The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► Did I tell you that I figured out what the heck that was?

00:00:02 ◼   ► I don't think so. No. So the backstory on this is that Dan and I were in the Steve Jobs theater

00:00:09 ◼   ► together sort of towards the back, maybe like five or six rows from the back. And during the event,

00:00:14 ◼   ► especially the first half, there was a lot of noise from seemingly like, like, I couldn't quite make

00:00:20 ◼   ► it out. But I thought it was like Asian language, sort of like speakerphone noise. And I thought

00:00:27 ◼   ► someone was on the phone and I thought so too. I completely thought it was somebody who was on the

00:00:33 ◼   ► phone like with you know like like like Chinese media and they were on the phone with somebody

00:00:39 ◼   ► at their office back in in China like to let them listen to the keynote live and I'm like dude

00:00:44 ◼   ► they're streaming it like you don't have to you don't have to let them listen in on speaker phone

00:00:50 ◼   ► you know and why are they talking um and it was a bit distracting and it was also kind of baffling

00:00:56 ◼   ► because I would like turn around to see who it was to maybe shoot them a dirty look and

00:01:01 ◼   ► and it it was like it seemed to like be moving around the theater like at first I thought

00:01:06 ◼   ► it was over my shoulder to the left and it seemed to be coming from over my shoulder

00:01:08 ◼   ► to the right anyway long story short what it is what it was is that Apple provides non

00:01:16 ◼   ► I don't know how many languages they support but if English is not your first language

00:01:20 ◼   ► they they give media like a little earpiece and they can get a live translation from somebody

00:01:26 ◼   ► you know, that Apple hires to translate it on the fly. And which is cool. But what happened was

00:01:33 ◼   ► they had them turned up way too loud. And I guess there's no volume on the actual thing that goes in

00:01:38 ◼   ► your ear. It's like Apple was controlling it and it was way too loud. And so what people were doing,

00:01:44 ◼   ► because it was so loud in their ear, is they took it out of their ear and were just sort of holding

00:01:48 ◼   ► it. And it was so loud. Like, it was supposed to be like an earpiece, you know, so you wouldn't

00:01:54 ◼   ► and distract people, but it was so loud

00:01:56 ◼   ► that that's what everybody could hear.

00:01:57 ◼   ► It was like, that's how loud it was.

00:01:59 ◼   ► - Oh, funny.

00:02:00 ◼   ► - And the reason it went away about half an hour

00:02:02 ◼   ► in his apple, figured out what was going on

00:02:03 ◼   ► and turned the volume down

00:02:04 ◼   ► and everybody stuck them back in their ears.

00:02:07 ◼   ► - I had an amazing meeting once in Tokyo with the,

00:02:12 ◼   ► I wanted to do a story on the evolution

00:02:14 ◼   ► of the Japanese vending machine.

00:02:17 ◼   ► And I met with the guy at Coca-Cola Japan

00:02:19 ◼   ► who runs all their vending machine operations,

00:02:22 ◼   ► which is a fascinating story.

00:02:24 ◼   ► and I'm not gonna get into the details now,

00:02:26 ◼   ► but in this meeting, and also I think

00:02:30 ◼   ► in a few other meetings I've had in Tokyo,

00:02:32 ◼   ► someone is an interpreter who sits in the room

00:02:34 ◼   ► and you have an earpiece where you can hear her speaking,

00:02:38 ◼   ► translating into English in real time

00:02:40 ◼   ► while you're sitting there in the meeting.

00:02:43 ◼   ► It's fascinating, it's very cool.

00:02:45 ◼   ► - Sort of like being at the UN or something.

00:02:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, exactly, yeah.

00:02:52 ◼   ► I gotta say, it was, you know, it had been a year

00:02:54 ◼   ► since we'd been in the Steve Jobs Theater,

00:02:56 ◼   ► and it's still a really impressive place.

00:03:01 ◼   ► I think you probably talked with Eli about this last show,

00:03:06 ◼   ► but the sound blew me away.

00:03:09 ◼   ► I forgot that they went completely all out

00:03:14 ◼   ► with the sound system and the projector and everything.

00:03:17 ◼   ► When they were playing that intro sequence,

00:03:21 ◼   ► Mission Impossible thing. The room was shaking. The bass was so strong. Not in an obnoxious way,

00:03:28 ◼   ► either, in a really, really compelling way. No, it's the best sound I've ever heard in a theater.

00:03:32 ◼   ► Literally no echo. It is super crisp.

00:03:35 ◼   ► That's all right. We love dogs on the talk show. Joanna's dog is always a problem. What's your dog

00:03:50 ◼   ► dog's name? Ralphie. Oh, that's a good name. Try to mute when he's that's all right. He's

00:03:55 ◼   ► guarding the door. So that's his job. Yeah, like it is his job. No, that's totally allowed

00:04:00 ◼   ► on this show. Now it is fantastic sound and I talked to some Apple people and I think

00:04:06 ◼   ► that they use it a little bit more internally than I was initially led to believe like I

00:04:10 ◼   ► heard from I wrote about how you know what a remarkable place it is combined with the

00:04:15 ◼   ► fact that at least publicly they only use like once a year. They do use it internally

00:04:20 ◼   ► a couple times a month they have team meetings and stuff there. It doesn't just sit unused

00:04:26 ◼   ► all year long. They do make some good use of it. I heard from a couple people that they

00:04:34 ◼   ► had a screening of The Incredibles 2. Employees were allowed to bring their kids and everything

00:04:41 ◼   ► like that. I haven't seen it yet. I love The Incredibles. I go to the theater so little

00:04:47 ◼   ► now it's criminal. It was sort of like a New Year's resolution for this year that I missed,

00:04:53 ◼   ► but I want to start going to the movies more often again because I love going to the movies,

00:04:57 ◼   ► and I don't know why I don't go. But I haven't seen The Incredibles 2 yet, but there's apparently a

00:05:00 ◼   ► scene where the little baby Jack-Jack is up in a corner, hiding—I don't know. This is not really

00:05:09 ◼   ► a spoiler—but he's up by the ceiling, hiding in a corner, back right, and he makes a noise.

00:05:15 ◼   ► and the theater, it made it sound like he was in the back corner of the theater.

00:05:18 ◼   ► Like my one friend at Apple was like, you know, me and my two kids,

00:05:21 ◼   ► we all just turned around and looked up there.

00:05:23 ◼   ► That's amazing. Yeah. That's cool.

00:05:26 ◼   ► How the promise of surround sound.

00:05:30 ◼   ► So what's coming up? I guess we, before we get into the news, we can, while we're talking about

00:05:35 ◼   ► the Steve Jobs theater, we can, we can speculate on what's coming up for Apple. Cause it,

00:05:39 ◼   ► everybody is expecting them to announce new iPad Pros and probably new MacBooks that are not pro

00:05:47 ◼   ► at an event, which I'm guessing—I honestly have no inside information about this. We're recording

00:05:53 ◼   ► this on October 15. Nobody has told me a damn thing. But I'm guessing it's going to be Tuesday,

00:05:59 ◼   ► October 30. But the question for me is where? Are they going to do it in the Steve Jobs Theater,

00:06:04 ◼   ► or are they going to do it like, you know, like they had that. Remember, were you there at the

00:06:10 ◼   ► Chicago thing? I was Yeah, yeah. had Lane tech where I took the SAT. That's exactly right. I

00:06:16 ◼   ► forgot about that. Right. What a small world. The place where you took the SATs was the I don't know

00:06:26 ◼   ► I have no idea what they're gonna do. But I feel like Tuesday, October 30 is the right day because

00:06:31 ◼   ► it's obviously not going to be this week. I mean, invitations haven't gone out yet. And I, in theory,

00:06:39 ◼   ► you know, they could send out invitations now for something next week, but I don't think they'll do

00:06:43 ◼   ► next week. And I don't think they ever would because next week is like this Friday is when

00:06:50 ◼   ► the iPhone 10 r goes on sale or pre pre order. And then next Friday is when it ships and I don't

00:06:55 ◼   ► don't think they would hold an event in between there because I would guess that

00:07:00 ◼   ► like reviews of the XR will be coming out at some point in between then and there. And

00:07:05 ◼   ► they're not going to have—they don't want to have reviews of a major new iPhone

00:07:08 ◼   ► coming out at the same time that they're announcing new things. Like, it doesn't

00:07:13 ◼   ► really make any sense from Apple's perspective.

00:07:15 ◼   ► Tom Bilyeu (01h00): Yeah, the minute you—I forgot where I read

00:07:18 ◼   ► that thinking first, but that made sense. I mean, there was a world in which—and maybe

00:07:23 ◼   ► this would have happened four years ago, they would have put out the invitations the day

00:07:28 ◼   ► of the Google Pixel event.

00:07:32 ◼   ► They did used to do stuff like that.

00:07:36 ◼   ► My guess is that you're right, the discipline of not messing up with the signal of the new

00:07:43 ◼   ► iPhone, no noise about iPads or anything else, just keep one story at a time, that makes

00:07:49 ◼   ► sense.

00:07:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, so if I had to bet,

00:07:53 ◼   ► I would bet that they'll have it

00:07:54 ◼   ► at the Steve Jobs Theater again.

00:07:56 ◼   ► But that's, it's simply, I don't know why I think that.

00:08:01 ◼   ► I really don't think that they would ever hold an event

00:08:04 ◼   ► at the old town hall on the old campus again.

00:08:07 ◼   ► - No. - Like why?

00:08:08 ◼   ► I mean, it would seem like--

00:08:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, that doesn't make sense.

00:08:10 ◼   ► - Even if it's not supposed to be as big a deal

00:08:13 ◼   ► as new iPhones, I think new iPads are pretty big.

00:08:18 ◼   ► - Oh man, I need one, so I hope it happens sooner than later.

00:08:23 ◼   ► Yeah, that's a good question.

00:08:25 ◼   ► Is it more work for the events team to do it on campus?

00:08:29 ◼   ► Or it's probably a lot less work

00:08:32 ◼   ► than having to do it somewhere else.

00:08:34 ◼   ► Even if it were in San Francisco or Cupertino,

00:08:37 ◼   ► even if it were in Silicon Valley,

00:08:39 ◼   ► it's probably a lot easier for them.

00:08:41 ◼   ► - I think it's a lot less work, a lot,

00:08:43 ◼   ► because it's less travel, obviously, for everybody,

00:08:45 ◼   ► because they're just doing their normal daily commute,

00:08:48 ◼   ► And I think for the, whatever you want to call the team

00:08:51 ◼   ► that does the setup, they don't have anything to set up.

00:08:53 ◼   ► I mean, not that they don't,

00:08:55 ◼   ► I mean, they put up some decorations

00:08:56 ◼   ► and stuff like that in the theater,

00:08:58 ◼   ► but it's nothing like the pop-up theaters

00:09:00 ◼   ► that they've been making in recent years

00:09:02 ◼   ► at places like the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium

00:09:05 ◼   ► and other places.

00:09:07 ◼   ► - Even Lane Tech High School,

00:09:09 ◼   ► like that was by far the cleanest day

00:09:11 ◼   ► in the history of that school.

00:09:12 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:09:13 ◼   ► And forever after, like it will never be as clean

00:09:17 ◼   ► it was the day that Apple went there. Right. Yeah, I guess there's the argument that like,

00:09:23 ◼   ► oh, keep, keep the Steve Jobs theater for only the most important special events, the iPhone event,

00:09:28 ◼   ► but I don't that doesn't really know. I don't think that means anything. Yeah,

00:09:33 ◼   ► I think it made sense, maybe for the first event to be there to be for last year's iPhone, you know,

00:09:39 ◼   ► the biggest event of the year is the iPhone announcement. I think it sort of made sense

00:09:43 ◼   ► to christen the theater with that event. But now it just, to me, makes sense that you'd

00:09:48 ◼   ► use it whenever you have something to announce. And the reason they only used it once last

00:09:51 ◼   ► year is it was a year where they just didn't have anything else to announce. I mean, one

00:09:56 ◼   ► of the reasons that people are so excited about new iPad Pros is that the iPad Pros,

00:10:00 ◼   ► our current ones, are really two generations old. They sort of skip the whole A11 CPU cycle.

00:10:09 ◼   ► So I think people are really excited. People who love the iPad are really excited about

00:10:12 ◼   ► because it's--

00:10:14 ◼   ► I hate to use the word overdue, but they're maybe

00:10:18 ◼   ► a little overdue.

00:10:19 ◼   ► No, I think that's super fair.

00:10:21 ◼   ► I mean, if you look at--

00:10:22 ◼   ► especially not even just in a vacuum,

00:10:24 ◼   ► but if you look at competition, it's getting better.

00:10:27 ◼   ► And that's not to say that they have

00:10:29 ◼   ► to respond to any sort of increased cadence pressure,

00:10:33 ◼   ► but there needs to be a new iPad Pro now.

00:10:38 ◼   ► And it seems like, especially if the idea is that it won't

00:10:41 ◼   ► have a home button and there's probably more to the story,

00:10:46 ◼   ► that's not just gonna be a press release update.

00:10:49 ◼   ► I think that commands an event.

00:10:51 ◼   ► So.

00:10:52 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:10:53 ◼   ► Remember when they did the Apple Watch and I think,

00:10:56 ◼   ► what was it?

00:10:58 ◼   ► I forget what year, when they announced,

00:11:01 ◼   ► there was a 2015 when they originally announced

00:11:03 ◼   ► the Apple Watch, maybe it was 2014.

00:11:05 ◼   ► But the, and they had that event on the college campus

00:11:07 ◼   ► in Cupertino, what's the name of that college?

00:11:11 ◼   ► - Yes, I don't know.

00:11:13 ◼   ► - But remember they built like a gigantic,

00:11:15 ◼   ► like a literal building out front for the hands-on area.

00:11:19 ◼   ► Like they built the equivalent of an Apple store

00:11:24 ◼   ► all temporary just to have an open air hands-on area

00:11:29 ◼   ► after the event, it was crazy.

00:11:33 ◼   ► - I mean, even the stuff they do in that convention center

00:11:37 ◼   ► where they have WWDC is pretty intense.

00:11:42 ◼   ► I think last summer they had a big demo area

00:11:46 ◼   ► and I don't remember, now I'm making things up.

00:11:51 ◼   ► But yeah, the construction they will do

00:11:53 ◼   ► inside of someone else's space is pretty intense.

00:11:57 ◼   ► So to go back to earlier, yeah,

00:12:01 ◼   ► I think that if there's going to be something

00:12:04 ◼   ► and they don't have a good reason

00:12:05 ◼   ► for it to be somewhere else,

00:12:06 ◼   ► the past they've had like events at like what the maybe I'm blending with Amazon too, but

00:12:13 ◼   ► like they'll have something at a library somewhere or something like that. Or, you know, the

00:12:17 ◼   ► education event this spring was at a public high school. But there doesn't seem to be

00:12:22 ◼   ► a place like that where they would have an iPad event. So and they used to have a member

00:12:26 ◼   ► they used to have events at the what's that place in San Francisco, your boy now your

00:12:31 ◼   ► Yerba Buena. It was just too small. It really wasn't that much bigger than Town Hall.

00:12:37 ◼   ► I guess it was a little bit bigger, but it always felt a little cramped. And the hands-on

00:12:43 ◼   ► area was always super cramped in there, too. I remember the one time just talking about

00:12:47 ◼   ► how over the top they go at Yerba Buena. It might have been the last year that Katie Cotton

00:12:52 ◼   ► was still there. And they knocked out a wall. The room where the hands-on thing was at Yerba

00:12:59 ◼   ► on thing was at Yerba Buena, they always painted—or I don't know if they used paint, but draped

00:13:05 ◼   ► with black, so it was sort of a very dark room with spotlights shining on the tables.

00:13:12 ◼   ► And they just took out a whole wall of the building so that it would be airy and sunshiny,

00:13:18 ◼   ► and then just paid to reconstruct it. It wasn't like a removable wall. They literally figured

00:13:25 ◼   ► out. They wanted open air. They did the work in advance to figure out, "Yeah, there's

00:13:32 ◼   ► no supporting beams in there. We could just knock this out, and then we'll just rebuild

00:13:35 ◼   ► it the next day." That's crazy. It's absolutely insane what they spend on these

00:13:40 ◼   ► events.

00:13:41 ◼   ► Tom Bilyeu (01h00): Yeah. It's amazing though. And it shows. It's

00:13:45 ◼   ► just attention to detail. And really, why spare any expense? I mean, sure, spare some

00:13:52 ◼   ► but not, you know, what's a couple, what's $10,000 here or there when that's like selling

00:13:59 ◼   ► 100 iPhones?

00:14:01 ◼   ► Yeah. Speaking of iPad Pro, did you see that—

00:14:04 ◼   ► 100, no, sorry, that's like selling 10 iPhones.

00:14:07 ◼   ► Yeah, exactly. It's like selling eight of the $1,500 ones.

00:14:11 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:12 ◼   ► Did you see that Adobe—I mean, it's sort of a poorly kept secret, but that today at

00:14:18 ◼   ► their Adobe Max conference, they preannounced Photoshop for iPad.

00:14:22 ◼   ► Right, which made me wonder, is this something that they announced last time there was a

00:14:27 ◼   ► major iOS event, or is this something that they will announce at the next major iOS event?

00:14:33 ◼   ► I would eat my hat if they don't have Adobe on stage at this next event.

00:14:38 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:14:39 ◼   ► And, you know what, I was actually watching some of the Adobe Max conference today live.

00:14:43 ◼   ► They had a great live stream. And Phil Schiller was on stage for a while. They Yeah, which

00:14:49 ◼   ► is I can't remember the last time. Wow. Somebody or Phil, I can't remember the last time Phil

00:14:54 ◼   ► Schiller was at somebody else's conference. I think it just goes to show how serious Apple

00:15:00 ◼   ► is about wanting stuff like Photoshop for iPad. And it's funny because the verge had

00:15:05 ◼   ► a really great hands on preview they got, you know, they got to play with it's not coming

00:15:09 ◼   ► out till 2019. So who knows if that means early 2019 or later 2019. I suspect that it

00:15:16 ◼   ► might be a little later. I wouldn't hold my breath for Photoshop for iPad in January.

00:15:22 ◼   ► Because there's definitely some, it's not just that it's beta, there's some features

00:15:27 ◼   ► that just aren't there yet. Like there's things you can tap on it, but it doesn't do anything.

00:15:34 ◼   ► But the Verge had a great hands on and they let their production staffers use it and put

00:15:39 ◼   ► play with it for a while and they had a great video today. I'll put it in the show notes

00:15:43 ◼   ► with their first thoughts on it. But the thing that keeps coming up is both from Adobe and

00:15:47 ◼   ► the people who are trying this pre-release version that it's quote unquote the real

00:15:51 ◼   ► Photoshop. It's not just an image editing app that they've put the Photoshop brand

00:15:56 ◼   ► name on. It really is Photoshop that we know and love from the desktop running on an iPad,

00:16:02 ◼   ► which is kind of crazy.

00:16:04 ◼   ► which makes you wonder why why they're doing it yeah I I'd add to good

00:16:12 ◼   ► question and I I wonder about that I I think it is a bet on you know that this

00:16:18 ◼   ► really is the future and I think it is a really good form factor for a lot of the

00:16:24 ◼   ► stuff people do in Photoshop sure there especially read you know retouching yeah

00:16:29 ◼   ► or well the one guy for the drawing the one guy for the verge made a great point

00:16:33 ◼   ► point, just a fantastic point where he was like taking an image of a sword and he just

00:16:39 ◼   ► wanted to get the background out, just to cut out the sword. And he said, "One of

00:16:44 ◼   ► the things you can do here, you just don't think about it, is you just rotate the iPad

00:16:48 ◼   ► as he goes around. It's like the way when you're drawing on a piece of paper, you

00:16:51 ◼   ► can just turn it upside down to do another part." He's just turning it around upside

00:16:55 ◼   ► down, turning it left, turning it right. That's something you can never do with a MacBook.

00:17:02 ◼   ► So I don't know. And I think a lot of the stuff with the pencil is obviously uniquely,

00:17:11 ◼   ► at least on the Apple platform, is unique to the iPad platform. And it looks to me,

00:17:18 ◼   ► from watching the Adobe Max thing, that they're doing it at a really, really high refresh

00:17:24 ◼   ► rate. They had a guy doing a demo with simulating oil paint. And just the way that he was swirling

00:17:32 ◼   ► two colors together, it was really just stunning that it wasn't—it just looked like a photograph

00:17:38 ◼   ► of, you know, like high-def photograph of like a Bob Ross-type guy using actual oil

00:17:43 ◼   ► paint. But that's really the secret. I mean, it's no good if there's latency there

00:17:49 ◼   ► between the pencil and the thing, but it looks to me like they're doing it right. So I

00:17:53 ◼   ► would guess that's the reason why.

00:17:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, also I guess in the era where you're,

00:17:59 ◼   ► if you're a creative professional,

00:18:01 ◼   ► you're probably paying for a subscription to Adobe now.

00:18:06 ◼   ► So it doesn't really matter.

00:18:08 ◼   ► The idea that you're not buying a $20 iPad version

00:18:12 ◼   ► of the app, you're subscribing to whatever

00:18:14 ◼   ► the yearly or monthly subscription is.

00:18:16 ◼   ► So at that point, they should get you using it

00:18:19 ◼   ► on every device you have and not just your one Mac

00:18:22 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:18:23 ◼   ► - Right, we could do a whole thing.

00:18:24 ◼   ► we could do a whole digression on software as a service and subscription versus buying and I know

00:18:28 ◼   ► that there are people out there I know because I get emailed from them all the time I know that

00:18:33 ◼   ► there are people listening to us who hate it who just who really really really feel strongly that

00:18:39 ◼   ► they want to give Adobe you know $299 or whatever and then they get to use Adobe Photoshop version

00:18:47 ◼   ► X.0 for as long as it runs on their computer and then choose whether or not to upgrade when

00:18:52 ◼   ► and X plus 1.0 comes out, you know.

00:18:55 ◼   ► And I, you know, there's all sorts of pros and cons

00:18:58 ◼   ► to subscription, but a certain absolute pro

00:19:02 ◼   ► is if you're already in, you're already paying,

00:19:04 ◼   ► you know, the monthly fee for the CC, the Creative Cloud,

00:19:08 ◼   ► and then all of a sudden next year at some point,

00:19:10 ◼   ► you just get Photoshop for iPad.

00:19:13 ◼   ► I mean, that's pretty sweet.

00:19:16 ◼   ► - Yep.

00:19:17 ◼   ► Yeah, now I'm gonna watch, now I gotta watch this video.

00:19:20 ◼   ► It looks cool.

00:19:21 ◼   ► It really is cool. I know at least one person is working on the team. It's the real deal.

00:19:30 ◼   ► I mean, it's top-flight talent at Adobe, and it is the real Photoshop. They're not just saying it.

00:19:37 ◼   ► So that's very cool. Here, why don't I take a break and thank our first sponsor?

00:19:42 ◼   ► Keep this show moving. Our first sponsor is our good friends at Casper.

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00:22:32 ◼   ► all right speaking of tablets I don't know we got a couple of things talked about this

00:22:39 ◼   ► show but we could jump right into the Google Pixel event.

00:22:43 ◼   ► Yeah, which I was going to go to but I didn't. I did not.

00:22:48 ◼   ► So I was going to go and timing wise it didn't really work out that great for me. They had

00:22:55 ◼   ► like it was a Tuesday. Last Tuesday was the keynote but because they had it in a sort

00:23:00 ◼   ► of like it wasn't a very big venue. It seems like it wasn't a lot of seating in New York.

00:23:06 ◼   ► They had a full day of press stuff Wednesday too. So that's what I did. I went up on Wednesday.

00:23:15 ◼   ► And it was nice. They had a nice little setup. They had a big, huge—I don't even want

00:23:21 ◼   ► to call it a studio—but a big, huge open space there in New York. And then they set

00:23:24 ◼   ► up a bunch of kiosks and a bunch of little fake rooms. They had a fake kitchen and a

00:23:30 ◼   ► fake bedroom and a fake living room. And then in groups of three, they were taking—I got

00:23:36 ◼   ► paired up with two other people from the media. And then we just sort of round robin go from

00:23:40 ◼   ► each station to the next and see everything. It was a nice way to do a hands-on thing.

00:23:46 ◼   ► That's cool. And I watched the keynote on video. It was a typical Google keynote, way

00:23:53 ◼   ► too long, way too many people. I always say it's so obvious. Like the one thing Apple

00:23:58 ◼   ► does and to me it would be like a canary in the coal mine if it ever started going the

00:24:03 ◼   ► other way in terms of, well, you know, Apple's really going downhill is with like a company

00:24:08 ◼   ► like Google, you can see the politics of the internal politics of who gets on stage, you

00:24:14 ◼   ► know, like it. It's like, well, we got to get somebody from this team up on stage. So

00:24:19 ◼   ► here, let's find some reason for them to be on stage, as opposed to just sort of telling

00:24:24 ◼   ► a story straight through about the products. I thought it could have been a much shorter

00:24:29 ◼   ► event but the tablet yeah so they have intrigues you a little bit I just set up

00:24:38 ◼   ► my my pixel XL which we can talk about later but yeah well the one thing I'll

00:24:43 ◼   ► say this in favor in Google's favor I thought it was a very cohesive group of

00:24:47 ◼   ► products to be announced three things the Google the new Google pixel 3 in two

00:24:52 ◼   ► sizes the brand new pixel slate tablet slash keyboard cover and their their new

00:25:01 ◼   ► talk to it device with a screen called the home hub and one two three those are

00:25:07 ◼   ► the three products they wanted to talk about I thought that they fit together

00:25:10 ◼   ► in in a you know an event very well the slate is interesting because it is their

00:25:18 ◼   ► first Chrome Chrome OS tablet like but it runs Android apps you know and I know

00:25:25 ◼   ► that they've been working on getting Android apps running in Chrome OS for

00:25:30 ◼   ► years now and I kind of feel like I kind of feel like the whole I kind of feel

00:25:36 ◼   ► like the whole reason maybe not the whole reason but a big driving factor in

00:25:40 ◼   ► that is to get it you know to for tablets I think because I think it makes

00:25:45 ◼   ► most sense there. I don't think using an Android app on a laptop makes all that much sense,

00:25:50 ◼   ► but on a touchscreen tablet type thing, maybe it does.

00:25:52 ◼   ► Tom Bilyeu (01h00): Right. Unless they do something like the new

00:25:56 ◼   ► OS X, is it called Marzipan or not? What are we calling it?

00:26:00 ◼   ► Jay Haynes (01h00): No. Well, we have to call it Marzipan so we

00:26:02 ◼   ► can have something to call it, but Apple is definitely not calling it Marzipan publicly.

00:26:09 ◼   ► But we can call it Marzipan.

00:26:10 ◼   ► Tom Bilyeu (01h00): Got it.

00:26:11 ◼   ► Jay Haynes (01h00): Yeah. And my first thought when I picked it

00:26:14 ◼   ► up is, man, this thing is way too heavy. This is too heavy. And then I did, like on the

00:26:22 ◼   ► train ride back to Philly, I did the, I like looked up what the iPad Pros weigh and it's

00:26:27 ◼   ► actually only ever so slightly heavier than the 12.9 inch iPad Pro. The reason I thought

00:26:32 ◼   ► it was heavy is I'm used to the 10.5 inch iPad and they only have one, the Pixel Slate

00:26:37 ◼   ► only comes in one size, which is roughly equivalent to the 12.9 inch iPad Pro. So it actually

00:26:43 ◼   ► isn't heavy compared to an iPad Pro.

00:26:45 ◼   ► It just felt heavy to me at first.

00:26:47 ◼   ► Has a very nice screen.

00:26:49 ◼   ► They're touting it.

00:26:51 ◼   ► I guess Apple's are all 264 pixels per inch

00:26:54 ◼   ► and then the pixel slate is like 295 pixels per inch.

00:26:58 ◼   ► So they're bragging about having the most pixels,

00:27:00 ◼   ► but it's most pixels per inch, but it looks good.

00:27:04 ◼   ► I will say this, just tapping around though

00:27:07 ◼   ► with the demo apps that they had,

00:27:09 ◼   ► a lot of it, they had like a text editor,

00:27:13 ◼   ► like, you know, sort of like a BB edit, you know, like a not like a word processor, but

00:27:18 ◼   ► like a good old fashioned plain text text editor. I forget what it was called. And I

00:27:24 ◼   ► should have asked. I wasn't sure if it and I guess this is actually a good thing. I couldn't

00:27:28 ◼   ► tell if it was a Chrome app or an Android app. But the fonts were just tiny, just like

00:27:34 ◼   ► I know I've my eyes. I'm 45 and kind of crap eyes. But I mean, by anybody's standards,

00:27:42 ◼   ► this was like, it was like the small print

00:27:44 ◼   ► on a credit card application.

00:27:47 ◼   ► You know what I mean?

00:27:48 ◼   ► Like when you're signing up for a new credit card

00:27:51 ◼   ► and there's like all this like tiny little small print

00:27:53 ◼   ► or like the small print when you buy like a iPhone

00:27:56 ◼   ► or something and there's like, here's the warranty.

00:27:59 ◼   ► It was like four point type.

00:28:01 ◼   ► And I don't know if it's configurable or not,

00:28:03 ◼   ► but it seemed it was a weird thing to have

00:28:05 ◼   ► on a demo machine, you know, like ready to go to tap on.

00:28:08 ◼   ► Like this does not seem thoughtfully designed.

00:28:11 ◼   ► The other thing that really stuck out to me compared to an iPad, the big thing for me

00:28:17 ◼   ► is that the keyboard cover, that it has real keys and a trackpad. And I tried playing with

00:28:25 ◼   ► it like snapping it out of the case back in and as soon as you snap it out, there's like

00:28:29 ◼   ► a little black arrow cursor for the trackpad. As soon as you disconnect it from the keyboard,

00:28:34 ◼   ► the moment it's disconnected, the arrow cursor just goes away. And then as soon as you snap

00:28:38 ◼   ► it back in and move the trackpad around, the arrow cursor shows up again. So it's all,

00:28:42 ◼   ► you know, I would really like to see Apple do something like that with the iPad, even

00:28:46 ◼   ► though there's no indication that they are. Because I find that one of the, to me, one

00:28:51 ◼   ► of the things that drives me nuts if I ever try to do like writing on an iPad is it text

00:28:56 ◼   ► selection. Just poking around with my finger on the screen, it seems so crude compared

00:29:01 ◼   ► to what I could do with a trackpad, how precise I can move it and double click on words and

00:29:06 ◼   ► how my hand is already right there by the trackpad.

00:29:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, unless you have a,

00:29:12 ◼   ► and I guess if you have a stylus,

00:29:13 ◼   ► if you're holding onto the pencil thing,

00:29:15 ◼   ► but if you are, you're probably not typing too.

00:29:17 ◼   ► It's not super comfortable to hold that.

00:29:20 ◼   ► - Yeah, but I don't think Apple doesn't let you

00:29:22 ◼   ► use the pencil to like move the insertion point around.

00:29:25 ◼   ► It's like only really meant for drawing.

00:29:27 ◼   ► So there's really no good way to select text,

00:29:30 ◼   ► in my opinion, on iOS period.

00:29:34 ◼   ► It's just, to me, is just a glaring hole

00:29:37 ◼   ► in the iOS experience, especially in that,

00:29:40 ◼   ► when you have the, whether it's the Apple Smart Keyboard

00:29:44 ◼   ► cover or some, any of the various third-party keyboards

00:29:47 ◼   ► you can get to use with an iPad,

00:29:49 ◼   ► it's like when you have it set up like a laptop,

00:29:52 ◼   ► using your iPad in a rough, either very laptop-like

00:29:55 ◼   ► or roughly laptop-like fashion,

00:29:58 ◼   ► not having a trackpad, to me, is just a huge,

00:30:01 ◼   ► it never, I never get used to it.

00:30:03 ◼   ► I mean, maybe I'm too Mac-centric,

00:30:05 ◼   ► but it certainly seems nice on the Chromebook.

00:30:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, I mean, I think that's one of the main reasons

00:30:11 ◼   ► I have not, like every time I do try to use

00:30:15 ◼   ► an iPad Pro for text, you know, for editing basically

00:30:21 ◼   ► or writing, I immediately grab my MacBook

00:30:24 ◼   ► and just go back to that.

00:30:25 ◼   ► I think you're right.

00:30:27 ◼   ► I don't think about it a lot, but the text,

00:30:29 ◼   ► The cursor insertion and just text selection is pretty bad.

00:30:33 ◼   ► - Yeah, and you know, it's the Surface, you know,

00:30:37 ◼   ► there's, I guess the, you know,

00:30:39 ◼   ► the battle for these tablets now is iPad,

00:30:42 ◼   ► the Microsoft Surface ones, and now, you know,

00:30:46 ◼   ► it's like a full reset.

00:30:48 ◼   ► Like Google is seemingly really backed away from Android

00:30:51 ◼   ► as anything other than a phone OS,

00:30:53 ◼   ► and this Chrome OS that runs Android apps

00:30:56 ◼   ► is their new tablet OS, and you know,

00:30:58 ◼   ► this is the first product that ships with that,

00:31:02 ◼   ► that's their entry in this.

00:31:03 ◼   ► The other two, Microsoft and Google,

00:31:05 ◼   ► all have trackpad support.

00:31:06 ◼   ► - Oh wow, all right, well now we're on, right?

00:31:11 ◼   ► It's on now.

00:31:12 ◼   ► Who'd you get the sense that they are building this for?

00:31:15 ◼   ► 'Cause 12-inch screen is not a super portable tablet,

00:31:20 ◼   ► did you get a sense that this is a work device

00:31:23 ◼   ► and not a ever on the house thing?

00:31:26 ◼   ► - It's a good question.

00:31:28 ◼   ► I thought about that too. And the other thing too is it starts at $599 but it goes up to

00:31:35 ◼   ► like $1400, $1500, mostly dependent on, I think you can either get it with like 64 or

00:31:44 ◼   ► 128 gigabytes of storage, but then the CPU goes up too and as you pay more for a better

00:31:51 ◼   ► CPU, and this is an Intel device, it is not running an ARM chip, which is to me interesting.

00:31:56 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:31:57 ◼   ► - But it, you know--

00:32:01 ◼   ► - Are those Chromebooks Intel?

00:32:03 ◼   ► - I guess, I would guess that they are.

00:32:07 ◼   ► They're just--

00:32:08 ◼   ► - I should probably know, but--

00:32:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that they are, but I don't know.

00:32:13 ◼   ► But this is, and you have a, you know, I don't know,

00:32:16 ◼   ► I've dropped off, you know, I just don't pay attention

00:32:19 ◼   ► to Intel's chips anymore, you know,

00:32:21 ◼   ► when I buy a MacBook, you know, I just,

00:32:24 ◼   ► there just aren't that many options

00:32:26 ◼   ► on the Apple side of things.

00:32:27 ◼   ► But there's like eight different CPU configurations

00:32:29 ◼   ► for the Pixel Slate with very different prices.

00:32:32 ◼   ► And you get a little bit more RAM

00:32:34 ◼   ► if you buy the more expensive ones, too.

00:32:37 ◼   ► So I do wonder who's buying a $1,400 Chrome OS tablet.

00:32:42 ◼   ► I mean, it's certainly not targeted

00:32:44 ◼   ► at that low-end Chromebook market

00:32:47 ◼   ► that is dominating education,

00:32:49 ◼   ► where there's like $199 plastic laptops.

00:32:53 ◼   ► It's definitely not that, starting at 599.

00:32:56 ◼   ► - I mean, I think this speaks to the bigger question.

00:32:59 ◼   ► If you zoom out and look at Google's hardware strategy

00:33:02 ◼   ► in general, especially for the phones,

00:33:05 ◼   ► and it seems like this too, you just kind of have to wonder

00:33:09 ◼   ► why they're doing it the way they're doing it.

00:33:12 ◼   ► I mean, it basically seems like they're pushing

00:33:16 ◼   ► for the super high end of the market,

00:33:18 ◼   ► they're trying to compete with, and in some cases,

00:33:21 ◼   ► seem to be very successfully either at Apple's level

00:33:26 ◼   ► of blending hardware and software or approaching it,

00:33:31 ◼   ► they're clearly not going mass market with these things.

00:33:36 ◼   ► You can see that the pixels are not flying off the shelves,

00:33:40 ◼   ► they're not super successful commercially,

00:33:43 ◼   ► even though they are really nice devices.

00:33:45 ◼   ► So this kind of fits in with that strange strategy.

00:33:49 ◼   ► I forgot who maybe it was,

00:33:53 ◼   ► I don't even wanna misattribute this,

00:33:55 ◼   ► but someone said like maybe they're just being a troll

00:33:57 ◼   ► by doing all this stuff?

00:33:58 ◼   ► Like they're--

00:34:00 ◼   ► - I don't think so.

00:34:01 ◼   ► And there was a couple of pieces.

00:34:03 ◼   ► I wanted to link to one,

00:34:04 ◼   ► maybe I'll get it by the end of this week.

00:34:06 ◼   ► There was a piece somebody wrote, maybe at Bloomberg,

00:34:09 ◼   ► kind of scoffing at the whole idea of Google doing phones

00:34:13 ◼   ► and why are they even bothering?

00:34:14 ◼   ► This is effectively like corporate masturbation

00:34:17 ◼   ► because they're not selling enough of these

00:34:21 ◼   ► to make any kind of dent in the market

00:34:23 ◼   ► or dent in their bottom line.

00:34:25 ◼   ► And I disagree with that.

00:34:26 ◼   ► Well, I don't disagree that it's a blip financially.

00:34:31 ◼   ► Somebody did the math and figured out that Apple,

00:34:34 ◼   ► like Apple sells as many iPhones in eight days

00:34:37 ◼   ► as Google sold Pixel phones in an entire year.

00:34:40 ◼   ► I'm almost surprised that it's not even

00:34:42 ◼   ► more lopsided than that.

00:34:45 ◼   ► But I think that there's no other Android phones

00:34:50 ◼   ► that are like the Pixel phones in my opinion.

00:34:52 ◼   ► I've described them a year or two ago.

00:34:54 ◼   ► I have a Pixel One, I skipped the Pixel Two generation,

00:34:57 ◼   ► and I've already pre-ordered a Pixel Three.

00:35:00 ◼   ► 'Cause I like to, to me,

00:35:02 ◼   ► it's the most interesting Android device.

00:35:04 ◼   ► I've described it as an,

00:35:06 ◼   ► it's an Android device for people who want Android,

00:35:09 ◼   ► but they want an iPhone-like phone.

00:35:13 ◼   ► because to me the rest of the Android,

00:35:15 ◼   ► especially the high-end market,

00:35:17 ◼   ► has sort of gone in a very different direction.

00:35:20 ◼   ► I mean, for all the legal consternation

00:35:23 ◼   ► between Apple and Samsung over the early Galaxy devices,

00:35:27 ◼   ► the lawsuit that went on for 10 years over the look and feel

00:35:33 ◼   ► or whatever you wanna call it.

00:35:34 ◼   ► And remember there was a moment where somebody held up,

00:35:40 ◼   ► there was a Samsung expert witness on the stand

00:35:43 ◼   ► and one of Apple's lawyers held up one of the phones

00:35:45 ◼   ► and said, "Here, can you tell if this is an iPhone

00:35:49 ◼   ► "or the Galaxy Note 3?"

00:35:51 ◼   ► And the guy was like, "No, I can't."

00:35:53 ◼   ► It was seemingly a good moment.

00:35:56 ◼   ► But I don't think that's like that anymore.

00:35:57 ◼   ► There's no confusing high-end Samsung Galaxy S9

00:36:02 ◼   ► or the Note, whatever they're up to.

00:36:04 ◼   ► They look very different.

00:36:05 ◼   ► They have a very different design language.

00:36:07 ◼   ► They have both software and hardware, they look different.

00:36:12 ◼   ► whereas the Pixel phones,

00:36:13 ◼   ► I'm not saying they're iPhone ripoffs,

00:36:15 ◼   ► but they're definitely iPhone-like in hardware.

00:36:19 ◼   ► - And very nice, like I'm holding a Pixel 3 XL

00:36:22 ◼   ► and an iPhone XS Max in two hands,

00:36:26 ◼   ► and neither one of them is much obviously nicer

00:36:31 ◼   ► than the other one, like very, very nice devices.

00:36:34 ◼   ► Both have really, really impressive screens,

00:36:36 ◼   ► and I could, you know, I mean, to some extent,

00:36:41 ◼   ► it probably is helpful for Google

00:36:43 ◼   ► to be able to show their employees,

00:36:45 ◼   ► like, hey, look at,

00:36:46 ◼   ► we can actually make this really good stuff too,

00:36:47 ◼   ► and you can own this and use Android as intended

00:36:51 ◼   ► on this device.

00:36:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, the other thing they do,

00:36:54 ◼   ► to me, the hardware is definitely iPhone-like.

00:36:57 ◼   ► I wouldn't mind running iOS on one of those devices

00:37:00 ◼   ► just in terms of how they feel.

00:37:02 ◼   ► They feel really nice in hand, they've always did.

00:37:04 ◼   ► And especially, they've really made it better

00:37:06 ◼   ► in the last two years.

00:37:07 ◼   ► Like, my Pixel 1 is okay,

00:37:10 ◼   ► but there's things about it that I think were mistakes

00:37:12 ◼   ► like the power button,

00:37:16 ◼   ► they like etched like a ridging on the side

00:37:20 ◼   ► and it's just not pleasant.

00:37:21 ◼   ► I think that because they put the volume button

00:37:23 ◼   ► right below the power button,

00:37:25 ◼   ► my guess is the thinking was,

00:37:27 ◼   ► well, let's give the power button this rigid feel

00:37:30 ◼   ► so you can tell, but it's like, you don't need that.

00:37:32 ◼   ► You just know which one's up and which one's below,

00:37:35 ◼   ► and they've gotten away from that.

00:37:38 ◼   ► They just feel better now.

00:37:39 ◼   ► But the other thing that they do with their phones,

00:37:42 ◼   ► you said the displays are,

00:37:42 ◼   ► I think the displays are fantastic.

00:37:44 ◼   ► But they're also to me, very iPhone-like

00:37:47 ◼   ► in terms of color reproduction.

00:37:49 ◼   ► Like they're not super saturated.

00:37:51 ◼   ► You know, like to me, the Samsung phones

00:37:53 ◼   ► and the LG phones all look--

00:37:56 ◼   ► - Ridiculous.

00:37:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, to me, they're just not to my liking.

00:37:59 ◼   ► They're just so over the top, oversaturated.

00:38:03 ◼   ► And it's, you know, some people like that.

00:38:05 ◼   ► And I've heard from, you know, like in China,

00:38:07 ◼   ► there's a lot of people who really, really like that look.

00:38:09 ◼   ► They like that it's not really realistic.

00:38:12 ◼   ► It's like hyper-realistic.

00:38:14 ◼   ► The Pixel phones are like iPhones to me

00:38:17 ◼   ► in terms of having a natural sort of color landscape.

00:38:22 ◼   ► - Yeah, it looks great.

00:38:24 ◼   ► Man, the one thing that really is throwing me off though

00:38:27 ◼   ► are the missing gestures from iOS,

00:38:30 ◼   ► like not being able to swipe backwards

00:38:33 ◼   ► and some of this stuff.

00:38:35 ◼   ► I've had it set up for about half an hour or so.

00:38:39 ◼   ► - I'll get used to it, or maybe not, but it's super weird.

00:38:42 ◼   ► However, I just discovered something very, very smart,

00:38:45 ◼   ► which is you can, I don't know how they do this,

00:38:47 ◼   ► but you can squeeze the phone,

00:38:50 ◼   ► and it activates their assistant, which is really clever.

00:38:54 ◼   ► - It seems like a gimmick, but when I played with it

00:38:57 ◼   ► in their hands-on area, it works pretty well.

00:38:59 ◼   ► - Well, and they use haptic feedback to make it feel

00:39:02 ◼   ► like you're actually squeezing the phone,

00:39:04 ◼   ► which I don't think I am.

00:39:05 ◼   ► Like, I hope it's not.

00:39:06 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:39:07 ◼   ► I'm not actually bending the phone, but it really feels like I am, which is cool.

00:39:12 ◼   ► I just hit it, I agree without reading the screen.

00:39:14 ◼   ► I don't know what they're collecting on me now.

00:39:16 ◼   ► Yeah, well, everything.

00:39:18 ◼   ► Uh-oh.

00:39:19 ◼   ► Yeah, it's really nice.

00:39:22 ◼   ► So to me, you asked before, who is the Pixel Slate for?

00:39:26 ◼   ► I'm not entirely sure about that answer.

00:39:29 ◼   ► It's not for me, because I'm not a big Chrome user.

00:39:34 ◼   ► I guess if you're all in on Chrome, though, and you want a tablet, this could be really

00:39:37 ◼   ► nice if you're sort of living the Chrome OS lifestyle. I don't know.

00:39:42 ◼   ► If you live in Google Docs, it might be a compelling device. I don't know.

00:39:46 ◼   ► Right. And it's, you know,

00:39:48 ◼   ► A lot, by the way, like tens of thousands of people in Silicon Valley live in Google

00:39:51 ◼   ► Docs all day. So,

00:39:52 ◼   ► Yeah, I do see it. You know, I have an iPad, I have a Mac book and, you know, I use them

00:40:00 ◼   ► at different times for different things. And, but there are, I can see how it would be nice

00:40:06 ◼   ► to reduce it to one device in some ways. Like, let's say like, I'm a notorious tab lever opener,

00:40:12 ◼   ► you know, I've at any given time, I've got like, six windows, each with, you know, 20 tabs open in

00:40:18 ◼   ► them. And if I've, you know, I wanted to read that, that story that Dan wrote about whatever,

00:40:23 ◼   ► and I know I've got it open in a tab, but I'm on the iPad. It's like, you can get it out of iCloud.

00:40:28 ◼   ► But it's like, I don't remember which device it was on sometimes. And I don't know where to look

00:40:32 ◼   ► for it. Whereas if it's one less device, the tab I have open with the article I've halfway

00:40:38 ◼   ► read is right there, even once I've detached it from the keyboard and I'm just sitting

00:40:42 ◼   ► on the couch at night. So I can see that, but I don't know. But with the phones, I definitely

00:40:48 ◼   ► see who the market is. And the thing that really strikes me about the Pixel owners,

00:40:53 ◼   ► and it just hit me this year, is I think in some ways, the Pixel aficionados right now,

00:41:01 ◼   ► Pixel phone aficionados, remind me a lot of being a Mac user in like the late 90s. So,

00:41:10 ◼   ► you know, and that was the era when, you know, there were all sorts of same thing, this same

00:41:15 ◼   ► argument like, hey, why does Google even bother making these things or market share so low,

00:41:20 ◼   ► it's all irrelevant, they should just give up because the market share so low. That's

00:41:23 ◼   ► everything everybody said about Apple in 1995, right, that they should give it up. You know,

00:41:29 ◼   ► Michael Dell said, what would he do if he ran Apple?

00:41:33 ◼   ► He'd liquidate the company and give the money back

00:41:36 ◼   ► to the shareholders.

00:41:37 ◼   ► But if you, like me, were a Mac user in the late '90s

00:41:42 ◼   ► and you really were passionate about the things

00:41:44 ◼   ► that the Mac still did, even at a technical level

00:41:49 ◼   ► when the OS was really behind the times,

00:41:52 ◼   ► at a user interface level, they never lost that lead.

00:41:56 ◼   ► and it was always a nicer user experience.

00:41:59 ◼   ► The word beleaguered was always thrown around,

00:42:03 ◼   ► but that's sort of what we felt like.

00:42:05 ◼   ► And I was never a big,

00:42:07 ◼   ► remember people would spell Windows W-I-N-D-O-Z-E

00:42:12 ◼   ► and stuff like that, and get in,

00:42:15 ◼   ► every single Usenet group, whatever it was,

00:42:17 ◼   ► it could be about the weather, like alt.philadelphia.weather.

00:42:22 ◼   ► Eventually it's gonna break into a Windows

00:42:24 ◼   ► versus Mac flame war. Like there was, there was no news group. Hey, those were fun though.

00:42:30 ◼   ► There was no news group that didn't eventually break into a windows versus dos flame war,

00:42:35 ◼   ► whether it was computer related or not. Probably the computer groups were the least likely

00:42:39 ◼   ► because everybody had gotten it out of their system. Um, but I just see it like on Twitter

00:42:45 ◼   ► when I see that the pixel people like touting like their, their, you know, photo advantages

00:42:51 ◼   ► and stuff like that. Like I see that passion and I see their frustration that it's not

00:42:56 ◼   ► more popular, right? That they're, they're like, it just seems like Google should be

00:43:01 ◼   ► selling more pixels than they are because it really is a very compelling device and

00:43:06 ◼   ► software experience. It just doesn't seem right that it's, that it's not more popular.

00:43:11 ◼   ► And I think that's a really good analogy. I think Mac users had that frustration for

00:43:15 ◼   ► a long time. They really did. And I see it, you know, I mean, there was a lot of reviews.

00:43:19 ◼   ► I can't speak to it because I don't have a Pixel 2. I'm getting the Pixel 3 soon.

00:43:22 ◼   ► But there's a bunch of reviews, like Nilay and a few others, all said that the Pixel

00:43:28 ◼   ► 2 from last year was still a better still camera than the iPhone XS. So who knows how

00:43:34 ◼   ► good the Pixel 3 is?

00:43:36 ◼   ► Yeah, I haven't had a chance to test it, but it seems to be great. The fact that they're

00:43:40 ◼   ► even in the same sentence is astounding. Whether it's 10% better or worse or even more than

00:43:49 ◼   ► That's pretty remarkable considering much like Apple, Google did not have much of a

00:43:56 ◼   ► hardware or sorry, did not have much of a camera and smartphone background before they

00:44:02 ◼   ► just started.

00:44:03 ◼   ► So yeah, there's a couple of features I wrote.

00:44:06 ◼   ► I wrote about it briefly on during Fireball, but there's a couple of features in the

00:44:10 ◼   ► Pixel 3 and it's a little confusing.

00:44:12 ◼   ► What's what's Pixel 3 specific and what is going to ship in a software update for

00:44:17 ◼   ► existing Pixel 1 and Pixel 2 owners later this year. There's a bunch of features they

00:44:22 ◼   ► talked about at the event. Some of them are specific to the Pixel 3 and some of them are

00:44:26 ◼   ► coming to supposedly coming to older Pixels later. But almost like that, who cares? But

00:44:34 ◼   ► the one feature that really blew me away is the one they're calling Top Shot, which is

00:44:40 ◼   ► like you, you don't have to go to a special mode. It's just I guess you can turn it off.

00:44:44 ◼   ► I don't see why you would though because it seems great you take a photo and

00:44:47 ◼   ► It keeps a couple of frames from before you tap the shutter button and it takes a couple of extra frames after

00:44:55 ◼   ► You hit the shutter button and it shoots a video in between as well. So it might take let's say five stills

00:45:03 ◼   ► At the full resolution with all of the everything, you know

00:45:07 ◼   ► They're all they get the same HDR processing everything you'd want and then in between knows there's video

00:45:14 ◼   ► And so the if you if you take one of the video frames you're gonna get less resolution

00:45:18 ◼   ► you know and it's not quite as good of a photo, but the idea is

00:45:22 ◼   ► Like let's say you're shooting a sporting event or or you know

00:45:27 ◼   ► And a whale is jump you're on a boat and whale jumps out of the water and you take a photo

00:45:32 ◼   ► That the absolute best image that you get might be one of those video frames even though it's a slightly lower resolution

00:45:41 ◼   ► Image it might be the one you want to keep because it's the perfect moment, right?

00:45:46 ◼   ► It's that perfect fraction of a sentence or second when the moment was just perfect

00:45:50 ◼   ► But it in practice it really seems to work. I again that this is something

00:45:56 ◼   ► I don't have a pixel in hand yet, but I only got to do it during the hands-on area

00:45:59 ◼   ► But what they did is they gave us each a pixel to walk around with and while they were explaining the feature to me

00:46:04 ◼   ► I took a picture of the the woman from Google product marketing who was telling me about it and I swear

00:46:10 ◼   ► As I took the picture, I actually caught her at a bad moment when she was looking down and her eyes

00:46:14 ◼   ► were closed. And as she's telling me about the top shot picture, I took a picture of her. It was a

00:46:20 ◼   ► bad, very unflattering photo because her eyes were closed and she's looking down. And it immediately

00:46:25 ◼   ► says, "Would you prefer to use this one?" And it went back like half a second and she looked

00:46:30 ◼   ► perfect. And she's looking right at me. It's like I gave myself the perfect demo of the feature.

00:46:37 ◼   ► And so when you take a good photo

00:46:39 ◼   ► and Google thinks it's a good photo,

00:46:41 ◼   ► it doesn't even ask you.

00:46:43 ◼   ► It like only is when it recognizes something like,

00:46:45 ◼   ► hey, there's a subject here with her eyes closed.

00:46:48 ◼   ► We should see if we can suggest something better.

00:46:52 ◼   ► And it happens instantaneously.

00:46:53 ◼   ► It happens right after you snap the shutter button.

00:46:56 ◼   ► - That's cool.

00:46:57 ◼   ► You can do that manually with live photos.

00:47:00 ◼   ► - Right.

00:47:01 ◼   ► Well, but the--

00:47:02 ◼   ► - You can scrub it a little bit.

00:47:03 ◼   ► - Right, so it's--

00:47:04 ◼   ► - The fact that this note,

00:47:05 ◼   ► This is like proactively recommending to you.

00:47:08 ◼   ► - Yeah. - That's cool.

00:47:09 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it really does, again,

00:47:11 ◼   ► I shot like five minutes worth of photos,

00:47:14 ◼   ► but it really does seem to only suggest it to you

00:47:18 ◼   ► when the photo really was taken at the wrong moment

00:47:21 ◼   ► and doesn't bother you

00:47:22 ◼   ► when you've taken a fine photo right away.

00:47:25 ◼   ► So it doesn't annoy you needlessly

00:47:27 ◼   ► and when it does interrupt, it's right.

00:47:30 ◼   ► That's pretty cool.

00:47:33 ◼   ► What was the other feature that I liked?

00:47:35 ◼   ► - I love how both of these come,

00:47:38 ◼   ► both Google and Apple though are using software

00:47:40 ◼   ► to make photos, you know, what, 50 to 100 times better

00:47:44 ◼   ► than just hardware alone would make them.

00:47:45 ◼   ► - Absolutely, yeah.

00:47:46 ◼   ► And it's great that they're pushing each other, you know,

00:47:50 ◼   ► and there's, you know, I'm not saying that Google's ahead

00:47:52 ◼   ► in every single regard, but it's great though

00:47:55 ◼   ► that somebody else is doing similar type things.

00:47:59 ◼   ► And I know Samsung has some AI features too,

00:48:02 ◼   ► everybody's sort of doing it,

00:48:03 ◼   ► but it seems to me like Google and Apple

00:48:05 ◼   ► are ahead of everybody else here in different ways.

00:48:08 ◼   ► - And who's not doing it are the camera companies.

00:48:09 ◼   ► Like I almost never,

00:48:11 ◼   ► I still love the photo that will come out from my Fuji

00:48:16 ◼   ► more than, it just feels like I'm taking a photo

00:48:19 ◼   ► in a way that an iPhone photo still does not.

00:48:23 ◼   ► But when you do it side by side,

00:48:26 ◼   ► a lot of times the iPhone photo actually does look better.

00:48:30 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:48:32 ◼   ► Another cool feature they have,

00:48:33 ◼   ► I guess it's not a camera feature,

00:48:34 ◼   ► but it's the, did you see the call screening feature?

00:48:39 ◼   ► - I did, yeah, that was cool.

00:48:41 ◼   ► - That is really-- - It's very Googly.

00:48:43 ◼   ► - It's very Googly, and it really, you know,

00:48:46 ◼   ► and they did, again, they demoed it exactly the right way

00:48:48 ◼   ► where there was like a Google employee up in a,

00:48:51 ◼   ► you know, like in a different room who called us,

00:48:53 ◼   ► and we got a real phone call.

00:48:55 ◼   ► - In an unmarked restaurant in Silicon Valley.

00:48:59 ◼   ► - Well, it was the complete opposite of duplex,

00:49:02 ◼   ► because it was a real demo of a real feature and super useful. And it's like they said,

00:49:07 ◼   ► I mean, they even acknowledged that the spam phone calls are worse than ever. I get them

00:49:14 ◼   ► all the time. So I would love to have that feature on iOS. And it just makes so much sense that

00:49:20 ◼   ► it just takes… For all these years, I mean, going back before iPhone, going back to the original

00:49:28 ◼   ► cell phones where they had a green button and a red button. There have always been two

00:49:31 ◼   ► buttons for when a phone call comes in. Take it or don't take it. And now there's this

00:49:35 ◼   ► third option where it's like, "Okay phone, you talk to this jerk. See who it is." Right?

00:49:41 ◼   ► And if it turns out it's somebody you know, if it's like, you know, your accountant is

00:49:45 ◼   ► calling you or somebody you know is calling from a weird number, you can see it on the

00:49:49 ◼   ► transcript and then just jump right into the call and be like, "Oh, okay. I didn't know

00:49:52 ◼   ► who it was. It's a very, very cool feature and like you said, very, very googly. What

00:49:59 ◼   ► else? Do you have both phones as a review unit?

00:50:05 ◼   ► Tom Bilyeu (01h00m 9s): I do, yeah. I've only done the big one. I've

00:50:10 ◼   ► not taken out the… I just picked them up today, so I have not.

00:50:14 ◼   ► Jay Haynes (01h00m 19s): I will say I think it's a little weird and

00:50:19 ◼   ► it is a little, they've gone the wrong way.

00:50:22 ◼   ► Like one of my very, very favorite things

00:50:23 ◼   ► about the iPhone XS is that the XS and the XS Max

00:50:28 ◼   ► are the only difference is the size.

00:50:30 ◼   ► That the cameras are exactly the same,

00:50:33 ◼   ► the CPU's exactly the same, they have the same amount of RAM

00:50:36 ◼   ► it's just you want a bigger one, you know,

00:50:37 ◼   ► so the display is bigger and the battery is bigger

00:50:39 ◼   ► because the, you know, because it's more room

00:50:42 ◼   ► for a bigger battery, but that's it.

00:50:44 ◼   ► They look the same, you know, and I just think,

00:50:48 ◼   ► Anyway, this is my way of saying,

00:50:49 ◼   ► I can't believe they put a big ugly notch

00:50:51 ◼   ► on the one and not the other.

00:50:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it doesn't seem to,

00:50:55 ◼   ► maybe I'm not finding it,

00:50:57 ◼   ► but there does not seem to be the Face ID type thing.

00:51:00 ◼   ► - No, they don't, no, there is no Face ID type thing.

00:51:03 ◼   ► It's only there to have the two cameras.

00:51:06 ◼   ► So the other weird thing, I'm not weird,

00:51:08 ◼   ► but certainly different from Apple,

00:51:11 ◼   ► I'll just say different,

00:51:12 ◼   ► is that they still only have one camera on the back

00:51:14 ◼   ► as the main camera,

00:51:16 ◼   ► but now they have two cameras on the front,

00:51:19 ◼   ► one of which is like a normal focal length selfie camera,

00:51:23 ◼   ► and now they have this super wide angle,

00:51:25 ◼   ► almost fisheye selfie camera to get a wider field of view.

00:51:30 ◼   ► - Oh, weird. (laughs)

00:51:34 ◼   ► I can see my whole apartment in one.

00:51:36 ◼   ► - Right, right.

00:51:37 ◼   ► So you zoom, it's like you go to the selfie camera

00:51:40 ◼   ► and then you can zoom the other way.

00:51:41 ◼   ► Instead of like zooming in like a telephoto,

00:51:43 ◼   ► you zoom out and it's super wide in there.

00:51:46 ◼   ► - It seems interesting, I guess.

00:51:48 ◼   ► I don't know. - You know what?

00:51:49 ◼   ► I would use this all the time. (laughs)

00:51:52 ◼   ► As someone who has an embarrassing number of selfies,

00:51:54 ◼   ► I would probably use this all the time.

00:51:56 ◼   ► That's cool, all right.

00:51:59 ◼   ► But it looks, I mean, it actually looks

00:52:01 ◼   ► kind of like a person looking back at you

00:52:02 ◼   ► 'cause there's two.

00:52:04 ◼   ► It looks like a smiling creature of some sort.

00:52:08 ◼   ► But yeah, I was surprised there was no face ID type thing.

00:52:11 ◼   ► - No, no, it's still--

00:52:12 ◼   ► - I'm now hooked on this fingerprint thing,

00:52:15 ◼   ► and get rid of it.

00:52:17 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's, I don't know.

00:52:19 ◼   ► I know that there are all sorts of people out there

00:52:21 ◼   ► who have mixed feelings about Face ID versus Touch ID

00:52:24 ◼   ► and who should not be holding their breath for it

00:52:28 ◼   ► but are secretly hoping that Apple is working on Touch ID

00:52:32 ◼   ► under the glass.

00:52:33 ◼   ► Like, I'm telling you, don't worry.

00:52:35 ◼   ► I don't think it's gonna happen.

00:52:37 ◼   ► I don't think.

00:52:37 ◼   ► - No.

00:52:38 ◼   ► - And I actually think, who knows?

00:52:40 ◼   ► I could be wrong.

00:52:42 ◼   ► Maybe it would work well in addition to Face ID,

00:52:44 ◼   ► but I sort of feel like there's an advantage

00:52:47 ◼   ► to only having one biometric ID,

00:52:51 ◼   ► that you don't have to choose

00:52:52 ◼   ► between fingerprint and face ID.

00:52:54 ◼   ► It's like if you've got the new phone, you use face ID,

00:52:56 ◼   ► and if you have an older phone, you use touch ID.

00:53:00 ◼   ► - I agree with you, though.

00:53:00 ◼   ► They definitely lose style points

00:53:02 ◼   ► for having the notch on one of them, but not the other.

00:53:06 ◼   ► So 99.9% of people will never have both of them

00:53:11 ◼   ► at any point.

00:53:13 ◼   ► And nor nor is this like iOS where they dictate how every phone looks like yeah

00:53:19 ◼   ► You know the whole point of Android is that it works on?

00:53:24 ◼   ► You know a hundred thousand different phones, so it's a weird-looking notch too, though

00:53:29 ◼   ► It is it's a it's the biggest notch. I've ever seen it's a deep notch. It's a deep notch and I

00:53:35 ◼   ► Know it's you know it's been amusing to watch like the the larger Android

00:53:42 ◼   ► fan droid world of people are very down on this notch.

00:53:47 ◼   ► To their credit, that they're being honest.

00:53:50 ◼   ► They're not just, oh, I love Pixel phone,

00:53:52 ◼   ► so I'm gonna say this notch is the best notch.

00:53:55 ◼   ► No, instead the consensus seems to be

00:53:56 ◼   ► that this notch is hideous.

00:53:59 ◼   ► It's just ungainly.

00:54:02 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's not bothering me at all.

00:54:04 ◼   ► Well, it is kinda weird, but I don't know, it's fine.

00:54:09 ◼   ► - I still don't like the notch on the iPhone X.

00:54:11 ◼   ► I am used to it though.

00:54:13 ◼   ► I am very used to it.

00:54:14 ◼   ► - I don't even see it anymore.

00:54:16 ◼   ► - But it just is weird that the two phones

00:54:19 ◼   ► have different foreheads,

00:54:21 ◼   ► 'cause the one has a regular forehead

00:54:23 ◼   ► and the other one has a notch.

00:54:25 ◼   ► - Are you back to the normal 10 size now?

00:54:28 ◼   ► - Yes, this is a weird thing.

00:54:32 ◼   ► I know that when you put the XS Max

00:54:35 ◼   ► next to a previous Plus phone,

00:54:38 ◼   ► like an iPhone 8 Plus or 7 Plus, whatever,

00:54:40 ◼   ► They're almost exactly the same size.

00:54:42 ◼   ► It's like less than, I think it's like a millimeter,

00:54:46 ◼   ► the iPhone XS Max is like a millimeter smaller

00:54:51 ◼   ► in each dimension or something like that.

00:54:53 ◼   ► It's very, very similar.

00:54:55 ◼   ► But for some reason, it looks and feels smaller in my hand

00:54:59 ◼   ► than the plus size phones did.

00:55:01 ◼   ► I think it's just like an optical illusion created

00:55:03 ◼   ► by the fact that it has so much greater

00:55:06 ◼   ► screen to body area ratio.

00:55:09 ◼   ► It somehow feels smaller.

00:55:11 ◼   ► So I never liked the plus size phones at all

00:55:14 ◼   ► and never was tempted to buy a six plus or seven plus

00:55:17 ◼   ► or any of those, even though it always bothered me

00:55:20 ◼   ► that they had slightly better cameras,

00:55:22 ◼   ► with optical image stabilization and a few features

00:55:25 ◼   ► that the smaller one didn't have.

00:55:27 ◼   ► It just, the XS Max was actually somewhat tempting to me.

00:55:30 ◼   ► It was the first time Apple made a larger phone

00:55:32 ◼   ► that I was like, hmm, maybe.

00:55:35 ◼   ► And there were times when I was testing it

00:55:36 ◼   ► when I forgot which one I had.

00:55:38 ◼   ► I was like, wait, is this the bigger one or the smaller one?

00:55:40 ◼   ► But I did end up buying the smaller one.

00:55:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, I haven't, I'm still in the review unit stage.

00:55:47 ◼   ► I was a plus guy for the three years

00:55:51 ◼   ► or whatever it was during that era.

00:55:54 ◼   ► And now I'm testing out this Max

00:55:57 ◼   ► and boy, that screen is gorgeous.

00:56:01 ◼   ► And to me, the most underappreciated thing

00:56:03 ◼   ► about the bigger phones is that typing is much more accurate

00:56:07 ◼   ► 'cause the keys are wider.

00:56:09 ◼   ► But I'm not really using the whole screen for anything.

00:56:12 ◼   ► I still find myself reading in the top third

00:56:16 ◼   ► of the screen almost or top fourth of it.

00:56:18 ◼   ► And this thing just feels big in your pocket.

00:56:21 ◼   ► Although having the new Apple Watch Series 4

00:56:27 ◼   ► makes it kind of a different game

00:56:29 ◼   ► because the, and we can talk about the new watch for a bit.

00:56:32 ◼   ► I mean, it is a really damn good device.

00:56:36 ◼   ► it feels like a computer on your wrist now

00:56:39 ◼   ► in a way that it just did not previously.

00:56:41 ◼   ► And I would say that's 80% just speed.

00:56:45 ◼   ► Like it actually responds to your clicks

00:56:48 ◼   ► and doesn't get caught up in a series of commands.

00:56:53 ◼   ► But the software is starting to get really good too.

00:56:57 ◼   ► I mean, especially the watch face like that.

00:56:59 ◼   ► - Well, hold that though.

00:57:00 ◼   ► Let's save it for a different section.

00:57:03 ◼   ► I got the feeling at the press thing

00:57:04 ◼   ► And I feel like I'm clearly in the minority.

00:57:07 ◼   ► I don't know, and it's the sort of thing

00:57:09 ◼   ► Apple doesn't like to talk about.

00:57:11 ◼   ► They'll give unit sales for iPhones,

00:57:13 ◼   ► but they don't like to break it down by model.

00:57:15 ◼   ► I would love to know what percentage of people

00:57:18 ◼   ► are buying the regular XS and who are buying the XS Max.

00:57:21 ◼   ► I really don't even know how to guess how that's going.

00:57:24 ◼   ► But at least among the enthusiast crowd,

00:57:28 ◼   ► like the sort of people who go to a Google press event

00:57:32 ◼   ► to see the new phones,

00:57:33 ◼   ► The bigger size is clearly the more popular.

00:57:38 ◼   ► It's like, 'cause, and you know, it's a funny thing

00:57:42 ◼   ► because like you go to the Apple event

00:57:44 ◼   ► and almost everybody's carrying an iPhone around.

00:57:46 ◼   ► Like at the Google thing, most of the press

00:57:48 ◼   ► who I was there looking around with were carrying pixels,

00:57:51 ◼   ► you know, 'cause they're sort of Google,

00:57:52 ◼   ► you know, it's gonna draw Google-oriented

00:57:54 ◼   ► members of the media.

00:57:56 ◼   ► - Totally.

00:57:57 ◼   ► - But it really looked to me,

00:57:57 ◼   ► just doing a quick eyeball survey,

00:57:59 ◼   ► that almost all of them had the Pixel 2 Plus

00:58:02 ◼   ► or whatever, what do they call the big one, Plus?

00:58:04 ◼   ► XL, XL, yeah, Pixel 2 XL.

00:58:08 ◼   ► Whereas I like the smaller one better, for sure.

00:58:12 ◼   ► But it is weird, it does look a little dated,

00:58:14 ◼   ► because it has a forehead and a chin.

00:58:15 ◼   ► I mean, here I am knocking the notch on the other one, but.

00:58:18 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:58:19 ◼   ► - And it seems, it's just one of those things

00:58:21 ◼   ► that Apple does better than anybody,

00:58:24 ◼   ► but, you know, and Google as sort of hardware

00:58:28 ◼   ► being not their forte.

00:58:30 ◼   ► The fact that even the one with the notch

00:58:33 ◼   ► still has the chin down below at the bottom,

00:58:35 ◼   ► it just is, it's not a premium look.

00:58:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, you wonder why they kept it,

00:58:46 ◼   ► whether they had to or they chose to.

00:58:50 ◼   ► - Yeah.

00:58:51 ◼   ► - I don't know.

00:58:52 ◼   ► - It does feel last year.

00:58:56 ◼   ► - I think they had to.

00:58:57 ◼   ► I think that it's technically super, super hard to go edge to edge.

00:59:03 ◼   ► Even though they're OLED, which makes it easier and not LCD, but everything I've heard from

00:59:10 ◼   ► people at Apple is that getting the iPhone X and XS to get as close to corner to corner

00:59:16 ◼   ► as they are is technically very hard.

00:59:19 ◼   ► and the XR, which we can get to, is even harder because it's an LCD screen, not an OLED. It

00:59:27 ◼   ► just looks weird. It just is sort of a weird look for the pixels, in my opinion. I also

00:59:33 ◼   ► thought that they were a lot lighter. I don't know what they weigh compared to a XS, but

00:59:38 ◼   ► I don't mind how much the XS weighs, but it is true. I mean, steel weighs more than aluminum,

00:59:43 ◼   ► So it is a heavier device.

00:59:46 ◼   ► I feel like the Pixels really compare better to the XR because they're more just off the

00:59:53 ◼   ► top of my head.

00:59:54 ◼   ► They're both glass on the front, glass on the back, aluminum on the sides, and then

00:59:58 ◼   ► a single camera on the back.

01:00:00 ◼   ► So it's sort of the XR is the one and the starting price is around the same, around

01:00:05 ◼   ► $750, $800.

01:00:06 ◼   ► It's like the XS is sort of a different class device than even the best Pixel.

01:00:11 ◼   ► It's true. We're entering a 10-R world. I need to recalibrate all my analysis now.

01:00:19 ◼   ► Yeah. I can't wait to find out more about it. Like the 10-R was sort of… it's like

01:00:26 ◼   ► they announced it and it was interesting. And you know, it was kind of rumored and here

01:00:29 ◼   ► it is. And it's this, you know, it's just so strange in so many ways because it's

01:00:34 ◼   ► like it's not the same size as the 10-S or the 10-S Max. It's in between. It's

01:00:40 ◼   ► size and it's in between which is a weird third size and it only has one camera but

01:00:45 ◼   ► it's the same great camera you know that the 10s has and it comes in a bunch of fun colors

01:00:53 ◼   ► which Apple hasn't done with an iPhone since all the way back at the 5c you know it's different

01:00:58 ◼   ► in so many ways and I kind of feel and I just feel like most people feel like 800 bucks

01:01:06 ◼   ► is already a ton of money to spend on a phone and so I just can't help but think that the

01:01:10 ◼   ► is going to be an incredible seller, you know,

01:01:14 ◼   ► 'cause it has the look and it has the performance

01:01:17 ◼   ► of an iPhone 10 and, you know, saving 250 bucks

01:01:21 ◼   ► for a, you know, primarily missing out

01:01:24 ◼   ► on a 2X telephoto camera that I'm guessing

01:01:27 ◼   ► a lot of people never use.

01:01:29 ◼   ► It's, you know, seems like, it seems like a lot of people

01:01:31 ◼   ► are gonna go into the Apple store and be like,

01:01:33 ◼   ► why would I even think about buying the more expensive one?

01:01:35 ◼   ► - Yeah, that's gonna be really interesting

01:01:39 ◼   ► because once you divide it into the monthly payments,

01:01:43 ◼   ► it's not as drastic a dollar difference,

01:01:48 ◼   ► 'cause now very few people

01:01:49 ◼   ► are actually buying the phone outright.

01:01:51 ◼   ► But even on a monthly basis, it's probably,

01:01:55 ◼   ► I don't know, what, 10, 20 bucks cheaper a month?

01:01:57 ◼   ► So maybe.

01:01:58 ◼   ► - And I just don't think typical people

01:02:02 ◼   ► are going to see the difference.

01:02:03 ◼   ► I mean, not like they wouldn't be able to tell them apart.

01:02:05 ◼   ► I mean, certainly the colors tell you that, you know.

01:02:08 ◼   ► But I really don't think that a typical person

01:02:11 ◼   ► would look at an iPhone XS and XR side by side

01:02:14 ◼   ► and think that the XS is that much better.

01:02:19 ◼   ► - Especially inside.

01:02:22 ◼   ► If you're outside, I would never wanna not have,

01:02:26 ◼   ► well, I don't know, I haven't tried the XR outside.

01:02:28 ◼   ► Maybe it's amazing.

01:02:29 ◼   ► But you can tell OLED outside in a way that

01:02:37 ◼   ► LCD just was not as good before.

01:02:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, and you know, I mean, you see it when you play games

01:02:43 ◼   ► and watch movies or something like that too,

01:02:45 ◼   ► where OLED has these richer blacks,

01:02:46 ◼   ► but I, to tell you the truth,

01:02:48 ◼   ► I don't really watch movies on my phone.

01:02:50 ◼   ► I mean, I either watch on TV or if I am on an airplane

01:02:53 ◼   ► or something, I want a bigger screen than the phone.

01:02:55 ◼   ► So, you know, I kind of miss out on that.

01:02:58 ◼   ► - Do you think this new, what is it, liquid retina?

01:03:01 ◼   ► Do you think that's what they're gonna call

01:03:03 ◼   ► the iPad Pro screen too?

01:03:04 ◼   ► - I wonder, that's a good question.

01:03:06 ◼   ► I guess I would guess so. I wouldn't be surprised if it's the exact same technology. I do have

01:03:14 ◼   ► another theory, by the way, because the other feature that's missing from the XR is 3D touch.

01:03:20 ◼   ► And it has been widely reported, you know, and this was one of those things that Ming

01:03:24 ◼   ► Qi Kuo had leaked a report back in February or something. So it's a long time ago it came

01:03:30 ◼   ► out that Apple's 6.1-inch mystery phone was going to lack 3D Touch. And it's all been reported as

01:03:38 ◼   ► like a cost-saving measure because this is the lower cost new iPhone. But it's not really a

01:03:43 ◼   ► lower cost new iPhone. It starts at $800 or $750. Like that's the normal price for a new flagship

01:03:50 ◼   ► iPhone. Like the XS and the iPhone X, it's created a new super tier above the normal price. And,

01:03:59 ◼   ► And when they first introduced, I just looked it up last night

01:04:03 ◼   ► for the show, actually.

01:04:04 ◼   ► But 3D Touch debuted with the iPhone 6S.

01:04:08 ◼   ► And that was a phone that started at $699.

01:04:12 ◼   ► That was the entry level price back then for the 6S.

01:04:15 ◼   ► And they all had 3D Touch.

01:04:16 ◼   ► So it's not cost, per se.

01:04:19 ◼   ► If a $699 phone four years ago could have 3D Touch,

01:04:24 ◼   ► then cost-wise, surely the $750 10R could have 3D touch.

01:04:29 ◼   ► I think it's a technical problem

01:04:31 ◼   ► that whatever shenanigans and technical wizardry

01:04:37 ◼   ► they had to pull to get an LCD screen

01:04:39 ◼   ► that comes as close to corner to corner as they did.

01:04:42 ◼   ► I mean, the whole reason that LCDs

01:04:43 ◼   ► have always had foreheads and chin

01:04:45 ◼   ► is for the backlighting stuff.

01:04:48 ◼   ► I think that whatever they had to do to get,

01:04:53 ◼   ► they sacrifice 3D Touch to get it to look like an iPhone X that goes corner to corner.

01:04:59 ◼   ► And I'm betting that it's an engineering problem, not a cost problem. And if it saves seven

01:05:03 ◼   ► bucks per phone, I'm sure that makes Tim Cook happy too. But it is weird for the product

01:05:09 ◼   ► experience though that they work in different ways for stuff like turning on the flashlight

01:05:13 ◼   ► and stuff like that.

01:05:14 ◼   ► Yeah, that was one of the things I just noticed on this Pixel 2 is not having... Because I

01:05:21 ◼   ► I basically only use it for cursor movement,

01:05:25 ◼   ► moving the cursor, but that alone to me

01:05:27 ◼   ► pays for the feature, so not having it--

01:05:31 ◼   ► - All right, this might blow your mind.

01:05:32 ◼   ► This might blow your mind.

01:05:33 ◼   ► Did you know, I think it's an iOS 12 feature.

01:05:36 ◼   ► I don't think it was there in iOS 11,

01:05:37 ◼   ► but Apple has added, and I think it was specifically

01:05:40 ◼   ► with iPads and the XR in mind.

01:05:44 ◼   ► You can now get that cursor move around feature

01:05:47 ◼   ► on a non-3D touch iOS device

01:05:49 ◼   ► by holding down on the space bar.

01:05:51 ◼   ► hold down on the space bar for a little bit

01:05:53 ◼   ► and then you get the same thing.

01:05:54 ◼   ► - Oh, okay.

01:05:56 ◼   ► - So you can buy a XR and you don't miss out on the--

01:06:01 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, look at that, wow.

01:06:04 ◼   ► - And for those of you listening

01:06:05 ◼   ► who don't know what I'm talking about,

01:06:06 ◼   ► 'cause one time a couple episodes,

01:06:08 ◼   ► six months ago I mentioned this

01:06:10 ◼   ► and I got so much email from people saying,

01:06:11 ◼   ► "Oh, holy shit, that's the greatest tip ever."

01:06:14 ◼   ► I had no idea.

01:06:15 ◼   ► Is that on a modern iPhone with 3D touch

01:06:18 ◼   ► when you're typing,

01:06:19 ◼   ► this actually gets to the point we were talking about earlier with the trackpad support where

01:06:22 ◼   ► you can 3D touch anywhere on the keyboard and it turns the keyboard into a trackpad

01:06:27 ◼   ► where you can move the insertion point around whatever text it is you're editing. And if

01:06:32 ◼   ► you touch again while you're moving it, it'll select text. Once you know to do it, it is

01:06:40 ◼   ► a truly, I know it's a cliché, but it's a game-changing feature. You can do it now on

01:06:46 ◼   ► non-3D touch iOS devices by holding down on the spacebar for a fraction of a second, and

01:06:50 ◼   ► it's a fantastic feature.

01:06:51 ◼   ► Well, there you go.

01:06:55 ◼   ► We just paid for the…

01:06:57 ◼   ► Before we go on, here's the other feature I wanted to mention with the Pixel cameras,

01:07:02 ◼   ► and it seems very cool.

01:07:03 ◼   ► It's called motion autofocus.

01:07:05 ◼   ► So you compose your shot, and you tap and hold on the subject.

01:07:09 ◼   ► Let's say it's a dog or somebody at Google actually went to a concert the night before

01:07:14 ◼   ► and shot, it was a great little video, really cool,

01:07:19 ◼   ► but you can tap on the subject,

01:07:22 ◼   ► and then once you tap on it, if the subject moves around,

01:07:25 ◼   ► the focus stays on that person as they move around,

01:07:29 ◼   ► using artificial intelligence to identify what it is.

01:07:33 ◼   ► So for a moving subject, it's absolutely,

01:07:36 ◼   ► it seems absolutely amazing, and once you see it,

01:07:38 ◼   ► you think, oh my God, every camera should have this.

01:07:41 ◼   ► And again, like you said, where it's Google and Apple

01:07:44 ◼   ► were inventing these things and the camera companies seem to be just leaving, leaving,

01:07:50 ◼   ► leaving all this stuff on the table.

01:07:52 ◼   ► Yeah, this is exactly what I need on my Fuji. So right, cool. All right. Great. Fuji is

01:07:59 ◼   ► probably the closest in my opinion. I'm not really, I can't say I'm a camera expert, but

01:08:03 ◼   ► I think Fuji of the major camera companies is the company that seems to me to be most

01:08:07 ◼   ► taking seriously the world of computational photography. Maybe I'm biased because I have

01:08:13 ◼   ► Fuji X100s, which is now a couple years old. I'm sure the newest ones do even more, but

01:08:18 ◼   ► it just seems to me like Fuji is doing more, more, more confidently moving towards the world

01:08:27 ◼   ► of computational photography. And whereas like Canon and Nikon to me still seem to be treating

01:08:33 ◼   ► digital sensors as like, it's like a 35 millimeter strip of film.

01:08:41 ◼   ► I guess I'm looking in the wrong spots then. I need to do some more research on that because

01:08:47 ◼   ► I buy Fuji for the glass and for the look and feel of the camera and also the amazing image

01:08:57 ◼   ► quality. I have not noticed much of the computational photography, but I will have

01:09:01 ◼   ► to do some reading on it now. I think compared to Google and Apple, they're still light years behind.

01:09:08 ◼   ► And this motion focus tracking is just mind-blowing.

01:09:11 ◼   ► But once you see it, it's very cool.

01:09:14 ◼   ► You can do it.

01:09:15 ◼   ► You don't even have to be a person.

01:09:16 ◼   ► Like somebody at the hands-on area last week just did it, like showed their watch and then

01:09:22 ◼   ► it like moved their hand around the frame.

01:09:23 ◼   ► And as they move the hand around the frame, the little white square stays on the watch.

01:09:27 ◼   ► It's really cool.

01:09:28 ◼   ► I mean, and the best part of all this, it just seems intuitive.

01:09:30 ◼   ► Like this is how photography should work.

01:09:33 ◼   ► you know, ignoring all the technical constraints

01:09:36 ◼   ► of the actual process of using sensors

01:09:39 ◼   ► to take a digital image, like, you know,

01:09:42 ◼   ► even the simplest thing of being able to zoom

01:09:45 ◼   ► by pinching on the viewfinder screen on an iPhone,

01:09:48 ◼   ► like, yeah, duh, of course that's how

01:09:50 ◼   ► a photo feature should work, so.

01:09:53 ◼   ► - What else is Google doing?

01:09:54 ◼   ► They had a cool feature, I don't know how well this works,

01:09:56 ◼   ► I mean, 'cause they obviously knew,

01:09:57 ◼   ► they had like a pair of Nikes, and you point,

01:10:00 ◼   ► I think it's a different mode you put the camera in,

01:10:02 ◼   ► but you put it like in ID mode, show the Nike's

01:10:06 ◼   ► and then it immediately says,

01:10:07 ◼   ► oh, these are the Nike Air Max, whatever, whatever.

01:10:11 ◼   ► I have to, you know, I hope Panzareno doesn't listen to this

01:10:14 ◼   ► but you know, whatever model of Nike this is,

01:10:18 ◼   ► you know, it tells you exactly what model it is

01:10:20 ◼   ► and gives you options for where you could go buy them

01:10:22 ◼   ► right now and stuff like that.

01:10:24 ◼   ► How widely that works with, you know,

01:10:27 ◼   ► all brands of shoes and shirts and whatever else

01:10:30 ◼   ► you might identify, who knows?

01:10:31 ◼   ► but apparently it works great with like movie posters.

01:10:33 ◼   ► So you pointed at a movie poster

01:10:35 ◼   ► and tells you everything you wanna know about that movie.

01:10:38 ◼   ► It's a pretty cool feature.

01:10:39 ◼   ► All right, let me take another break here.

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01:12:44 ◼   ► You could do it yourself on Squarespace.

01:12:46 ◼   ► It really is super easy for non-technical users,

01:12:50 ◼   ► non-designers even to build a really great looking website.

01:12:55 ◼   ► website that works great, super fast, everything you'd want. Responsive designs, looks good

01:13:01 ◼   ► on everything from phones to a giant iMac. It's really great. So check them out next

01:13:07 ◼   ► time you need a website or somebody you know needs a website. If you sign up for a year,

01:13:13 ◼   ► you get a free domain name registration. So start your trial today. You get a free trial,

01:13:17 ◼   ► by the way. That's the other thing. You can build it and use it for a while, like 30 days,

01:13:22 ◼   ► You don't have to pay a dime.

01:13:24 ◼   ► When you do pay, go to squarespace.com/talkshow, just squarespace.com/talkshow and remember

01:13:30 ◼   ► that code talk show, know the, and you will save 10% off your first purchase.

01:13:37 ◼   ► So you can save 10% on that whole first year, save 10% and get the free domain name.

01:13:42 ◼   ► That's squarespace.com/talkshow.

01:13:43 ◼   ► - Kind of want to start bribing and or forcing all restaurants to just move over to Squarespace.

01:13:55 ◼   ► - When there is a bad website for a restaurant, I think the exact same thing.

01:14:00 ◼   ► - It's like half an hour out of my day just to find the menu or the reservation link or

01:14:05 ◼   ► whatever.

01:14:06 ◼   ► - Right.

01:14:07 ◼   ► - Flash still?

01:14:08 ◼   ► - Flash still?

01:14:10 ◼   ► - I feel like restaurants always had,

01:14:13 ◼   ► they were always flash.

01:14:15 ◼   ► I would say there was no industry in the world

01:14:17 ◼   ► that was more likely to have a flash player website

01:14:20 ◼   ► than restaurants.

01:14:21 ◼   ► I feel like they've gotten their act together

01:14:23 ◼   ► in recent years.

01:14:24 ◼   ► I feel, especially in new places,

01:14:25 ◼   ► at least here in Philly, it seems like a lot of new places

01:14:28 ◼   ► have pretty good websites.

01:14:29 ◼   ► - Well, it's 'cause if you view source,

01:14:31 ◼   ► they're pretty much all Squarespace now.

01:14:33 ◼   ► There are a couple other tools that exist,

01:14:35 ◼   ► but they're not as good.

01:14:36 ◼   ► So, and you know, and I also feel like website, websites,

01:14:41 ◼   ► it was like you could just do like a talk

01:14:43 ◼   ► at like a web design conference

01:14:44 ◼   ► about how bad websites for restaurants were.

01:14:47 ◼   ► People want the exact same thing.

01:14:49 ◼   ► For every time they go to a website for a restaurant,

01:14:52 ◼   ► they want like three things.

01:14:54 ◼   ► They wanna see the menu, they wanna know the hours,

01:14:58 ◼   ► and they wanna know how do you make a reservation?

01:15:00 ◼   ► You know, it's, and usually now it's open table,

01:15:04 ◼   ► but just put a big button there so they can tap it

01:15:06 ◼   ► and shoot them right over to OpenTable

01:15:07 ◼   ► to make the reservation.

01:15:08 ◼   ► But that's all people want,

01:15:10 ◼   ► and websites used to hide all of those things.

01:15:14 ◼   ► Like how could you have a restaurant

01:15:15 ◼   ► and not put the menu up?

01:15:16 ◼   ► That's what people want to know.

01:15:17 ◼   ► Is there something here to eat that looks good to me?

01:15:20 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:15:22 ◼   ► It's nuts.

01:15:25 ◼   ► - All right, the Home Hub,

01:15:27 ◼   ► that's the last thing from Google that I didn't talk about.

01:15:29 ◼   ► It's like a little, you know,

01:15:31 ◼   ► they've got a whole bunch of these,

01:15:33 ◼   ► they're little speaker type things,

01:15:35 ◼   ► and this one has a screen.

01:15:36 ◼   ► I kind of-- - What do you think

01:15:39 ◼   ► of these things, these screen speakers?

01:15:41 ◼   ► Amazon has one, you know,

01:15:43 ◼   ► we don't need to get into detail about Facebooks, but--

01:15:46 ◼   ► - One of the things they mentioned very, very prominently

01:15:50 ◼   ► was that they deliberately did not put a camera

01:15:52 ◼   ► in this device.

01:15:53 ◼   ► And I thought that's pretty interesting coming from Google.

01:15:56 ◼   ► You could see Apple bragging about making a thing

01:16:00 ◼   ► without a camera for privacy's sake,

01:16:01 ◼   ► but I thought it was pretty interesting

01:16:04 ◼   ► that Google did. I don't know about these things with the screen. I guess I kind of

01:16:12 ◼   ► get it. I think that the Home Hub though is too small. That's my take because it's

01:16:20 ◼   ► sort of like this, I don't know what the diagonal measurement of the screen is, but

01:16:24 ◼   ► it's sort of like either a very, very small tablet, even smaller than an iPad mini or

01:16:30 ◼   ► like the world's biggest phone, like the biggest phablet ever made. But if you're

01:16:36 ◼   ► going to have it in your kitchen and it has a screen, I feel like people want to use that

01:16:40 ◼   ► as a TV at some point. They want to watch video. They own YouTube and they definitely

01:16:46 ◼   ► mentioned YouTube in terms of like, "Hey, you can talk to the thing and get it to show

01:16:51 ◼   ► YouTube videos." But I feel like it's too small of a screen in a kitchen to be that.

01:16:56 ◼   ► I feel like you want something more like the size

01:16:58 ◼   ► of a regular iPad as a minimum.

01:17:01 ◼   ► And then the other area where they showed it off

01:17:03 ◼   ► was like as a bedside table dingus.

01:17:08 ◼   ► And I don't feel like that makes any sense at all

01:17:10 ◼   ► because everybody charges their phone next to their bed

01:17:12 ◼   ► so they don't need a device that size.

01:17:14 ◼   ► And in fact, Google even came out

01:17:16 ◼   ► with their own little Qi charging pad stand

01:17:19 ◼   ► that stands your iPhone up

01:17:21 ◼   ► so it can serve as a bedside clock/picture viewer.

01:17:26 ◼   ► So I don't get the home hub.

01:17:29 ◼   ► I get the idea of having a screen on these talking devices,

01:17:32 ◼   ► but I feel like if you're gonna have a screen,

01:17:33 ◼   ► you want it to be at least like 10 inches,

01:17:36 ◼   ► at least for use in a kitchen.

01:17:38 ◼   ► I just feel like this one is too small.

01:17:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, yeah, that's a good point.

01:17:42 ◼   ► I've watched many '90s Cubs games

01:17:45 ◼   ► on a four-inch tube TV in my kitchen,

01:17:48 ◼   ► but you don't have to do that anymore.

01:17:51 ◼   ► - I watch my iPad a lot.

01:17:54 ◼   ► When I do watch video, it's often in the kitchen,

01:17:57 ◼   ► 'cause we only have one TV,

01:17:59 ◼   ► and so I'll often watch baseball games on the iPad,

01:18:03 ◼   ► and I just can't imagine doing it on a smaller screen

01:18:06 ◼   ► than a 9.7-inch iPad.

01:18:07 ◼   ► It's nice for me, and it's certainly, at 9.7 inches,

01:18:11 ◼   ► it isn't something that you would be,

01:18:15 ◼   ► it wouldn't be great for a communal viewing, right?

01:18:18 ◼   ► It's sort of personal.

01:18:19 ◼   ► It's like a nice size for you to watch one thing.

01:18:22 ◼   ► You wouldn't really wanna have a group of four people

01:18:24 ◼   ► staring at an iPad, but.

01:18:26 ◼   ► - Yeah, and it's ambient, especially these kitchen things.

01:18:29 ◼   ► I'm kind of interested in these.

01:18:31 ◼   ► I don't own any of them, but in the Facebook one

01:18:33 ◼   ► is its own kind of can of worms,

01:18:36 ◼   ► but which does have camera that will track you around

01:18:40 ◼   ► if you wanna do video conferencing on it.

01:18:43 ◼   ► I think the idea of having kind of a purpose-built device

01:18:48 ◼   ► that's just on in the kitchen,

01:18:50 ◼   ► you don't have to go find the iPad.

01:18:54 ◼   ► maybe don't have your phone with you.

01:18:57 ◼   ► I think it's interesting, especially for ambient TV,

01:19:00 ◼   ► like a sports game where you're gonna ignore 75% of it,

01:19:05 ◼   ► but then maybe lean over and watch the at-bat

01:19:08 ◼   ► or the field goal.

01:19:11 ◼   ► But for looking at recipes or playing music or whatever,

01:19:17 ◼   ► it's an interesting genre to me.

01:19:19 ◼   ► I haven't spent my own money on any of them.

01:19:21 ◼   ► I don't know if I will.

01:19:23 ◼   ► To me it's like, okay, I have an old iPad

01:19:26 ◼   ► that does a lot of that already.

01:19:28 ◼   ► But I can see why Amazon and Google and Facebook

01:19:32 ◼   ► are making them.

01:19:34 ◼   ► They don't have to be the thinnest thing imaginable.

01:19:38 ◼   ► They don't have to, in many cases,

01:19:40 ◼   ► they're plugged into the wall,

01:19:41 ◼   ► so they don't even have to have a good battery life.

01:19:44 ◼   ► So it's kind of interesting.

01:19:47 ◼   ► Kind of serves the purpose that the home PC

01:19:50 ◼   ► may have once had, like the living room,

01:19:53 ◼   ► computer where the family can each check their email or do things. You're not going to do

01:19:58 ◼   ► your homework on it.

01:19:59 ◼   ► Right. No, and the interface is interesting exactly along the lines you're talking where

01:20:04 ◼   ► instead of being, I don't even know what OS it's running. I don't know if it's running,

01:20:08 ◼   ► if it's Android under the hood. I guess I should have asked. That's a question I guess

01:20:11 ◼   ► I could have asked. I guess it might be Android, but it's not Android like, it's not like a

01:20:17 ◼   ► phone. You know, there's no home button and a screen full of apps and text that is meant

01:20:23 ◼   ► to be held 18 inches from your eyes. Everything on it is big. The text is big and it's, in a way,

01:20:32 ◼   ► even an iPad is still sort of, it can't do everything. You can't have an interface that

01:20:40 ◼   ► works both 18 inches in front of your face and five feet away. And so for things like

01:20:48 ◼   ► cooking instructions and stuff like that. The text is comically large compared to a

01:20:53 ◼   ► phone, but it actually seems exactly right for something that might be well over an arm's

01:20:58 ◼   ► reach away while you're making whatever it is you're making. I just feel like it

01:21:03 ◼   ► should be bigger, I think. I don't know, though.

01:21:07 ◼   ► I just don't know if this is the device that people all of a sudden decide they love

01:21:13 ◼   ► and need. But I probably would have said that about the first Echo devices too and the smart

01:21:19 ◼   ► speakers. And here we are and everyone has one now. So, and I use mine every day.

01:21:24 ◼   ► Yeah, I, you know, that's funny. I digression, I guess, but we have like smart shades.

01:21:35 ◼   ► Ooh, I need those.

01:21:38 ◼   ► Oh, they're great. They're from Lutron and they're super quiet. And for a long time,

01:21:44 ◼   ► we have buttons, little remotes that control them and they're okay. But it's really better when you

01:21:52 ◼   ► issue voice commands and you can raise all of them like on our main living floor all at once.

01:21:57 ◼   ► But we had it for a long time where we had the only integration that ours supported was Amazon.

01:22:05 ◼   ► So we had to do it through the echo. And you had to give these exact commands. So to open

01:22:14 ◼   ► the kitchen shades, it was, "Hey, dingus, turn on kitchen shades up." So the name of the scene

01:22:21 ◼   ► was "kitchen shades up." And to make it happen, you had to say, "Turn on." So grammatically,

01:22:27 ◼   ► that's a mess. Turn on kitchen shades up and then turn on kitchen shades down.

01:22:32 ◼   ► And there was also this weird rule,

01:22:34 ◼   ► and again, I'm not blaming Amazon.

01:22:36 ◼   ► It might have been Lutron whose fault it was,

01:22:39 ◼   ► and maybe with other things it would be better with Amazon.

01:22:44 ◼   ► But not only that, but in your scene names,

01:22:46 ◼   ► you couldn't use the words on and off.

01:22:50 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:22:52 ◼   ► And it's just, it was, and it's so much,

01:22:55 ◼   ► so we got like the base station for the Lutron thing.

01:22:59 ◼   ► It's just looks like a little like Wi-Fi router.

01:23:03 ◼   ► But we got that swapped out

01:23:06 ◼   ► with one that's HomeKit compatible.

01:23:08 ◼   ► And I like doing this stuff through Siri so much better.

01:23:12 ◼   ► And I know that all sorts of people think Siri's garbage

01:23:16 ◼   ► and Alexa is so much better, but you can,

01:23:19 ◼   ► in the Home app, you can like, it's so much easier to,

01:23:22 ◼   ► A, it's way easier to program and to adjust it.

01:23:26 ◼   ► And you can give it whatever name.

01:23:27 ◼   ► And it's like with the Amazon thing,

01:23:29 ◼   ► I could never, I honest to God couldn't figure it out.

01:23:31 ◼   ► It was like, it's like once we had it set up, that was it,

01:23:34 ◼   ► but I didn't know how to change it.

01:23:36 ◼   ► But it still is sort of confusing.

01:23:38 ◼   ► And Siri lets you speak to it so much more naturally.

01:23:41 ◼   ► You can just, you know, name it, name something,

01:23:44 ◼   ► kitchen shade, open the kitchen shades,

01:23:47 ◼   ► and just say, you know, hey, dingus,

01:23:49 ◼   ► open the kitchen shades.

01:23:51 ◼   ► And you can say all sorts of things like,

01:23:54 ◼   ► just, you know, open up the shades in the kitchen

01:23:56 ◼   ► and it'll do it.

01:23:58 ◼   ► It doesn't have to be the exact right command line style incantation.

01:24:02 ◼   ► It understands natural language.

01:24:05 ◼   ► But it was funny.

01:24:06 ◼   ► I was confused and thought it was broken because I programmed it so that both our living room

01:24:12 ◼   ► and our kitchen are on the same floor.

01:24:14 ◼   ► And I made a scene called "Open all shades and close all shades."

01:24:18 ◼   ► And then I would say, "Hey, Dingus, open all shades."

01:24:20 ◼   ► And sometimes it would work and open them all.

01:24:22 ◼   ► And then other times it would open every shade in the house, including our bedrooms.

01:24:27 ◼   ► And it was because I named it was like I gave it a bad scene name because sometimes Siri

01:24:31 ◼   ► would interpret it as this is the exact name of a scene you defined. I'll do it. And other

01:24:37 ◼   ► times it was like, I'll open every shade I know about because you said open all the shades.

01:24:43 ◼   ► Which is actually, it was almost like it was too clever. So I changed the name of the scene

01:24:46 ◼   ► to like main floor shade, open main floor shades and close main floor shades. And now

01:24:51 ◼   ► there's no more confusing. But I have to say that editing that stuff in the home app and

01:24:55 ◼   ► iOS is so much nicer to me, way nicer and way more sensible and very visual in terms

01:25:02 ◼   ► of, "Oh, I see. Here's the icons for all the shades that'll go up when I turn this

01:25:06 ◼   ► scene on." It's super, super visual and really nice, and I almost feel like Apple

01:25:12 ◼   ► doesn't get enough credit for how nice that is.

01:25:14 ◼   ► Tom Bilyeu: Yeah, especially now that—and I haven't actually spent much time in the

01:25:19 ◼   ► Siri, whatever the automator thing is called,

01:25:23 ◼   ► the workflows.

01:25:24 ◼   ► - Yeah, shortcuts.

01:25:26 ◼   ► - Shortcuts, yeah, but being able to stitch

01:25:28 ◼   ► all those things together really makes HomeKit compelling

01:25:32 ◼   ► if you already have all the devices.

01:25:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's a big if, but once you do,

01:25:36 ◼   ► it's really pretty sweet.

01:25:38 ◼   ► - Yeah, but even just like the Home app,

01:25:40 ◼   ► being able to toggle that stuff without saying anything too

01:25:44 ◼   ► can be useful.

01:25:46 ◼   ► - Yeah, totally, absolutely.

01:25:49 ◼   ► just open it up, hit a button, there it goes.

01:25:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, much like live photos,

01:25:54 ◼   ► I can imagine HomeKit being one of those things

01:25:57 ◼   ► that just becomes quietly more and more popular and useful

01:26:01 ◼   ► and the kind of thing that,

01:26:03 ◼   ► I only have one smart light bulb,

01:26:06 ◼   ► so that doesn't do anything,

01:26:07 ◼   ► but when we move, we'll probably have a bunch of stuff.

01:26:10 ◼   ► - Yeah, and I have to say, it was really pretty cool too,

01:26:15 ◼   ► because at some point when we first bought these shades,

01:26:18 ◼   ► we had to set up this Lutron app

01:26:20 ◼   ► and we got an account with Lutron.

01:26:22 ◼   ► But I haven't opened that Lutron app in over a year.

01:26:26 ◼   ► In fact, I'll bet that on my iPhone XS,

01:26:29 ◼   ► I'm not even logged in because I don't think

01:26:31 ◼   ► I've, I haven't opened it since I got a new phone.

01:26:33 ◼   ► But once you've got it configured,

01:26:35 ◼   ► when you open the iOS Home app,

01:26:38 ◼   ► it already knows about all these things

01:26:39 ◼   ► 'cause the Lutron app uses the APIs to say,

01:26:42 ◼   ► okay, I'll report to HomeKit,

01:26:43 ◼   ► here's everything I know about.

01:26:44 ◼   ► And so you open the Apple Home app

01:26:47 ◼   ► and all of the stuff that it can control,

01:26:49 ◼   ► it's all just there.

01:26:50 ◼   ► You don't have to add devices to home

01:26:54 ◼   ► once you've configured them

01:26:55 ◼   ► in whatever the app is for the thing.

01:26:57 ◼   ► It's really, really pretty nice.

01:26:59 ◼   ► And I feel like exactly what you said,

01:27:01 ◼   ► that it's sort of, everybody was like,

01:27:04 ◼   ► ah, you know, and there was that whole thing

01:27:05 ◼   ► when HomeKit was first announced where,

01:27:07 ◼   ► because they had sort of a lot tighter review process

01:27:12 ◼   ► and security concerns,

01:27:15 ◼   ► that there were hundreds and hundreds of things

01:27:17 ◼   ► that you could control through the Amazon devices

01:27:22 ◼   ► and there were a lot fewer for HomeKit

01:27:24 ◼   ► because Apple had these more stringent things,

01:27:26 ◼   ► but I feel like quietly they've gotten a lot of these things

01:27:31 ◼   ► into the system.

01:27:31 ◼   ► I don't know, it's something that if anybody blew it off

01:27:36 ◼   ► years ago, it's worth another look

01:27:37 ◼   ► if you haven't looked at it recently

01:27:39 ◼   ► is what I'm trying to say.

01:27:40 ◼   ► What else do we got here?

01:27:44 ◼   ► We didn't talk about it. We were saving it. We were saving the Apple Watch Series 4.

01:27:48 ◼   ► Yeah. Why don't we...

01:27:50 ◼   ► Yeah, let's talk about it. It's like you said. We can fit it in with the new Palm phone that came out.

01:28:01 ◼   ► Which is basically an Apple Watch with no band on it, right?

01:28:05 ◼   ► Right. I linked to it on Daring Fireball. I guess I'll put it in the show notes. Dieter

01:28:09 ◼   ► Bone, of course, who's the the palm guy, the palm guy. Love it. It's a it's so weird that

01:28:18 ◼   ► somebody bought the name palm and put this on this because there's nothing palm like about it. It just

01:28:24 ◼   ► says palm but it's not web os. It's android. It's mostly stock android. It's a little phone that

01:28:31 ◼   ► Verizon is selling very heavily. Verizon, I guess, is a big part of it. I don't think it's even on

01:28:38 ◼   ► any other carriers. It even has a little Verizon thing on the glass on the front, sort of subtle

01:28:43 ◼   ► down at the bottom.

01:28:45 ◼   ► Which in itself is, like as Dieter points out, is kind of messed up because Verizon

01:28:50 ◼   ► arguably like sunk the Palm by not selling the Pre or whatever.

01:28:56 ◼   ► Right. When Palm was worth saving and really was making very interesting products that

01:29:05 ◼   ► just couldn't get traction for some reason, Verizon definitely helped sync them. And now

01:29:12 ◼   ► they're selling a device.

01:29:13 ◼   ► And now they're back with Steph Curry.

01:29:15 ◼   ► Yeah, so it has a 3.3 inch screen, which is actually smaller than even the original iPhone.

01:29:21 ◼   ► The original iPhone is 3.5. It's a tiny little phone. It obviously has smaller bezels than

01:29:26 ◼   ► an old iPhone 2, so it's not quite corner to corner, but it's pretty small. It's certainly

01:29:32 ◼   ► one of the smallest touch screen phones I've ever seen. And it looks adorable. But to me,

01:29:39 ◼   ► the thing that is just like, what are they thinking, is that it's designed as a secondary

01:29:44 ◼   ► phone. In the same way that with the cellular Apple Watch, you pay 10 bucks a month to Verizon

01:29:50 ◼   ► so that you can have this second phone that technically has its own SIM card and phone

01:29:56 ◼   ► but instead because it's paired with your main device, you're, you know, if you put your main

01:30:03 ◼   ► phone away and you go out with your little new palm phone and somebody calls your regular number,

01:30:07 ◼   ► the palm phone will ring and you'll talk to it on there and you'll get your text messages there,

01:30:12 ◼   ► etc. It's like an alias to your phone as opposed to a second phone. Right. But what it's like,

01:30:19 ◼   ► Like to me, having the cellular Apple watch is pretty cool in that regard.

01:30:25 ◼   ► And especially now with the new watchOS, and now that third-party apps like Overcast can

01:30:34 ◼   ► actually do podcasts from the watch, when I go jogging now, I don't have to put my phone

01:30:41 ◼   ► in a ridiculous fanny pack underneath my shirt.

01:30:45 ◼   ► I can literally just leave the house with just my watch and AirPods.

01:30:50 ◼   ► And it's such a great AirPod feature, the way that if the AirPods are paired with my

01:30:54 ◼   ► phone but I leave the house without them with my watch, they just automatically go to the

01:30:59 ◼   ► watch.

01:31:00 ◼   ► And it's like, "Okay, I'll just play the audio from the watch."

01:31:02 ◼   ► And you don't have to fiddle around with anything.

01:31:04 ◼   ► It just works.

01:31:05 ◼   ► And I go to Overcast, play a podcast, and I'm listening to it.

01:31:09 ◼   ► It's fantastic.

01:31:10 ◼   ► And I know that if somebody calls me, I'll get the phone call.

01:31:13 ◼   ► It's really a great feature, but I can't see I can't like having it on a watch having your watch be a secondary phone

01:31:20 ◼   ► It seems like a great feature and I really do like it. It's definitely worth ten bucks a month to me

01:31:25 ◼   ► Having a second phone not so much like it just doesn't make any sense to me. I

01:31:32 ◼   ► Wish that they had just made a phone at this really tiny adorable size and made it good enough that it could be your main

01:31:41 ◼   ► phone, that it has a great camera. That to me would be more of a statement in terms of,

01:31:48 ◼   ► "Hey, how about we focus less on these 5.5-inch screens that absorb so much of our attention

01:31:54 ◼   ► every day? How about you take a tiny little 3.3-inch phone and spend less time on it?"

01:31:59 ◼   ► That would be more interesting to me. This idea of a secondary phone, it goes back to

01:32:04 ◼   ► at Dave Morin from what was it? Path with his day phone and night phone. Anyway.

01:32:13 ◼   ► Yeah. No, I, I have, I mean, I have no interest in this at all. I, I've found there's another

01:32:20 ◼   ► company that it's called punked or punked that makes like, you know, uh, Android powered,

01:32:26 ◼   ► essentially like candy bar phones, like all these things that, that are trying to, to like force you

01:32:33 ◼   ► off of your phone, either for convenience

01:32:36 ◼   ► or for time well spent, quote unquote.

01:32:40 ◼   ► The idea that people are gonna spend another $350 for that

01:32:44 ◼   ► just doesn't make any sense to me.

01:32:45 ◼   ► Like it does not seem like, I don't know.

01:32:49 ◼   ► The watch, I guess that's how much my problem,

01:32:52 ◼   ► I think my new watch actually costs like $500,

01:32:54 ◼   ► so here I am, a huge hypocrite.

01:32:57 ◼   ► But that, again, to me, has different utility.

01:33:03 ◼   ► Like it's a purpose-built device as opposed to having just a second smaller phone that doesn't have I

01:33:09 ◼   ► Guess if you're on Android, maybe it's like if you're on an iPhone

01:33:13 ◼   ► I don't know how you what just switch over to Android at nighttime or something

01:33:17 ◼   ► I guess it's clearly meant for people who have an Android phone. It's not yeah, it doesn't it won't do I message either

01:33:23 ◼   ► So, oh, yeah true, right? Yeah, that's why I was scared to put my SIM card into this pixel 3

01:33:29 ◼   ► I don't want to mess up my iMessage.

01:33:32 ◼   ► - Oh, I forget how that works now.

01:33:33 ◼   ► That's why I bought a second SIM card years ago.

01:33:37 ◼   ► - I'm gonna get a second SIM card for that.

01:33:39 ◼   ► - Yeah, I got it at T-Mobile and it's great.

01:33:41 ◼   ► I forget what I pay per month,

01:33:42 ◼   ► but it really is like no nonsense.

01:33:45 ◼   ► It's like 40 bucks a month or something like that.

01:33:47 ◼   ► And the bill really is like 40 bucks a month.

01:33:50 ◼   ► It's not like--

01:33:51 ◼   ► - I kinda wanna try the Project Fi.

01:33:52 ◼   ► - Oh, that's another Google too.

01:33:53 ◼   ► - Google's thing.

01:33:54 ◼   ► - Yeah, especially if you're gonna be popping it

01:33:56 ◼   ► into Android phones.

01:33:57 ◼   ► It's probably a good thing to try.

01:33:58 ◼   ► - I don't know how easy that is to start and stop.

01:34:02 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:34:03 ◼   ► - I don't really wanna keep paying for it.

01:34:05 ◼   ► - Yeah, the T-Mobile one is great 'cause it's prepaid

01:34:08 ◼   ► and you can sign up to automatically renew every month,

01:34:12 ◼   ► but if I ever do wanna cancel,

01:34:14 ◼   ► I would just go to their website, say I wanna cancel,

01:34:19 ◼   ► and then at the end of the month,

01:34:21 ◼   ► my SIM card will just stop working.

01:34:23 ◼   ► So there's no contract, no funny business.

01:34:26 ◼   ► It's really a great way,

01:34:27 ◼   ► If you're gonna get a, it just seems so much easier

01:34:30 ◼   ► than getting a sim, like a secondary quote unquote sim card

01:34:33 ◼   ► from like the AT&T or Verizon.

01:34:36 ◼   ► - Yeah, totally.

01:34:37 ◼   ► Yeah, anyway, so the watch, yeah, so the Palm,

01:34:43 ◼   ► I don't really have much to say about the Palm

01:34:46 ◼   ► other than that, as someone who loved, loved, loved Palm

01:34:50 ◼   ► for I don't know what, 15 years,

01:34:52 ◼   ► like sad to see this era, but this too will pass.

01:34:57 ◼   ► pass, I guess? I don't know.

01:34:58 ◼   ► Yeah, it's such a, it's the saddest story in the entire,

01:35:03 ◼   ► I'm gonna, to me, the iPhone marks the beginning of like a new era of personal computing. And it's

01:35:10 ◼   ► very, it just seems so clear in hindsight that there's pre-iPhone and post-iPhone.

01:35:14 ◼   ► And that is just, it's every bit as big a deal as like the Mac was for computing. And in the

01:35:22 ◼   ► In the post-iPhone world, to me, the greatest tragedy is that Palm didn't make it because

01:35:27 ◼   ► they were doing such interesting stuff with their user interface.

01:35:29 ◼   ► I mean, Dieter never misses an opportunity to point out how many of the things, the new

01:35:36 ◼   ► features of the iPhone X with the swipe up from bottom to go to a card view of running

01:35:42 ◼   ► apps and all sorts of things that Palm's webOS was doing in 2008, 2009.

01:35:49 ◼   ► It was.

01:35:50 ◼   ► They deserve so many kudos.

01:35:51 ◼   ► And it was a super attractive OS.

01:35:54 ◼   ► It looked great.

01:35:55 ◼   ► It was really, really well done.

01:35:56 ◼   ► And I know there were a bunch of ex-Apple people at Palm.

01:36:00 ◼   ► And I always said, like the Palm Pre,

01:36:05 ◼   ► you could easily have gone back,

01:36:07 ◼   ► if you took like a 2008 Palm Pre

01:36:10 ◼   ► and went back 10 years to like 1997 in time

01:36:14 ◼   ► and showed it to people and said,

01:36:16 ◼   ► this is, you know, covered up the logos

01:36:17 ◼   ► and said, this is Apple's cell phone from 10 years ago.

01:36:20 ◼   ► everybody would say, oh yeah, definitely,

01:36:21 ◼   ► oh my God, that's amazing, I can't wait to get it.

01:36:23 ◼   ► And you could totally sell it as the Apple phone

01:36:26 ◼   ► from 10 years in the future.

01:36:28 ◼   ► 'Cause just in terms of the system design

01:36:30 ◼   ► and what it looked like, it just was so copacetic.

01:36:34 ◼   ► - Curve corners. - Yep, curve corners.

01:36:36 ◼   ► It just, you know, if you like Apple stuff,

01:36:40 ◼   ► it was hard not to like the Palm stuff.

01:36:42 ◼   ► And if anything, it was almost more of a classic

01:36:46 ◼   ► pre-Steve Jobs Apple look and feel

01:36:49 ◼   ► than the post Steve Jobs look and feel.

01:36:52 ◼   ► There was, you know, it was almost more like

01:36:54 ◼   ► the classic Apple, which I loved,

01:36:57 ◼   ► and in many ways, you know, I was just looking.

01:37:01 ◼   ► Somebody actually reported a typo on Daring,

01:37:04 ◼   ► over the weekend, somebody reported a typo

01:37:06 ◼   ► from October 11th, 2002 on Daring Fireball.

01:37:10 ◼   ► - Excellent.

01:37:11 ◼   ► (laughing)

01:37:12 ◼   ► - So I said-- - What was it about?

01:37:13 ◼   ► - It was just, I missed the word A.

01:37:14 ◼   ► It was just like this, I don't, it was like this,

01:37:18 ◼   ► this should have said like, "This is a big deal," and it just said, "This is big

01:37:22 ◼   ► deal," or something like that. So I fixed it and said to them, "You've just broken

01:37:27 ◼   ► the record for oldest typo ever," because I only started the site in August 2002, so

01:37:32 ◼   ► it was like 10 weeks into Daring Fireball, and I just fixed it now. But I remember, and

01:37:41 ◼   ► then it sucked me into reading old 2002 Daring Fireball articles. And a big theme back then

01:37:47 ◼   ► all the various ways that Mac OS X was crummy compared to Mac OS 9. And to me, the Palm

01:37:53 ◼   ► Pre sort of had that Mac OS 9 niceness in terms of no weird, fiddly things. I don't

01:38:05 ◼   ► know. It's a sad story.

01:38:07 ◼   ► I think 8.5 for me was the one closest to my heart.

01:38:12 ◼   ► Yeah, probably for me too.

01:38:14 ◼   ► - Could have just been the point of my life

01:38:16 ◼   ► that I was at, I don't know.

01:38:17 ◼   ► - I don't know, I also have a soft spot for system 7.5.

01:38:22 ◼   ► I thought 7.5 was a really sweet one.

01:38:25 ◼   ► Although it was the current version for so long

01:38:29 ◼   ► that maybe it was like Stockholm syndrome.

01:38:34 ◼   ► 7.5 was like-- - That's true.

01:38:36 ◼   ► - 7.5 was the classic Mac OS that was like

01:38:41 ◼   ► at the time when Apple was flailing with these,

01:38:45 ◼   ► eventually all these efforts for quote unquote

01:38:47 ◼   ► next generation OSs that never really even came close

01:38:51 ◼   ► to seeing the light of day.

01:38:52 ◼   ► And so therefore it just sort of sat around

01:38:55 ◼   ► as the current version of Mac OS for a long time.

01:38:58 ◼   ► But that's neither here nor there.

01:39:01 ◼   ► Apple Watch Series 4.

01:39:06 ◼   ► - Well, so to me the most interesting thing I've seen,

01:39:09 ◼   ► - Well, and you posted the good links

01:39:11 ◼   ► to the 9to5Mac story on making the Infograph face

01:39:16 ◼   ► more useful, and I've got a couple of those utility apps

01:39:20 ◼   ► that I had never heard of before, which is kinda cool.

01:39:23 ◼   ► But to me, the most exciting thing is just this idea

01:39:27 ◼   ► of the UI playground that is the Apple Watch face

01:39:30 ◼   ► now that there's enough space to poke around

01:39:35 ◼   ► and Steve, was it Steve Trout and Smith?

01:39:40 ◼   ► Is that how you say his name?

01:39:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, so I'll put a link to this in the show notes.

01:39:44 ◼   ► I think I've got it here already, yeah.

01:39:45 ◼   ► But Steve Trout and Smith, who is hacker extraordinaire,

01:39:49 ◼   ► he's one of the, you know his name,

01:39:51 ◼   ► he's one of the guys who sometimes finds things

01:39:55 ◼   ► in beta OS releases of iOS that reveal

01:39:58 ◼   ► upcoming hardware products and stuff like that.

01:40:00 ◼   ► He's also a very, very talented programmer.

01:40:03 ◼   ► But he's been on a kick since, if anybody is,

01:40:05 ◼   ► by the time you listen to this,

01:40:07 ◼   ► he'll be maybe closer to a week.

01:40:08 ◼   ► But for the last maybe half a week or so,

01:40:12 ◼   ► he's been, a recurring theme with Apple Watch

01:40:15 ◼   ► is how come they don't allow third-party watch faces?

01:40:19 ◼   ► There's apps, and then your app can provide complications

01:40:23 ◼   ► that fit in these predefined, okay,

01:40:26 ◼   ► there's a corner complication, monochrome,

01:40:31 ◼   ► for the certain watch face,

01:40:32 ◼   ► and then there's a corner complication on the utility face

01:40:35 ◼   ► that is color and you provide,

01:40:38 ◼   ► you get to use these APIs to make a complication

01:40:41 ◼   ► for your app that provides data that fits

01:40:44 ◼   ► in these little complication areas

01:40:46 ◼   ► that are predefined by Apple,

01:40:48 ◼   ► but you don't get, nobody's allowed,

01:40:50 ◼   ► nobody but Apple is allowed to make watch faces.

01:40:53 ◼   ► And that's been a source of controversy or debate

01:40:56 ◼   ► ever since the Apple Watch shipped is,

01:40:58 ◼   ► what is Apple thinking in this regard?

01:41:01 ◼   ► Is it something they haven't gotten around to yet?

01:41:02 ◼   ► Is it something they're on the fence over or are they like, "Hell no, we're never going

01:41:05 ◼   ► to let people make watch faces."

01:41:09 ◼   ► And if so, why not?

01:41:10 ◼   ► But so rather than just talk about it, Stephen Troughton Smith just started making them.

01:41:16 ◼   ► And it's not even like a hack.

01:41:17 ◼   ► It's not really a watch face.

01:41:18 ◼   ► What he's done is he's making apps and then he turned on the setting in the Apple Watch.

01:41:23 ◼   ► I think you have, I don't know if you can do it on a watch itself or if you have to

01:41:26 ◼   ► use the phone app.

01:41:27 ◼   ► But there's a setting for last used app.

01:41:32 ◼   ► And it's like, I think by default, it'll, you know, like when you raise your wrist,

01:41:36 ◼   ► does it show you your watch face?

01:41:37 ◼   ► Or does it show you the last app you were using?

01:41:39 ◼   ► And I think by default, it's like after two minutes, it goes back to your watch face.

01:41:44 ◼   ► So like if you're using, you know, a weather app or something like that on your wrist,

01:41:49 ◼   ► and you tap around, you don't have to like quit it or go back to home, you can just lower

01:41:53 ◼   ► your wrist and go about your day.

01:41:55 ◼   ► five minutes later when you go to check the time it just goes back to your watch face.

01:41:59 ◼   ► But what he's done is set it so that it always goes back to your last running app. And he's

01:42:05 ◼   ► made these apps that look like watch faces. And so every time he raises his wrist, it

01:42:10 ◼   ► just shows his custom app that shows a watch face. And he's literally, you're going to

01:42:18 ◼   ► think I'm making this up, but he's made like a system where he can generate, he's got like

01:42:24 ◼   ► a bunch of options for color schemes and dial schemes. He's generated like 65,000 of these

01:42:32 ◼   ► things algorithmically by randomizing the colors and the options. Most of them look

01:42:39 ◼   ► really cool.

01:42:40 ◼   ► It is amazing. It is super cool.

01:42:42 ◼   ► I'll put a link in. If you haven't looked at these things, it is really, really cool.

01:42:47 ◼   ► One of the options he has is something that emulates the very clever—I've never seen

01:42:53 ◼   ► anything like it just because it could only happen on a digital face. But the Hermes watch faces for

01:42:58 ◼   ► Series 4 have an option where half the screen is one color and the other half is the other color,

01:43:06 ◼   ► and the dividing line between them is based on the minute hand of the watch. So as time changes,

01:43:13 ◼   ► the color scheme slowly changes over the course of 60 minutes. So he's replicated that and has

01:43:20 ◼   ► literally like, I think that's how this started. Yeah. He was just trying to clone that maybe. I

01:43:24 ◼   ► don't know. Yeah, but it's, it's, it's really awesome. I love it. Yeah. And the other thing

01:43:30 ◼   ► he's doing, and they do look plausible because the one thing about Apple watch faces branding wise,

01:43:37 ◼   ► and we're talking about analog style ones, ones with an hour hand and a minute hand.

01:43:41 ◼   ► The one thing all Apple watch faces to date share in common is they use the exact same style of

01:43:48 ◼   ► of hands, which I've actually asked around.

01:43:52 ◼   ► When I was on the Houdini podcast a couple of weeks ago

01:43:55 ◼   ► talking about Apple Watch, and I actually asked,

01:43:57 ◼   ► 'cause those guys know more about watches than anybody,

01:44:00 ◼   ► I asked if there was a name for this style of hand.

01:44:02 ◼   ► Like there's all sorts of watch lingo

01:44:04 ◼   ► for like different style of hands.

01:44:05 ◼   ► Like there's some that are called like fence post hands

01:44:09 ◼   ► because they're like straight

01:44:10 ◼   ► and then they have like a triangle at the end.

01:44:12 ◼   ► Think about like a traditional Americana fence,

01:44:15 ◼   ► you know, a picket fence.

01:44:17 ◼   ► There's sword hands, like certain kind of hands

01:44:20 ◼   ► that look sort of like a sword.

01:44:22 ◼   ► But this style of hands doesn't really have a name.

01:44:25 ◼   ► It's used, a couple of high-end watchmakers

01:44:28 ◼   ► use hands like this, but everybody knows the look.

01:44:30 ◼   ► It's sort of like a capsule with a little skinny thing

01:44:33 ◼   ► at the end to connect it to the center,

01:44:35 ◼   ► like an oval, these oval-shaped hands.

01:44:38 ◼   ► He's, Stephen Troughton Smith's faces

01:44:39 ◼   ► use Apple Watch's hands.

01:44:41 ◼   ► Like he's somehow, genius that he is, fished out.

01:44:44 ◼   ► He figured out where on the Apple Watch OS

01:44:46 ◼   ► the hands are stored, and so he's not replicating

01:44:49 ◼   ► their hands, he's using Apple's hands.

01:44:50 ◼   ► - I didn't realize that, that's awesome.

01:44:52 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's really cool.

01:44:53 ◼   ► And then I actually play this very small role in this,

01:44:57 ◼   ► I actually, 'cause I know him and I pinged him

01:45:00 ◼   ► over the weekend, is his first ones,

01:45:04 ◼   ► the proportions were slightly off,

01:45:06 ◼   ► like his second hand stuck out over the,

01:45:10 ◼   ► you know like on the, if you have a round watch,

01:45:12 ◼   ► and Apple Watch, and there's little tick marks

01:45:15 ◼   ► to mark the seconds, a bunch of the faces have them.

01:45:17 ◼   ► The second hand should be exactly the radius

01:45:21 ◼   ► of those tick marks so that the tip of the second hand

01:45:24 ◼   ► exactly touches the tick marks as it goes around.

01:45:28 ◼   ► His hands were a little bit too small

01:45:30 ◼   ► and I helped him with a little bit

01:45:32 ◼   ► of proportion sizing on that.

01:45:34 ◼   ► It's just the sort of thing you don't really notice

01:45:35 ◼   ► but then once he fixed it, he was like,

01:45:37 ◼   ► "Holy crap, that looks so much better."

01:45:38 ◼   ► It's exactly right.

01:45:39 ◼   ► But these are amazing.

01:45:42 ◼   ► - So the bigger question then is,

01:45:44 ◼   ► Is this the kind of thing that Apple ever opens up

01:45:48 ◼   ► or is that on purpose?

01:45:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, I don't think they will.

01:45:52 ◼   ► I think that they don't

01:45:53 ◼   ► and I think it is definitely on purpose

01:45:55 ◼   ► for a couple of reasons.

01:45:57 ◼   ► And it's not gonna make Apple Watch users happy

01:46:00 ◼   ► to hear me say that, but I don't think it'll ever happen.

01:46:03 ◼   ► What do you think?

01:46:04 ◼   ► I can give you what I think the reasons are.

01:46:06 ◼   ► - Yeah, what do you think they are?

01:46:07 ◼   ► - I think one, they don't want people

01:46:11 ◼   ► to make ugly watch faces.

01:46:12 ◼   ► And if they opened it up,

01:46:14 ◼   ► there's pros and cons to opening it up

01:46:18 ◼   ► because some of them would obviously be beautiful.

01:46:20 ◼   ► I mean, we can see from Stephen Troughton Smith's work

01:46:23 ◼   ► that some of them are really beautiful.

01:46:25 ◼   ► And it would be so much more,

01:46:27 ◼   ► so much greater variety in choices,

01:46:30 ◼   ► but a lot of them, most of them would be ugly.

01:46:33 ◼   ► And I don't think they want to allow that.

01:46:35 ◼   ► I actually, I kind of know that the one watch face

01:46:40 ◼   ► that is on Apple Watch that they are deeply ambivalent about

01:46:43 ◼   ► is the photo's face, the one that lets you pick a photo

01:46:45 ◼   ► of your own to put on a watch.

01:46:47 ◼   ► And the reason they're sort of like,

01:46:49 ◼   ► is that a lot of people's pictures

01:46:52 ◼   ► they put up on their watch are ugly, and they don't like it.

01:46:55 ◼   ► But they kind of knew, like, that's just the one thing

01:46:57 ◼   ► that the story I heard is that knowing how people

01:47:00 ◼   ► set their wallpapers on their phone and stuff like that,

01:47:02 ◼   ► and how many people wanna have a picture of their kids,

01:47:04 ◼   ► or their spouse, or their dog,

01:47:07 ◼   ► and that's what they've done.

01:47:09 ◼   ► It's the wallpaper on their computer.

01:47:11 ◼   ► It's the wallpaper on their phone.

01:47:12 ◼   ► It's just what people do.

01:47:14 ◼   ► And so they go, "Oh, we gotta do it.

01:47:17 ◼   ► "We gotta let people put a picture of their kids

01:47:18 ◼   ► "on their watch if that's really what they wanna do."

01:47:20 ◼   ► But that's the one face that can be ugly.

01:47:22 ◼   ► Otherwise, and as many gripes as we've all had,

01:47:26 ◼   ► Marco Arment had a great story this week

01:47:28 ◼   ► talking about why all of, effectively,

01:47:31 ◼   ► he started talking about Infograph.

01:47:34 ◼   ► Like you said, with the "9to5" article,

01:47:36 ◼   ► it was sort of like,

01:47:36 ◼   ► "Hey, Infograph is overwhelming by default,

01:47:38 ◼   ► but if you turn everything off and then just slowly start adding stuff back, you can kind of keep it sane.

01:47:43 ◼   ► But ultimately... I'm very happy with how I have mine set up right now.

01:47:47 ◼   ► Marco makes a very convincing argument that all of the analog faces for Apple Watch are dissatisfying in some way.

01:47:53 ◼   ► Yeah. And, you know, you could solve that if you could open it up to third parties.

01:47:59 ◼   ► But I don't think Apple wants to do that because they don't want to allow ugly watch faces.

01:48:03 ◼   ► And I think the second reason is...

01:48:08 ◼   ► It's probably even gonna be even less popular among people who are hoping to see custom watch faces on Apple watch is I

01:48:14 ◼   ► Think marketing wise it's a huge they see it as a huge advantage that Nike and Hermes watches have watch faces that other

01:48:22 ◼   ► watches don't have

01:48:24 ◼   ► And that is true

01:48:25 ◼   ► You know and some people said oh, it'll be a copyright nightmare because somebody's gonna make a knockoff Rolex watch face

01:48:31 ◼   ► And then Rolex will sue Apple and stuff like that

01:48:33 ◼   ► Like I don't think copyright's the issue because it's like people could make a fake Rolex

01:48:38 ◼   ► Watch face for the phone. I mean you could do anything on the phone, you know, I mean, I I don't

01:48:43 ◼   ► I don't think the watch is special in that regard

01:48:45 ◼   ► But I just but I do think though that like the they don't want people like Steven Troughton Smith making these watches that give you

01:48:53 ◼   ► the Hermes look and feel

01:48:55 ◼   ► without

01:48:56 ◼   ► Spending the money on an Hermes watch

01:48:58 ◼   ► Yeah

01:49:00 ◼   ► It's interesting like that the copyright stuff

01:49:04 ◼   ► Yeah, every once in a while you see something in the App Store

01:49:07 ◼   ► That's a clear copyright violation, but it seems to police itself pretty well like the App Store is not

01:49:13 ◼   ► Terrible in terms of well, I don't know. I'm in the high side if you look for it. Sure

01:49:21 ◼   ► You'll find stuff wherever but yeah, it's not you know, the way that things work is the

01:49:27 ◼   ► What rises up?

01:49:30 ◼   ► If you search I'm sure you can find Disney knockoffs or whatever, but it's not like it

01:49:36 ◼   ► Those things can't become very popular before they get taken down. So yeah

01:49:40 ◼   ► Yeah

01:49:42 ◼   ► The Mickey Mouse face is another good example of that where there's obviously some kind of financial arrangement between

01:49:47 ◼   ► Apple and Disney for the Mickey Mouse and the Pixar one and they're you know, they I think I think they enjoy I

01:49:54 ◼   ► Don't know who's paying. I don't even know who's paying whom they're

01:49:57 ◼   ► Like, who is paying? Is Apple paying Disney or is Disney paying Apple? I honestly—

01:50:05 ◼   ► That's an excellent question.

01:50:06 ◼   ► I don't know, but I feel like they don't want Universal making one for the minions without

01:50:14 ◼   ► Apple's involvement. Just, you know, here you go, here's your minion's watch face. You know,

01:50:18 ◼   ► they like having that control. So I don't think it's going to happen.

01:50:22 ◼   ► - To me the argument would be out of functionality's sake,

01:50:26 ◼   ► now that this watch face is basically becoming

01:50:30 ◼   ► the equivalent of the panic activity monitor screen

01:50:34 ◼   ► or whatever that, you know.

01:50:36 ◼   ► - Status board.

01:50:38 ◼   ► - Status board, yeah.

01:50:39 ◼   ► I guess the info graph and the digital info graph

01:50:44 ◼   ► provide enough of a canvas that you're more limited

01:50:48 ◼   ► by what Apple allows you to do functionally

01:50:50 ◼   ► than by how it looks necessarily or how it's laid out.

01:50:54 ◼   ► But I could see a world of different possibilities

01:50:59 ◼   ► of different configurations and features

01:51:04 ◼   ► that a built-in watch face would never really support

01:51:08 ◼   ► out of the box that could be potentially useful

01:51:10 ◼   ► or interesting.

01:51:11 ◼   ► But it's been interesting to see over the years

01:51:16 ◼   ► what they allow you to customize and what they don't.

01:51:19 ◼   ► Like on the iPhone, first you couldn't even set

01:51:22 ◼   ► the background, now you can.

01:51:24 ◼   ► So you can make your phone as ugly as you want it to.

01:51:26 ◼   ► But you still can't custom configure icons.

01:51:31 ◼   ► Apple is still the only, I mean, sort of,

01:51:34 ◼   ► like Major League Baseball Apple let you change

01:51:36 ◼   ► the icon to your favorite team.

01:51:40 ◼   ► But I believe Apple is still the only calendar app

01:51:43 ◼   ► that has the correct date in their icon.

01:51:46 ◼   ► - Right, and the way that their clock app

01:51:49 ◼   ► has an actual moving second hand.

01:51:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, and is that just a battery and CPU consideration,

01:51:56 ◼   ► or do they just not want to see,

01:51:58 ◼   ► the way that Twitter stopped letting you use an animation

01:52:02 ◼   ► as your avatar, do they just not want to imagine a world

01:52:06 ◼   ► where every app icon is moving all the time?

01:52:09 ◼   ► - Right.

01:52:10 ◼   ► - So I could see them being, I could see a case where,

01:52:13 ◼   ► obviously they haven't gotten to it yet.

01:52:15 ◼   ► There seems to be not much,

01:52:18 ◼   ► they definitely seem to be aware

01:52:20 ◼   ► how useful the watch face is.

01:52:22 ◼   ► Like it is clearly the most useful screen.

01:52:25 ◼   ► So they're onto that.

01:52:28 ◼   ► As to whether or not they let you as a developer

01:52:33 ◼   ► decide how the things are laid out

01:52:37 ◼   ► or the size or the functionality of them,

01:52:41 ◼   ► you're right, it probably seems,

01:52:43 ◼   ► That seems like two or three steps beyond where we're going.

01:52:47 ◼   ► - And again, I don't mean to be a Debbie Downer here on this.

01:52:51 ◼   ► I just don't think they want to do it.

01:52:53 ◼   ► And if I, like as an outsider,

01:52:56 ◼   ► somebody who just is a customer and has an Apple Watch,

01:53:00 ◼   ► I kind of wish they would allow it because I would,

01:53:04 ◼   ► I am vaguely dissatisfied with every single Apple Watch face

01:53:08 ◼   ► and I feel like if third-party developers

01:53:12 ◼   ► could make their own, I could get one that I think is perfect. And so, me as a user kind

01:53:18 ◼   ► of wishes they would open it. But if I worked at Apple and it was my decision to make whether

01:53:23 ◼   ► Apple Watch would open to third parties, I'd probably say no because I would selfishly—I

01:53:29 ◼   ► would enjoy the fact that we have complete control over the watch faces. And I do think

01:53:34 ◼   ► that it's because Apple sort of sees itself as a "real watchmaker," you know, that

01:53:41 ◼   ► treat the watch a little differently than they treat other devices and they're a little

01:53:45 ◼   ► bit more protective of what it looks like. Every single watch face that they provide

01:53:53 ◼   ► is like they think that this is copacetic with the Apple Watch brand. And if they opened

01:53:59 ◼   ► it up to all third parties, they'd lose that. So maybe the best case scenario—and

01:54:04 ◼   ► I know Stephen Trouton Smith even said this on Twitter at some point over this thread—is

01:54:08 ◼   ► is that what he hopes would be like a middle ground,

01:54:11 ◼   ► where instead of like the app store,

01:54:13 ◼   ► where there's 10,000, 10, 20,000 developers

01:54:16 ◼   ► and they're all submitting watch faces,

01:54:17 ◼   ► if Apple just picked a hand-selected limited third parties

01:54:22 ◼   ► to be able to bless them with the ability

01:54:24 ◼   ► to provide third-party faces,

01:54:27 ◼   ► that that's an interesting middle ground.

01:54:29 ◼   ► And Steven said that he'd be happy with that

01:54:31 ◼   ► because if that was even possible technically,

01:54:34 ◼   ► he could hack it and make his own.

01:54:38 ◼   ► Like all he needs is for them to allow it at all,

01:54:42 ◼   ► and then he could just make his own watch faces