The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► We gotta pack a three hour show into about 90 minutes here,

00:00:02 ◼   ► Rene.

00:00:03 ◼   ► - We can do it.

00:00:04 ◼   ► - I think we can.

00:00:04 ◼   ► No baseball, no sports, no movies, nothing like that.

00:00:08 ◼   ► We gotta get right to work.

00:00:10 ◼   ► - Okay.

00:00:10 ◼   ► - Got a good list of topics.

00:00:12 ◼   ► I'm gonna say number one, I wanna talk about

00:00:15 ◼   ► MacBook keyboard failures.

00:00:18 ◼   ► It's a recurring theme on the show.

00:00:20 ◼   ► And in between the last episode of this show

00:00:22 ◼   ► and us talking today, a fellow I know

00:00:26 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:00:28 ◼   ► got hit by the speck of dust of doom.

00:00:31 ◼   ► And that fellow would be you.

00:00:34 ◼   ► - Yeah, like you, I think we both had a bunch

00:00:37 ◼   ► of different review units since they came out in 2016.

00:00:41 ◼   ► They were the original Skylake ones,

00:00:43 ◼   ► they were last year's Kaby Lake ones.

00:00:45 ◼   ► Between MacBooks and MacBook Pros, my own and Apple's,

00:00:48 ◼   ► I've probably gone through eight,

00:00:50 ◼   ► and I've used two or three of them consistently,

00:00:52 ◼   ► and I never had any problem, and then two weeks ago,

00:00:56 ◼   ► the control key stopped working.

00:00:59 ◼   ► And I don't use the control key often.

00:01:00 ◼   ► I use it for terminal and ludicrously to pick up,

00:01:03 ◼   ► to pull out the emoji keyboard picker.

00:01:05 ◼   ► - Yes, yes, yes. - Yeah.

00:01:06 ◼   ► (laughs)

00:01:07 ◼   ► And I wasn't able to do that anymore.

00:01:10 ◼   ► - For people who do not know, you can type on a Mac,

00:01:15 ◼   ► you can type control command space

00:01:18 ◼   ► and it brings up the emoji picker.

00:01:19 ◼   ► And it's a fantastic feature.

00:01:23 ◼   ► It's funny, I've kind of gotten away from tips and tricks

00:01:25 ◼   ► in recent years. I don't know why, but it's like I've started, I'll get to some later

00:01:30 ◼   ► that are on the show notes, but that's another one. And it's like, I know that there's some

00:01:35 ◼   ► cool third party utilities that help with emoji and stuff like that. But I think if

00:01:38 ◼   ► people knew about the command control space and the fact that you can search, yes, it's,

00:01:45 ◼   ► it's a fantastic feature. It's so it's like, you know, you type flower and it's like all

00:01:49 ◼   ► the flower emoji show up. Oh, I love this feature. Anyway, I can't reassign it. So if

00:01:54 ◼   ► control key is gone you just you can't use it which exact model was this it was

00:02:03 ◼   ► a MacBook Pro correct yeah it was a 13 inch MacBook Pro with the touch bar all

00:02:08 ◼   ► right almost so what's the current status you made a video I have it in the

00:02:11 ◼   ► show notes it will be there and you can you know you went through the rigmarole

00:02:15 ◼   ► with the Apple support document where you hold the the MacBook at a precise 61

00:02:21 ◼   ► degree angle and then hold the can of air at a 57 degree angle.

00:02:27 ◼   ► Yeah, and you can't go too far because then it'll push cold out and not dust and you'll

00:02:31 ◼   ► get, not that I did this too often, but you'll get like frozen stuff all over your keyboard.

00:02:35 ◼   ► I think that's why some people like, you know, it's just like everything in life where it's

00:02:40 ◼   ► like you can go really cheap or really expensive. But I know some people have those, instead

00:02:45 ◼   ► of buying the aerosol cans of compressed air, you can get like an actual mechanical device

00:02:51 ◼   ► know, which I think solves that problem of when you hold it at a weird angle, it turns

00:02:55 ◼   ► to ice and you worry that you're about to give yourself frostbite or something like

00:02:59 ◼   ► that.

00:03:00 ◼   ► Ben Stuart Yeah, no, I went through all of that and it

00:03:02 ◼   ► worked-ish. If I hit the control key a little more briskly than I usually hit keys and I

00:03:08 ◼   ► bias towards the left side, it works, but it's not comfortable. I have been shown how

00:03:15 ◼   ► to take the key off. I have friends in the industry and they've shown like an easy way

00:03:19 ◼   ► taking the key off. So I'll probably do that next. Pop it off, clean it more thoroughly,

00:03:22 ◼   ► pop it back on.

00:03:23 ◼   ► You know, I've heard that taking the keys off this model of keyboard, it's in the

00:03:28 ◼   ► litany of things that are bad about this keyboard design. What I've heard is that it is a precarious,

00:03:35 ◼   ► it is very precarious and that you can damage it. You know, and that in fact, it's so

00:03:41 ◼   ► easy to do that even people who take it in for service, like the genius or might try

00:03:46 ◼   ► to do it and therefore it's covered but then it's like oh broke a little piece of plastic

00:03:50 ◼   ► now the whole top piece has to go back and be replaced yeah like apparently the space

00:03:54 ◼   ► bar is just impossible because it will break if you try to take it that's what i've heard

00:03:57 ◼   ► yeah yeah some of the other keys aren't as dangerous um so i might try that or i might

00:04:02 ◼   ► just take it to the gym i i use my space bar yes so does casey nice that apparently he

00:04:10 ◼   ► had huge complaints about the space bar all right so your current status is you haven't

00:04:14 ◼   ► - You haven't taken it in for service.

00:04:15 ◼   ► You're thinking about performing surgery.

00:04:17 ◼   ► And you know what the worst part is?

00:04:18 ◼   ► Control is the one, you know,

00:04:20 ◼   ► there's option and command on both sides,

00:04:22 ◼   ► but only one control key.

00:04:23 ◼   ► - Yeah, absolutely.

00:04:24 ◼   ► And I should preface this by saying that

00:04:26 ◼   ► I didn't have any problems at all with these keyboards.

00:04:29 ◼   ► My previous generation MacBook before this new keyboard,

00:04:31 ◼   ► the scissor switch one, I had the E key fail

00:04:34 ◼   ► and I took it in and I had, it was like $500

00:04:38 ◼   ► because they had to swap out the entire top case

00:04:40 ◼   ► and battery assembly as well.

00:04:42 ◼   ► And it took 24 hours.

00:04:43 ◼   ► It was covered by AppleCare.

00:04:45 ◼   ► So I just thought I was lucky, but now apparently there's no generation of MacBook whose keys

00:04:50 ◼   ► I can tolerate.

00:04:51 ◼   ► Darrell Bock Well, and we have WWDC next week, so you need

00:04:54 ◼   ► this thing, right?

00:04:55 ◼   ► I mean, do you have like a Plan B?

00:04:57 ◼   ► David Schanzer Yeah, I still have the review unit they gave

00:05:01 ◼   ► us last year for Mac OS High Sierra, which I haven't used very much.

00:05:06 ◼   ► But it's 15 inches, which I don't usually travel with, but I might do that and just

00:05:09 ◼   ► bring my MacBook Pro with me.

00:05:11 ◼   ► Darrell Bock Comfortable on the near.

00:05:12 ◼   ► my iMac Pro. Well, I would just use it. Sorry. I use the iPad Pro on the airplane now because

00:05:16 ◼   ► the seats have gotten so small. It feels like they're not Mac friendly.

00:05:19 ◼   ► No, that's true. It's very true. I can't remember the last time I used to. I guess

00:05:23 ◼   ► the only time I sometimes use a Mac on a plane is very specifically the return flight home

00:05:31 ◼   ► after an Apple event if I haven't finished writing about it. That's like the one time.

00:05:35 ◼   ► Like I don't do any kind of general productivity with a Mac on an airplane. It's just too

00:05:41 ◼   ► unwieldy. Even when I get upgraded and I'm in first class and there's plenty of room,

00:05:48 ◼   ► it's just ungainly. It's not your shorter room, but there's no good place to put it.

00:05:54 ◼   ► You can literally put it on your lap and it's not really a great angle. And then you put

00:05:59 ◼   ► it on the tray and I feel like I'm a little kid at the lunch table and my arms are up

00:06:03 ◼   ► at my shoulders. It's too high.

00:06:05 ◼   ► - And the funny thing for me is I'm keyboard agnostic.

00:06:08 ◼   ► Like I can use the iPad Pro fine.

00:06:10 ◼   ► I do tons of writing on it.

00:06:12 ◼   ► I can use the old MacBook keyboard, the new one.

00:06:14 ◼   ► I was setting up the review unit

00:06:16 ◼   ► that I hadn't used in a long time.

00:06:17 ◼   ► And those keys are just super tight.

00:06:19 ◼   ► And then I went back to the 2016 one

00:06:20 ◼   ► that I've been using for two years.

00:06:22 ◼   ► Like all these butterfly keys feel all loosey goosey now.

00:06:24 ◼   ► It's amazing how fast your brain acclimatizes.

00:06:27 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, I totally, I mean,

00:06:28 ◼   ► I've never really used the new one.

00:06:30 ◼   ► And Ben Thompson and I talked about this,

00:06:31 ◼   ► I think on the last episode.

00:06:32 ◼   ► I've never really used one as my main machine.

00:06:34 ◼   ► I've only used review units.

00:06:36 ◼   ► My personal MacBook Pro is still a 2014.

00:06:38 ◼   ► But even after just a few minutes with the other one,

00:06:41 ◼   ► this keyboard, I love it because I feel it's 100% reliable.

00:06:45 ◼   ► But it does feel like the keys are all ready to fall off.

00:06:50 ◼   ► They're so jaded. - See, they both betrayed me

00:06:52 ◼   ► now, so I have no safe harbor.

00:06:53 ◼   ► - All right.

00:06:56 ◼   ► - But it is, I mean, a lot of people are complaining

00:06:59 ◼   ► that you do have to replace the entire top assembly.

00:07:02 ◼   ► And that's an industry-wide problem,

00:07:04 ◼   ► it's a trans industry problem because Apple made unibodies and

00:07:07 ◼   ► they're much better structurally, but they're huge

00:07:08 ◼   ► things you have to replace. And your car now has these huge

00:07:11 ◼   ► crash panels and crumple zones. If you get a little dent, you've

00:07:14 ◼   ► got to replace the entire panel. And as we get better and better

00:07:17 ◼   ► manufacturing, stronger and more efficient devices, we lose we

00:07:21 ◼   ► lose the miniature like the modularity of them.

00:07:24 ◼   ► You know, this is I'll hear from it. And I know that there are

00:07:28 ◼   ► people listening to the show who are on the other side of the

00:07:30 ◼   ► fence and who are angry if you know better to have very strong

00:07:35 ◼   ► feelings about the entire industry but Apple and Apple

00:07:39 ◼   ► specifically is move away from modular devices meaning you know

00:07:47 ◼   ► the best example this primary example is room removable

00:07:50 ◼   ► batteries right i mean again it was a topic on my show one of

00:07:55 ◼   ► the most recent episodes but it's funny the way that it used

00:07:57 ◼   ► be like it seems so antiquated now but part of like the pre WWDC trip checklist is make

00:08:06 ◼   ► sure both of your MacBook batteries are fully charged. Right? Where's that spare? Where's

00:08:10 ◼   ► the spare that I haven't used since the last time I went on a big trip? Oh, there it is.

00:08:13 ◼   ► What's the charge on that one? You know, it just seems so ridiculous now. Now it's the

00:08:19 ◼   ► external USB C battery. Right. But you know, and it's the same, you know, with the phone,

00:08:24 ◼   ► It's just, you know, there's just something goes wrong

00:08:27 ◼   ► and usually a lot of it has to be replaced.

00:08:29 ◼   ► And I get it, you know, and there's trade-offs, you know.

00:08:32 ◼   ► There were advantages to being able to just swap out

00:08:35 ◼   ► the keyboard without swapping out everything else,

00:08:37 ◼   ► but there's also disadvantages.

00:08:39 ◼   ► And like you said, you know, the structural integrity

00:08:41 ◼   ► of the unibody designs is incredible.

00:08:42 ◼   ► Like, you pick up an old, you know, MacBook

00:08:46 ◼   ► from 10, 15 years ago, and not only does it feel

00:08:49 ◼   ► thick and heavy, but it just feels sort of--

00:08:51 ◼   ► - It's creaky.

00:08:51 ◼   ► - Junk, yeah, creaky, exactly.

00:08:53 ◼   ► It's like, man, I can't believe that we tolerated this.

00:08:56 ◼   ► We were spending $3,500 on these things back then

00:08:59 ◼   ► and they creak.

00:09:00 ◼   ► - And that's the opportunity cause.

00:09:01 ◼   ► It's like everybody wants everything, but you can't.

00:09:03 ◼   ► Everything's a trade-off.

00:09:04 ◼   ► Apple can design for structural integrity

00:09:06 ◼   ► or they can design for modularity.

00:09:08 ◼   ► You can't have both.

00:09:09 ◼   ► You gotta have trade-offs.

00:09:10 ◼   ► - So I'm on board with that.

00:09:12 ◼   ► That's the trend.

00:09:12 ◼   ► I see why.

00:09:14 ◼   ► I see that the train left the station years ago.

00:09:16 ◼   ► I'm on board with it.

00:09:18 ◼   ► But that to me, it's not an argument

00:09:20 ◼   ► that Apple should go somehow figure out a way

00:09:24 ◼   ► to make a keyboard that can be swapped in

00:09:26 ◼   ► if the keyboard goes bad.

00:09:28 ◼   ► The argument is that they, with this design,

00:09:31 ◼   ► the keyboard needs to be more reliable than ever.

00:09:33 ◼   ► - Yes. - Right?

00:09:34 ◼   ► Like, it's not just that this keyboard

00:09:36 ◼   ► isn't reliable enough, it's that it really should be,

00:09:39 ◼   ► given how hard it is to replace

00:09:41 ◼   ► and how integrated it is with the whole top piece.

00:09:44 ◼   ► It really oughta be more reliable than the previous design.

00:09:48 ◼   ► - And that was the worst part.

00:09:49 ◼   ► Apple Insider did a great job with the numbers,

00:09:51 ◼   ► but almost nobody actually bothered to read the article.

00:09:53 ◼   ► It didn't say that there were more,

00:09:56 ◼   ► so just to back up for a second,

00:09:58 ◼   ► in every way the new MacBook Pro

00:10:00 ◼   ► looks to be way more reliable than previous generations.

00:10:03 ◼   ► The number of incidents in their sampling pool

00:10:04 ◼   ► were way down in everything except for keyboard.

00:10:08 ◼   ► In 2016, they were way up.

00:10:09 ◼   ► In 2017, they looked like they approached 2015 levels again,

00:10:14 ◼   ► but that's when the rest of the computer

00:10:15 ◼   ► got way, way better and the keyboard really didn't.

00:10:18 ◼   ► So we're just left to see that maybe it was worse,

00:10:21 ◼   ► maybe they've slowly improved it,

00:10:22 ◼   ► but it hasn't seen anywhere near the improvements

00:10:24 ◼   ► of the rest of the body.

00:10:25 ◼   ► - Yeah, the one that I like the most is the hinge.

00:10:29 ◼   ► And when they first came out with these devices,

00:10:32 ◼   ► and I had my briefing, and they said,

00:10:34 ◼   ► "This is, you know, we can't put everything in a keynote."

00:10:36 ◼   ► And there's some things that would sound silly

00:10:38 ◼   ► in a keynote, like bragging about the hinge,

00:10:40 ◼   ► but that the new hinge compared to like my 2014,

00:10:44 ◼   ► A, the biggest difference is that it's so much easier

00:10:47 ◼   ► to open the screen without like with just a thumb,

00:10:50 ◼   ► without the bottom moving and to with like one finger

00:10:54 ◼   ► to position it at exactly the angle you want

00:10:57 ◼   ► and it'll stay there, right?

00:10:59 ◼   ► Like, so it's easier to move, you know,

00:11:02 ◼   ► to adjust the angle that it's open,

00:11:04 ◼   ► but yet also just as stable in terms of,

00:11:08 ◼   ► oh, it's not gonna droop a little bit when you let go.

00:11:10 ◼   ► It's truly a fantastic hinge

00:11:11 ◼   ► and I believe it's actually more reliable.

00:11:13 ◼   ► I think that's one of the,

00:11:15 ◼   ► Because it's a common source of failure.

00:11:18 ◼   ► Because there's so much that goes,

00:11:19 ◼   ► passes between the display and the bottom part.

00:11:23 ◼   ► All right, that's it for the keyboard.

00:11:27 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:11:28 ◼   ► Oh, here's one.

00:11:29 ◼   ► Here's a tip and trick I posted over the weekend.

00:11:32 ◼   ► I've avoided this feature my entire life.

00:11:34 ◼   ► There's a feature in iOS that you can turn on in security,

00:11:37 ◼   ► in the settings,

00:11:39 ◼   ► that after 10 failed passcode attempts, wipe the device.

00:11:45 ◼   ► And I forget when they added that.

00:11:46 ◼   ► I think it was back around IS4.

00:11:49 ◼   ► - It's when they added the hardware encryption

00:11:51 ◼   ► 'cause they could just throw the keys away.

00:11:53 ◼   ► - Right.

00:11:53 ◼   ► - They didn't have to actually wipe the device.

00:11:54 ◼   ► - Right, that's the way that works is it,

00:11:57 ◼   ► everything on your SSD and your phone is encrypted.

00:12:01 ◼   ► And rather than sit there and wait for a 256 gigabyte drive

00:12:08 ◼   ► to be wiped, they can just throw away the key

00:12:11 ◼   ► and without the key, there's no way

00:12:13 ◼   ► It's effectively unreadable.

00:12:15 ◼   ► - It's pseudo random gibberish to anybody who looks at it.

00:12:18 ◼   ► - Right.

00:12:19 ◼   ► I avoided this feature for the reason

00:12:23 ◼   ► that it seemed like a good idea.

00:12:25 ◼   ► And I'm trying to think, what are the hypothetical cases?

00:12:30 ◼   ► Like personally, I'm not really worried

00:12:33 ◼   ► about law enforcement to my knowledge.

00:12:36 ◼   ► I have broken any laws other than the speed limit

00:12:39 ◼   ► in a number of years, but it's possible.

00:12:42 ◼   ► It's, you know, I don't know, something could happen, you know. And if my phone were taken by,

00:12:49 ◼   ► you know, I don't know, TSA agents or something. Even just a thief who wants to not have to bother

00:12:54 ◼   ► with activation lock to get into the phone. But the most common scenario for me would be a thief,

00:13:00 ◼   ► you know, and it could be something like it falls out of my pocket in a cab and I leave it and

00:13:05 ◼   ► somebody else picks it up. In theory, I don't want to be paranoid. But, you know, remember when Matt

00:13:11 ◼   ► Honan from now at BuzzFeed got targeted as a journalist a couple of years ago and had

00:13:16 ◼   ► his iCloud account hacked. And once his iCloud account was hacked because they had access

00:13:20 ◼   ► to his email and he used that email for a whole bunch of other services, you know, he

00:13:24 ◼   ► got owned in a bunch of ways. It's possible that somebody, you know, WWDC who knows who

00:13:29 ◼   ► I am could try to take my phone or something like that. I never turned it on. But then

00:13:35 ◼   ► I looked at it and I just have been reevaluating my security stuff overall, just sort of a

00:13:41 ◼   ► a self-audit on what do I do. I'm looking at two-factor stuff too, like how do I keep

00:13:47 ◼   ► track of those one-time codes. But I looked at this feature and I realized that I had

00:13:52 ◼   ► misinterpreted it all along, ever since until this weekend. I thought that if you turn this

00:13:57 ◼   ► on, somebody who got your phone, like a prankster at a bar, a "friend" who just leaves your

00:14:04 ◼   ► phone, that they could sit there and enter "1234 1234 1234 1234 1234" 10 times and then

00:14:10 ◼   ► and boom, your phone's erased. Turns out it doesn't work like that at all. And the difference

00:14:17 ◼   ► is—well, number one, I asked in a poll on Twitter, which I find fun sometimes, "Do

00:14:22 ◼   ► you enable the feature?" And I got, "Do you use that feature?" And out of 4,700

00:14:29 ◼   ► votes plus a bunch of Tweetbot users who just wrote yes or no, no problem. But it seemed

00:14:37 ◼   ► to run like this. Almost exactly, it was 34% and 66%, so exactly one-third, two-third.

00:14:43 ◼   ► One-third enable it, two-third don't. And the number one reason people gave for not

00:14:48 ◼   ► is no, I have kids. Meaning they don't want their kid, you know, you're sleeping, kid

00:14:53 ◼   ► comes into bedroom, picks up your phone, starts playing with it, trying to unlock it, and

00:14:56 ◼   ► then all of a sudden your phone's erased. Well, here's the thing that this feature is

00:14:59 ◼   ► so much more clever than I had thought, and I shouldn't be surprised. You get five free

00:15:06 ◼   ► attempts at your passcode. Five as fast as you can enter them. But after that fifth failed

00:15:12 ◼   ► one, you're putting a one-minute timeout where the only thing you can do with your

00:15:15 ◼   ► phone is make a 911 call. And if the sixth one fails, you go to a five-minute timeout.

00:15:22 ◼   ► And if that one fails, you go to a 15-minute timeout. And I think it—I didn't press

00:15:28 ◼   ► my luck further than that. But apparently, the timeouts escalate to the point where no

00:15:33 ◼   ► matter how long you wait between tries, it takes at least three and a half hours to get

00:15:37 ◼   ► 10th to enter the 10th one. Once I realized that, I turned it on instantly on every iOS

00:15:45 ◼   ► device I have because I cannot imagine a scenario where the phone is out of my hands without

00:15:53 ◼   ► my knowledge for three and a half hours and where I wouldn't want this feature enabled.

00:15:58 ◼   ► - Yes.

00:16:00 ◼   ► No, I mean, there's a classic debate

00:16:01 ◼   ► and I have to credit Dave Nainian, a super duper,

00:16:03 ◼   ► for opening my eyes to it.

00:16:04 ◼   ► I was all about everything has to be encrypted,

00:16:07 ◼   ► everything has to be safe, everything has to be secure.

00:16:09 ◼   ► And when I was talking to him for an article,

00:16:11 ◼   ► he said, "Well, no, because in a lot of cases,

00:16:14 ◼   ► you don't want fail secure, you want fail safe."

00:16:16 ◼   ► There are circumstances where your worst nightmare

00:16:19 ◼   ► is information being stolen from you.

00:16:21 ◼   ► But in other situations, your worst nightmare

00:16:23 ◼   ► is you losing access to that information.

00:16:25 ◼   ► And it's why some people will never encrypt backup drives

00:16:28 ◼   ► because if those have your wedding photos

00:16:30 ◼   ► or the photos of your children being born,

00:16:32 ◼   ► you cannot do disc recovery on an encrypted drive.

00:16:35 ◼   ► So if somebody else deals those photos,

00:16:36 ◼   ► yeah, they have your photos,

00:16:37 ◼   ► but if you lose them, you're getting divorced.

00:16:39 ◼   ► Like there's just no way to come back from that.

00:16:41 ◼   ► And this to me, I think people were worried

00:16:43 ◼   ► that they would lose their data.

00:16:45 ◼   ► Someone like their kid would type it in,

00:16:46 ◼   ► but this is really a case where you can have that security.

00:16:49 ◼   ► You're not risking the deletion of your information.

00:16:51 ◼   ► - One of my favorite tips along those lines,

00:16:53 ◼   ► and I remember when I first read it, I was just like,

00:16:57 ◼   ► No, but it was because it was from somebody who I trust implicitly, Bruce

00:17:02 ◼   ► Schneier, security expert, great writer. But he wrote a couple of years back and

00:17:08 ◼   ► he's referenced it since that for a lot of typical users a great way to keep

00:17:13 ◼   ► track of your passwords, especially important ones, is to write them down on

00:17:17 ◼   ► a piece of paper. And you think like, "No!" But his explanation, it makes sense, is

00:17:24 ◼   ► is that people have been good at keeping physical objects,

00:17:29 ◼   ► important physical objects secure

00:17:32 ◼   ► and in a known location forever.

00:17:35 ◼   ► Like we're kind of hooked up evolutionarily

00:17:37 ◼   ► to be able to keep a physical object safe.

00:17:40 ◼   ► It's the digital stuff that we can make goofy,

00:17:44 ◼   ► absent-minded mistakes or be tricked into fishing

00:17:47 ◼   ► or something like that.

00:17:48 ◼   ► But like if you keep your passport safe,

00:17:52 ◼   ► Why not keep a piece of paper with your most important passwords wherever you keep your

00:17:57 ◼   ► passport?

00:17:58 ◼   ► It's probably way safer than any digital and less likely to be victimized by phishing

00:18:04 ◼   ► or something than anything you could do digitally.

00:18:07 ◼   ► And this is also part of when you listen to Apple's rationale for why they stay in countries

00:18:11 ◼   ► like China or the data repatriation thing, France wants citizens' data to be local

00:18:16 ◼   ► to that country.

00:18:17 ◼   ► And you can understand this on a global scale.

00:18:19 ◼   ► In some countries we happen to like better than others or we are less afraid of than

00:18:23 ◼   ► others but no one really likes the idea of a foreign government having ownership of their

00:18:26 ◼   ► data but one of the things that big companies have to factor in is for an average citizen

00:18:31 ◼   ► even in China, even in the EU, even in North America, South America, whatever, some of

00:18:35 ◼   ► them care less about security than they do about backup and them keeping access to iCloud

00:18:40 ◼   ► photo library as silly as it sounds is so much more important to them than them having

00:18:45 ◼   ► Access to a VPN app. Yeah, and they have to balance the interests of a very large customer base. Hmm. Totally true

00:18:52 ◼   ► All right. Let me take a break here and thank our first sponsor. It is one of my favorite sponsors

00:18:56 ◼   ► What a fabulous product these people sell away away makes

00:19:01 ◼   ► Suitcases really travel bags and accessories

00:19:06 ◼   ► And they're just fantastic

00:19:09 ◼   ► They use high quality materials and have a much lower price compared to other brands because they're one of these

00:19:14 ◼   ► you know, internet companies, you know, typical podcast advertisers, they sell direct, they make

00:19:19 ◼   ► them, they make these things themselves, they design them themselves, and they sell them direct

00:19:23 ◼   ► to you. So there's no retail markup like you get when you buy a suitcase at a, you know, retail

00:19:27 ◼   ► store. Truly, truly low prices for really high quality suitcase. They have over 10 colors and

00:19:34 ◼   ► five sizes. The sizes are the most aptly named sizes I could imagine. They're called the carry

00:19:42 ◼   ► carry-on, the bigger carry-on, the medium, the large, and the kids carry-on. You know

00:19:47 ◼   ► exactly how big these things are just from the names, right? All their suitcases are

00:19:52 ◼   ► made with premium German polycarbonate that's very lightweight. I can verify this and bends

00:19:57 ◼   ► but never breaks. The interior features a patent pending compression system useful for

00:20:02 ◼   ► overpackers. This is one of my favorite features about this suitcase because my previous carry-on

00:20:07 ◼   ► was effectively just a big rectangle.

00:20:09 ◼   ► I had it for years and years and years.

00:20:11 ◼   ► I mean, maybe close to 20 years.

00:20:13 ◼   ► But you just opened it up

00:20:16 ◼   ► and it's just a big rectangle of volume

00:20:19 ◼   ► and I would just stuff everything in there.

00:20:21 ◼   ► The little features, it's not a lot, it's not complicated,

00:20:24 ◼   ► but the couple of features they have in here,

00:20:27 ◼   ► like a little panel that you can secure down with a belt,

00:20:31 ◼   ► keeps your shirts from getting wrinkled up.

00:20:34 ◼   ► have a little bag that's perfect for storing your dirty clothes so your dirty clothes aren't

00:20:39 ◼   ► getting mixed in with clean. It's really great. It's a really great system. They've got four

00:20:45 ◼   ► 360 degree spinner wheels. They're great wheels. Really, I've had this bag. If you can, if

00:20:50 ◼   ► you're a longtime listener, you know that a ways been sponsoring this show for a while.

00:20:54 ◼   ► And they sent me one of these suitcases back when I first started sponsoring and the thing

00:20:57 ◼   ► still looks brand new. It looks like I could take it back. Honest to God, it looks like

00:21:02 ◼   ► I can take it back and get a refund. It's in such great shape. And that's not like I

00:21:05 ◼   ► baby it, but the wheels are as good as they were on the first day. It's really great.

00:21:12 ◼   ► And the other thing is the carry-ons come with a built-in battery that you can use as

00:21:17 ◼   ► USB ports and you can use it to charge whatever, anything that charges over USB. And I know

00:21:23 ◼   ► that there's some rules on certain airlines now about these built-in batteries. You can

00:21:27 ◼   ► take it out very easily. So if you're flying somewhere and they're like, you know, you

00:21:31 ◼   ► you gotta take the battery out.

00:21:32 ◼   ► You can just take it out.

00:21:32 ◼   ► It's not a problem.

00:21:33 ◼   ► It's not like you can't take your suitcase on the plane

00:21:35 ◼   ► because you have a battery.

00:21:36 ◼   ► It comes right out.

00:21:38 ◼   ► But it's just such a convenient thing.

00:21:40 ◼   ► So it's like every seat in the airport now has,

00:21:42 ◼   ► for me, has a charger because I've got my bag with me.

00:21:45 ◼   ► You don't have to hunt around for the seats

00:21:47 ◼   ► that happen to be near an outlet or something like that.

00:21:50 ◼   ► Anyway, they have a 100-day free trial.

00:21:52 ◼   ► So you buy it, use it for three months,

00:21:54 ◼   ► and if you don't like it, you can get a refund.

00:21:56 ◼   ► No reason to worry about it.

00:22:00 ◼   ► And they have free shipping on any order

00:22:02 ◼   ► within the contiguous US.

00:22:04 ◼   ► So sorry, Alaska.

00:22:05 ◼   ► Anyway, it's a great product.

00:22:09 ◼   ► I use it, I'll be packing it for WWDC over the weekend.

00:22:12 ◼   ► Wouldn't wanna travel without it.

00:22:16 ◼   ► It's a really great bag.

00:22:17 ◼   ► Very lightweight, great wheels, everything like that.

00:22:19 ◼   ► Here's the deal for listeners of the show.

00:22:20 ◼   ► You've saved 20 bucks at awaytravel.com/talkshow.

00:22:24 ◼   ► Awaytravel.com/talkshow.

00:22:27 ◼   ► And remember that promo code talk show.

00:22:29 ◼   ► know the just talk show and you can save 20 bucks at checkout. So there you go.

00:22:34 ◼   ► Save 20 bucks at away travel.com/talk show.

00:22:37 ◼   ► Next on the list. We got to keep going. We got so much, so much.

00:22:44 ◼   ► Do you know what I, while we're talking about security,

00:22:49 ◼   ► there's these apps. One of the things that I've done,

00:22:54 ◼   ► I just isn't even on the notes, but

00:22:56 ◼   ► One of the things that I've been convinced of is that using your phone number as a second

00:23:03 ◼   ► factor in two-factor auth, meaning you say, "Oh, I'll use two-factor with this service

00:23:09 ◼   ► and I'll enter my name, my password, and then it'll send me an SMS message with a code and

00:23:16 ◼   ► I can enter the code." It's better than not having two-factor, but SMS, I've been convinced,

00:23:25 ◼   ► not something you should rely upon because of how many times I've seen stories of people,

00:23:31 ◼   ► their carrier getting social engineered effectively. So somebody who wants to steal Renee Richie's,

00:23:39 ◼   ► you know, Dropbox account, and they know your phone number, they could call your carrier

00:23:44 ◼   ► and say, Hey, this is Renee Richie, is it my phone number? I need to, you know, I need

00:23:49 ◼   ► to get a new SIM because I got this new phone, you know, what do you know, and you'd think

00:23:53 ◼   ► that shouldn't work. But and I don't think it's easy. I don't think it always works.

00:23:58 ◼   ► But I've read enough horror stories that it's not trustworthy.

00:24:01 ◼   ► Jared Ranerel I'll go a step further. I mean, I refuse to

00:24:03 ◼   ► use that because I've heard stories about people who are traveling and you know, they

00:24:07 ◼   ► have their tickets on their phone, they present it, and the custom person will just seize

00:24:10 ◼   ► the phone and then they see two factor, they can type in a request for it, get it on the

00:24:15 ◼   ► phone and get into your account. So it's I just don't think it's secure at all. It's

00:24:19 ◼   ► out of band, but it's doesn't add doesn't add any security to your device.

00:24:22 ◼   ► Yeah, that's interesting

00:24:24 ◼   ► And it's also the case I I you know and it's rare

00:24:30 ◼   ► I mean it's it's you know

00:24:31 ◼   ► This is not something you want to optimize for but it is an issue is you're in an airplane or you're overseas

00:24:38 ◼   ► Where you're just on Wi-Fi, so you don't have to incur roaming fees

00:24:43 ◼   ► And you've got Wi-Fi, but you can't get an SMS right? It's because you can't get a phone call up in the air

00:24:52 ◼   ► It's just not great. So I've tried to get rid of my phone number as a second factor

00:24:58 ◼   ► on any service that will let me, including Google. Like my Google accounts, I have a

00:25:03 ◼   ► few, but my Google accounts, none of them know my phone number anymore. I don't use

00:25:08 ◼   ► my phone for anything related to my accounts if I can. But then what do you use for a second

00:25:15 ◼   ► factor. Well, Apple uses Apple lets you not think about it because Apple uses just the

00:25:23 ◼   ► devices themselves, right? The assumption is if you have more than one Apple device

00:25:27 ◼   ► and you can say that you trust one, it will send push notifications. You may know people

00:25:33 ◼   ► out there may not even realize they're not using SMS for this, that it's just sort of

00:25:37 ◼   ► a magic right to your device. You know, if your phone's your trusted device and you're

00:25:42 ◼   ► setting up a new iPad and you're logging into iCloud, it'll send a push notification

00:25:47 ◼   ► to your other trusted devices. You might get the same thing on your Mac and your phone,

00:25:53 ◼   ► but then you answer it on one, put the code in, and then it's all good. And then the

00:25:56 ◼   ► new device is added to your list of trusted devices. That's something Apple can do,

00:26:03 ◼   ► and I think they've done a great job and it's sort of unheralded, but it wouldn't

00:26:07 ◼   ► for somebody like Dropbox or something like that. So what you can do, and again, I'm not

00:26:14 ◼   ► an expert on this, but they have these things, I forget the name of the protocol, it's like

00:26:18 ◼   ► T-O-T something, but effectively it's a standardized way to get one-time expiring passwords that

00:26:27 ◼   ► only last for like 30 seconds. Google has an app called Google Authenticator. Have you

00:26:32 ◼   ► ever used that?

00:26:33 ◼   ► I used to I use aussie now. That's where and that was what I'm switching to. That's exactly

00:26:38 ◼   ► great minds think alike. So but they generate the same type of codes. There are six digit

00:26:44 ◼   ► numbers, they only last for 30 seconds. And then the apps, all the apps I've tried,

00:26:49 ◼   ► show you like so if you have, you know, whatever your name is, at gmail.com,

00:26:54 ◼   ► you open up the app, and it'll say whatever your name at gmail.com. And it might say, you know,

00:27:01 ◼   ► 729123. But it'll tell you that it's got 20 seconds left. So if it says it only has three

00:27:07 ◼   ► seconds left, just wait three seconds. It'll give you the new one for the next 30 seconds,

00:27:12 ◼   ► then enter it in and you're in. So I've been using Google Authenticator for this for about

00:27:19 ◼   ► a year. And as part of my reevaluating my security stuff, the one thing that annoys

00:27:26 ◼   ► me about it is that Google Authenticator is tied to one phone. So like I have it on my

00:27:34 ◼   ► iPhone but then when I get a new iPhone it's like I have to kind of be careful because

00:27:40 ◼   ► I don't want to wipe the old phone until I've set up the new phone and used the old phone

00:27:45 ◼   ► to get the Google Authenticator codes because they're only being generated on that one device.

00:27:54 ◼   ► If I lost the phone, if somebody stole it, if it broke, if I dropped it and it just shattered,

00:27:59 ◼   ► somebody steals it, whatever. You're not locked out of your accounts. There's recovery codes

00:28:05 ◼   ► that you can print. And again, like the thing I just said, like keep them in a secure location.

00:28:11 ◼   ► There's ways to recover, but there's no easy way to get right in. Wouldn't it be better

00:28:16 ◼   ► if you could get it from any device? And that's what Authy does. Authy syncs these things

00:28:20 ◼   ► so you can install the Authy app, A-U-T-H-Y. And then you can get the same codes on multiple

00:28:29 ◼   ► devices. So I'm in the midst of moving everything from Google Authenticator to Authy for that

00:28:34 ◼   ► reason.

00:28:35 ◼   ► I use 1Password for passwords and they now have two factor built into them. They didn't

00:28:41 ◼   ► at the time, so I just got started with Authy and I stayed that way because I like having

00:28:45 ◼   ► a separate app for that.

00:28:46 ◼   ► Yeah, well, I know a couple of people, Ben Thompson, in particular, he uses one password,

00:28:50 ◼   ► and he uses authy for the one time fee. He's the one who kind of pushed me towards this.

00:28:54 ◼   ► And his explanation is exactly what he's just it. Maybe it's not even logical, but he just

00:28:59 ◼   ► doesn't want to have the password and the second factor in the same app. You know, like it somehow

00:29:06 ◼   ► feels more compartmentalized to have your password and one password and have your, you know, one time

00:29:13 ◼   ► authentication code in a separate app. I looked at one, I don't use one password for my passwords,

00:29:18 ◼   ► I just use the keychain. But I looked at one password as a rival to Authy, because I could

00:29:27 ◼   ► have it on my phone and my Mac and get, you know, just use it for these one-time keys. And it's a

00:29:34 ◼   ► great app, I could see why people like it, but it doesn't make sense to use it only, in my opinion,

00:29:39 ◼   ► to use it only for the one-time things.

00:29:41 ◼   ► Like you're either buying into the one password lifestyle

00:29:43 ◼   ► and putting everything in one password or it's overkill.

00:29:47 ◼   ► - So for me, I didn't, I liked the idea of iCloud Keychain,

00:29:50 ◼   ► but until iPhone 10 and Face ID,

00:29:53 ◼   ► they never put any sort of security intercept

00:29:55 ◼   ► between the device and the password.

00:29:58 ◼   ► So let's just say, you know, someone's lost

00:30:00 ◼   ► and they wanna use your phone or you're at a conference

00:30:01 ◼   ► and someone wants to show you a website,

00:30:03 ◼   ► you hand them your phone and they have immediate access

00:30:06 ◼   ► to your passwords and your credit cards,

00:30:08 ◼   ► where with something like 1Password or LastPass

00:30:11 ◼   ► or Dashlane, all those things,

00:30:13 ◼   ► they'd have to enter in another password

00:30:14 ◼   ► or use Touch ID or Face ID to get it.

00:30:17 ◼   ► But now with iPhone 10 and the Face ID thing,

00:30:19 ◼   ► if it had launched like that,

00:30:20 ◼   ► if it had launched with Touch ID support,

00:30:22 ◼   ► I would have probably gone all in on it.

00:30:24 ◼   ► - Well, I get away from that

00:30:25 ◼   ► because I don't let anybody use my phone.

00:30:27 ◼   ► (laughing)

00:30:28 ◼   ► - That's fair.

00:30:30 ◼   ► - Not really a problem.

00:30:31 ◼   ► But anyway, Authi, I recommend it.

00:30:34 ◼   ► So the takeaway from this segment of the show

00:30:37 ◼   ► is if you're using SMS as a second factor

00:30:39 ◼   ► on various services, I say look into taking an afternoon,

00:30:43 ◼   ► cleaning this up, get rid of SMS as your second factor.

00:30:46 ◼   ► There's also just the fact that SMS isn't encrypted.

00:30:50 ◼   ► And again, what, is the Russian spy agency gonna come in

00:30:55 ◼   ► and put a tap on the line and intercept this unencrypted SMS?

00:31:01 ◼   ► I really doubt it, but still, it is unencrypted.

00:31:06 ◼   ► It just seems wrong in principle to use an unencrypted protocol to send something that

00:31:14 ◼   ► should definitely be encrypted.

00:31:17 ◼   ► And we're living in a time when we have vast data storage capabilities and it seems like

00:31:22 ◼   ► organizations just collect this data and sit on it.

00:31:25 ◼   ► And no one's doing anything criminal here, but you never know when something's going

00:31:29 ◼   ► to happen, an accident will happen, or a lawsuit or a criminal prosecution will ensue, and

00:31:33 ◼   ► they'll be able to go backwards in time and just look at all the data they collected on

00:31:37 ◼   ► you and find something to support whatever they want to get you on. And I don't even

00:31:40 ◼   ► want to risk that.

00:31:41 ◼   ► Right. All right. Next topic. Anyway, so take away, get rid of SMS as a factor and look

00:31:48 ◼   ► into Aussie if you're looking for a client to sync these things. I suppose there's some

00:31:55 ◼   ► mild security trade off between the way that Aussie syncs these things. Now what they sync

00:32:00 ◼   ► to the server is encrypted. So there's nothing on Authy's server. It's end-to-end encrypted,

00:32:05 ◼   ► so it's not like your code—somebody can log into your Authy account and see your codes,

00:32:12 ◼   ► or if their server was compromised, that your codes would be exposed. I suppose there's

00:32:17 ◼   ► some kind of security advantage to Google authenticators only on one device thing, but

00:32:22 ◼   ► it's just so inconvenient when that's the device you're looking to replace.

00:32:25 ◼   ► — especially if you lose it, then you're done.

00:32:27 ◼   ► Right. Especially if you lose it. Right. Anyway, next topic. Gotta get this out. I don't

00:32:35 ◼   ► think I talked about it. I think this whole thing erupted in between the last show and

00:32:38 ◼   ► this show. I've had a bit of a gap in the programming schedule. But this whole thing

00:32:44 ◼   ► with Google's duplex demo on stage at I/O, which I raised some questions about.

00:32:50 ◼   ► I hadn't even thought about it until you said it. I was just all hooked right in.

00:32:54 ◼   ► I it took me a day the first day I watched and it was in my opinion

00:32:59 ◼   ► I know that there for Android, you know, I owe is Google's version of WWDC and there's two types of news

00:33:06 ◼   ► There's you know it to

00:33:08 ◼   ► Use two very broad buckets. There's general-purpose news

00:33:12 ◼   ► Of interest to anybody who uses the platform and then there's developer news

00:33:17 ◼   ► And so the developer news for Android is a bit outside my wheelhouse

00:33:22 ◼   ► Like I don't know how big a deal the new Android and Chrome OS features are app slices

00:33:28 ◼   ► But in terms of stuff that broke through out of you know, developer news into mainstream news

00:33:34 ◼   ► I don't think there's any question that this duplex demo was the one that got the most attention

00:33:39 ◼   ► It for two reasons it seemed like just the fact that it

00:33:45 ◼   ► Supposedly worked that you could say, you know, hey dingus

00:33:49 ◼   ► Call whatever hair salon and try to get me an appointment Wednesday afternoon

00:33:54 ◼   ► And that it would actually place a phone call and have this interaction and make a phone call according to the recordings

00:34:02 ◼   ► They played that's interesting enough because that's that that's a serious

00:34:06 ◼   ► Break, that would be a serious breakthrough in

00:34:09 ◼   ► In this voice driven assistant stuff like nobody has anything that does that does that right now?

00:34:15 ◼   ► That's that's a breakthrough and then the second factor

00:34:18 ◼   ► is the vocal intonations where the assistant was doing these umms and you know these verbal tics

00:34:29 ◼   ► that gave it a life rather uncanny lifelikeness like and you could hear gasps from the audience

00:34:38 ◼   ► and I think that's why it was so engaging and I realized and and day one the the you know the

00:34:45 ◼   ► takes were wow, Google has this amazing voice assistant that can make phone calls and it

00:34:49 ◼   ► sounds human. And immediate 15 minutes later, followed up by wow, this thing is really creepy.

00:34:56 ◼   ► You know, yes. Right. And I get that take the Hey, this is creepy. We shouldn't is,

00:35:04 ◼   ► you know, some people were outright some people just reasonably just reasonably asking it.

00:35:09 ◼   ► it ethical to create an AI that would trick the receptionist?

00:35:18 ◼   ► It tries to masquerade as human.

00:35:19 ◼   ► Right, but is that ethical? I don't know.

00:35:24 ◼   ► It's such a nuanced argument because for a normal person using it, maybe it isn't. But if you have

00:35:32 ◼   ► accessibility issues, like you don't speak the language, or you have a speech impediment, or

00:35:35 ◼   ► you're mute? Is it ethical to force someone to disclose that they're using an assistant?

00:35:39 ◼   ► Dave Asprey And what is the difference? What is the difference

00:35:42 ◼   ► between using it as an accessibility thing? To me, those ethical questions are not clear

00:35:50 ◼   ► cut. And we're running right up to questions that science fiction writers have been dealing

00:35:59 ◼   ► with since the dawn of science fiction.

00:36:02 ◼   ► I think that's what was off-putting about at least for me

00:36:04 ◼   ► What was off-putting about the discussion is that Google was sort of treating it as cocky

00:36:08 ◼   ► What look at we can do with technology and they didn't exhibit any humanness any respect any

00:36:12 ◼   ► I didn't give us any idea that they understood the responsibility of what they were doing, right?

00:36:16 ◼   ► It seems very clear to me that they hadn't really thought about that. Yeah, and and again

00:36:21 ◼   ► even if the conclusion is

00:36:24 ◼   ► That a service like this shouldn't masquerade as human

00:36:31 ◼   ► without at least disclosing it up front, like this is a call from the Google, your Google assistant,

00:36:36 ◼   ► you know, I'm working on behalf of a client or something, you know, whatever

00:36:39 ◼   ► preface they would say to make clear that this is what's going on.

00:36:41 ◼   ► In the aftermath of that ethical criticism, Google came out with the statement that, oh, yeah, yeah,

00:36:48 ◼   ► we're going to have it, we're going to have it to disclose itself. But if they were thinking of that,

00:36:53 ◼   ► why would they have added all of these ums and ahs that make it sound human?

00:36:57 ◼   ► Right. And if you had any basic, like even basic PR, anyone who's doing a keynote, you go through

00:37:01 ◼   ► objection handling, you go segment by segment, and you realize what the reaction will be to each

00:37:05 ◼   ► segment as you try to get the best language possible. So either they were completely inept

00:37:10 ◼   ► and didn't think about it, or they didn't care. Yeah, I don't know. But put all that aside,

00:37:16 ◼   ► put the ethical questions aside. It is damn cool, if it works as they're recording shows, which I

00:37:24 ◼   ► do believe as time goes on is a bigger and bigger if, but put it aside as to whether it should do

00:37:30 ◼   ► that. And maybe it shouldn't, but if the fact that they could do it is amazing, it really is the

00:37:37 ◼   ► stuff of science fiction. I mean, it is... Could be one of the most fundamental technologies of

00:37:42 ◼   ► our time. Yeah, it's really a very cool thing if it works. Well, just to add further to it,

00:37:50 ◼   ► to this whole issue, what happens if something goes wrong? Like, you're calling to make a

00:37:54 ◼   ► hair appointment. I spoke about this with Steve Aquino on his show, and all of a sudden

00:37:58 ◼   ► it books you a perm and a blonde dye job, and that's not what you want. And should

00:38:01 ◼   ► it just—at that point, when it's failing, does it have to tell you it's not human?

00:38:04 ◼   ► Dave: Right. Or, you know, I don't know. I just imagine there's so many ways that

00:38:08 ◼   ► it could fail. But anyway, the next day—I don't know what made me go back to it, but

00:38:14 ◼   ► I was like, you know, sometimes that's how I start the day is I just review, "Well,

00:38:18 ◼   ► what the hell did I write about yesterday?" And I thought about it, and I watched that

00:38:22 ◼   ► segment of the keynote again, and my spidey sense just went nuts. Like, as I studied it

00:38:30 ◼   ► the second time and stopped, wasn't, you know, no longer was wowed by the humanness of the thing,

00:38:35 ◼   ► I just actually listened to the details of the call. And I thought, and the fact that Sundar

00:38:42 ◼   ► Pichai said, "This is a actual call to an actual hair salon," that, you know, he emphasized it

00:38:48 ◼   ► multiple times that this is these are real calls. And they were just so many red flags to me,

00:38:54 ◼   ► like the way that they didn't answer the phone with the name of the establishment.

00:38:58 ◼   ► Like the fact that like, I, you know, I don't I haven't done a survey of 100 hair salons,

00:39:06 ◼   ► but I, you know, there's places that you can just walk into without an appointment. And then there's

00:39:10 ◼   ► places where you need an appointment. And when you book an appointment, they usually ask like,

00:39:15 ◼   ► you know, if there's a particular stylist who you want, you know, like your reg, if you're a

00:39:19 ◼   ► regular customer or something like that, you know, and I'm sure you could say, I'll just take whoever

00:39:25 ◼   ► is available, you know, at one o'clock on Wednesday. But that that that just wasn't

00:39:30 ◼   ► brought up in the call, you know, and just, and then I there was a CNET store, I forget who wrote

00:39:37 ◼   ► it, but somebody at CNET got access to this a couple of days before IO, which is, you know,

00:39:43 ◼   ► a very typical PR move for tech companies. Apple, to my knowledge, doesn't do it before

00:39:51 ◼   ► keynotes because they're so super secretive about keynotes. But they'll have stuff ready

00:39:59 ◼   ► to go.

00:40:00 ◼   ► They'll sometimes see a wired piece or some big magazine thing.

00:40:02 ◼   ► But Matthew Panzareno recently got access to... What was it that he got access to?

00:40:11 ◼   ► The Mac Pro.

00:40:14 ◼   ► That's right.

00:40:15 ◼   ► And Infinity War.

00:40:16 ◼   ► The man is intolerable.

00:40:18 ◼   ► The Mac Pro and the Mac Pro team and the Pro Tools team that has, you know, and you got

00:40:25 ◼   ► this scoop on how they've hired actual professional music producers and film editors and have

00:40:34 ◼   ► hired them as contractors to just work right across the hall from like the Final Cut Pro

00:40:38 ◼   ► team and the logic team. When they run into a problem, to be able to just grab an engineer

00:40:46 ◼   ► or one of the managers or somebody and say, "Here, here. This annoys me. I clicked this

00:40:51 ◼   ► button. I clicked this menu." Every time, it takes eight seconds for the menu to finish

00:40:56 ◼   ► filling in, and I clicked this menu 30 times a day. That was an actual example that they

00:41:03 ◼   ► came up with. Then they figured out what the bottleneck is, and then all of a sudden, they

00:41:05 ◼   ► it so the menu just opens instantly. Companies do this. They'll seed an exclusive to somebody.

00:41:13 ◼   ► So this guy for CNET got an exclusive on Duplex a couple of days before I/O, but all he got to do

00:41:20 ◼   ► was hear recordings. He didn't get to hear a live call happen. It just seems very strange to me.

00:41:27 ◼   ► And I realized, I mean, it's like, I don't know if you saw the Twitter debate on this, but it was

00:41:35 ◼   ► so bifurcated between people who are like, "Hmm, you're right. This is a little fishy.

00:41:42 ◼   ► I wonder what's going on." And the people who are like, "You're nuts." The comparison that kept

00:41:48 ◼   ► coming up was that I had gone full birther. Well, that's a reference to the…birthers are the people

00:41:55 ◼   ► who think Barack Obama was not born in the United States. But the people who insisted that he had to

00:42:03 ◼   ► show a birth certificate to prove that he wasn't born in Kenya or whatever.

00:42:09 ◼   ► At the Apple events, if they showed you Face ID on stage, they have working examples backstage

00:42:14 ◼   ► and people explain how they work and walk you through it and you see live. Even if you

00:42:17 ◼   ► don't get to do it yourself all the time, you get to see it done yourself.

00:42:21 ◼   ► Right. Again, I wasn't comparing it to Apple at all. It's just, I guess, because that's

00:42:27 ◼   ► what I typically write about everybody makes it about Apple, especially the Googler type

00:42:33 ◼   ► people who read my stuff. But they're like readers. Well, what

00:42:37 ◼   ► you know, what about HomePod? HomePod? You know, where's the

00:42:40 ◼   ► to HomePod support? Well, which is actually

00:42:42 ◼   ► to see that at WWDC. They walked us in the back and they showed

00:42:45 ◼   ► it. Right. We got to hear it at WWDC. And even when HomePod

00:42:50 ◼   ► first shipped earlier this year, at the product briefings, you

00:42:55 ◼   ► know, and you know, it famously Airplay two didn't ship until

00:42:58 ◼   ► literally yesterday. Yeah, I think right. It's been a long

00:43:02 ◼   ► week. It's been a long week. So yes, HomePod shipped and spent months on the market without

00:43:08 ◼   ► any of the AirPlay 2's features, which include pairing two of them in stereo or pairing multiple

00:43:15 ◼   ► ones throughout a home to play the same music simultaneously in multiple named rooms, you

00:43:21 ◼   ► know, and being able to tell your dingus to move the song to the dining room or whatever.

00:43:27 ◼   ► of those features shipped with HomePod because AirPlay 2 didn't ship. But at the briefing when

00:43:34 ◼   ► HomePod shipped, and I think you did too, got to see ones running obviously beta software,

00:43:44 ◼   ► but paired in stereo or in multiple rooms, and could see it in action and could tell Siri to

00:43:50 ◼   ► play a certain song and it all worked. I mean, again, it wasn't shipping. Nobody said it was

00:43:56 ◼   ► shipping. Everybody said this is coming. But there were, you

00:43:59 ◼   ► know, everybody who was everybody in the media who got a

00:44:02 ◼   ► briefing got to see that it actually live demo, right? Yeah.

00:44:06 ◼   ► It's very strange not to play a recording and not have a demo.

00:44:11 ◼   ► And and again, there are certain types of demos that don't scale.

00:44:14 ◼   ► So self a perfect example is self driving car. There's no

00:44:18 ◼   ► they can't bring a self driving car on stage at IO and have the

00:44:21 ◼   ► car drive around the I mean, I guess I could have it move

00:44:25 ◼   ► forward six inches or something, but you can't do a road test for an audience of 4,000 I/O

00:44:32 ◼   ► attendees. That's why the trusted people in the media exist, that somebody who writes

00:44:40 ◼   ► for whatever website and you know them, they have a body of work behind them and they say,

00:44:45 ◼   ► "I got invited to Google's test track or whoever's test track and I got to see this

00:44:50 ◼   ► car and it did this and it did that and I was in the back seat and this is what happened.

00:44:57 ◼   ► That's why the media are there. You don't just take the company's word for it, but somebody

00:45:01 ◼   ► gets a demo and gets to report on how it went. This duplex thing, nobody did it. And there's

00:45:06 ◼   ► still to this day, as of May 30th, to my knowledge, there's still not one person in the media

00:45:13 ◼   ► who has seen or heard a duplex call take place live, which really makes me think that something

00:45:20 ◼   ► really, really screwed up. A number of mistakes were made in between "Let's put this in the

00:45:27 ◼   ► I/O keynote and here's what Sundar is actually going to say." I think there were a number

00:45:32 ◼   ► of mistakes. My guess is that it doesn't sound nearly as good as the recordings they played.

00:45:42 ◼   ► Either longer pauses between segments, either more awkward inability to parse certain questions

00:45:50 ◼   ► like, do you have a particular stylist in mind or something like that. And I wouldn't

00:45:54 ◼   ► even be surprised if the human-like audio, you know, voice quality doesn't sound like

00:45:59 ◼   ► the recordings. That this was sort of, these recordings were sort of idealized versions

00:46:05 ◼   ► of what they're trying to build and somehow between making them and then Sundar getting

00:46:11 ◼   ► up on stage, it turned into these are actual calls. And once they realized this and, you

00:46:17 ◼   ► know about the only one raising questions there was a great story at

00:46:19 ◼   ► axios with a bunch of just just perfect I love axios because they just they have

00:46:24 ◼   ► this style of like just getting right to the point and if the whole point is only

00:46:29 ◼   ► 200 words it's a 200 word story and there's no padding but they just had a

00:46:33 ◼   ► great list of questions of you know you know just more or less how do we know

00:46:37 ◼   ► that this actually is is real because you guys said it's for Google is

00:46:40 ◼   ► answering right which is the astounding part because usually yeah you you talk

00:46:45 ◼   ► to the—and even if you don't get a statement on the record, you get enough background information

00:46:49 ◼   ► to be able to convey, like, yes, it really is working, or no, or this. And it's astounding

00:46:53 ◼   ► for two reasons, because first, like, there's this whole trust but verify thing, and Google

00:46:58 ◼   ► has enormous credibility with assistants, but you can't go on stage and show a product

00:47:03 ◼   ► that's not real. That's just—you lose so much credibility. But also, you can't

00:47:08 ◼   ► not demo it at all for anybody. That product is not real unless you've shown it to somebody

00:47:13 ◼   ► outside the company.

00:47:14 ◼   ► - Right, and it's like I wrote in my last,

00:47:16 ◼   ► hopefully last piece on this

00:47:17 ◼   ► until something actually ships.

00:47:19 ◼   ► As far as I'm concerned,

00:47:23 ◼   ► unless it comes out maybe in the next week or so,

00:47:26 ◼   ► I was right.

00:47:29 ◼   ► It wasn't listenable as recorded in May.

00:47:34 ◼   ► Like if it ended up that it's shipping

00:47:35 ◼   ► in some limited means in August,

00:47:39 ◼   ► that doesn't mean that I was wrong

00:47:40 ◼   ► that it wasn't ready in May, right?

00:47:42 ◼   ► Like it famously, and people aren't angry about it,

00:47:45 ◼   ► but back in 2002, there was a New York Times story

00:47:48 ◼   ► that claimed that Apple was working on a cell phone

00:47:53 ◼   ► that ran Mac OS X.

00:47:55 ◼   ► And I wrote, it was really one of the first articles

00:47:59 ◼   ► at Daring Fireball 2002 was the year I started the site,

00:48:01 ◼   ► and I called it iPhony.

00:48:04 ◼   ► And I just tried to explain,

00:48:05 ◼   ► this is, what they're describing is impossible.

00:48:10 ◼   ► Then people stumble on that site that it's four years before the iPhone

00:48:15 ◼   ► People stumble on that article and they're like, you know, usually in good in good cheer, but they're like, wow you really blew that one

00:48:22 ◼   ► Because it's you know, what they're describing does sound a lot like the iPhone

00:48:26 ◼   ► It's a cell phone that runs a modified version of OS 10

00:48:29 ◼   ► But I wasn't wrong in 2002

00:48:32 ◼   ► It literally was impossible to get Mac OS 10 back Mac OS 10 barely ran on piece on Macs in 2002

00:48:39 ◼   ► right? It was barely running on Macs. That was pre-Lobot, pre-Purple, pre-everything.

00:48:47 ◼   ► Right. And it was a technical miracle that it ran in 2006, or 2007, I guess,

00:48:56 ◼   ► when it actually shipped. It was unbelievable feats of hardware and software engineering to

00:49:04 ◼   ► to get it working the way it was in 2006.

00:49:06 ◼   ► In 2002, ARM hardware and mobile GPUs

00:49:11 ◼   ► and display technology, none of it was there.

00:49:14 ◼   ► Like, just because it happened four years later

00:49:17 ◼   ► doesn't mean that I wasn't right in 2002.

00:49:19 ◼   ► And I feel like the same thing is gonna happen

00:49:20 ◼   ► with this Google Assistant, where again,

00:49:22 ◼   ► I don't dispute that among all companies

00:49:25 ◼   ► or include university AI labs and stuff like that,

00:49:31 ◼   ► that if anybody's close to getting a vocal assistant

00:49:35 ◼   ► that can do this, I would bet on Google.

00:49:37 ◼   ► There's no doubt in my mind.

00:49:38 ◼   ► I think you'd be a fool not to make them the odds on favorite

00:49:41 ◼   ► to get something like this working first.

00:49:43 ◼   ► Like that's where it's so exasperating

00:49:47 ◼   ► where it felt like, you know,

00:49:49 ◼   ► there'd be people on Twitter telling me

00:49:51 ◼   ► that I'm just bent out of shape

00:49:53 ◼   ► because Siri is so far behind.

00:49:56 ◼   ► I, you know, I don't understand

00:49:57 ◼   ► how far ahead Google Assistant is.

00:49:59 ◼   ► It's like, no, that has nothing to do with it.

00:50:00 ◼   ► I just smell a fishy demo.

00:50:02 ◼   ► - There was a whole feeling about that show.

00:50:04 ◼   ► They mentioned the word AI so often

00:50:06 ◼   ► that they thought we were afraid,

00:50:07 ◼   ► like it felt like they were afraid

00:50:07 ◼   ► we were gonna forget that AI existed.

00:50:09 ◼   ► And the entire thing was so cocky

00:50:11 ◼   ► and so full of hubris that they were just,

00:50:14 ◼   ► it felt like we wanna show off our technology,

00:50:16 ◼   ► we wanna show that we're the leaders.

00:50:18 ◼   ► And that's not what these things should be about,

00:50:19 ◼   ► at least in my opinion, they should be about,

00:50:21 ◼   ► like again, like the responsibility

00:50:22 ◼   ► that comes with these things.

00:50:23 ◼   ► I think that's the gist of why

00:50:24 ◼   ► we felt uncomfortable with it.

00:50:26 ◼   ► - Well, and think about it this way too,

00:50:27 ◼   ► in terms of how would they get there?

00:50:29 ◼   ► You know if you're thinking like I am like that they probably made some kind of catastrophic not catastrophic but a terrible

00:50:34 ◼   ► Mistake in terms of overselling where they were and like one way to think about it is just which tense

00:50:40 ◼   ► Verb do you use you know like you know nobody was saying in February HomePod?

00:50:47 ◼   ► Includes do present tense include the support for stereo pairing. Yeah

00:50:53 ◼   ► Everybody wrote it in the future tense that Apple says it will ship an update later this year to enable

00:51:00 ◼   ► dual speakers whereas the headlines for this duplex thing I have I cited a whole bunch of examples and I don't blame them I

00:51:08 ◼   ► Kind of got hooked into that

00:51:10 ◼   ► Present tense on day one where I just kind of trusted Google

00:51:13 ◼   ► But they're all written in the present tense Google assistant can now make phone calls, you know to make appointments for you

00:51:19 ◼   ► And that's I really think that's wrong. They didn't show that

00:51:23 ◼   ► that and I think it makes a difference. Yeah, no, totally. I mean, AirPower still hasn't

00:51:28 ◼   ► shipped but they were sitting there on the tables when we went backstage. Right, and

00:51:32 ◼   ► you could pick up the phone and see that it stopped charging and put it back down and

00:51:36 ◼   ► see that it started charging and pick up their sample watch that was on it and, you know,

00:51:41 ◼   ► it was there for us to play with and, you know, again, it was obviously a prototype

00:51:47 ◼   ► but they had prototypes that, you know, and again, I didn't have a stopwatch to see,

00:51:51 ◼   ► know, how fast it charged. I don't know. But I mean, at least in terms of what you could

00:51:55 ◼   ► do in five minutes hands on time, it was, it was there to play with. All right, enough

00:52:00 ◼   ► on that. Let me let me take another break here and thank our good friends, such good

00:52:04 ◼   ► friends, longtime sponsors of the show Squarespace. Look, Squarespace is your all in one place

00:52:11 ◼   ► to make a website, right? You can register the domain you pick from a whole bunch of

00:52:15 ◼   ► really beautiful templates. They're customizable out the wazoo. So you can do this if you're,

00:52:21 ◼   ► let's say you're not a web developer, you don't really have those chops at all, but you are a

00:52:27 ◼   ► designer. You know how to make logos, you know how to pick colors, you know how to pick fonts

00:52:30 ◼   ► and stuff like that. And you know how to, you're a graphic designer. You can use Squarespace to make

00:52:37 ◼   ► a branded website that fits with the design that you want. And again, they have templates to get

00:52:45 ◼   ► get you started. But you're not locked into them where your site is going to end up looking

00:52:50 ◼   ► exactly like one of these templates. You can customize it out the wazoo. There are so many

00:52:54 ◼   ► websites that you encounter on a daily basis that are made with Squarespace and you'd never

00:52:59 ◼   ► know it unless you look at the DoView source and start looking to see whether stuff is

00:53:03 ◼   ► being served from the Squarespace domain. It's really amazing. A ton of my favorite

00:53:07 ◼   ► even restaurant sites in particular notoriously used to be terrible. I mean, it was a joke,

00:53:13 ◼   ► but it was actually true where you go to a restaurant website and they wouldn't even

00:53:17 ◼   ► have the hours listed. It's nuts. When you go to a restaurant website and it's actually

00:53:22 ◼   ► like a nice website, looks good, loads fast, has all the stuff you'd want, I swear at least

00:53:28 ◼   ► two out of three times you view source, it's a Squarespace site. You're encountering Squarespace

00:53:32 ◼   ► sites all the time. And the reason why is it's so much easier than doing it by hand

00:53:38 ◼   ► and they take care of all the technical stuff,

00:53:41 ◼   ► the actual hosting, making sure it's reliable,

00:53:44 ◼   ► providing great analytics in a simple,

00:53:48 ◼   ► it's just like everything else at Squarespace,

00:53:50 ◼   ► the presentation of the analytics you get

00:53:51 ◼   ► from a Squarespace site, where people are going,

00:53:55 ◼   ► where they're getting to your site from,

00:53:56 ◼   ► it's all beautiful, really logically designed reports.

00:54:00 ◼   ► I can't recommend it enough.

00:54:02 ◼   ► And it means that you don't have to worry

00:54:04 ◼   ► about any of those details.

00:54:05 ◼   ► So if you are running a restaurant

00:54:07 ◼   ► or you're setting up something for, you know,

00:54:10 ◼   ► your kid's Little League team or your church

00:54:13 ◼   ► or something like that, you don't have to worry

00:54:16 ◼   ► about the technical aspects.

00:54:17 ◼   ► You don't waste time with stuff

00:54:19 ◼   ► that you shouldn't be wasting time on.

00:54:21 ◼   ► Really, really can't recommend enough

00:54:23 ◼   ► that the next time you need to make a new website

00:54:25 ◼   ► or somebody you know comes to you for help making a website,

00:54:28 ◼   ► push them to Squarespace first and see how far you can go.

00:54:32 ◼   ► You're probably gonna stay there.

00:54:34 ◼   ► So make your next move, get your own unique domain

00:54:36 ◼   ► and create a beautiful website at Squarespace.

00:54:39 ◼   ► And you can start a free trial today

00:54:41 ◼   ► at squarespace.com/talkshow.

00:54:44 ◼   ► Squarespace.com/talkshow, you get a free trial.

00:54:47 ◼   ► And when you do decide to sign up and start paying,

00:54:50 ◼   ► use that same URL, squarespace.com/talkshow,

00:54:53 ◼   ► and the offer code talk show.

00:54:55 ◼   ► Once again, no the, just talk show.

00:54:56 ◼   ► That'll get you 10% off your first purchase.

00:54:59 ◼   ► You could prepay for a whole year, save 10%.

00:55:02 ◼   ► It's like getting a couple of months free.

00:55:04 ◼   ► So my thanks to Squarespace for their continuing support.

00:55:06 ◼   ► of the talk show.

00:55:08 ◼   ► Do you see this thing where there was Motherboard got some court documents on the iPhone 6 bendgate

00:55:16 ◼   ► and the story, the headline they use, "Internal documents show Apple knew the iPhone 6 would bend."

00:55:22 ◼   ► Which, I mean, I didn't, I wasn't a huge fan of how the story got covered. Like, my understanding is

00:55:28 ◼   ► Apple has this materials department and they understand materials. So, for example, when they move from

00:55:33 ◼   ► moved from the aluminum iPhone to the plastic iPhone 2G,

00:55:37 ◼   ► they knew that plastic was more likely to crack,

00:55:39 ◼   ► but it had some benefits over aluminum for them.

00:55:41 ◼   ► Then when they moved to glass,

00:55:42 ◼   ► they knew that glass was more likely to break,

00:55:44 ◼   ► but there were benefits to moving to glass anyway.

00:55:47 ◼   ► Same thing when they moved from the iPhone 5 design,

00:55:51 ◼   ► which had the, I forget if it was aluminum

00:55:52 ◼   ► or stainless steel band on it, and the aluminum back,

00:55:55 ◼   ► they knew that the larger surface and the lack of the frame

00:55:59 ◼   ► was gonna allow it to bend more because physics.

00:56:01 ◼   ► They knew these things, but they were trade-offs

00:56:04 ◼   ► that they thought were important to make.

00:56:05 ◼   ► And over the course of the iPhone 6 lifespan,

00:56:09 ◼   ► when they had millions of people using it,

00:56:11 ◼   ► they found out exactly where those issues were.

00:56:13 ◼   ► And just like they made every product,

00:56:14 ◼   ► like the iPhone 8 glass is way better

00:56:16 ◼   ► than the iPhone 4S glass,

00:56:18 ◼   ► the iPhone 6S aluminum frame is way better than the 6.

00:56:22 ◼   ► So it's like they knew

00:56:22 ◼   ► because they understand material sciences,

00:56:24 ◼   ► but this made it sound very conspiratorial.

00:56:27 ◼   ► - Right, it makes it sound conspiratorial.

00:56:29 ◼   ► And the problem starts right in the headline,

00:56:30 ◼   ► where it says Apple knew the iPhone 6 would bend.

00:56:33 ◼   ► Well, everything can bend.

00:56:35 ◼   ► - Yes.

00:56:35 ◼   ► - Right?

00:56:36 ◼   ► - Well, like ceramics shatters, right?

00:56:37 ◼   ► Apple.

00:56:38 ◼   ► Every material has a problem.

00:56:40 ◼   ► - The problem is that you need to say relative to what?

00:56:43 ◼   ► And the article does then go on to say

00:56:45 ◼   ► that it bends more easily than the iPhone 5S,

00:56:48 ◼   ► which is the model it was replacing

00:56:50 ◼   ► at the top of the product line.

00:56:51 ◼   ► Well, duh, of course it bends more easily than the 5S.

00:56:55 ◼   ► I mean, we know that, right?

00:56:56 ◼   ► We know that from all the videos.

00:56:57 ◼   ► Like you can, a strong person can take an iPhone 6,

00:57:01 ◼   ► or at least the ones that shipped originally,

00:57:03 ◼   ► and if they really try hard,

00:57:04 ◼   ► they could bend it with their own hands.

00:57:07 ◼   ► And an iPhone 5S doesn't bend like that.

00:57:09 ◼   ► Of course it bends more easily than a 5S.

00:57:11 ◼   ► It's bigger, it has a bigger surface area.

00:57:13 ◼   ► - And it's metal.

00:57:15 ◼   ► - The comparison isn't does it bend more easily

00:57:18 ◼   ► than the 5S, it's, the comparison is does it bend too easily

00:57:22 ◼   ► to have shipped as the design?

00:57:24 ◼   ► That's the question.

00:57:25 ◼   ► and it's not answered at all in these documents.

00:57:28 ◼   ► And I would say that the fact that the iPhone 6

00:57:31 ◼   ► remained in the product line until last year

00:57:34 ◼   ► would suggest that it was fine.

00:57:36 ◼   ► It was obviously a con to the new design,

00:57:41 ◼   ► but not catastrophic.

00:57:44 ◼   ► - Yeah, and again, the iPhone 3G cracked.

00:57:49 ◼   ► The plastic would crack along the buttons.

00:57:51 ◼   ► The iPhone 4 had the antenna issues,

00:57:53 ◼   ► and Apple kept that in the lineup after the 4S.

00:57:55 ◼   ► All of design is compromised, material science is compromised, and this is a normal process

00:57:59 ◼   ► of development for a product.

00:58:02 ◼   ► There is, now there is the case that they did somewhat, at some point in the iPhone

00:58:08 ◼   ► 6's product lifespan, they did alter it with some kind of reinforcement at the bend point.

00:58:16 ◼   ► But I believe, I think that anybody who had problems up until that point, if it was still

00:58:21 ◼   ► under warranty could get it replaced, I believe, right? I think it was covered.

00:58:28 ◼   ► I believe so. I mean—

00:58:30 ◼   ► And if not, then that's—

00:58:32 ◼   ► I guess that's a problem, but I believe it was covered.

00:58:35 ◼   ► Yeah, Apple is usually pretty good. And this is the same thing with the keyboard issue.

00:58:39 ◼   ► They have internal metrics, and when something becomes an issue, it's an automatic alert,

00:58:43 ◼   ► and then people have to make a decision about it. But it has to reach that level. Apple

00:58:46 ◼   ► is just too big a company. Sad to say this, but like 1% of Apple users is a huge amount

00:58:50 ◼   ► of people, but if an issue fluctuates one to two to three percent within a product lifestyle,

00:58:55 ◼   ► that's not exploding phones. There's always some battery failure in every phone. It's

00:58:59 ◼   ► when it's catastrophic that it becomes a problem.

00:59:02 ◼   ► Dave Asprey The iPhone 4 and Tennegate is my favorite

00:59:05 ◼   ► example of that because it's like the tech press became—it was like blood in the water,

00:59:12 ◼   ► a bunch of sharks attacking it. I mean, the extraordinary—truly extraordinary in hindsight

00:59:19 ◼   ► that Apple held the special press event

00:59:20 ◼   ► just to address Antennagate.

00:59:23 ◼   ► - I mean, they had to because Antennagate was reproducible.

00:59:26 ◼   ► You could take any iPhone 4 and reproduce attenuation.

00:59:30 ◼   ► It didn't affect everybody

00:59:32 ◼   ► because it would only lower the signal by a certain amount.

00:59:34 ◼   ► And if you had a good signal, you didn't even notice it.

00:59:36 ◼   ► But if you were barely online,

00:59:39 ◼   ► you could use it as a play/pause button.

00:59:40 ◼   ► - Right, to me, it's a casebook example

00:59:43 ◼   ► of how to handle a PR crisis, right?

00:59:45 ◼   ► It's take your time, get your ducks in a row,

00:59:47 ◼   ► but then get out in front of it, as far out in front of it as you can.

00:59:51 ◼   ► But the thing in hindsight that to me proves that it wasn't really a catastrophic or scandalous

00:59:56 ◼   ► problem is that the iPhone 4 was the top of the line iPhone for a longer stretch of time

01:00:04 ◼   ► without any alteration to the antenna design than any other phone because it was the last

01:00:10 ◼   ► one that shipped in late June and then the iPhone 4S was the first one that shipped in

01:00:17 ◼   ► the fall and I think even that one that was late and shipped in October yes so

01:00:24 ◼   ► it was the top-selling iPhone for like 16 or 17 months on the market for years

01:00:29 ◼   ► especially and then stayed on the market for years afterwards as a lower priced

01:00:34 ◼   ► option in the line with a completely undesired unchanged antenna design now

01:00:41 ◼   ► yes they did change that style of antenna design starting with the Verizon

01:00:47 ◼   ► iPhone 4 that came out, you know, like six months off cycle, and then they used that

01:00:52 ◼   ► Verizon-style antenna with the 4S, and that was better. And it's, you know, to me very

01:00:58 ◼   ► much analogous to the way that the iPhone 6S used a higher grade aluminum than the iPhone

01:01:05 ◼   ► 6. That's just progress, you know? Yeah. But was it bad enough that it never should

01:01:09 ◼   ► have shipped in the first place? No.

01:01:11 ◼   ► Yeah, but at the same token if if a hundred percent if you could show keyboard failure to 100% level like you could go to

01:01:17 ◼   ► An Apple store and make any Apple keyboard fail or you could go to an Apple store and make every iPhone 6 Bend

01:01:23 ◼   ► You'd have to treat it similarly

01:01:24 ◼   ► But these things have so so few instances compared to something like the like the antenna issue

01:01:30 ◼   ► That you just can't hold them in the same sphere

01:01:34 ◼   ► All right, let's move on Apple accepts then rejects valves steam link app boy

01:01:42 ◼   ► This is a weird story. Yes, cuz it's not like

01:01:46 ◼   ► you know like it, you know me and you decide to make an app and we're indie developers and we have a

01:01:53 ◼   ► rejection problem over questionable grounds

01:01:56 ◼   ► You know, which is bad enough and as often, you know something that we'll write about or talk about or whatever

01:02:02 ◼   ► But this is Steam.

01:02:03 ◼   ► This is not-- or Valve.

01:02:04 ◼   ► You know, this is not like a little indie developer.

01:02:07 ◼   ► This is a huge game developer.

01:02:12 ◼   ► Probably one of the most important game developers

01:02:15 ◼   ► in the world.

01:02:15 ◼   ► Right.

01:02:16 ◼   ► And they don't interact with Apple the way

01:02:18 ◼   ► that indie developers interact with Apple

01:02:21 ◼   ► through the black hole of the iTunes submission thing.

01:02:25 ◼   ► And both sides are pros.

01:02:31 ◼   ► Valve is so far, at least publicly, is taking this with a stiff upper lip.

01:02:34 ◼   ► They didn't make it public. They did bring the negotiations public.

01:02:40 ◼   ► Well, they had to though. They had to because the part that's so weird is it seems clear. I don't,

01:02:48 ◼   ► this isn't fair, but it seems clear that they had been in contact with Apple in advance while

01:02:53 ◼   ► they were working on bringing Steam Link. And just, I'm not an expert on these things, but

01:02:58 ◼   ► Basically, my understanding is that Steam Link is like VNC for gaming.

01:03:03 ◼   ► So if you have a Mac or PC in your house with Steam installed, and Steam is like a Netflix

01:03:08 ◼   ► for video games type thing, except you can buy, but you can go there, you can publish,

01:03:14 ◼   ► it's like their own little app store for games, for PC games.

01:03:18 ◼   ► Very well respected company, people love it.

01:03:19 ◼   ► There's all sorts of cool indie games that are on Steam.

01:03:24 ◼   ► It's a great service.

01:03:25 ◼   ► Steam Link is a way you have your Mac or PC somewhere on your land, in your house, with

01:03:31 ◼   ► Steam installed. You put Steam Link on your iPhone and now you can play these games. And

01:03:36 ◼   ► I guess where it would really be cool would be on Apple TV where you could use a controller.

01:03:41 ◼   ► But then you can play these games and it just streams over your Wi-Fi. And you can't do

01:03:48 ◼   ► it outside your house. You can't like go to three blocks away and then get on cellular

01:03:54 ◼   ► and do it from anywhere. It's not streaming from Valve's servers. It's only a way to connect

01:04:01 ◼   ► to the thing that's already in your house when you're in your house. It seems pretty

01:04:05 ◼   ► clear that somebody, some connections at some levels, Valve and Apple were in communication

01:04:11 ◼   ► on this in advance. Then they finished and submitted it and it was accepted. And that's

01:04:17 ◼   ► when Valve announced it. And then the next day, it's it, you know, see, again, we don't

01:04:23 ◼   ► know this but it seems pretty clear that some other you know it was like the left

01:04:26 ◼   ► hand at Apple was like yeah yeah this is great can't wait to have it we'll

01:04:29 ◼   ► promote it we've got a you know we've probably had like an App Store promotion

01:04:32 ◼   ► ready to go and then the right hand was like what is this and then it got

01:04:38 ◼   ► cancelled and I kind of feel like apples in the wrong on this one I get it and

01:04:43 ◼   ► again this isn't about whether they should be protecting the App Store's 30%

01:04:49 ◼   ► you know, revenue share for any kind of in-app purchase in general. Let's just say for the

01:04:54 ◼   ► sake of argument that we all agree that that's fine, and it's a good business practice, and

01:04:59 ◼   ► you know, Apple is well warranted to protect it. I don't think this is that. I don't think

01:05:04 ◼   ► this is an end around the app store's 30/70 split.

01:05:08 ◼   ► Yeah, it's super interesting to me. Famously, when in-app purchases first came out, you

01:05:14 ◼   ► couldn't do it with free apps because Apple didn't want an end run around the app store.

01:05:18 ◼   ► They thought maybe paranoid or maybe not

01:05:21 ◼   ► that the minute you could make transactions

01:05:25 ◼   ► outside the app store, everyone would make a free app.

01:05:27 ◼   ► They would have their own commerce running on their backend.

01:05:30 ◼   ► And Apple would essentially be maintaining

01:05:31 ◼   ► the world's largest free app store for no money.

01:05:33 ◼   ► And Apple doesn't operate things at a loss.

01:05:35 ◼   ► So then when they did make it free,

01:05:37 ◼   ► apps could use in-app purchases.

01:05:38 ◼   ► They said you can't run your own store

01:05:40 ◼   ► because again, they knew that everyone would just make

01:05:41 ◼   ► a placeholder app and do all their commerce.

01:05:44 ◼   ► This has some slight flavor to that

01:05:47 ◼   ► because you can go and buy all your games on Steam

01:05:49 ◼   ► and then play them on iPhone.

01:05:50 ◼   ► And games is by far the biggest revenue generator

01:05:53 ◼   ► for the App Store.

01:05:55 ◼   ► But I think with Apple, it's not always about money.

01:05:57 ◼   ► It's about control of the platform.

01:05:59 ◼   ► And the only thing I can see with this

01:06:01 ◼   ► is that they don't wanna cede control of iPhone gaming

01:06:04 ◼   ► to Valve.

01:06:05 ◼   ► And in a paranoid world, this might be that.

01:06:07 ◼   ► - Games might be number one overall,

01:06:09 ◼   ► but I did look, I was curious the other day,

01:06:12 ◼   ► and I looked at the top grossing,

01:06:13 ◼   ► which you can't get to on the iPhone anymore

01:06:16 ◼   ► far as I can tell. They have top paid apps and top free apps on the iPhone App Store,

01:06:21 ◼   ► but they don't list top grossing anymore. But they still do have it on the website and

01:06:27 ◼   ► I guess in iTunes. And I thought it was pretty interesting in the top five. And this is related

01:06:32 ◼   ► to something Ben Thompson and I were talking about, which is that these pay-to-play games

01:06:36 ◼   ► like Candy Crush are kind of an ethically questionable territory.

01:06:40 ◼   ► - Yeah, the casino game.

01:06:41 ◼   ► - Yeah, it's like a casino game.

01:06:43 ◼   ► And it's kinda off-brand for Apple

01:06:46 ◼   ► to be involved in that to any degree.

01:06:49 ◼   ► And my analogy to that would be like,

01:06:52 ◼   ► you go on a cruise ship,

01:06:54 ◼   ► and they usually have a,

01:06:56 ◼   ► almost always have a casino somewhere on board the ship,

01:06:59 ◼   ► because once you're in international waters,

01:07:01 ◼   ► there's no laws, and I don't know if you've ever heard this,

01:07:04 ◼   ► but casinos can be rather profitable for the casino owner.

01:07:08 ◼   ► The Disney Cruise Line does not have casinos.

01:07:12 ◼   ► Not because it's not profitable, but because I believe that they've concluded, probably

01:07:18 ◼   ► correctly, that it's too off-brand for them, for the Disney brand.

01:07:27 ◼   ► But anyway, I looked at the top grossing apps, and number one was Netflix.

01:07:32 ◼   ► Hulu was like five, and Pandora was three.

01:07:36 ◼   ► So three of the top five.

01:07:38 ◼   ► Again, I don't know how that goes with the long tail.

01:07:41 ◼   ► I bet the long tail has a lot more games than streaming services.

01:07:48 ◼   ► There just aren't that many streaming services like Netflix and Pandora and Hulu.

01:07:53 ◼   ► But I thought that was a pretty good sign in terms of there's a source of revenue where

01:07:57 ◼   ► there's no moral qualms about it.

01:08:00 ◼   ► When you pay 10 bucks or 12 bucks a month for Netflix and you get Netflix, that's a

01:08:05 ◼   ► fair deal.

01:08:06 ◼   ► You knew exactly what you're getting into.

01:08:08 ◼   ► You're not getting badgered.

01:08:10 ◼   ► Give us another dollar and we'll take out the commercial.

01:08:15 ◼   ► You're getting what you paid for.

01:08:17 ◼   ► So anyway, I'm not quite sure.

01:08:18 ◼   ► - They figured out early on in the app store,

01:08:22 ◼   ► they, I mean, game developers,

01:08:23 ◼   ► that people would not pay $10 for a game.

01:08:25 ◼   ► They wouldn't even pay $5 for a game,

01:08:27 ◼   ► but they would pay $50 to $100

01:08:29 ◼   ► to have a better farm than their friends.

01:08:30 ◼   ► They'd lord it over them,

01:08:31 ◼   ► or to get their car back on the track faster

01:08:34 ◼   ► 'cause they were bored.

01:08:35 ◼   ► We will pay for ego gratification and instant gratification,

01:08:38 ◼   ► and that's the best way to separate a human being

01:08:40 ◼   ► from their money.

01:08:41 ◼   ► And everyone has gone all in on this,

01:08:43 ◼   ► and it's led to the detriment of the gaming industry.

01:08:46 ◼   ► But to your point, yeah, Disney does not have casinos.

01:08:48 ◼   ► Usually profitable does not have them.

01:08:50 ◼   ► And there's an argument to be made

01:08:51 ◼   ► that Apple could run an app store that's very different

01:08:54 ◼   ► than this just by policy decisions alone.

01:08:56 ◼   ► But to the previous thing,

01:08:58 ◼   ► this whole thing with Valve is so bizarre

01:09:00 ◼   ► because you have Phil Schiller commenting on it now

01:09:02 ◼   ► saying that they're discussing it with Valve,

01:09:04 ◼   ► and they're working on problems in the app store.

01:09:06 ◼   ► And I like to give Apple, not the benefit of the doubt,

01:09:09 ◼   ► but I like to assume that I don't know everything.

01:09:10 ◼   ► Like famously, everyone got super upset

01:09:13 ◼   ► when Apple banned a popular app from the app store.

01:09:15 ◼   ► And it turned out that that developer

01:09:16 ◼   ► had a ton of shady stuff going on as well.

01:09:19 ◼   ► And we just all thought Apple was guilty immediately

01:09:22 ◼   ► until all of that came out.

01:09:23 ◼   ► So you never know if there's like a privacy concern

01:09:25 ◼   ► or a security risk or something like the VPN connection

01:09:28 ◼   ► isn't secure and they wanna work on it.

01:09:30 ◼   ► I just don't know here,

01:09:31 ◼   ► but I'd like to find out what's happening.

01:09:32 ◼   ► - The Schiller thing came in an email to a Joe Random customer

01:09:37 ◼   ► who just wrote to Schiller knowing that he's the direct,

01:09:42 ◼   ► the app store, the buck stops with him,

01:09:44 ◼   ► with the app store.

01:09:45 ◼   ► And when people like Phil Schiller

01:09:48 ◼   ► write back to somebody like that,

01:09:49 ◼   ► they know there's a chance that the guy's gonna turn around.

01:09:51 ◼   ► And he actually sent it to me too.

01:09:53 ◼   ► I didn't realize till yesterday

01:09:54 ◼   ► 'cause I was catching up on email.

01:09:56 ◼   ► But he sent it to me, he sent it to MacRumors.

01:09:58 ◼   ► I don't, you know, I wouldn't do that personally,

01:10:01 ◼   ► But it's clear from the way Schiller wrote the email,

01:10:03 ◼   ► he knew that I could leak.

01:10:05 ◼   ► And it was written very carefully.

01:10:07 ◼   ► There's nothing embarrassing.

01:10:08 ◼   ► I thought it was interesting that he listed

01:10:10 ◼   ► user-generated content as a problem.

01:10:12 ◼   ► And I don't know enough about Steam.

01:10:13 ◼   ► I don't know if they've got games

01:10:14 ◼   ► where you get to dress up as a Nazi or--

01:10:18 ◼   ► - Or adult content or something.

01:10:19 ◼   ► - Yeah, or something like that.

01:10:20 ◼   ► But that user-generated content,

01:10:23 ◼   ► it sounds like it might be a little bit more than just,

01:10:26 ◼   ► "Hey, we think it's an end around the 70/30 split."

01:10:29 ◼   ► So there have been issues with apps that include discussion groups previously.

01:10:33 ◼   ► Like it's interesting because Apple has Safari and you can get anything in the world on Safari.

01:10:38 ◼   ► But when it comes to the app store, even embedding web views for a while was controversial.

01:10:41 ◼   ► They wanted you to put that 18 and over sticker on it and then it was discussion groups.

01:10:45 ◼   ► What was the content of the discussion groups?

01:10:47 ◼   ► So it seems like that's something they still wrestle with.

01:10:49 ◼   ► All right, let me take a third and final break here and thank our third sponsor.

01:10:54 ◼   ► This is really a trifecta of great sponsors on this episode.

01:10:57 ◼   ► This one is for Eero.

01:10:59 ◼   ► Now Eero is a Wi-Fi system for consumers that lets you build out what's called a mesh network.

01:11:09 ◼   ► That basically, you've probably heard about this, but you get a couple of pieces of hardware.

01:11:14 ◼   ► They're all about little puck size things about the size of an Apple TV, the main ones.

01:11:18 ◼   ► You put a couple of them throughout your house and their website will make it clear.

01:11:22 ◼   ► You give it the square footage or how many floors you have or something like that.

01:11:26 ◼   ► they'll help you decide how many you might need.

01:11:28 ◼   ► You set up, one of them is the main one

01:11:31 ◼   ► that connects to like your cable modem

01:11:33 ◼   ► or your files connection or whatever,

01:11:34 ◼   ► but it's the same, it doesn't matter which one you pick,

01:11:37 ◼   ► it's the same hardware.

01:11:38 ◼   ► And then the other ones in the house,

01:11:40 ◼   ► they just talk to each other and they create one network.

01:11:44 ◼   ► So it's not like you've got like three,

01:11:46 ◼   ► if you've got three of them that you have three networks

01:11:48 ◼   ► and your phone has to be ready to switch

01:11:50 ◼   ► from one network to another.

01:11:51 ◼   ► The way these mesh networks work is three devices

01:11:55 ◼   ► work together to create the illusion of one network

01:11:58 ◼   ► that your devices use and it could just fill your house

01:12:01 ◼   ► with really solid wifi.

01:12:02 ◼   ► There is no way in my current house

01:12:04 ◼   ► that one base station could ever,

01:12:07 ◼   ► it's a row home in Philly and it just goes up

01:12:11 ◼   ► and it just, signals don't go through floors very well.

01:12:14 ◼   ► There's just no way that one base station would work.

01:12:19 ◼   ► It just wouldn't.

01:12:20 ◼   ► So we've switched to Eero a while ago.

01:12:22 ◼   ► Apple's out of the base station game now.

01:12:25 ◼   ► I really can't think of a better one

01:12:29 ◼   ► than Eero to recommend.

01:12:30 ◼   ► I know they're the sponsor,

01:12:31 ◼   ► I'm getting paid to tell you this,

01:12:32 ◼   ► but I'm telling you, even if they weren't,

01:12:34 ◼   ► it's what I would tell you to look at first.

01:12:36 ◼   ► You set it up with a really nice iPhone app.

01:12:39 ◼   ► They have an Eero iPhone app,

01:12:40 ◼   ► you manage the network with it,

01:12:42 ◼   ► but you don't feel like you're a junior network engineer.

01:12:46 ◼   ► It really is a setup process

01:12:48 ◼   ► that an Apple user would appreciate.

01:12:51 ◼   ► You're not typing in weird 192.168 IP addresses to log into a skanky web server running on

01:13:00 ◼   ► the thing. It's a really nice app. You can name the devices, tell them which room they're

01:13:04 ◼   ► in, all very graphical. You could even run like a speed test to see what type of performance

01:13:10 ◼   ► you're getting right within the app. And the second generation products that Eero has include

01:13:18 ◼   ► something called the Eero Beacon. It's half the size of the regular Eero base station,

01:13:23 ◼   ► which is already pretty small, but it's even more. It's half the size and you can simply

01:13:27 ◼   ► plug it into a wall outlet to expand coverage into any room. So if you just need a little

01:13:32 ◼   ► oomph just to get to like the fourth floor of your house or something like that, you

01:13:35 ◼   ► can just add as many of these beacons as you want. If there's an outlet, there's Wi-Fi.

01:13:40 ◼   ► And since the beacon doesn't have an Ethernet port, you do need at least one regular Eero

01:13:47 ◼   ► to connect at the modem. But other than that, you could just use these beacons. And they're

01:13:52 ◼   ► even included, you think it sounds like a nightlight, you just put it in a socket. Well,

01:13:55 ◼   ► guess what? They have an LED nightlight in the device, so you could use it as a nightlight.

01:13:59 ◼   ► And of course, if you don't want to, you can turn it off very easily right in the app.

01:14:05 ◼   ► They even have an ambient light sensor though, so that if you want to use it, it'll just

01:14:09 ◼   ► intelligently adjust the brightness automatically depending on the time of day and how much

01:14:13 ◼   ► light there actually is in the room where you have it. Just a great idea, really a great

01:14:17 ◼   ► way to go. The second generation is such a great upgrade in terms of just being easy

01:14:22 ◼   ► and small and convenient. I really love this product, I love the company. Very happy customer,

01:14:30 ◼   ► me. They even have incredible customer support so if you do need help, and you probably won't,

01:14:36 ◼   ► but you can get a hold of a WiFi expert in 30 seconds or less most times of the day.

01:14:42 ◼   ► I have one running right now. I'm talking to Renee over in euro Wi-Fi network.

01:14:46 ◼   ► Really recommend it. So here's the deal. Their code is the talk show. They have the the.

01:14:53 ◼   ► So what you do is go to euro.com. Remember that code, the talk show,

01:14:58 ◼   ► and you can get free overnight shipping to the US or Canada. Hello, Renee. Just visit

01:15:05 ◼   ► euro.com and at checkout, select overnight shipping and enter that promo code, the talk show,

01:15:10 ◼   ► and you'll get the shipping for free. So overnight you'll have it tomorrow listening to you. Whatever

01:15:15 ◼   ► day of the week you're listening to me right now, you could have an Eero network in your house

01:15:18 ◼   ► tomorrow with free shipping. So my thanks to Eero. Mine actually just arrived yesterday. I haven't

01:15:24 ◼   ► set it up yet, but the box came yesterday. Isn't it nice? It's nice packaging too. Yeah,

01:15:29 ◼   ► it's beautiful. Looking forward to it. Really, it's great stuff. I was just looking at it the

01:15:34 ◼   ► other day in my bedroom and I was like, you know how you know this is nice is that my wife doesn't

01:15:38 ◼   ► complain that we have a Wi-Fi base station in our bedroom. Well, we were just talking about it after

01:15:44 ◼   ► Apple discontinued the airport line. Like, which company do you trust? Because this is your data.

01:15:48 ◼   ► It's your data on the front line of the internet. And there's a lot of companies whose business is

01:15:52 ◼   ► predicated on the collection and use of your data, to put it delicately. And Apple was a company that

01:16:00 ◼   ► you could trust. They didn't care what data you had. And it was hard finding another company like

01:16:03 ◼   ► that but Euro is so former Apple engineer and Apple's mindset centric that it was an easy choice.

01:16:10 ◼   ► Yeah. Anyway, before we move on to WWDC rumors, of which there's not a lot to talk about really,

01:16:20 ◼   ► which is kind of exciting, iOS 11.4 and AirPlay 2 shipped yesterday. And finally, I think this is

01:16:28 ◼   ► truly an unironic finally. But in my practice so far, we have two home pods in the house.

01:16:36 ◼   ► I moved the one from the bedroom down into the kitchen, so we have two in the kitchen

01:16:40 ◼   ► to play with the stereo. Everything works exactly as it says on the tin. It was just

01:16:46 ◼   ► as easy to set up a stereo pair as Apple had promised, even with one that had already been

01:16:52 ◼   ► configured in another room. Once I got the software update on the home pod, it immediately

01:16:57 ◼   ► prompted me, "Hey, I see you're in the same room as the other HomePod. Do you want to

01:17:01 ◼   ► set them up as a stereo pair?" And I was like, "Yes." And then I immediately said, "Play

01:17:05 ◼   ► whatever," and whatever immediately started playing in stereo on the two devices. I cannot

01:17:12 ◼   ► imagine how it could be easier to set them up. I really can't because if it was any more

01:17:17 ◼   ► automatic it might do it when you didn't want it to.

01:17:20 ◼   ► And you can go in and tweak it. Like you can go in and switch the left and right and make

01:17:23 ◼   ► them say tones to test and you can do all that. But the automatic setup is amazing.

01:17:27 ◼   ► Yeah, the automatic setup is amazing. You know, it's a shame it took as long as it did,

01:17:32 ◼   ► but apparently they wanted to get it right. And I have to say, day one, it works seamlessly.

01:17:37 ◼   ► I mean, it's exactly as promised.

01:17:40 ◼   ► The interesting thing is they made a conscious decision to have Siri only respond from one

01:17:44 ◼   ► of them. So by default, the left channel will be the one that has Siri. You can change it.

01:17:48 ◼   ► Like when you ask Siri something, the docs, I think, say you hold down on it and it will

01:17:52 ◼   ► I couldn't get that to work, but if I went to the right

01:17:54 ◼   ► HomePod and I said turn on Siri it would switch Siri to there and stay there so you can move it back and forth

01:18:01 ◼   ► But that was an interesting choice. I the way I it is interesting that they don't both talk at once I can see why

01:18:07 ◼   ► And it seems like it's a little smarter than that. It seems like in in in

01:18:12 ◼   ► Like when I was up in New York yesterday for a demo of this

01:18:16 ◼   ► And they had it set up like on two ends of a yeah of a table against a wall

01:18:21 ◼   ► Which I think is a very typical distance for stereo speakers in my kitchen. I set them up on different sides of the room and

01:18:28 ◼   ► It seems to me whichever one I'm facing is the one that answers me which makes sense

01:18:34 ◼   ► Like because I'm not I can't face both of them at the same time

01:18:38 ◼   ► So if I turn around and look at the one that doesn't seem to answer by default when I'm in a neutral physical position

01:18:45 ◼   ► It that's the one that answers me though because my voice is coming right at it

01:18:48 ◼   ► - That's interesting.

01:18:49 ◼   ► So when I pair it, as far as I know,

01:18:51 ◼   ► once you pair them, it just picks one,

01:18:53 ◼   ► but it does use the microphone system

01:18:55 ◼   ► from both of them all the time to make sure it hears you.

01:18:57 ◼   ► - Yeah, well, try putting them on opposite sides of a room,

01:18:59 ◼   ► and I suspect you'll see that.

01:19:01 ◼   ► I think it's just that if your voice is coming

01:19:03 ◼   ► at both of them more or less

01:19:05 ◼   ► like from an equilateral triangle position,

01:19:08 ◼   ► there is a default one that always seems to answer.

01:19:11 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:19:12 ◼   ► I like, some of it is just so cool.

01:19:13 ◼   ► Like you can do with Apple TV, you can do it with iPhone,

01:19:15 ◼   ► but then you put them in other rooms

01:19:17 ◼   ► And you can just say play whatever song in the bedroom or play this song in the living room

01:19:21 ◼   ► And it just I mean like people who are not Apple people who've been doing this with the Amazon or Google forever

01:19:27 ◼   ► They're laughing

01:19:27 ◼   ► But there's something about having it so deeply embedded in the Apple ecosystem and the way that Apple handles interface that makes it just as a very

01:19:34 ◼   ► fluid experience yeah, I don't want I wouldn't have a lot of time so I'm not gonna go on with it more but

01:19:39 ◼   ► I like it

01:19:43 ◼   ► WWDC rumors or lack thereof is my heading in the show notes. They double down

01:19:48 ◼   ► so who knows you know that stuff is the closer we get the more likely stuff is to leak because it's just the nature of

01:19:55 ◼   ► The game that they you know

01:19:57 ◼   ► rehearsals and who know and marketing material

01:20:01 ◼   ► Start getting finalized and more people are exposed to it

01:20:05 ◼   ► And you know, it's no coincidence that like in the 48 hours before a keynote. There's often last-minute leaks

01:20:11 ◼   ► Which is I think attributable simply to the fact that people who are less invested in it

01:20:16 ◼   ► I've suddenly have access to it and you know are willing to spoil the surprise, but we'll see you know Apple famously is as

01:20:24 ◼   ► you know issued that report earlier this year about leaking and how many leakers they've caught and

01:20:30 ◼   ► Fired yeah

01:20:34 ◼   ► So we'll see I don't know

01:20:37 ◼   ► I'm really hopeful though that not much more will leak because I think this is more exciting

01:20:42 ◼   ► I think it's way more exciting to like kind of not even to know what's coming

01:20:47 ◼   ► I mean do I don't there's I don't know if you know anything

01:20:50 ◼   ► There's two sorts of leaks like there are leaks when something is doing something wrong and you it needs to get out like people who?

01:20:56 ◼   ► Are whistleblowers and stuff like that, but this is always more like spoilers, right?

01:21:00 ◼   ► Do I want to read the plot to the next Marvel movie or the next?

01:21:02 ◼   ► Star Wars movie and then go see it and think the whole thing is boring. So already know it. No, I really don't

01:21:07 ◼   ► I have to monitor these things because it's my job, but if I didn't have to do this

01:21:11 ◼   ► I wouldn't want to know anything about the show

01:21:12 ◼   ► I'd want to go in there and really enjoy the hell out of it

01:21:15 ◼   ► So I'm kind of happy when stuff doesn't leak because it makes the show more exciting for me

01:21:19 ◼   ► Yeah

01:21:19 ◼   ► I wrote something this week or that Koi Vinh friend of the show had a really nice article about the custom illustration work that

01:21:27 ◼   ► They're doing in the App Store and that he you know had when I first this is with the iOS 11 App Store that debuted

01:21:33 ◼   ► last year

01:21:34 ◼   ► and

01:21:36 ◼   ► Effectively, they're running it as a periodical.

01:21:40 ◼   ► I don't think I know anybody in particular who's on that team, but I know that they've hired people from actual magazines.

01:21:48 ◼   ► People who worked at like Cone Nast and other really high-end design magazines.

01:21:52 ◼   ► It's run as a real editorial operation.

01:21:55 ◼   ► And they have, I don't know if they're on staff or if they're all contract work, but they hire, pay real illustrators to do real custom illustrations to accompany the articles that they write.

01:22:05 ◼   ► that they write. And it's really nice. And it's, as Coy says, in this world, it's so

01:22:10 ◼   ► many people just go write the clip art instead of commissioning original artwork. It's nice

01:22:13 ◼   ► to see somebody do that. And I just wrote offhandedly that one of the things I'm looking

01:22:17 ◼   ► forward to at WWDC is seeing the iOS App Store 2.0 come to the Mac. And somebody, I think

01:22:24 ◼   ► it was like 9 to 5 Mac, was like, "Oh, maybe Gruber knows something that we don't know."

01:22:30 ◼   ► often coyly drops them like that. This isn't the secret. I don't know if it's coming this

01:22:36 ◼   ► year. I don't. But it was on my show last year where I asked Phil Schiller about it.

01:22:44 ◼   ► And he just said, "We thought it was the right thing to do to bring it to iOS first, but

01:22:48 ◼   ► we're invested in the Mac App Store. It's important to us." He didn't say it'll come

01:22:53 ◼   ► next year, but he said, he very strongly suggested that it will come, this sort of thinking will

01:22:59 ◼   ► come to the Mac App Store.

01:23:01 ◼   ► - I thought it was almost understood

01:23:02 ◼   ► 'cause during the briefings last year,

01:23:04 ◼   ► I think everybody asked about it

01:23:05 ◼   ► and they said it was being worked on

01:23:07 ◼   ► and it feels like a this year thing.

01:23:10 ◼   ► - So it wasn't, you know what I mean?

01:23:11 ◼   ► This isn't like a deep dark secret little birdie.

01:23:14 ◼   ► This was Phil Schiller on stage at a public event,

01:23:18 ◼   ► strongly insinuating that they were already

01:23:20 ◼   ► at work on the Mac one.

01:23:21 ◼   ► - And they're doing all of them.

01:23:22 ◼   ► Like the bookstore is getting,

01:23:23 ◼   ► every store is gonna get this makeover.

01:23:25 ◼   ► - Right, and I completely agree with him.

01:23:28 ◼   ► I think it's very obvious that it was very, you know, it's the biggest and most important

01:23:32 ◼   ► store to store. So of course the iOS one got the treatment first. So that's something I

01:23:39 ◼   ► expect next week. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if maybe it's more than the Mac App Store.

01:23:44 ◼   ► Maybe there is a new bookstore and other stuff. What else? There's rumors about a Beats branded

01:23:52 ◼   ► Siri speaker sort of like a little brother to the home pod that would come at a lower price

01:23:57 ◼   ► yeah, I guess the same way that the

01:24:00 ◼   ► W1 chip went into beats products and made air pod equivalents. There'll be some beats equivalent of the home pod, right?

01:24:06 ◼   ► there's the the

01:24:10 ◼   ► Thing from months ago that Mark Gurman called marzipan

01:24:14 ◼   ► Which he says was is some sort of secret effort to get iPhone apps

01:24:20 ◼   ► running on the Mac, and there were certain people who got very excited about this. I

01:24:24 ◼   ► don't believe that's coming next week, and B, I don't believe it actually is a

01:24:31 ◼   ► way to get iOS apps running on the Mac. I think it's more of like a cross-platform

01:24:38 ◼   ► UI toolkit that would help you share code and components between Mac apps and iOS apps,

01:24:44 ◼   ► I don't think it's like, boom, here's your iOS app running on the Mac with a recompile

01:24:51 ◼   ► and Xcode or something like that.

01:24:53 ◼   ► My understanding is that since Apple did that reorg, they've had this problem.

01:24:56 ◼   ► The iMessage team has to build iMessage for iOS and iMessage for app and they've across

01:25:00 ◼   ► the company, they've built new and undisclosed tools that helps them do all this.

01:25:04 ◼   ► And they're going to pick one.

01:25:05 ◼   ► I don't think it's ready for this year either, but they're going to pick the ones that are

01:25:07 ◼   ► best and write them as public tools, not internal tools, which are often, you know, see to your

01:25:12 ◼   ► pants stuff and then we'll get this.

01:25:14 ◼   ► but there's several interplaying projects.

01:25:16 ◼   ► - Yeah, I've been talking, bottom line is that Apple's,

01:25:19 ◼   ► you'd think that they would have internalized this by now,

01:25:23 ◼   ► but Apple, when they ship the stuff

01:25:27 ◼   ► that they actually use themselves,

01:25:29 ◼   ► it's the best developer stuff that they ship.

01:25:31 ◼   ► And when they ship stuff that's like,

01:25:33 ◼   ► good enough for you people, but we don't use it,

01:25:36 ◼   ► it's buggy. - Including frameworks.

01:25:39 ◼   ► - It's buggy and incomplete.

01:25:43 ◼   ► The best example I could think of, or just, well, maybe it's not the best example, but

01:25:47 ◼   ► a simple example is that a year after the iPhone shipped and the App Store came, you

01:25:52 ◼   ► know, was announced, you know, in February or whatever, and by the time the one year

01:25:56 ◼   ► anniversary rolled around, they opened the App Store and developers had had three or

01:26:00 ◼   ► four months. The, you know, the App Store, you know, the eight, the public APIs for writing

01:26:05 ◼   ► iPhone apps in 2008 right away, it didn't include everything Apple could do because

01:26:09 ◼   ► obviously Apple has to write the system level software that operates at the lowest levels.

01:26:15 ◼   ► But for the most part, though, it gave third party developers ability to write apps as

01:26:20 ◼   ► good as Apple's apps. And that, you know, maybe a lot of maybe some of Apple's apps

01:26:24 ◼   ► were written completely within the API limitations of the public APIs. Compare and contrast with

01:26:32 ◼   ► the original Apple Watch, where the original watch kit wasn't really native at all, but

01:26:36 ◼   ► All the apps that Apple had on the watch were native.

01:26:39 ◼   ► And so you'd launch one of Apple's apps on the watch

01:26:41 ◼   ► and it would open up and you could use it.

01:26:43 ◼   ► And you'd launch a third party app

01:26:45 ◼   ► and it would spin for 30 or 40 seconds and maybe open.

01:26:50 ◼   ► - But I mean, iOS, iPhone OS too, that was a complete,

01:26:53 ◼   ► Henri Lamoureux's team had to do

01:26:54 ◼   ► a second forest march basically.

01:26:56 ◼   ► And I think Scott Forestall wrote scroll and table

01:26:58 ◼   ► and they had to rewrite UI scroll and UI table

01:27:01 ◼   ► and make them public.

01:27:02 ◼   ► They were in no shape for public at first.

01:27:03 ◼   ► - Right, so the thing I've heard from a few

01:27:05 ◼   ► developer friends about this cross-platform UI toolkit, whatever it's called, is that

01:27:11 ◼   ► they hope it's something that Apple themselves are using, because there's a good chance

01:27:15 ◼   ► then it'll be good, and they really hope it is not a, "Well, we don't use this,

01:27:19 ◼   ► but you dummies who want a shared UI code between two platforms can, here you go."

01:27:23 ◼   ► It's my understanding that there's a bunch of stuff Apple's using that they're going

01:27:26 ◼   ► to sort of rewrite for public consumption over the next year or two.

01:27:31 ◼   ► Other than that, man, what the hell else is coming?

01:27:33 ◼   ► I guess...

01:27:34 ◼   ► to me because like there was rumors of the new MacBook Air but that sounds like

01:27:37 ◼   ► it was pushed off there were rumors of the new iPad pros but there have been

01:27:40 ◼   ► zero leaks and usually there are some hardware leaks from from the supply

01:27:44 ◼   ► chain right and a curious thing if they don't do iPad pros is then presumably

01:27:50 ◼   ► the next time it could happen would be September typically Apple these days

01:27:55 ◼   ► they used to sometimes have August event but they don't have it in years and even

01:28:00 ◼   ► then they were like software like for iLife apps or something so if they don't

01:28:04 ◼   ► do it at WWDC, then they're pushed back to September, and that would mean that the iPad

01:28:08 ◼   ► Pro either skips an entire generation of A11 processors and goes right to the A12, or the

01:28:18 ◼   ► iPad Pro gets the A11 an entire year late and remains a year behind CPU-wise the iPhone

01:28:26 ◼   ► whatever comes after the iPhone X and 8. It's just curious.

01:28:33 ◼   ► And the Macs are a huge question mark now because Intel is just having the worst, ever

01:28:37 ◼   ► since they went to 14 nanometer, they've had the worst time.

01:28:39 ◼   ► They went from TikTok, TikTok to TikTok, optimize, optimize, optimize.

01:28:43 ◼   ► And I've talked about this before, but every time I fall asleep, I'm afraid I'm going to

01:28:46 ◼   ► wake up and they will have sandwiched another lake in between Coffee Lake and Cannon Lake.

01:28:51 ◼   ► So they've been, a lot of the Mac delays we've seen lately are entirely because Intel hasn't

01:28:55 ◼   ► had the chips ready.

01:28:56 ◼   ► And I don't know if the Coffee Lake Mac chips are ready at this point.

01:28:58 ◼   ► insert we don't have time to go on a long tangent about the hypothetical move to ARM

01:29:04 ◼   ► for the Mac except to just say that at a certain level you can wave your hands over some of

01:29:11 ◼   ► the technical complexities. It certainly would make sense for the MacBook. The MacBook would

01:29:16 ◼   ► actually get a performance bump, I think. My guess is that a MacBook running an Apple

01:29:22 ◼   ► a 12 processor or even an A11 processor would get a nice performance boost across the board.

01:29:28 ◼   ► The problem would be that there's no known ARM chips that compete with Intel at the high end,

01:29:35 ◼   ► for let's just say the iMac Pro, the Mac Pro, devices that Apple has publicly recommitted to

01:29:41 ◼   ► very recently. So it's not like the story is, well, they're getting out of the pro hardware game.

01:29:46 ◼   ► theory apples chip team could have secretly been working on arm based chips that actually do compete at the highest levels of

01:29:54 ◼   ► performance

01:29:56 ◼   ► But that would be shocking. I mean it would be great news. It'd be terribly exciting, but

01:30:01 ◼   ► It would be a thunderbolt out of the sky in terms of being

01:30:05 ◼   ► shaking up the industry and and

01:30:08 ◼   ► Just to put a little bow on it. I think it would be really difficult for Apple to move

01:30:14 ◼   ► to arm without moving the entire platform to arm I

01:30:18 ◼   ► Think it could also be super interesting if the MacBook and maybe sort of an Apple TV Mac mini hybrid

01:30:24 ◼   ► We're running purely on arm if the intermediary devices were fusion cores where you had arm cores for

01:30:29 ◼   ► Look for power efficiency and you still had legacy Intel cores for compatibility and performance and on the high end

01:30:36 ◼   ► They stay at Xeon because if there's one area that Intel is investing in it's still the Xeon chips

01:30:42 ◼   ► Yeah, so it's possible that they have something it would be terribly exciting. But again, there's no there's no leaks about it

01:30:48 ◼   ► I mean, it's all just spike. It's just

01:30:50 ◼   ► podcasters

01:30:53 ◼   ► Podcasters and Twitter users saying well, maybe they'll switch to arm

01:30:55 ◼   ► Yeah, no, I mean they've had the same way they had Intel Mac. They had Intel Macs in the closet for years

01:31:02 ◼   ► They've had arm maps in the closet for years. It just depends

01:31:05 ◼   ► They hold them over Intel's head to say what you guys aren't done yet, but actually shipping it raises a lot of

01:31:12 ◼   ► implementation questions right and every other time that they've switched from 68k to power PC and then from power PC to Intel

01:31:18 ◼   ► There was like a one year transition period and then after that your tradition transition period everything was running the new platform

01:31:25 ◼   ► Yeah, it just and again they could do it

01:31:27 ◼   ► You know, it doesn't have to go that way but for a bunch of reasons that we just don't have time to expand upon in

01:31:32 ◼   ► Detail it just makes a lot more sense though that if you're going to move you move the entire platform from top to bottom

01:31:37 ◼   ► So I don't know

01:31:38 ◼   ► It also depends on they position it because you can do pitch you could position it as an iOS clamshell

01:31:42 ◼   ► And then you nicely sidestep a lot of the Mac issues. So what are we we're got Thursday Friday Saturday Sunday Monday

01:31:48 ◼   ► So we're five days out from the keynote. I'm gonna say five days out from the keynote

01:31:53 ◼   ► We have less we have fewer rumors about what might be in the keynote than any year. I can remember. Yeah

01:31:59 ◼   ► Terribly exciting. Yeah

01:32:02 ◼   ► I'm thrilled. All right, anything else? I got it. Yeah. Yeah, you got to go

01:32:07 ◼   ► - I know, so I'm looking forward to seeing you on Monday.

01:32:09 ◼   ► - All right, yeah, I can't wait to see you eat too.

01:32:12 ◼   ► It'll be fun.

01:32:13 ◼   ► Everybody can follow René on Twitter @RenéRichie.

01:32:18 ◼   ► And of course, you can see all the fine work from him

01:32:21 ◼   ► and his very talented staff at iMore.com.

01:32:24 ◼   ► I'm sure they'll have extensive coverage of the keynote

01:32:27 ◼   ► and all the news on Monday.