this seemed like a pretty solid update.
Marco:
I would not say a lot of kind things about the new watch faces yet.
Marco:
I've only played with them for one day, but... It's such a shame.
Marco:
You know, this is, again, it's like... They even brought an Allen Dye to troll me.
Marco:
I've been wearing my Apple Watch more ever since I got the Series 5 last fall.
Marco:
I finally came to appreciate the Apple Watch...
Marco:
When I started to finally admit to myself and let it admit to the world that the Apple Watch is a terrible analog watch, what it really wants to be is a digital watch.
Marco:
The Series 5 really hits home with that because of the way the screen dims.
Marco:
If any app is open at all, it will always dim in inactive mode to a digital time in that upper right corner and in a blurred screen or whatever.
Marco:
If you usually have an analog watch, but occasionally you look at it and it's a digital time, that's even more jarring than if it's just always the same.
Marco:
And so I started to realize a combination of that and how incredibly mediocre and frustrating all of their analog faces are to me, that my happiness with the Apple Watch is...
Marco:
is improved by me totally staying away from all the analog faces because the analog faces continue to be what you would expect if you asked a graphic designer who has never worn an analog watch to design one.
Marco:
And every single analog watch face on the Apple Watch is like that.
Marco:
The people who design these have never worn an analog watch.
Marco:
And they're graphic designers, not watch designers.
Marco:
And you could argue whether that should be the case or not for something like the Apple Watch, which is a computing device really first and a watch kind of second.
Marco:
Maybe that's the right choice.
Marco:
But the result of that is that the analog watch faces are not good analog watch faces.
Marco:
They suffer from severe problems of legibility, severe – I would call them design quirks and design flaws and functionality flaws.
Marco:
If you let the Apple Watch just be a digital watch, and the face I'm almost always using now is either solar in the winter or infograph modular in the summer when I want to see things like the UV index and stuff like that.
Marco:
If you just let it be what it really wants to be, which is a digital watch, it's a much happier experience in a lot of ways.
Marco:
So I've been using it that way.
Marco:
So all of these new analog faces...
Marco:
I went through them today.
Marco:
I tried coming up with good combinations.
Marco:
I was unable to.
Marco:
So I'm going to continue to have it be a digital watch for me.
Marco:
And I wouldn't say I'm happy with it.
Marco:
I don't look at my digital watch with my infograph modular face and say, wow, that's a nice looking watch.
Marco:
But it is functional.
Marco:
And that's the role digital watches have always had throughout history is like prioritizing function over beauty.
Marco:
And that's what the Apple Watch continues to do.
Marco:
So now that I let it be that, I'm more at peace with how incredibly mediocre to bad all of the analog faces are.
Casey:
How do you really feel?
Casey:
I like stripes in principle a lot.
Casey:
So this is where you can select, I think, anywhere between three and nine stripes.
Casey:
You can select what color each of the stripes is, and then you can select an angle that the stripes are oriented as.
Casey:
I really, really dig this in principle because it kind of gets you the ability to...
Casey:
show some amount of pride in perhaps your country if you're not american uh in your particular sports team that you enjoy or or just or his sports or whatever i don't know colorful thing you i mean you could make like an m logo out of these stripes uh out of the stripes watch face if you still believe you match your outfit i think that's the main one
John:
Yeah, that's true too.
John:
If you're color coordinating, you color coordinate your watch band.
John:
Now you can color coordinate your watch face, which is one of the things that Mark always talks about with his anger at the watch faces.
John:
Something you can't do with a real watch is change the color of it.
John:
But if you have a digital screen, you can.
John:
So why not make that an option?
John:
And I think with the ability to save watch faces...
John:
If you spend the time to make a watch face that perfectly matches one of your outfits, I think you can just save that off.
John:
And then the next time that outfit comes up, just swipe over to the pre-made watch face for that outfit.
John:
So it is time well spent if you really want to color coordinate.
John:
And especially if you have a huge collection of bands that also match your stuff, it seems pretty cool to me.
Marco:
Yeah, and I will say the bands – we have yet to see any of these in person yet, of course, and the current status of the world is going to make it difficult for a lot of people to see any of this stuff in person for a long time.
Marco:
But I am –
Marco:
cautiously optimistic about these new bands the direction they're going with them looks really good to me the apple watch has always excelled in having really good bands like not relative to other apple devices not relative to other fitness trackers but relative to the entire watch industry apple watch has had some of the best bands in the industry and so this new type of band is basically the stretch band coming in both the um the like a braid finish or just a rubbery finish and
Marco:
I'm looking forward to that.
Marco:
I printed out the thing.
Marco:
I ordered myself a white rubber one because that's my band of choice because I really am curious.
Marco:
I think I'm a size 7.
Marco:
We'll find out.
Marco:
There might be some returns happening.
Marco:
We'll see how that goes.
Marco:
But...
Marco:
These are probably going to be really nice.
Marco:
There is a slight annoyance.
Marco:
If you've never been an Apple Watch owner of a strap that can't lay flat, it is less convenient.
Marco:
Straps that lay flat make charging much easier because you can just have the charger sitting flat on the desk or on some other flat thing face up and just stick the watch down flat.
Marco:
When you have a band like these that can't go flat, it's more annoying.
Marco:
You've got to have either some kind of stand that has a flip-up or right-angle thing, or you've got to manually stick it on every time, lifting it up slightly.
Marco:
That's kind of annoying.
Marco:
But otherwise, I'm looking forward to trying these out.
Marco:
Honestly, I'm also kind of curious about the new LeatherLink.
Marco:
I don't think I have much of a need for a leather Apple watch strap, but the old LeatherLoop
Marco:
was something that always felt way worse than it looked.
Marco:
It was very hard.
Marco:
It almost felt like a plastic link bracelet.
Marco:
The new one has fewer parts, seems generally a little bit sleeker, a little more elegant of a design.
Marco:
So I'm looking forward to seeing how that is in practice once I can ever go to a store again.
Marco:
But yeah, otherwise, I'm really happy that the bands are moving forward in what appear to be good ways.
Marco:
I'm looking forward to receiving mine to try it out.
Marco:
And finally, before we get off the subject of Apple Watch aesthetics, I am very happy to see these new colors, too.
Marco:
You know, you mentioned, Casey, there's a blue one.
Marco:
There's also a product red one for the first time.
Marco:
You mentioned the graphite steel, which kind of replaces the space black and all but the Hermes line.
Marco:
what I would caution people about is don't make any assumptions on how these things will look until you can see them in person or until you have, if you have a very good, easy way to return things, because it's very hard to tell how Apple watch finishes and colors look like on a website.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
I found this to be the case last year with the titanium.
Marco:
It looked way different in person than what I expected it to look like by looking at the website.
Marco:
And I expect that same thing to happen again this year with the new gray color of the steel and probably also with the blue and red aluminum.
Marco:
So who knows?
Marco:
It might look very different than what you expect.
Marco:
So go into it knowing that there's a risk you might be returning it if you just buy blind on the website.
John:
Speaking of returns, like the solo loop things, we'll put a link in the show notes to the PDF, the sizing thing, which they do as good a job as they can for a thing that you print out to size.
John:
Like it's got a little square on it where you can put a credit card and basically says if your credit card fits exactly in the square, you know you printed it at the right size, which is much easier than trying to get people to measure things for the ruler.
John:
And you cut it out and you wrap it around your wrist.
John:
But, man, for a stretchy thing, it's like, okay, well, this little thing you put around your wrist can measure how big your wrist is, but the paper is not elastic.
John:
So how firm do you want it to squeeze, right?
John:
Maybe you would actually want a smaller size because you needed to be grip tighter.
John:
Maybe you want a higher size because you wanted to lose to this.
John:
You really, really would like to try these things on in person.
John:
But, you know, COVID, so it's not that easy.
John:
So, I mean, Apple usually has a pretty good return policy, but it is kind of a hassle.
John:
The other thing about the solo loop is that
John:
as i tweeted when they were announced they look a little bit like an arm hair menace to me like i do not relish the idea of trying to squeeze one of those things over my very hairy arms especially the rubbery grippy ones and speaking of that we haven't talked about pricing yet for any of the things but the the apple watch itself is 390 dime which i think is unchanged from the last top of the line apple watch right serious that's right yeah starts at because they go up and up anyway the solo loop the rubbery kind of looks like the sport band solo loop thing is 50 bucks which is you know it's
John:
no more highway robbery than the sport band being 50 bucks is but it is what it is if you if you want to get a cheaper one i'm sure there'll be clones on amazon shortly um the braided solo loop is a hundred dollars and i was like what what is it braided from rapunzel's hair i don't understand how this thing could cost a how it can cost a hundred dollars and b how it's twice the cost of the rubbery one i guess it costs money to have tiny nano machines braid them for you i don't
John:
I don't know risk.
John:
Apple must be making a lot of money on these.
John:
And I understand they're like Marco said, they're high quality.
John:
They're good.
John:
And I agree.
John:
They are really cool, but it's like, it's like a options on a Porsche.
John:
It's where the real money is made.
John:
You know, they sell you the watch for, for a pretty good profit, but the profit on these, these straps must be ridiculous.
John:
Anyway, series six looks like a good update.
John:
Um,
John:
Nothing amazing.
John:
I haven't been keeping up with the Apple watch world, but before this keynote, I was actually kind of hoping they were like, maybe this year they'll surprise us all and say, you know, the Apple watch now looks totally different, but they didn't.
John:
And it doesn't, but it's still a good product.
Marco:
Yeah, this is definitely an incremental update.
Marco:
You know, this is not like, oh, my God, you have to rush out and buy this.
Marco:
It's amazing.
Marco:
Like, it's not one of those years.
Marco:
This is like, you know, if if you're into the idea of getting a new watch or if your current watch is older and dying or the battery is not lasting long anymore and you want a new one, this is this looks like a great update.
Marco:
I'm personally very excited about the brighter dim mode of the screen in bright sunlight.
Marco:
That is something that the Series 5, for all of its wonderfulness with having that always on screen, I have wished for it to be a bit brighter in the sleep mode in sunlight.
Marco:
I frequently, this summer, run into a time where I would glance at my watch in the sun and it would actually be kind of hard to read the time until it activated.
Marco:
So that should be nice.
Marco:
Otherwise, I know it's a frivolous thing.
Marco:
I don't need this.
Marco:
I'm not going to even try to justify it.
Marco:
I have no justification whatsoever.
Marco:
I'm just getting it because it's a fun thing and I like it.
Casey:
Yeah, I'm probably going to order one the next day or so.
Casey:
Of course you are.
Casey:
Are they shipping?
Casey:
Are they shipping?
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
Order today delivers September 30th through October 2.
Casey:
So not that long from now.
Marco:
Yeah, as usual, it depends on which combination you get.
Marco:
Many of them don't ship until October or November.
Marco:
Some of them ship still on Friday, I think.
John:
Fair enough.
John:
You know what you two are not getting, though?
John:
A power adapter with your Apple Watch because Apple says that the Apple Watch does not come with – anyone doesn't have an Apple Watch.
John:
This is what they're not including in the box.
John:
So they're still including the little thing that smacks onto the back of the watch that charges it and then has a little cord snaking from it.
John:
But the thing that that cord plugs into, they used to give you this tiny little thing that was very, very small, and it plugged into an outlet.
John:
And then it had USB-A on the other side.
John:
I don't know if they switched them to USB-C, but whatever.
Marco:
There is a USB-C one available, but I think the one that comes in the box is still USB-A.
John:
Yeah.
John:
So it was just a thing that plugged into the wall, and it was as small as it could possibly be, you know, and then you plugged a USB thing into it, right?
John:
That little tiny thing that plugged into the wall is what they're not including.
John:
And...
John:
in the presentation they said we're not including this because it reduces the carbon footprint lots of people have places where you can plug any kind of usb thing into why do we need to give you another one a lot of people just chuck these away which makes perfect sense they pitch it as uh it's the equivalent of 50 000 cars being removed from the road per year for apple not to ship these things because apple scale is very large they sell a lot of apple watches that's a lot of you know waste and you know carbon emissions saved so good for apple um
John:
I think this would have been an absolutely 100% clean win if they said we're not including the power adapter.
John:
Of course, you can buy power adapters separately.
John:
You probably shouldn't buy them from Apple, but you can buy one of these for a couple bucks at a gas station.
John:
Because it's the lowest voltage you could possibly imagine.
John:
To charge your watch, you don't need a high power.
John:
It's literally anything you can plug USB-A into.
John:
You're fine.
John:
But Apple didn't say...
John:
we can buy it separately and we're lowering the price by the cost of that adapter, which, which wouldn't be, which wouldn't be much, but it would just be like, look, we haven't always changed about this.
John:
It would complete the, the waste pitch, right?
John:
It's saying we're doing this for environmental reasons.
John:
It's like, if you want it, you can buy it.
John:
And it's the same price as it was before, but if you don't want it, now you don't have to pay for it, right?
John:
Don't pay for something you don't need.
John:
And by you not paying for it and us not giving it to you by default, it's,
John:
We're saving the environment, and you're saving money, and that's great.
John:
And unfortunately, that little tiny power thing probably costs $5.
John:
Not from Apple.
John:
It costs $19.
John:
Right, but I mean for Apple.
John:
Like Apple's cost to make that little thing is whatever, $5, $10, whatever.
John:
Knock something off the price.
John:
Instead of making it $399, make it $395.
John:
So that $5, that was the power adapter.
John:
And then people can say, clean win.
John:
environmental if i don't want it i want to have it and if i do want it i can have it it would be great if you could buy it for five bucks from apple but like i think that would work out but of course apple being apple they didn't change the price it's exactly the same price as it was you just get less in the box yep except if you buy a titanium or hermes model they do come with a power adapter because rich people need the waste and
John:
and also the the titanium and hermes ones also come with a sport band did you know that you pick whatever band you want and they also throw in a sport band for free 50 value sport anyway so if you're a rich person you still get tons of stuff and they and it makes lots of waste and if anyone's going to have someplace where they can already plug in a bunch of usb charging stuff it's probably someone who's buying a very fancy watch because like all of us i mean
John:
I'm not going to say no one uses that little power brick, but I think if you have a lot of Apple devices, you probably have places in your home already available where you can plug in a USB-A style charging thing or USB-C style charging thing, especially when you don't need very high power delivery.
John:
Like you're not trying to charge an iPad Pro here.
John:
Literally anything that's USB will charge this just fine.
John:
So I think this is a good move.
John:
I think Apple shouldn't include stuff like this by default, but I wish they had passed any of the monetary savings.
John:
onto their customers even just in a symbolic gesture of goodwill i like the fact that they're passing on the carbon savings to the world good i applaud this is exactly what you want i don't want to have to pay for things that i don't want and it is wasteful and i would choose not to have it because i don't need it but can i get five bucks off i don't know
Marco:
Well, and it's kind of – I mean, yes, it's wonderful that they're saving that waste.
Marco:
There's also other ways they could do that.
Marco:
For instance, every sport band, every watch that comes with a sport band or every sport band you buy separately has three pieces.
Marco:
There's the loop piece and then there's two of the whole pieces.
Marco:
There's a short one and a long one.
Marco:
Every sport band they sell or every watch that comes with a sport band –
Marco:
you're probably throwing away half of the band without even using it once because you find the one that fits you and then you never use the other one.
Marco:
And also, they could maybe make their devices more serviceable over time.
Marco:
That would probably reduce waste by a significant margin, way more than removing USB power adapter.
Marco:
And this isn't to say that they're going to keep it or that they should keep it.
Marco:
I mean, this is probably inevitable and we're probably past the point where they're going to do this anyway.
Marco:
and you better believe they're also going to remove it and probably the headphones from the iPhone as well.
Marco:
I think this all but seals the deal on that.
Marco:
They're gone from the iPhone 12.
Marco:
But I don't know.
Marco:
I'm with you, John.
Marco:
I wish that it didn't feel just like we're now just getting less for the same amount of money because there is an environmental benefit here.
Marco:
but you know they could have done a better job of selling it to us i think giving us something for it but that was never going to happen there was never and like there was no way they're going to reduce the price by 10 or 20 bucks it's never going to happen i mean the apple way to pitch this is well we did reduce the price by that much it's just the series six costs a little bit more than the series five to make so yeah it just happened exactly the same number like all this stuff is fuzzy math
Marco:
Yeah, it's a lot of BS, too.
Marco:
Let's be honest.
Marco:
They're going to make a little bit more money from this.
Marco:
And whenever there is something that helps the environment, that also makes them more profit, that's a pretty easy thing to do.
John:
Yeah.
John:
The thing about the watch strap, having both of them in there, like anything that has to do with fit, I can imagine them being a little bit wary about asking people to do that because that could actually produce more waste in terms of returns and people not understanding the difference and all this other stuff.
John:
You know, that's why I worry about the solo loop, especially without people being able to try them on.
John:
Like, in some respects, they're stretchy, you know, like stretch pants.
John:
They fit everybody.
John:
But on the other hand, I don't want something squeezing my wrist too tight or being too loose or whatever.
John:
Love to watch for people in the wild.
John:
if and when these things start shipping, who are wearing solo loops, they were obviously one size too big, but didn't bother returning it.
John:
So it's just rattling around on their wrist.
Marco:
You know what I mean?
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
Well also like, you know, as anybody knows who has ever want to watch, like your wrist size changes.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
sometimes even within the same day uh depending on elastic is good right you know depending on like how how hot or humid it is or how hot you are maybe from a workout or something having a a fixed size wrist or watch band that you can't easily change like another different hole or something um is certainly less comfortable in some cases but in the ideal case if you get one that fits you perfectly that is a fixed size it is potentially great
Marco:
Because then you don't have the big blob of thickness in the bottom with all the mechanism of the clasp and everything.
Marco:
You can just have this one continuous piece of material.
Marco:
So when you're resting on a keyboard or a desk or something like that, you don't have that big blob pushing into you.
Marco:
So in an ideal case, if you can find a fit that works with you most of the time, that's the best of all worlds.
Marco:
But that might be a little bit tricky at first until you figure out what size you are.
Casey:
So Sony took out five or 10 bucks worth of guts and gave a hundred dollar discount.
Casey:
Apple took out a couple of cents worth of guts and it's the same money.
Marco:
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Marco:
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Marco:
And this is developed by developers for developers.
Marco:
DoorDeck's open SDK and APIs allow developers to integrate with their clients' apps.
Marco:
Or if you don't have your own app, you can use theirs.
Marco:
And DoorDeck works with your Apple Watch, too.
Marco:
The Apple Watch enables you to unlock your doors without needing to get your iPhone out of your pocket or anything like that.
Marco:
So...
Marco:
There's been a recent surge in demand for building managers and business leaders to understand how tenants are using the buildings they're in.
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:
Thank you so much to Doordeck for sponsoring our show.
Casey:
All right, so the Apple Watch SE, which I don't know how I feel about that name, but whatever, at least it's consistent.
Casey:
I think it was described on Upgrade as kind of the merging of the Series 4 and Series 6, which I thought was a pretty good description.
Casey:
So it has a Series 5 system on a chip.
Casey:
It does not have the always-on display.
Casey:
It does not do ECG, and it does not do the blood oxygen stuff.
Casey:
It has the same accelerometers and altimeters as the Series 6.
Casey:
It starts at $280, which really isn't bad.
Casey:
I mean, it's a lot of money, but it's not terrible in the grand scheme of things.
Casey:
And adding cellular is only $50 instead of the $100 it is on the Series 6, which is frustrating, but, you know, it is what it is.
Casey:
But great news, Marco, the Series 3.
Casey:
Oh, never mind.
Casey:
It's not dead.
Marco:
Honestly, this is the kind of thing that affects Underscore more than me because I still continue to barely make a watch app, and he makes many of them.
Marco:
But the reality is that the Series 3 is still in the lineup at $200.
Marco:
And this matters a lot because...
Marco:
There's massive competition at the low end price-wise of things like Fitbits and everything for the Apple Watch, and there's pretty much no competition in the $400 and up price range.
Marco:
They don't have much there.
Marco:
So really, they need to have something at this low price point, and they've had the Series 3 sitting there, the few years old Series 3 sitting there for a little while, and
Marco:
The Series 4 was immediately discontinued when the Series 5 came out.
Marco:
So the Series 4 never got its chance to be the cheap one.
Marco:
It kind of got iPhone 5-ed into the sunset.
Marco:
And the Series 5, I guess, is now the same thing.
Marco:
They're not selling that anymore either as far as I can tell.
Marco:
So it's also gone.
Marco:
So it's just 6 and SE.
Marco:
But I like what the SE is.
Marco:
I wish it was cheaper so we could get rid of the Series 3 because the Series 3 is not only the last 32-bit device in Apple's lineup, but it's also the last of the Apple Watch old screen size and old screen shape and old complication type and everything else.
Marco:
So the sooner we can get rid of the need to support that as developers, the easier certain stuff is on the Apple Watch.
Marco:
That being said, that's like saying as you're walking through hell, the ground could be a little bit smoother.
Marco:
Of all the various hostile bits of developing apps for the Apple Watch, dealing with those small screen sizes or its 32-bititude doesn't really compare to all the other incredibly rough edges and hostile environment that it is.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
It would be easier for developers if that Series 3 went away earlier rather than later, but it's still not going to be a great platform to develop apps for, if I'm honest, and it's not going to make it that much easier.
Marco:
So it isn't nearly as hard to support that as it is to support small iPhone screen sizes, for instance.
Marco:
Anyway, from a product perspective, I think the Apple Watch SE is a good idea.
Marco:
We actually ordered one to try to be our kids' first Apple Watch because I'm much more excited about this family setup thing.
Marco:
You can basically have an Apple Watch that is set up and paired to your iPhone for somebody else in your family.
Marco:
So this is especially useful.
Marco:
The examples they gave were children or possibly if you have a relative...
Marco:
who doesn't have an iPhone, but you want them to have an Apple Watch for various reasons.
Marco:
You want to maybe know where your kids are, give your kids some way to emergency call you, or you want to keep tabs on an elderly relative who might have health issues.
Marco:
So this kind of thing is great.
Marco:
We were literally in the market for this this past summer, and we're to the point with our kid where some of his friends have phones, and we don't want to give him a phone yet.
Marco:
It's a little early for that.
Marco:
But he will also, you know,
Marco:
go off and play like down the block or, you know, walk to the ice cream shop at the end of the block or whatever.
Marco:
And it's like, you kind of would like to know, to have some way to know where he is.
Marco:
And yes, I know we all grew up without this, but you know, today is today and we have options.
Marco:
We were thinking like, we should probably get a, maybe an Apple watch, but we were thinking maybe like we'd pair it to like an old iPhone that he would not ever have with him.
Marco:
But anyway, this is a better way to do that.
Marco:
And they get, they get their own phone number.
Marco:
It has to be cellular.
Marco:
They get their own phone number that you can then text and call.
Marco:
Presumably it needs its own service that you have to pay your carrier some amount for that I'm sure AT&T will make very simple and definitely won't gouge you on the activation fee and will definitely make it super easy to cancel.
Marco:
In the chat, ask a good question.
Marco:
If I'm buying a Series 6 anyway, why not give the kid my Series 5 hand-me-down?
Marco:
That's because I buy the stainless steel model and it's too heavy for him.
Marco:
He prefers the aluminum model, but we don't have any cellular aluminum models to give him.
Marco:
So we're going to try the series, sorry, the SE.
Marco:
I recognize, again, this is yet another thing.
Marco:
I know I don't really need this, but I'm admitting that I'm buying it because it's cool.
Marco:
So there it is.
Casey:
I do think this is a really cool idea.
Casey:
And, you know, we had seen signs of this, was it last year when they announced the App Store on the Apple Watch?
Casey:
And I'm assuming that that's going to work with family setup.
Casey:
Perhaps it won't.
Casey:
But stuff like that, where it seems like the watch is getting ever more independent.
Casey:
And I think this is a really, really clever idea.
Casey:
I mean, Declan, even in the before times, Declan was pretty much always with us.
Casey:
And so he is too young for this.
Casey:
And
Casey:
I'm not sure we would even necessarily explore it if he was older.
Casey:
But one way or another, I think it is an extremely cool idea.
Casey:
And I think if we lived in a place more similar to where you are, Marco, I think I would be much more enthusiastic about it.
Casey:
I think this is really clever.
Casey:
And I'm really curious to see how well this is implemented because –
Casey:
Anytime Apple does stuff with families, in my experience, it seems like if you have the most vanilla, plain Jane, easy, happy path way of doing things, it all works great.
Casey:
But if you do something even remotely weird, everything falls apart.
Marco:
Tell me about it.
Marco:
I spent all day doing Xcode provisioning profile crap because I have CarPlay entitlements.
Marco:
Talk about being off the beaten path.
Marco:
You can't do crap without anything automatic with that.
Marco:
Oh, and good luck getting Catalyst to work.
Casey:
Oh yeah, enjoy that.
Casey:
That does not sound fun at all.
Casey:
And the other thing I'm worried about is, so let's assume for a moment that Adam is going to have this watch and wear it to school and he'll be away from presumably any sort of cellular phone and he will be away from his house Wi-Fi.
Casey:
I don't know if there is Wi-Fi at the school.
Casey:
I don't know if he'd be able to get on it either way.
Casey:
But that indicates to me that this watch will be sitting with the cellular radioactive like all day long.
Casey:
And I can tell you,
Casey:
Even in the best of times, my 40 millimeter watch, when I'm using cellular, which admittedly, I'm also typically streaming music and I'm doing an exercise, which is a lot.
Casey:
So consider the source here.
Casey:
But I have not been impressed with battery life when I actually am using the cellular features on my watch.
Casey:
Like it destroys the battery.
Casey:
And so I really hope, and I guess since this isn't always on, that'll make a big difference too.
Casey:
It won't have the always on display.
Casey:
But I really hope that the battery life is better than I expect because I have the
Casey:
I have the expectation that the battery life is going to be real, real bad.
Marco:
That's very possible.
Marco:
That's certainly a risk.
Marco:
It's something I've heard from both you and I believe from David Sparks of Mac Power Users when I talked about this with him like two years ago.
Marco:
when a cellular Apple Watch is away from its paired iPhone, it does burn the battery so quickly that this might be a bad idea.
Marco:
So we'll find out.
Marco:
I've never tried running it that way all day long.
Marco:
So we'll see what happens in practice.
Marco:
I think you're right that having the...
Marco:
the series fives processor which is pretty efficient but without the series fives always on screen does probably give it a good amount of battery headroom that said of course this is going to be the smaller model it is kind of funny by the way that my eight-year-old is going to wear the same size watch that i do the 40 millimeter
Marco:
But, yeah, so we'll see how it works.
Marco:
This plan could totally backfire, and I might report back in a month that, oh, yeah, we returned it because it sucked.
Marco:
But we'll see.
Marco:
I have a feeling they probably did this family setup thing for good reason.
Marco:
like because this would be a problem with almost any family setup context so you know and and they family setup only works on cellular there's probably a reason for that too because they realize this is what people actually want this for not just for wi-fi only ones so we'll see how it goes but i actually i think they probably designed it with that in mind so it will probably be okay keep in mind also that he's in school most of the day he's not allowed to like text people on his watch in school and
Marco:
And of course, we are going to enforce that.
Marco:
We're going to make sure that that's enforced.
Marco:
So he's not going to be heavily using the cellular necessarily.
Marco:
It's going to be more of a way for us to track his location and for him to call people in emergencies.
Casey:
Anything else on the watch specifically?
Casey:
Then we have Fitness Plus up next, but anything else on the watch?
John:
Yeah, I just wanted to tell Marco that he's going to enjoy finding out what an eight-year-old can do to an Apple Watch.
Casey:
Oh, no.
John:
I bet you'd probably take good care of yours.
John:
Let's see if that thing lasts a month for you to get mad at the battery life.
Marco:
I told him, though, because he's a nice kid, and he was concerned about getting something expensive.
Marco:
And so what I did was I showed him one of my watches, and I'm like, look, see this giant scratch on the side of this?
Marco:
I'm like,
Marco:
I scratched this watch the day I bought it.
Marco:
And here's that first scratch.
Marco:
And I told him, like, you're going to scratch the crap out of it and you just have to learn to be okay with that because I want you to wear it and use it and everything.
Marco:
And he's a little bit worried, but it's time, I think.
Marco:
He's ready for it.
John:
I wasn't really talking about scratches, but we'll see how it goes.
Marco:
The Apple Watch is pretty sturdy, to be fair.
John:
Eight-year-olds are pretty amazing.
John:
The other thing I think is relevant to the SEN family setup.
John:
And also the Series 3 still being in the mix, right?
John:
So Family Setup only works with the Series 4 later.
John:
So if you buy Apple's cheapest watch to give with your kid, you can't use Family Setup with it.
John:
And the second thing is, the Series 3 is $199, and the SE is $279.
John:
And boy, the Series 3 is so much worse than the SE, right?
John:
That's a good point.
John:
Which is basically a Series 5 Plus.
John:
It's like...
John:
I don't care about the Series 3 from a developer's point of view.
John:
I understand underscore is pain, but in general, Marco's right that we do need to have a $199 model, but $279 is so close.
John:
It's so close.
John:
It feels like next year they've got to get rid of that Series 3, bring the SE down.
John:
Because it's weird now that if you go, I want a watch for my kid, and they're like, well, here's our cheapest watch, but you don't want that one for your kid because let me tell you why.
John:
This is a little bit weird in between.
John:
All this is to say is the Apple Watch SE looks like a really good deal.
John:
uh, compared to everything else.
John:
But the series three just looks like a dog to me.
Marco:
Oh yeah.
Marco:
But if you, if you think about it, like if Apple's profit is usually, you know, 30 to 40% on hardware, that kind of is their entire profit.
Marco:
Like the difference between those two.
John:
Like, I know.
John:
Well, I, who knows, who knows what these watches and what, what the actual cost of materials are.
John:
They are very small.
John:
We didn't mention that, but one of the other things they pitch is they're using even more recycled materials for their watches and everything too.
John:
So that might factor in, but anyway, next year, next year, their lineup will make even more sense, but they've made progress this year.
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Casey:
So I think we've talked about this on the show in the past, but Aaron has been very dedicated and I've been semi-dedicated to doing some sort of daily exercise.
Casey:
And for me, that comes in various forms.
Casey:
But for Aaron, that's pretty consistently been something called Beachbody, which is like a kind of Netflix for exercise videos and things like that.
Casey:
Well, Beachbody is two things.
Casey:
It's a total pyramid scheme, which Erin is not at all involved in, thank goodness.
Casey:
And it's also a really, actually genuinely good Netflix for exercise videos.
Casey:
And I do some of the Beachbody workouts as well.
Casey:
She does a lot more of them and is much more dedicated than I. But they're pretty good.
Casey:
And the app is okay.
Casey:
It's not stupendous, but it works.
Casey:
And they have apps for your phone and your iPad as well as, of course, the Apple TV.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
But the idea, particularly in these times, the idea of working out at home with somebody instructing you as much as they can in a one-way fashion, instructing you on how to exercise and get fit, in my personal opinion, that can work and it can work pretty well.
Casey:
And for Aaron to get this kind of Netflix for exercise, so to speak, I believe it's $100 a year.
Casey:
And yesterday, Apple announced Apple Fitness Plus, which is basically a Beachbody-style thing, so a kind of Netflix for exercise videos, that's really built around the Apple Watch.
Casey:
I don't think it absolutely requires an Apple Watch.
Casey:
I'm actually not sure about that, but it's certainly built around the Apple Watch.
Casey:
And at first glance, I thought, okay, well, this is just Beachbody, but by Apple.
Casey:
You know, of course, the production values are through the roof and everything is so pretty and so on and so forth, but it's the same basic idea.
Casey:
But then...
Casey:
They started talking more and more about it.
Casey:
And there are a series of really little things that add up to really, really impress me.
Casey:
So one of the things that they said was that Jay Blahnik, I think, was the presenter doing this part.
Casey:
He had said that, you know, as you're doing these exercises, well, first off, when you start one of these, you know, presumably you're doing this on like the Apple TV or an iPad or something like that.
Casey:
When you start one of the exercises, it will automatically start a workout of the appropriate type on your Apple Watch, which is an integration that I don't recall, I guess other than the remote app, I don't recall there ever really being a direct integration between the Apple TV and the watch.
Casey:
And that also makes me wonder, how is this going to work if Aaron and I both use the same Apple TV, you know, obviously not simultaneously, but
Casey:
Well, actually, I guess, what if we do do it simultaneously, you know, because not only do they start the exercises on your watch, but another thing they do is they show your stats on screen so you can see your rings, you can see your heart rate, and...
Casey:
And so on and so forth.
Casey:
And yeah, I know that they're allegedly like profiles on the Apple TV.
Casey:
And I suppose that might work, but I don't know.
Casey:
I'm skeptical.
Casey:
But nevertheless, one of the other cool things that they do other than starting the workout is that they'll show you, like I said, your heart rate, your rings, etc.
Casey:
on screen.
Casey:
And they said if there's a time at which the trainer says, oh, and check out your heart rate right now.
Casey:
It will actually enlarge the heart rate readout on the screen when the trainer says that.
Casey:
So it's easier to see.
Casey:
Is this important?
Casey:
Absolutely not.
Casey:
But is it extremely cool?
Casey:
Heck yeah, it is.
Casey:
I just think that this is Apple at its finest.
Casey:
When they control the entire widget or the entirety of all the widgets, they can do really slick stuff like that.
Casey:
And I think that that is super, super cool.
Casey:
Yeah.
Casey:
They have all sorts of different workouts.
Casey:
They have like yoga, treadmill, bike, dumbbell, sort of, you know, lifting, high intensity interval training, all sorts of different stuff.
Casey:
Dancing.
Casey:
Rowing for Marco.
Casey:
Yep.
Casey:
Rowing for Marco.
Casey:
Mindful cooldowns, all sorts of different stuff.
Casey:
And I didn't catch this part of the presentation, but they were talking about on Upgrade that one of the things they're doing is like a complete beginner version where I guess if you're completely unfit as so many of us are, and I would say I definitely wasn't up until recently, they have, I guess, I would assume low impact or not terribly challenging exercise programs that you can try.
Casey:
Uh, it's free for three months when you get a new Apple watch, then it's 10 bucks a month or $80 a year, family sharing included.
Casey:
It's available sometime by the end of the year and appears to be English only for now.
Casey:
Uh, that is a whole lot of information.
Casey:
Marco, I'm really interested to hear what you have to say about it, but let's give John a chance first because I think you're, you're going to have a lot more to say than John.
Casey:
So John, take it away.
John:
I haven't actually used any of these things, so I'm not entirely sure what the market for it is.
John:
The only comparison that I have any information about is the one that everybody's making, which I don't think is particularly apt, and that's to Peloton and these other very expensive cycling things, which were sort of pioneers in this space of getting people with a lot of money to buy a really expensive stationary bike and then hook up a gigantic screen to it and connect it to the Internet.
John:
And that's sort of a home-derived offshoot of the spin classes that people go do.
John:
And Apple entering with this product is like, well, this makes sense for Apple.
John:
This is the type of thing that they're used to.
John:
It integrates with their devices, but it's basically just a thing that shows on the screen.
John:
And they're going to have new content every week.
John:
And like you said, the production values are really high and everything.
John:
But you know what it reminds me of more than Peloton?
John:
It reminds me of, do you remember when Apple, maybe you've already forgotten about this a little bit, a lot of people have, came out with these, we're making music lessons by famous musicians with high production values that will teach you to play the piano or whatever.
John:
Do you remember that?
John:
Yep.
John:
Where are those now?
John:
I think they still exist, but did not set the world on fire, did they?
John:
This looks a lot like that.
John:
This has better integration.
John:
It's kind of like if Apple's music lessons, you know, directly integrated with an Apple keyboard or something, because here they have the watch doing the health monitoring for you and it hooks in, so it's better than that.
John:
But...
John:
It does make me wonder, I mean, at least I always make fun of Apple for not understanding the gaming market.
John:
I don't know much about the fitness market, but when I look at Peloton, that is a company that seems to me understands very well what causes people to engage with exercise.
John:
And the reason I mention gaming is when I read about Peloton, I'm like, oh, they are using, not gamification because it's just an overloaded term, but they...
John:
They're using aspects of technology to bring sort of social and competitive angles to what is essentially a thing that you do by yourself in your house to motivate people to exercise.
John:
And Apple, in some respects, did that with the activity rings, encouraging people in a Fitbit style to be aware of their health, first of all, and second of all, to be competitive to achieve some kind of goal.
John:
Peloton takes that a step further with...
John:
The social aspect and the sort of the celebrity aspect and the personality aspect of having their instructors be, you know, very personable and, you know, eventually famous and having you do things in group and compete with your friends and compete with other people in the class.
John:
The same things that the spin classes did in person, but now it's powered over the Internet and it's the entire world.
John:
That kind of integration and also the live classes, which Apple doesn't have any of, of like being able to be acknowledged in a live class as you sit there peddling your part out in your own house than having the famous instructor that you've been watching in the Peloton video mention you or something like that.
John:
That is, you know, setting aside the $2,000 bicycle.
John:
I'm not even talking about that.
John:
Pretend the bike was free.
John:
That experience that gets people to get made Peloton what it is today and makes it a successful business.
John:
It seems like Apple either...
John:
Apple certainly doesn't have a lot of those features and it doesn't seem like it values or understands them because there's no reason technologically Apple couldn't have a lot of those features.
John:
Granted, again, it can have a $2,000 bicycle, but all the other aspects I talked about, the social aspect, the interactive aspect, the live aspect, the competitive aspect,
John:
Apple does not have now this is a version one granted but they're coming into a world where things like Peloton already exists so I do wonder is this going to end up as a less expensive mass market version of Peloton or is it going to end up as the exercise equivalent of Apple's music lessons.
Marco:
hmm that's a good question i mean i i think the odds are pretty good that this will at least see good usage especially because as we'll get to with the the apple one um you know finally services uh bundle i think people will know about this more because it's one of the things that's included in the top tier of the bundle that they're going to possibly want for other reasons and
Marco:
And so it's going to be like, well, I'm paying for this anyway.
Marco:
Let's check it out.
Marco:
So there will be some aspects of that.
Marco:
I also think that this is just a bigger market.
Marco:
I think more people want to exercise with instruction than want to learn musical instruments in GarageBand or wherever that was.
Marco:
So I think it's probably going to be a bigger audience no matter what.
Marco:
But you are right.
Marco:
A lot of the appeal of Peloton is the competitive aspect and the live aspect.
Marco:
Those are two things that are very much not present here.
Marco:
I'm very excited about Apple Fitness Plus, even though I probably won't use it very often because I have my own trainer setup that I do, so I'm not really the market for it yet.
Marco:
But
Marco:
I might do it if I'm traveling or if it's a day where I don't have anything else planned but I want to get a little bit of a workout in.
Marco:
I think I'll use it here and there.
Marco:
The Absolute Beginner program that Casey mentioned is wonderful.
Marco:
And the actual experience of working out with it does look pretty cool.
Marco:
It looks like they've done a really good job with the integration and everything, with the Apple Watch and everything.
Marco:
So all that stuff, I'm sure it's going to be nicely produced, nicely done.
Marco:
where apple i think will suffer is what john said like i think they're they're probably never going to really nail the competitive thing i can't see them doing live classes possibly ever those both seem like things that are fairly difficult for apple to do like
Marco:
you know, culturally or skill wise, whatever it is, like they're not good at that kind of thing.
Marco:
I don't think they're going to do it.
Marco:
Um, but I think this will still have great value in giving people who, I mean, the problem is it would have much greater value if it was free for everybody who, who owned an Apple watch.
Marco:
Like that would be significantly nicer.
Marco:
Um,
Marco:
The fact that they made it its own pay service or its own member of a bundle that is a bundle of paid services.
Marco:
I know why they did it.
Marco:
I know it's inevitable.
Marco:
Of course, they're going to charge money for it.
Marco:
But like, you know, old Apple would have just had this be a thing they did to make you buy Apple Watches.
Marco:
modern apple wants this to be its own profit center that will happen to also sell some new apple watches here and there and that's i i kind of think it's too bad but again i know why they did it i i know it's kind of inevitable with today's apple the thing is there's a free version of this that apple could do that would be better than that because peloton doesn't offer much for free like free quote-unquote if you get that bicycle but don't pay for the service
John:
You can still kind of use it, but it's crap.
John:
What could Apple do for free?
John:
Not that the marginal cost of producing these exercise videos per week is anything close to what they hope the subscriptions are going to be because, again, you pay these exercise instructors to make these videos every week and you pay video production crews and so on and so forth, but that's a fixed cost.
John:
Then you get as many subscribers as you can.
John:
It's not a Zippo.
John:
It has to be a subscription because they have to pay these people to make new videos every week.
John:
Marco's right.
John:
They could totally just eat that and
John:
you know, make it up in volume, quote unquote, by getting people into the ecosystem and so on and so forth.
Marco:
The amount of money they make by selling Apple watches is so much greater than whatever this costs them to produce in its entirety.
John:
It's not like you're helping pay for these instructors' salaries with your thing.
John:
Plus, they're saving all that money from all the power adapters.
John:
In the free realm, one of the things that Peloton offers in its pay things is something that Apple would be awesome at, an actual thing that Apple would already be awesome at.
John:
They'd have like scenic rides where when you're riding the bicycle, you're just going through scenery.
John:
It's not an instruction class and it's not competitive.
John:
It's like, what if you just want to ride your little stationary bike and go on a beautiful mountain trail?
John:
Apple has screensavers that already practically do that.
John:
It'll be the air version of it, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
Apple would be great at that.
John:
And you can offer those for free because you make 17 videos of scenic bike trails or whatever and or, you know, scenic running trails or whatever.
John:
And those are part of the free tier because you just make them once literally and you never make them again.
John:
And you put a couple dozen of them in there.
John:
And that gets people into the idea of doing exercise in front of their TV or iPad while seeing their stats reflected from their watch.
John:
Again, Peloton is stingy with the functionality of the free tier, not giving you all the cool integrations with it.
John:
all that stuff because baltine integrates with like heart rate sensors and i think even with the apple watch at this point right um so i there is a way where apple could have this this is fitness plus right how about fitness without the plus everybody gets fitness without the plus and it's like five videos of every type you know five of each kind of the videos for cycling dance yoga treadmill just to give you a taste but it's the same five videos so you're gonna get sick of them right and then
John:
15 or 20 cool scenic videos for the same activity type things and if you like that sign up for fitness plus and what do you get for that maybe you get better stats tracking leaderboards social compete with friends blah blah blah and also every single week new videos you don't get sick of watching the same videos over and over again
John:
Um, but no, we didn't get, we didn't get the free tier.
John:
We just got to pay one.
John:
Um, I, I'm not, it's not steeped enough in the, in the fitness world to know how competitive this is with, uh, you know, other things like the, the beach bod thing or the pricing.
John:
Was it, was it in this ballpark?
John:
Casey?
Casey:
It's more expensive.
Casey:
This is $80 a year.
Casey:
Beachbody on demand is $100 a year.
John:
Isn't Beachbody an MLM or something too?
Casey:
Yeah, that's what I said earlier.
Casey:
So if you don't do any of the MLM stuff, then you have to pay like full retail for it.
John:
Are you joking?
John:
Is it literally a multi-level marketing scheme?
Casey:
I think it literally is.
John:
I'm not 100%.
John:
I can't tell if you're just trying to make fun of Beachbody or like it is literally.
Casey:
No, no, no.
Casey:
No, I legitimately think that it is an MLM because – and I haven't like done the proper research and I might be wrong about this.
Casey:
But it seems to me like they really encourage you to become a quote-unquote coach.
Casey:
And then when you're a coach, then you get discounts on things.
Casey:
And then they want you to peddle their like special nutritious stuff.
John:
And then you get a pink Cadillac at the end.
John:
I get it.
John:
Okay.
Casey:
Yeah, yeah.
Casey:
Exactly.
Casey:
Reference acknowledged.
Casey:
What was that?
Casey:
Mary Kay?
Casey:
Is that right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
You should put a link to multi-level marketing in the Wikipedia page in the show notes for people who don't know what this is.
Marco:
I had a friend whose mom had the pink Cadillac in high school.
Marco:
Goodness.
Casey:
But yeah, basically, I believe it to be an MLM.
Casey:
But what's nice about it is Aaron has completely and utterly ignored the MLM aspects and doesn't seem any worse for it.
Casey:
And again, I think that the MLM side of Beachbody is really super gross, but...
Casey:
If you take the videos for what they are as just exercise videos, and admittedly, I don't have a lot to compare to, but it seems to me like they're pretty darn good.
Casey:
And as I've mentioned before, I am not a particularly strong person, and I am not particularly cut or ripped or whatever the euphemism is these days.
Casey:
But I have certainly built muscle where I did not have muscle before.
Casey:
And that's been almost exclusively because of what I've done with these Beachbody workouts.
Casey:
So, yeah, when I say it's MLM, I legitimately believe it to be MLM.
Casey:
But again, maybe I'm wrong.
Casey:
Who knows?
John:
Yeah, well, try out the fitness thing.
John:
You get the free three months.
John:
It's worth comparing, right?
John:
Because it is cheaper, right?
Casey:
It is cheaper.
Casey:
And that's only if I get a watch, though, John.
Casey:
You never know.
Marco:
You're going to get a watch.
Casey:
I know.
Marco:
You always do.
Marco:
You already have a watch.
Marco:
What are you talking about?
Marco:
He only gets three months free with a new Apple Watch purchase.
Marco:
Oh, that's what the... Yeah, okay.
Casey:
Hey, man, I don't always get a watch.
Casey:
This would be the first time I did an annual watch.
Casey:
I did the Series 0, Series 3, Series 5.
Casey:
This would be the first annual watch.
Casey:
Oh, and real-time follow-up, it does indeed require an Apple Watch.
Casey:
I actually closed the page, but there's an FAQ at the bottom of the Apple Fitness Plus page, and it says you absolutely do need an Apple Watch for reasons.
Marco:
And that isn't that unreasonable, you know, given the kind of integration that it has and everything.
Marco:
That's probably fine.
Marco:
You know, worst case scenario, it just won't go anywhere and we won't ever hear about it again.
Marco:
But I think this is probably going to be a success to some degree.
Marco:
I don't think it's going to take over the world.
Marco:
I don't think it's going to replace anybody's Peloton or their beach MLMs.
Marco:
But I do think it is probably going to help people in a maybe a more casual way, similar to what the Apple Watch always does.
Marco:
Like,
Marco:
what the apple watch does and has it has always done is it brings fitness in at least a casual way to more people that's like one of the greatest things the apple watch does if not the greatest thing it does it gets people more into fitness even at a very casual level some more than that but you know even at a very casual level everyone starts caring about like hitting their stand goal hitting their green ring or whatever like that's that's what the apple watch is really good at
Marco:
This just takes it the next step forward.
Marco:
If you want to go a little bit further into the world of moving, then this is the next step for you to start doing.
Marco:
That's really great.
Marco:
It has the potential to really help a lot of people out, to really be very useful.
Marco:
It has a lot of potential for casual use.
Marco:
As I said, I'm never going to go into Peloton or anything because I have my own other thing that I do, but
Marco:
There are times when I would occasionally want to use something like this, and it'll help me out too because I only want it occasionally.
Marco:
So while I wouldn't be the target customer for some bigger, more established or more involved thing, this is something I might dip into sometimes.
Marco:
And if it comes with a bundle that we will eventually talk about that I'm already paying for, it's like, well, it's already there, so let me dip in on this Friday when I have no other workout and I want to do some rowing with some person guiding me.
Marco:
And there's also going to be so many people who hopefully do take advantage of that absolute beginner thing, who have never done this before and might be intimidated to do something that is –
Marco:
You know, either in person with a trainer somewhere or in a gym around a bunch of other people who like, geez, before I ever went to a gym, I was so scared to ever go because I didn't want to be seen by all these other people who knew what they were doing and were more in shape than I was.
Marco:
It was a very self-conscious thing for me to ever go to a gym.
Marco:
This is the kind of thing where you can just do this with the stuff you already have anyway from Apple in the privacy of your own home.
Marco:
And because it isn't even live, you don't even feel self-conscious because nobody's watching you.
Marco:
So there's a lot of value to that.
Marco:
And Apple didn't invent this, but if they're going to do a pretty good job that's going to be easily available to lots of people, there's a lot of value to that.
Marco:
So I think ultimately this will either go nowhere, which will be a shame, or it will go somewhere, which will be pretty good.
Marco:
It is kind of annoying that they made it a subscription and it's part of the services revenue and all that stuff.
Marco:
But, you know, you take the good with the bad, I guess.
Casey:
Yeah, I think that's a really good summary, and I think a pretty good place to leave it.
Casey:
But before we do real-time follow-up, reading from Wikipedia, Beachbody LLC is a privately held American multi-level marketing company.
Marco:
There you go.
Casey:
That solves that.
Casey:
So, all right, let's talk about Apple One.
Casey:
We had heard rumors of this.
Casey:
I think it was leaked in the Apple Music app for Android or something like that.
John:
Yeah, it was in our show notes, and we never got to it.
John:
Sorry.
John:
But, yeah, the name was leaked a while ago.
John:
One is the bundliest number.
Ha!
John:
My favorite thing about Apple One is that there are three plans.
Casey:
Yeah, that is a good point.
Casey:
So yeah, so Apple One is their bundle.
Casey:
There are three plans.
Casey:
There's individual, family, and premiere.
Casey:
And they're not all geographically available everywhere.
Casey:
It depends on where the things that are being offered are available.
Casey:
But for Americans anyway –
Casey:
The individual plan is $15 a month.
Casey:
It has Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, and 50 gigabytes of iCloud storage.
Casey:
And so that's a savings of about $6 a month.
Casey:
The family plan means you can share with up to five other people.
Casey:
We're not sure if you have to cohabitate or not.
Casey:
I would assume not, but I'm not sure about that.
Casey:
But anyways, that's $20 a month, 200 gigabytes of iCloud storage, and it saves you $8 a month.
Casey:
It has the same Music, TV+, Arcade, and iCloud storage.
Casey:
And then Premiere, which is $30 a month, it has two terabytes of iCloud, and it adds news and fitness.
Casey:
So that gives you music, TV+, arcade, iCloud, news, and fitness+.
Casey:
And that's a savings of about $25 a month.
Casey:
That's the short, short version.
Casey:
I'm really in classic Casey style.
Casey:
I'm waffling a lot about this.
Casey:
I don't pay for iCloud storage, which I know is ridiculous.
Casey:
I don't need to lecture about it right now.
John:
Your photo backup.
John:
I think I forgot about this and I'm mad all over again.
John:
What are you doing?
John:
You're like the old people in my family that I'm going to complain about a little bit later.
John:
You're just as bad as them.
Casey:
Probably.
Casey:
But I also don't use iCloud Photo Library, and I want to.
Casey:
It is on the list of to-dos that I haven't gotten to yet.
Casey:
I want to.
Casey:
But anyways, I don't use Apple Music.
Casey:
I don't use iCloud Photo Library.
Casey:
I've never even tried Apple Arcade.
Casey:
I do like Apple TV+.
Casey:
I'm not sure if I want to pay for it or not, but I do like it.
Casey:
And so for me, at a glance, I don't want any of this.
Casey:
Why would I want any of this?
Casey:
I'm a devout Spotify user, and I don't really play video games that terribly often.
Casey:
And I'm surviving, whether or not I'm having a good life or not, I'm surviving without iCloud storage.
Casey:
So why bother?
Casey:
But I was talking to Tyler Stallman yesterday about it.
Casey:
I'm hopefully going to appear on a show of his sometime this week.
Casey:
And in the midst of hearing him talk about it, it occurred to me
Casey:
You know, even though I don't pay for iCloud storage yet, it is on the to-do list of things I want to do.
Casey:
I probably do want Apple TV+.
Casey:
I'm not 100% committed, but I think I want it.
Casey:
And although I am, again, a devout Spotify person, like, if I got Apple Music for, major air quotes, free, that wouldn't be so bad.
Casey:
And I just told you that I am at least casually interested in Fitness+.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
I wouldn't be surprised if I end up doing the Premiere plan sometime in the next couple of months because it actually, in a lot of ways, makes a lot of sense.
Casey:
Oh, and the other thing is I've got a terabyte of photos.
Casey:
So if those ever end up in iCloud, I pretty much need to either jump to the Premiere plan or apparently you can do the family plan, but then you can add additional iCloud storage for an additional fee.
Casey:
So...
Casey:
One way or another, it's quite possible that I'm going to be subscribing to something here sometime soon.
Casey:
John, you already subscribed to at least some of this stuff.
Casey:
So what is your plan?
Casey:
Where are you thinking on this?
John:
Yeah, I did some quick math to see, like, would I save any money with these bundles, given what I have?
John:
It's complicated by the fact that I'm still on my free first year of Apple TV Plus.
John:
Right.
John:
So right now, if I got the bundle, I wouldn't actually be saving any significant money.
John:
In fact, I think it would be more expensive for me to get the top end bundle because I do have the big the two terabyte iCloud storage already.
John:
Right.
John:
So if I wanted, I'd have to get Premiere.
John:
The thing I couldn't figure out is if you add storage to the other tiers, does it just cost the same amount?
John:
I'm assuming it does because they didn't say you get any kind of bargain on it.
John:
But if you buy one of the other bundles and you say, I want to add storage, I think the storage just costs the same amount it always did.
John:
So the thing about 2TB iCloud is that's $10 a month on its own.
John:
So that kind of kills my...
John:
ability to use other plans but anyway once my free year of apple tv goes by it's actually going to save me like five bucks or something over what i it's saving me five bucks and i get two services that i don't care about that i'm never going to use or whatever maybe i will but like if i just ignore news and fitness i still save five bucks but i get i save five bucks a month and i get news and i get fitness right so i'm i'm gonna get the premiere if only just to unify it into one bill right um but i i this whole all these offerings
John:
really frustrate me from the perspective of
John:
like how can Apple best solve problems that it has with its customer base as opposed to how can Apple make an attractive service bundle or how can Apple make more revenue for services or how can Apple get, you know, all the reasons they're doing this that make sense, right?
John:
But the one that really burns me is like Apple has a problem with its customers where like they have problems with their lives and their digital devices related to their unwillingness to pay a monthly fee for anything, right?
Yeah.
John:
that's that's a real thing that happens casey is a perfect example people don't want to pay for more iCloud storage so they don't have enough iCloud storage to store all their photos and then their phone goes in a lake and they lose their photos this is a real legitimate problem the technical people in the family deal with all the time because they have to convince the non-technical people please please pay for more iCloud storage you don't have an iCloud backup of your phone that's literally the only place any of these things exist because you don't have a personal computer right which is which is fine and everything but
John:
Apple's customers are losing important data like photos and video because nobody wants to pay for storage.
John:
And if Apple One was focused on solving problems Apple's customers have, it would be all about...
John:
Yeah.
John:
Getting that music into the cloud and getting their photos into the cloud and getting them iCloud backups of all their devices so that when they inevitably destroy them, they don't lose their data.
John:
And none of these plans help with that at all because Apple's not interested in solving that problem.
John:
In fact, the insulting 50 gigabytes of iCloud storage that comes with individual is ridiculous.
John:
Like, that's not enough for anything.
John:
And then the family goes up to 200 gigabytes.
John:
What kind of...
John:
What kind of families, iTunes, iCloud backups of their devices alone fit into 200 gigabytes?
John:
It's totally ridiculous.
John:
I guess they just never take any photos or video, right?
John:
Even just the backups of their apps, if they fill all their phones, you know.
John:
And then the two terabyte plan only coming with Premiere, two terabyte is fine.
John:
And by the way, Gruber confirmed on his website, he says, I am reliably informed that you're able to purchase an additional two terabytes.
John:
on top of the two terabytes that you get the premiere so if you get premiere and you want to pay i'm assuming 10 bucks more a month you can get a total of four terabytes which breaks through the previous ceiling of two terabytes which is important if you have a ton of photos but anyway i wish there were some kind of plan that looked like a bargain to somebody who is thus far refusing to pay for icloud storage they gave you enough icloud storage to be useful
John:
The individual plan looks like a bargain if you're already sold on Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade.
John:
But then you get no iCloud storage, right?
John:
And if someone is already sold on those three services, they're probably not the type of person, like weirdly Casey, who will pay for all sorts of things but won't pay for iCloud storage.
John:
There is no plan that's like...
John:
I don't want to pay for storage.
John:
If you could say, you know, I don't want to pay $5 a month in storage.
John:
It's like, well, if you pay $8 a month in storage, you get enough storage to solve your storage problems and access to the world's music.
John:
I mean, it doesn't work out because Apple music, they have to pay a bunch of people for, or maybe Apple arcade, like something you could, some kind of plan that would get more people to stay, pay for cloud storage.
John:
And none of these plans do that.
John:
And in fact, these plans make it much, much more difficult for people to play for storage.
John:
They almost encourage you,
John:
to be stingy with the storage and just get these wonderful services and not worry about storing anything.
John:
Well, I'm sorry, my photos aren't stored on Apple TV or Apple Arcade or Apple Music.
John:
My photos are either stored on my phone or in iCloud.
John:
And if I have 50 gigabytes of iCloud storage, it's not going to work, Apple.
John:
So this kind of pisses me off for that reason.
John:
Like the bundles are great for what they offer,
John:
But that problem, like Apple had a chance to solve it by finally having something that they can entice people to get over that hump of pain because look at what a deal it is.
John:
People love bundles, sales, look how much I can save.
John:
The more you buy, the more you save.
John:
I don't understand the iCloud sizes.
John:
It's like putting USB 1.0 on a computer.
John:
Isn't it more expensive to give people 50 gigabytes of storage?
John:
Isn't that like under the allocation size of whatever cloud storage thing you're using to chunk up people?
John:
It's like, I don't... I don't know if this is weird.
John:
People don't care about this, but...
John:
There is a customer problem that Apple has that they could have solved with this bundle and they didn't.
John:
Instead, they just basically did a more convenient way for people like me to pay for services and maybe get a little, you know, get the rich people who are paying for all these services anyway to get Apple Fitness Plus and maybe get on board there.
John:
I don't think it's going to help News Plus because it's like, whatever.
John:
Yeah, I'm going to get News Plus, but I'm still never going to look at it.
John:
Sorry, Apple.
Marco:
Yeah, I mean, where this is, you know, strategically useful for Apple is that it kind of helps prop up the less popular or, I wouldn't even go so far as to say failing, I think it might be too early to call anything failing, but certainly like the weaker offerings.
Marco:
So, you know, for me, like, you know, I'm, I am a, you know, we are a two terabyte family here, like the iCloud storage, like we,
Marco:
We have multiple people doing iCloud backups with large photo libraries.
Marco:
So we had to jump to the two-terabyte plan a couple years back.
Marco:
And so if you're already doing the two-terabyte plan, and if you have Apple Music for the family, you're already at $25 a month in individual plans.
Marco:
Premiere is $30.
Marco:
And so to match that, you basically need to want arcade or news or TV Plus or fitness.
Marco:
And if you want any of those things, it makes sense to buy the Premiere bundle then.
Marco:
And I think a lot of people will do that.
Marco:
I think that's going to be fairly common.
Marco:
Certainly not the majority of iPhone owners, much to Apple's chagrin.
Marco:
I think you're right, John, that so many people who buy iPhones have no interest in paying Apple a subscription per month for anything.
John:
And they resent it.
John:
They resent the fact they just bought this incredibly expensive phone.
John:
It's like, I can't even back it up what you tell me I'm supposed to do for some reason.
John:
Now I have to pay Apple more money.
John:
I just paid them $1,000 for this phone.
John:
No way I'm giving them another cent.
Marco:
Right.
Marco:
And they will gladly accept the incredibly poor user experience of having to constantly fight for iCloud storage because they're on the free whatever it is like 10 megabytes plan.
Marco:
They're constantly battling that.
Marco:
It's a terrible user experience, and they don't have photo backups, as you mentioned.
Marco:
But they wouldn't pay any subscription at any price.
Marco:
The only way to improve their experience is to improve the free offering, which I think is very unlikely to happen.
Marco:
Unfortunately, Apple's not going to get those people in any way that Apple would stomach.
Marco:
What these plans do is for people who are already willing to pay Apple subscription fees, this makes a more compelling bundle and it helps Apple prop up all of their other smaller unpopular services.
Marco:
So for instance, as we head into the time period in which Apple TV Plus is going to start expiring for everybody, the free year they got from buying last year's phones is going to expire.
Marco:
There's going to be a lot of people questioning whether they want to keep Apple TV Plus.
Marco:
Hi.
Marco:
Now, if you have a bundle where you're going to buy music and iCloud storage anyway, and it's only a few extra dollars to get TV Plus and Arcade and News and Fitness, a lot of people are probably going to choose that option.
Marco:
And that'll help keep TV Plus going.
Marco:
It'll help keep News Plus going, which, let's be honest, is probably not doing great.
Marco:
and it'll probably help arcade which again i i kind of blew by it last week but i don't think arcade is doing that well i could be wrong i don't think they've ever actually said anything but i just i never hear from anybody about a new game they played on apple arcade i've never i never hear anybody talking about any of any of those games which leads me to believe that not a lot of people are giving a lot of attention and so i don't i don't think apple arcade is doing great but um if it's part of a big bundle like this look
Marco:
Amazon Prime TV as a streaming service largely sucks and has largely always sucked.
Marco:
There's not a lot of good stuff on Amazon Prime TV streaming.
Marco:
But the reason why it's so popular by user base is because Amazon Prime is a compelling overall option mostly for the free shipping and stuff that it has a lot of people in it.
Marco:
Anyway, that's the whole value of a bundle.
Marco:
That is like the strategic power of bundling.
Marco:
that you can take something that you're going to sell a bunch of anyway and stick a bunch of other crap onto it that will therefore get huge audiences and user bases even if they aren't very good.
Marco:
And so that's one of the reasons why it was important for Apple to do a bundle because they're trying to launch a whole bunch of different services and some of them are working and some of them are kind of eh.
Marco:
And this will massively boost the usage of all of them among the people for whom it's worth buying that top tier bundle.
Marco:
So in that point of view, this is going to be, I think, a great success for Apple services push, even though it feels a little bit gross on some levels.
Marco:
But like, I'm going to buy it.
Marco:
I'm in because I was already hitting the 30 bucks.
Marco:
I'm already paying for arcade, even though I never actually launched into games and I should probably cancel it.
Marco:
And I'm already paying for, I guess I will start paying for TV plus next month, even though I've only watched like two TV plus shows, but I still like them.
Marco:
So, you know, this is, this is a good time for this and I think it'll do well and it will help prop up all these other services and give Apple an easy platform with which to launch future services.
John:
like the bundle effect also helps with, for things like Apple TV plus, like you mentioned Amazon prime, not being a powerhouse video streaming service, but both Apple TV plus and Amazon prime have a couple of shows that are really good that you'll hear about from friends.
John:
Right.
John:
And the normal move is, uh, like I've been doing with CBS all access, which isn't called that anymore.
John:
I, uh,
John:
I kind of, you know, unintentionally predicted its demise a couple of shows ago.
John:
Anyway, it's now Paramount Plus.
John:
It's stupid.
John:
Anyway, what I would do is I would subscribe, watch the series that I heard all my friends talking about, then unsubscribe.
John:
But when it's part of a bundle, it seems like more of a hassle.
John:
But I've already got the bundle with it in it.
John:
And I guess I could unsubscribe.
John:
But then it comes with all the bundles.
John:
And so should I go with like a lesser bundle?
John:
And like it's just like it's you just leave it.
John:
right it's harder to if you want to individually manage these services you can but that's a hassle you get multiple bills you got to remember which ones you're canceling oh we've done watching Ted Lasso now we can cancel Apple TV Plus but what about season two just get the bundle and stop thinking about it and that's what Apple wants you to do and that's the power of the bundle
Casey:
All right, so iPad 8th generation, A12, old pencil, $329, $299 for education.
Casey:
It ships Friday.
Casey:
Moving on, iPad Air.
John:
I mean, that's basically it for the iPad 8th gen.
John:
What did it come up before?
John:
The 7th gen was A10, right?
Marco:
Yeah, they went from A10 to A12.
Marco:
I love how incredibly important this product is and yet how incredibly boring it is.
Marco:
Good for them.
Marco:
They're finding ways to keep delivering good value to schools and bulk purchasers, and that's great.
Marco:
It was kind of sad when they said they called it their most popular iPad.
Marco:
I'm like, oh, that's kind of... It's kind of sad that this is... I mean, I know why.
Marco:
It makes sense why, but... It's the Apple Watch Series 3 of iPads.
Marco:
This is true largely.
Marco:
This is one of the reasons why Tim Cook is the way he is, that...
Marco:
Whatever the cheapest product is in a given product line is usually the most popular one for Apple.
Marco:
Usually the cheapest iPad is the most popular iPad.
Marco:
The cheapest MacBook is the most popular MacBook.
Marco:
There's so much of their sales now go to bulk purchasers, like businesses and schools and stuff.
Marco:
Or if you're ordering like 100 MacBook Airs for your staff or whatever, it's just better to just get the cheap one and you don't care as a business so much.
Marco:
Cost is more important.
Marco:
Or if a school is buying 5,000 iPads for its entire student body, you kind of want them to be the cheap ones.
Marco:
So I understand why it is this way.
Marco:
But it is kind of sad that we spend all this time obsessing about and focusing on all these nicer, higher-end products.
Marco:
And Apple spends all this time developing all these nicer, higher-end products.
Marco:
But what actually sells, for the most part, is whatever's cheapest.
John:
Well, it's got two things going against it.
John:
One is that we're at a generational boundary.
John:
kind of like the Series 3 and Series 5, 32-bit, 64-bit, big screen, small screen.
John:
And so this iPad is the last of the old-shaped iPads to drift out of the line.
John:
It's still in the line for now, but to Apple's credit, I think the 7th gen was a good product in that they said, okay, this is still going to be the old form factor, but let's make it be able to do...
John:
all the things so they gave it pencil support it's the old pencil but hey at least it's got pencil support now they give it a decent processor and give it a decent screen and give it a good touch id and you know like it it made it viable but it's so clearly the last generation of ipad and now in the eighth gen they gave it two generation newer processor which makes it stay viable it is still a viable and still a good product and still has pencil support and still the old pencil but it's so clearly the very last gasp of that form factor so
John:
when the apple watch series 3 disappears and all the apple watches have the good new display with the rounded edges and then eventually this will disappear and all the ipads will have the flat sides and we'll be in a much better place so it's not in this case not really the fault of apple selling the same product forever because they have been updating this and they updated it again so i think this is actually if you want a cheap ipad don't feel bad getting his ipad it's a good ipad right
John:
it's you know it feels good in your hand it's got good specs for the price it's very popular and it's quote unquote sad that you know they don't get the fancy new one but this is still a good i still use an ipad shaped kind of like this and i don't feel sad about it and mine mine does not have an a12 in it so i i still think this is a good product i think it's probably still a little bit overpriced given what they put in it but only aval knows what its exact margins on every individual product right so
John:
I think it's fine, but next year the line will make more sense.
Marco:
Well, I would say price-wise, actually, it's one of the best values in the lineup, like in Apple's entire product lineup.
Marco:
It remains one of the best values for sure.
John:
Yeah, because it's a very cheap product, and it has good specs.
John:
It's not terrible.
John:
You can play really good games on it, and it has an okay-ish camera, and it's got a pencil that works like the original Apple Pencil, which is actually pretty good, and it's got all the things.
Casey:
All right, so then we have the iPad Air.
Casey:
And I'm really confident I am not in the market for an iPad Air.
Casey:
But I really think that this might have been the most impressive or perhaps interesting announcement of the entire hour-long session that we've been talking two hours about.
Casey:
But this is the first appearance of the A14.
Casey:
which is five nanometers.
Casey:
It's a six core CPU, two big boys and four little boys.
Casey:
So two high performance cores and four little cores or energy efficient cores.
Casey:
A four core GPU.
Casey:
It quote, runs more instructions in parallel quote, because I guess more execution units, more instructions in flight at once.
Casey:
There's a deeper pipeline.
Casey:
John, I presume you have something you want to add here.
Casey:
So what would you like to add to that?
John:
Well, you're just reading my notes as if you know what they mean.
John:
That's great that you're doing that.
John:
Yes, yes, yes.
John:
It's something that they said in one of their text things.
John:
It runs more instructions in parallel.
John:
Maybe it was during the presentation they said it.
John:
But they didn't elaborate, and that can mean a lot of different things.
John:
Because this is the very first device to have the A14, it's the first chance we get to take a look at, like, what is the A14?
John:
What has it got?
John:
So you covered, I think, its major specs and the important things, right?
John:
Yeah.
John:
more instruct runs more instructions in parallel that could mean it has more execution units it could also it could also mean that it just has more instructions in flight at once and that could mean that it has a deeper pipeline but it could mean none of those things or just one of those things or any combination of them so we still don't really know
John:
how what does the a14 have over the a13 right and they mentioned high large high performance caches are they bigger caches than the a13 probably but how much bigger you know so we have to wait for like an attack or somebody to tear this apart to find out what's in it but they did give us some other stats 11.8 billion transistors which is 40 more transitions in the a13 and then they did this weird thing during this whole section because the ipad air is weird and
John:
where they made comparisons, but not to the A13.
John:
Yeah.
John:
They made comparisons to the iPad Air's old chip, which was, I believe, the A12, right?
John:
Correct.
John:
So they would say it's 40% faster in CPU performance compared to the A12.
John:
It's 30% faster in GPU performance compared to the A12.
John:
compared to the A12, like not to the A13.
John:
And so now you got to do all those math.
John:
Okay.
John:
Well, if the A13 was as much faster than the A12 and you got to do all sorts of algebra.
John:
And it's like, just Apple, just tell us, I mean, we're going to find out as soon as we get these anyway, but anyway, it's weird because it's,
John:
So, yeah.
John:
you know it's weird like as many people put if it wasn't a covid times maybe this you know the phone would have been released in september and this wouldn't have been a thing but the way it worked out the ipad air is the first one to get the a14 the a14 looks better than the a13 it's way better than the a12 but nothing nothing about it stands out enough for us to know apple typically did not throw a bunch of benchmarks up on the screen so i guess we'll have to wait for these to ship to find out
Marco:
what does this really do what is it clocked at how much ram does it have how does it compare to the a13 so on and so forth but here you go your a14 debut product the middle of the range ipad yeah it's it's kind of certainly there's there's a large question mark of like why haven't the ipad pros been meaningfully updated in so long when now this comes out and is the best ipad by a
John:
Well, I mean, that's the thing of people saying, oh, well, the iPad, quote unquote, pro, that thing has an A12 in it.
John:
It doesn't even have an A13.
John:
And this this supposed mid range one has a 14.
John:
14 is bigger than 12.
John:
In fact, it's too bigger than 12.
John:
That's terrible.
John:
This is the new best iPad.
John:
But those little letters they stick on the end really do mean something.
John:
The A12Z has eight cores, not six.
John:
and an 8-core GPU, not a 4-core.
John:
So it would not surprise me, and I believe it's probably going to be the case, that the A12Z stomps all over this particular A14 in any spec that you could care to do a spec test for, because it's maybe not single-core, but everything else, multi-core and anything having to do with GPU.
John:
The GPU is literally twice as big.
John:
Now, it's not the same GPU, and they aren't the same cores, so it might be closer than you think, but I feel like the iPad Pro, especially with all eight of its GPU cores enabled,
John:
is still fairly comfortably at the top of the line the real question is why didn't they just wait to update the ipad pros and put a14 x or z or q or p or whatever the hell they're going to be in that one and i mean the answer to that that makes a lot of sense to me is they're about to ship apple hopes a lot of a14 chips in iphones how many what is their manufacturing capacity for a14 derived things on this new five nanometer process
John:
There's maybe not enough to support the A14 series, something derived from A14 on the 5 nanometer process.
John:
They may not have had enough manufacturing capacity for it to ship.
John:
in all their upcoming Macs, in all their upcoming iPads, and all their upcoming iPhones.
John:
Now, granted, those three things I listed, the iPhone is the big piece of the pie, and then the Mac and the iPad are little tiny things off in the corner.
John:
So maybe it's not as big a factor as I think.
John:
But if you don't have enough to go around, and you've got to skimp somewhere, and this is the big year the Mac is making the transition, maybe you skimp on the top-end iPads.
John:
I don't know.
John:
I mean, even that makes a little sense to me because...
John:
They probably sell so many more of the $329 iPads than they do of the iPad Pros.
John:
But for whatever reason, the iPad Pro is off cycle.
John:
But that doesn't mean the iPad Air is now suddenly the best or the fastest iPad.
John:
It's not.
John:
It's a really good one and really interesting.
John:
And the iPad Pro will have to be updated eventually.
John:
But for now, this middle-of-the-range iPad is more like just below high-end iPad.
Marco:
Yeah, and in other ways, it looks awesome.
Marco:
This iPad Air, it looks fantastic.
Marco:
The only weird thing about it is what it means for the iPad Pro, but the actual iPad Air as a product looks pretty great.
Marco:
I mean...
Marco:
you could argue it's better than the ipad pro in many ways um i think one of the only shortcomings i see about it is the um the speaker system isn't as nice as the pro speaker system but for other things about it oh and of course no face id but to some people that's actually a feature and no promotion oh it's only 60 hertz i believe
John:
No promotion.
John:
It's only 500 nits instead of 600 nits.
John:
The screen resolution is slightly lower.
John:
The USB-C interface only transfers at 5 gigabits, not 10 gigabits.
John:
There are a bunch of things that you probably don't care about.
John:
Oh, the camera's on the back.
John:
It doesn't have the LiDAR sensor.
John:
It doesn't have the multiple cameras or whatever.
John:
But, you know, this is a really good mid-range...
John:
ipad that's pressing up against the high end and if you don't care about all those things that i just listed so you can save a lot of money and get this thing in colors and it's a great product the face id kind of surprises me because like of all the places to cut cost like you can take out face id but then you have to put the touch id thing and and how much are you really saving i'm sure face id is more expensive than that touch sensor right but it just
John:
It seems kind of weird to me that that was where they chose to save costs on this particular product to take out the face ID.
John:
Because, I don't know, maybe I'm just used to the idea that, look, if you don't have any buttons on the front, you have to support face ID.
John:
But they're saying, no, no, we don't.
John:
We can stick it on this weird button that you're going to have to hunt for and remember which side of the thing it's on.
John:
Because, you know, for all the things that we complained about the, you know...
John:
Having the touch ID on the front of the iPad and it being in different orientations, you can just look at it and you see where the little button is.
John:
You have to stick your finger.
John:
But it's kind of hard to see where the quote-unquote top button is and what side it's on or whatever.
John:
You might have to feel around and find it.
Yeah.
John:
it seems a strange place to save costs to me but that's what they did and i am excited about the idea of touch id coming back to any of apple's products really i you know there was no phones at this event obviously phones are going to come soon i haven't been keeping up with the rumors and it's you know like you said with the the covet things it's not as if apple decided the last moment to stick touch id on their phones and ipads because of covet because that's their timelines are way longer than that but i would love it if the new iphone
John:
have touch id into the button and face id yeah and if this one doesn't have it i really hope apple is considering it for the next iphone or the next next iphone because they they've shown they can do it we can put touch id in a power button and boy wouldn't it be great to have all those options yeah that i oh i would love that so much to have both and i mean heck maybe that's the plan for the ipad pro
Marco:
Maybe the next iPad Pro will have both, and maybe if they can fit the required stuff into the iPhone, geez, I would love that so much.
Marco:
Because that would be a godsend with doing masked outings, shoppings, and everything like that.
Marco:
It would be so great.
Marco:
And even before COVID, even in the last few years using Face ID,
Marco:
There are times when Face ID doesn't work right, and there are times when Touch ID doesn't work right.
Marco:
It would be great to have iOS devices that provide both and either allow you to unlock with whichever one recognizes you first, or if you want some super secure ultra mode, you can have it require both.
Marco:
And to have that be an option would be awesome.
John:
Do any of you have any idea why the screen resolution is lower?
John:
Here's the numbers.
John:
It's 2360 by 1649.
John:
And the iPad Pro of a similar size is 2388 by 1668.
Marco:
The iPad Air screen size is quoted as 10.9 inches.
Marco:
Right, instead of 11.
Marco:
So it's got to be just like slightly smaller of a screen.
Marco:
That's it.
John:
It's just the same DPI and they just shaved pixels off the edge.
John:
I guess all the apps scale now, so it's not an issue anymore for iPadOS apps and stuff.
John:
yeah yeah it's just it's weird i mean it's just it's based on whatever panels they could get in the right quantity with the right attributes because the panel is it's true tone p3 anti-reflective coding like it's you should go to apple put a link in the show notes apples like product configurator when you go down the list of comparing the features you'll be surprised how many things the pro has that the air doesn't and you may also be surprised by how little you care about those things right like lots in lots of areas there are specs that are missing there's features like i said there's no lidar there's no second camera in the back it's just
John:
There's no portrait mode Animoji or Memoji because there's no face ID sensors in the front, so it can't do that depth stuff.
John:
The two speakers instead of the four.
John:
There are tons of things that are lesser about this than the Pro, including, I still think, even the A14 in terms of raw horsepower when you're using all of it.
John:
But...
John:
So this product is just waiting for the next iPad Pro to come that's going to have all the iPad Pro features and an 8 or 12 core A14Q processor, whatever the hell it's going to be.
John:
This is going to be a monster, right?
John:
Plus all the ARM Macs, and we don't know what they're going to have in them.
John:
So this is a preview of things to come and a great deal on a flat-sided iPad that uses the new Pencil.
John:
If you don't care about all that stuff that is listed for the pro, if you can, if you can't tell the difference between 500 and six and 600 nits of brightness, get this one.
John:
It'll be, it'll be great.
John:
Like I, I even, you know, I'm, I'm perpetually, you know, somewhat in the market for a new iPad since mine is so old.
John:
And I was thinking about like, do I care about any of the pro features?
John:
Maybe I should get this one because I kind of like the idea of touch ID, but I just I think I'm just going to wait.
John:
That's just me personally.
John:
But if you if you are in the market for an iPad and any of the attributes of the flat sided ones appeal to you, the air is this is a great time to buy the air because never will it be this this high in the in the lineup in terms of performance and price and all that other stuff.
John:
We didn't mention this also comes in colors and not just like two or three.
John:
It comes in what?
John:
Rose gold, green, blue, silver, and gray.
John:
Yeah.
John:
Good for them on that.
John:
It's about time.
John:
Agreed.
John:
Agreed.
John:
Especially since on this one, this is another thing I don't like about the flat-sided iPads.
John:
And seeing Touch ID and the power button made this make a little bit more sense to me.
John:
The flat-sided iPads all have these sandwich cases that just put a flat thing on the back and a flat thing on the front, but nothing on the sides.
John:
I don't care about the naked sides.
John:
What I care about is the sort of, you know, the edges of the Oreo cookie sticking off of the edge, you know, like sharp edges, right?
John:
Because you've got the little flangey edges of the case and then the smooth metal of the sides.
Yeah.
John:
From the edges, I don't like that sandwich feeling.
John:
I don't like sharp top and bottom edges and metal middle.
John:
I'd rather have it be curved and nice, right?
John:
Obviously, they couldn't cover one side because you stick the pencil there, right?
John:
But they could have covered all the other sides, but now you've got another place where you can't really...
John:
put too much case because yeah you could you could shove your finger down into a little touch id belly button to get to it but it's a lot easier to use touch id when it's just on the naked metal sticking out like we all had the phones with the touch id in the front of it if you ever tried to use a case that surrounded the touch id button it became this linty little belly button you had to shove your finger down into to get it to the touch id sensor and that was it's more awkward these sort of i was gonna say intangible it's the opposite they're literally tangible these tangible feelings of using a device how does it feel in your hands
John:
is I feel like profoundly influenced by the shape of the device and the shape of the case.
John:
And these flat-sided iPads, while they look awesome and are great for attaching accessories and working as little portable computers, I think the case, the sandwich case design, makes them less pleasant to hold in your hand if you're still using it like an old-school iPad user and not as like a floppy laptop.
Casey:
I don't know.
Casey:
All told, though, the iPad Air is super, super impressive.
Casey:
And, yeah, if you're even remotely in the market for an iPad, I would really take a strong, close look at this.
Casey:
They have all the neat colors.
Casey:
They have, you know, the nice – I like the flat sides personally.
John:
They work with all the accessories, the cool keyboard with the magic – I don't forget the names of the magic keyboard with the cool hinge thingy and all the other cases.
John:
Like all that stuff works with this.
John:
It's all USB-C.
John:
It's, you know, it's –
John:
it looks kind of sad when you see that one single camera poking out of that huge camera hole and apple's accessories but they all fit they all do fit so to apple's credit it's not you know you can you can buy the accessories and use them with the ipad air or the ipad pros and presumably for a while to come if they continue to make ipads in this shape
Casey:
So I thought it looked really, really good.
Casey:
So overall, I think outside of the march ever, the ever forward march towards services revenue, I thought the presentation was pretty darn good.
Casey:
And nothing was earth shattering to me, although the iPad Air does look really good.
Casey:
But all told, I think it was a pretty good presentation and I'm satisfied with it.
Casey:
It just makes me, though, even more excited and I'm just salivating for the next iPhones.
Casey:
I don't know what I expect from them, but I'm just ready to see it.
Marco:
Yeah, me too.
John:
Yeah, I thought those were all good products.
John:
There's nits to be picked with all of them, but this is exactly what I want to see from updates.
John:
Make all your things better in the ways that I expect you to make them better with one or two cool things.
John:
They did it.
John:
Good job.
Marco:
Thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Stripe, and DoorDeck.
Marco:
And thank you to our members who support us directly.
Marco:
You can do that yourself at atp.fm slash join if you'd like.
Marco:
And we will talk to 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.
Marco:
So that's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M-N-T, Marco Arment, S-I-R-A-C-U-S-A, Syracuse.
Marco:
It's accidental.
Marco:
Accidental.
Casey:
They didn't mean it.
Casey:
So long.
John:
Oh, there's one more thing, Marco.
John:
iOS 14 is shipping tomorrow, which is actually today.
John:
Surprise!
Marco:
God, what a move.
Marco:
What a cap to the summer.
Casey:
Let's not focus on this for too much because I feel like I've been in a pretty good mood all night.
Casey:
I don't want to ruin it.
John:
I don't think this is definitely a bad mood thing.
John:
So here's the thing.
John:
Regular users of Apple's products don't know or care anything about this.
John:
It's just a developer concern.
John:
It's a developer relations concern that developers expect to have the final release of the OS before it ships so they can get their stuff ready for it.
John:
And there's usually a couple of days lead time up to a couple of weeks or a week or whatever.
John:
We'll put a link in the show notes to Will Haynes on his website, a graph of how long
John:
we usually have for the gms right it shows a bunch of different color-coded things and at the end of each line graph is a little dark gray bar that shows how long the gm was out for and this is a new record of like less than 24 hours basically right which is not ideal for developers users don't care but it may impact them if they you know get ios 14 and one of their favorite apps doesn't work because that developer expected to be able to ship on day one but it turns out they couldn't and turns out their current version doesn't work with ios 14.
John:
It's just a, you know, it's not corporate relationship managers.
John:
This is just developer relations.
John:
Just Apple either doesn't know that what a scramble is going to put developers in or Apple thinks it's a scramble, but we had to do it and we feel bad about it, but it'll all be over shortly.
John:
And it's not the end of the world, but it's just another fumble, like another fumble in Apple's
John:
recent history of not great developer relations and the the tea leave reading among among the people who are developer adjacent and care about this is like well why apple why would why wouldn't you do this why not just like ship everything like two days later or three days later like what's the big rush right because developers don't expect to have months of time with the final release but they expect that you know a few days maybe a week or whatever less than 24 hours seems extreme and
John:
We understand why they hold back the GM, because you could look at the GM and find out all these features that we just talked about that were previously secret, right?
John:
But you can do the announcement, give developers the GM, and then say everything ships in two days.
John:
And then the developers get two extra days.
John:
So this is just a silly unforced error amongst much larger developer relations issues.
John:
It just...
John:
It came at a bad time for them.
John:
Kind of like the hay controversy happening right before WWDC.
John:
Something like this happening when developers are already kind of cranky at Apple is not great, but this too will pass fairly quickly in.
John:
Unlike all the other things we talk about, this is not a systemic problem where Apple is constantly releasing GMs 24 hours at a time.
John:
This is literally the first time this has ever happened with iOS.
John:
Live and learn.
John:
Hopefully Apple will.
Marco:
Yeah.
Marco:
And honestly, like, you know, people expect me to rail against this a lot.
Marco:
And yeah, you know what?
Marco:
It does suck.
Marco:
But I will take this over iOS 13's release any day.
John:
As long as iOS 14 works better than 13, we'll live with it.
John:
Even developers.
Marco:
iOS 13's release was so horrendous in so many other ways not least of which because it was buggy but also because it was so buggy it broke our apps in weird ways like there were actually like weird behaviors in our apps in common things like navigation bars that shipped at iOS 13.0 and I think 13.1 even broke more things like it's easy to forget it's like it's like when you know when you forget how much labor hurts so you have a second kid like
Marco:
It's so easy for us to block out how bad iOS 13's launch was last year.
Marco:
It was so rough in so many ways.
John:
Ladies, you can email Marco for comparing iOS 13 development to child labor.
Marco:
Yeah, this is a massive improvement over last year.
Marco:
admittedly this is again like you know it's like making the path smoother in hell but still like this is a huge improvement from last year so while it was ill conceived timing by apple like i again i don't think they mean to be jerks with this stuff i think they just don't think about it like i think they honestly they aren't concerned or at least the people who are concerned don't have don't have the power to override the hardware schedule
Marco:
You know, like, so I think they just they are oblivious to how much they how much work they cause for us unnecessarily and on short notice.
John:
Yeah, it's probably some kind of math.
John:
Like every day we wait to put things on sale approaching the holidays cost us X amount of money.
John:
Right.
Marco:
Exactly.
John:
Therefore, therefore, we're going to ship right after the keynote instead of waiting two days because those two days cost us X amount of money.
John:
But, you know, hopefully developers will all.
John:
Send grumpy feedback and maybe that equation will balance differently next year.
John:
Obviously, the other thing is, of course, COVID.
John:
Everything is screwed up in this schedule.
John:
The phones are delayed.
John:
The phones aren't being announced in the September event like they normally would.
John:
Everything's all messed up.
John:
I think people do give Apple some leeway.
John:
But if it turns out to be that simple cost-benefit analysis of it costs us X amount of dollars to delay these launches and it costs us Y amount of negative feedback from developers and Apple chooses in terms of the money, that's not great.
Marco:
Yeah, but honestly, I bet that didn't even factor in to the decision as much as whoever made the call to do that probably just didn't even think about what it would be like for outside developers.
Marco:
This is always the problem with Apple.
Marco:
The people inside,
Marco:
don't have any idea what it's like to be outside they really truly don't and they are so blind to the real world of what we actually face with lots of things from you know apis like they because they don't need to use only public apis uh in many many public apis exist they actually don't use it all like
Marco:
watch kit um you know dealing with the app store dealing with a lot of the provisioning profile crap that i was talking about earlier like there's all sorts of stuff that apple's internal employees don't need to deal with directly themselves usually and so therefore they are totally blind to the problems that exist there and the challenges that exist there and i bet this the timing of this gm being you know
Marco:
less than 24 hours before the OS was released.
Marco:
I bet it wasn't them trying to be jerks.
Marco:
It might not have even been them, you know, thinking, well, it'll cost too much to delay it any further.
Marco:
The most likely explanation for this is that they are so oblivious to what it's like being a developer outside of Apple that they didn't even think about it.
John:
And this is common for companies.
John:
I've worked at lots of different big companies, and it's like there is a...
John:
a concerted effort inside most good companies to try to do what you just described, Marco, which is like, what is it like for our customers?
John:
What is the experience of being our customer?
John:
How do our customers see us?
John:
Uh, you know, what do they experience?
John:
Like, and you would think, well, doesn't every don't ever, isn't that easy thing to know?
John:
Cause you say it's like Apple should know what, like what it's like to be outside of Apple.
John:
Yeah.
John:
It's surprisingly hard to know what it's like for the people outside your company when you're in the company because you're not the customer.
John:
You're the company making this stuff.
John:
And so there's all this time and money and effort and personnel put towards the – good companies put towards the idea of –
John:
Help us figure out what it's like to be our customer so we know how to change our products.
John:
Because people have all sorts of reckons inside the company about, you know, well, we should do this because our customers want.
John:
It's like, but what do our customers actually say?
John:
What do they actually want?
John:
What do they actually experience?
John:
What are their actual pain points instead of us just guessing or trying to use metrics of like, let's just measure where they click and we'll figure it out.
John:
It's like you have to talk to them.
John:
You have to bring people from outside the company in who have experience out.
John:
It's kind of like the pro workflow team, right?
John:
What is it like for the customers of our Pro Tools?
John:
Apple solved that problem by saying we obviously don't know.
John:
We have to get people who have a career outside the company using tools like ours and then hire them and say your whole job is to use our stuff and say if you were one of our customers, which you previously were very recently, tell us what it's like to use this.
John:
What's actually important to you?
John:
What do you care about?
John:
So it's actually not easy and not trivial.
John:
We feel when you're the customer, you're like, how can Apple not know what we're feeling?
John:
Because we're feeling it and we're all and we're numerous and there are many of us.
John:
And if they wanted to know, they could just ask.
John:
And here we are.
John:
We're yelling at them and they just don't seem to get through to them.
John:
Right.
John:
So Apple obviously could do a better job at this.
John:
But it is actually a fairly tricky problem to figure out.
John:
what it is like to be on the outside and it takes a lot of effort and i think apple probably does expend effort doing that just either insufficient or not well directed but things like the pro workflow team as we talked about when it was formed show things headed in the in a better direction right first taking the feedback that hey you can should continue to make pro products and
John:
Maybe put more ports in them.
John:
We're working on that still.
John:
And then second, we need outside help.
John:
Let's hire a bunch of people in the industry to work for Apple.
John:
I think I've done a lot of that in health, too, hiring people from the health world to work on their health products.
John:
And I think it shows in the stuff they've been making.
John:
DevRelations, still ripe for some advancement in that area.