The Talk Show

00:00:00 ◼   ► I'll tell you what. I am convinced that at some point during this show we're gonna be interrupted by

00:00:04 ◼   ► some device nearby me making noises

00:00:08 ◼   ► Because it's I've got too many too many phones

00:00:11 ◼   ► Yeah, I was messing with my website configuration about an hour ago

00:00:16 ◼   ► And and I caused some downtime and I had like four devices vibrate with some kind of alert, but we're telling me about this

00:00:22 ◼   ► it's it's crazy and I've got wires everywhere all they're all white and

00:00:28 ◼   ► with different ends on him, it's a mess.

00:00:32 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a weird and unique time of the year,

00:00:36 ◼   ► like the new iPhone just got into my hands time.

00:00:41 ◼   ► And my personal iPhone just came here yesterday.

00:00:45 ◼   ► I just got it yesterday.

00:00:46 ◼   ► So now it's like this is the worst,

00:00:49 ◼   ► because I had been using on a daily basis the review unit

00:00:54 ◼   ► iPhone from Apple.

00:00:56 ◼   ► but I still had my personal iPhone 4S.

00:01:05 ◼   ► And now I've got my new one, which I've restored, and now I'm just going to use that one.

00:01:09 ◼   ► But I find I have so much affection for my old 4S that I – and I've – this is the

00:01:17 ◼   ► first year I've really been conscious of it, but I've done it every previous year,

00:01:20 ◼   ► too, that for a day or two, I keep it running, and sometimes I put it in my other pants pocket

00:01:25 ◼   ► walk around with both phones.

00:01:26 ◼   ► [laughter]

00:01:27 ◼   ► >> Mine's still on my desk, but I haven't, the only thing I used it for was I had to

00:01:32 ◼   ► set up some kind of, some dock accessory yesterday that didn't work with the lightning plug,

00:01:36 ◼   ► so I had to use the 4S, but yeah, I mean, I still have almost all my old phones. I keep

00:01:42 ◼   ► one of every generation. So whenever Tiff and I have the same one, then I'll end up

00:01:47 ◼   ► selling one of those once we move on. But I still have all of mine, because, I don't

00:01:52 ◼   ► I don't know. I mean, my excuse so far has been for testing, but I'm a little bit sentimental

00:01:57 ◼   ► about some of them. Except for 3G. That was a piece of crap.

00:02:00 ◼   ► Yeah, that kind of was.

00:02:01 ◼   ► That was fun getting rid of that. But I have to keep my 3GS for testing, but even when

00:02:06 ◼   ► that's… I might keep that afterwards. I don't know. But I have my original iPhone

00:02:09 ◼   ► sitting in the drawer. I haven't turned it on in probably a year because I can't

00:02:14 ◼   ► run anything on it anymore. But in case I need to, it's there.

00:02:17 ◼   ► The ones… I could probably get rid of everything except the original. The original I still

00:02:22 ◼   ► like to take out and just—I don't turn it, even turn it on. I just put it in my hand

00:02:26 ◼   ► and feel it. And now, you know—and there's still something. And I know, like, I know

00:02:32 ◼   ► Cable Sasser, I don't know if he still feels this way, but I know that when the four first

00:02:36 ◼   ► came out, he was a real—even after he'd used it for a while, was not a fan of the

00:02:42 ◼   ► harsh corners. And I know Edward Tufte—Tufte? God, I don't—Tufte, I think.

00:02:49 ◼   ► I have no idea.

00:02:50 ◼   ► I have no idea.

00:02:51 ◼   ► But I know that he does not like the corners.

00:02:55 ◼   ► He's complained about it.

00:02:56 ◼   ► And not like, hey, he just got his first iPhone 4, 4S, or now 5 with the corners, and like

00:03:01 ◼   ► a day or two in he's complaining about it after he's been using it for a while, actually.

00:03:07 ◼   ► And he was singing the praises of the retina display and about how much more detail you

00:03:11 ◼   ► can put in, that this is fantastic.

00:03:14 ◼   ► But he also said, why in the world did they go away from the round edges?

00:03:18 ◼   ► I don't mind it. I like the sharp edges. But there is something to be said about the round

00:03:23 ◼   ► edges of the original.

00:03:24 ◼   ► It never really bothered me. I don't know. Actually, one thing that did bother me about

00:03:28 ◼   ► the original was that it got so hot.

00:03:30 ◼   ► I never noticed that. I guess sometimes on edge it did.

00:03:33 ◼   ► Well, it was only edge.

00:03:35 ◼   ► Yeah, but I'm saying when I was using it on edge, not like--

00:03:40 ◼   ► Well, rather than Wi-Fi.

00:03:41 ◼   ► Exactly. When I was using a lot of data on the cellular network.

00:03:44 ◼   ► Yeah, yeah, I did notice that. And I haven't, the new one, the 5, I haven't noticed it

00:03:50 ◼   ► really getting hot at all. And I don't even know if it's gotten warm. Like, you know,

00:03:54 ◼   ► it's hard to tell when you've been using it for a while whether it's warm because

00:03:56 ◼   ► your hand's been on it or whether it's generating heat from inside that you can actually

00:04:00 ◼   ► detect. But it seems, like I've used mine out a lot already and it seems pretty solid,

00:04:05 ◼   ► pretty, pretty elegant. You know, it's, the A6, man, I, I think Apple really underplayed

00:04:11 ◼   ► the A6 in the presentation because it's so far from what we know about it, you know,

00:04:17 ◼   ► like an end text running these benchmarks and trying to figure out what it is and it

00:04:21 ◼   ► looks like it's really awesome. And it makes the A5X look like a piece of crap.

00:04:25 ◼   ► Yeah, it really does. And I know there's a bunch of stuff I'd listen to the latest

00:04:32 ◼   ► episode of Build and Analyze. When was that from? Earlier this week or end of last week?

00:04:36 ◼   ► Yeah, Monday. Yeah, it was four days ago.

00:04:38 ◼   ► You pointed out there that it's significantly and noticeably faster CPU-wise than the current

00:04:44 ◼   ► iPad parenthesis 3 and close parenthesis.

00:04:50 ◼   ► And the iPad 3 needs more speed because, you know, as I mentioned on the show, I'm not

00:04:54 ◼   ► going to go too far into it here, but it got the huge boost of all those extra, all the

00:04:59 ◼   ► extra GPU power from the A5X, but it's the same CPU.

00:05:02 ◼   ► And a lot of graphical operations still run on the CPU, like things that aren't fully

00:05:06 ◼   ► hardware accelerated.

00:05:08 ◼   ► And one of the things that hits me with Instapaper was that page turn animation, because I have

00:05:13 ◼   ► to capture the image of one page before it turns away so I can scroll the web view underneath

00:05:19 ◼   ► it.

00:05:20 ◼   ► Oops, I just told all my competitors how I did that.

00:05:22 ◼   ► Well, oh well.

00:05:23 ◼   ► They don't listen.

00:05:24 ◼   ► They don't listen to the show.

00:05:25 ◼   ► They listen to your show.

00:05:27 ◼   ► If they listened to my show, they would have submitted voiceover updates already, but they

00:05:31 ◼   ► haven't.

00:05:32 ◼   ► doing like some of those graphical operations that I do with the pagination are done in the CPU and so

00:05:37 ◼   ► when the iPad 3 came out it was the first time a new device made something in my app slower and

00:05:43 ◼   ► Because it was all these like way more pixels, you know four times as many pixels

00:05:47 ◼   ► But roughly the same CPU speed as the iPad 2 and that was that was the skepticism of the whole before they came out with

00:05:54 ◼   ► The retina iPad the skepticism was from people who know their shit, you know people like you who are

00:06:01 ◼   ► developers who are writing code that does things like the page curl animations or game

00:06:07 ◼   ► developers. There's a lot of skepticism about, I just, really? I don't know. That's an awful

00:06:12 ◼   ► lot of pixels, right? I mean, just in all sorts of ways. Putting them through the CPU,

00:06:19 ◼   ► just everything. In and out of video memory. I think people underestimate just how aggressive

00:06:24 ◼   ► it is to have that many pixels on a tablet.

00:06:27 ◼   ► Oh yeah, and I mean that many pixels on anything.

00:06:30 ◼   ► Like we've seen, we even see now with the retina MacBook Pro that, that you know, one

00:06:34 ◼   ► of the biggest bottlenecks of the retina MacBook Pro is the GPU just pushing that many pixels.

00:06:40 ◼   ► And so I think the one reason, and that the iPad was always ahead of the iPhone CPU wise,

00:06:46 ◼   ► there's a couple reasons.

00:06:47 ◼   ► One, it needed it because it's had bigger screen, and two, it physically has more room

00:06:53 ◼   ► for it.

00:06:54 ◼   ► you know, there's a ginormous battery in there

00:06:56 ◼   ► compared to the iPhone.

00:06:58 ◼   ► And you know, it's just easier place

00:07:01 ◼   ► to put a bigger CPU or system on a chip.

00:07:03 ◼   ► - Oh, definitely.

00:07:05 ◼   ► And they also, they sell way fewer iPads than iPhones.

00:07:09 ◼   ► So if there's any kind of manufacturing yield issues

00:07:12 ◼   ► or potential issues, like if it's a new process

00:07:15 ◼   ► or a new architecture, it's generally easier for them,

00:07:19 ◼   ► I would imagine, to run it first on the iPad

00:07:21 ◼   ► and then launch it on the iPhone later

00:07:22 ◼   ► because of what they've done until now.

00:07:23 ◼   ► - Right.

00:07:24 ◼   ► This is the first time that an iPhone is faster than the iPad.

00:07:28 ◼   ► Yeah, it's really amazing.

00:07:30 ◼   ► And I do think that they underplayed it.

00:07:31 ◼   ► And I think one of the reasons maybe is that you can say it on stage, but it's not really

00:07:39 ◼   ► demoable.

00:07:40 ◼   ► You know, you just say faster, and it just sounds like marketing, pap, you know?

00:07:45 ◼   ► Well, and even if they said, "Oh, this is a custom-designed thing," well, technically,

00:07:50 ◼   ► the A4 and A5 were custom in the way that they were custom arranged in the package.

00:07:55 ◼   ► But the cores weren't really customized.

00:07:58 ◼   ► And I think that's a level of detail that the press wouldn't have really appreciated

00:08:02 ◼   ► at the time of the event.

00:08:03 ◼   ► I think people underestimate, if you really think about it, and we're so used to Apple

00:08:06 ◼   ► giving these good introduction events, but I think it's really, really hard to write

00:08:11 ◼   ► them, to structure them, and to pick what you're actually going to say.

00:08:14 ◼   ► Because I know that if it were me, I would have been lazy.

00:08:17 ◼   ► The thing I would have said is, at first, just before it even got into what it does,

00:08:23 ◼   ► just in terms of the build, I would have just said, "You have to feel it.

00:08:28 ◼   ► You have to feel it.

00:08:29 ◼   ► You've just got to put it in your hand and feel how light it is and feel it."

00:08:32 ◼   ► And everybody who gets one – this is what everybody says.

00:08:35 ◼   ► This is what Amy said when I first showed it to her.

00:08:38 ◼   ► Everybody who first picks it up is like, "I can't believe what it feels like."

00:08:41 ◼   ► But they don't say that, right?

00:08:42 ◼   ► They talk about specific stuff about the microns and the build quality.

00:08:47 ◼   ► Because I feel like saying you have to feel it, it doesn't sound, it is true, but it doesn't

00:08:53 ◼   ► sound true.

00:08:54 ◼   ► It sounds like just this type of marketing stuff anybody would say.

00:08:57 ◼   ► Yeah, and I mean, maybe that's why, you know, they probably assume that if they say it,

00:09:02 ◼   ► no one's really going to believe them.

00:09:04 ◼   ► Right.

00:09:05 ◼   ► Whereas if everyone who picks one up says it, that's a different story.

00:09:07 ◼   ► That's more powerful.

00:09:08 ◼   ► Yeah, I love the thing.

00:09:11 ◼   ► I still, it's still almost, like the whole first day or two that I had it, it felt kind

00:09:16 ◼   ► of fake and I was a little worried about dropping it just because it was so light I figured

00:09:20 ◼   ► like it's you know like I think you said it's like picking up an empty shell like it really

00:09:24 ◼   ► is it feels like you're picking up just an iPhone case you know with no iPhone in it

00:09:29 ◼   ► I actually but now I'm used to it and man it was getting used to the tall screen was

00:09:35 ◼   ► fast like now I so I've so quickly got to the point where when I looked at the iPhone

00:09:40 ◼   ► 4 again it looked ridiculously short to me that took me like three days yeah and I kind

00:09:46 ◼   ► of touched on this in my review, and part of it is my personality, is that I'm just

00:09:50 ◼   ► an inveterate procrastinator. So I wrote, you know, the embargo was Tuesday evening.

00:09:57 ◼   ► I wrote the review all day Tuesday, kind of, you know, cleared the schedule, didn't post

00:10:02 ◼   ► much during the day, and I pretty much wrote the whole—I had notes that I had been taking,

00:10:06 ◼   ► just scribbles, like my notes looked like crazy person notes. And I just wrote it all

00:10:12 ◼   ► on Tuesday. But I almost think that I had to though, because my opinion of it had evolved

00:10:17 ◼   ► significantly from the first few days. And honestly, I still look back and sort of wistfully

00:10:28 ◼   ► look back at the days before I was getting these things in advance, and I would just

00:10:32 ◼   ► write reviews whenever I was ready. And I kind of feel like I wish I had more time,

00:10:38 ◼   ► still had more time with the device,

00:10:40 ◼   ► 'cause it still hasn't really settled in.

00:10:42 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think that that's kind of a problem

00:10:45 ◼   ► with a lot of the way the tech press operates

00:10:47 ◼   ► is that a lot of these products,

00:10:50 ◼   ► you really want a little bit longer term review,

00:10:53 ◼   ► but everyone's interested in reading the review

00:10:55 ◼   ► when the thing comes out.

00:10:56 ◼   ► But there's so many, anything,

00:10:58 ◼   ► especially a mobile product,

00:11:00 ◼   ► you kind of need to have it for a while.

00:11:02 ◼   ► You need to go different places with it.

00:11:03 ◼   ► You need to maybe go on vacation or something

00:11:06 ◼   ► to see how it performs there,

00:11:07 ◼   ► and maybe go to a conference or something,

00:11:10 ◼   ► to get a good feel for how good this thing is

00:11:13 ◼   ► or how it works with your life

00:11:15 ◼   ► and how it works in different types of situations

00:11:18 ◼   ► rather than you get the review unit

00:11:21 ◼   ► and you gotta write your review in two days.

00:11:23 ◼   ► And that's, it's definitely hard to,

00:11:28 ◼   ► as you said, it's probably hard to really get

00:11:32 ◼   ► a good review of it out then.

00:11:34 ◼   ► But if you don't do it then,

00:11:37 ◼   ► like if you're a big site, like one of the big gadget sites,

00:11:40 ◼   ► they have to get it out on day one.

00:11:42 ◼   ► Like that's what their audience demands,

00:11:44 ◼   ► and they're competing on day one

00:11:45 ◼   ► with all the other publications.

00:11:47 ◼   ► New York Times, Wall Street Journal,

00:11:48 ◼   ► they have to get theirs out on day one

00:11:50 ◼   ► because that's what people demand from them.

00:11:52 ◼   ► And like you're in this kind of weird halfway spot

00:11:56 ◼   ► where you're on Apple's good side with the PR stuff

00:12:01 ◼   ► so you get the review units in advance,

00:12:04 ◼   ► but your audience is more people like me

00:12:08 ◼   ► who would appreciate the longer term review.

00:12:11 ◼   ► But how do you balance that?

00:12:13 ◼   ► That's gotta be difficult.

00:12:14 ◼   ► - Well, six days is not bad.

00:12:16 ◼   ► And part of it is you just have to be,

00:12:21 ◼   ► and it's the luxury of being,

00:12:22 ◼   ► that I do this site full time

00:12:23 ◼   ► and I don't have anything else to do,

00:12:24 ◼   ► that I knew that I could spend all day Tuesday writing it.

00:12:27 ◼   ► And if I have evolving thoughts as I go forward,

00:12:32 ◼   ► I can just write something new, I guess.

00:12:34 ◼   ► But I found with the things, and I know you were talking about it on your show, you know,

00:12:39 ◼   ► stuff like reaching with the thumb, it really changes as you use the device.

00:12:45 ◼   ► It, you know, just to – but you need a couple days.

00:12:48 ◼   ► And I'll tell you what, my day one response was I – the draft in my head that I was

00:12:53 ◼   ► writing two Wednesdays ago, the first day that I had the device, the review unit, was

00:12:59 ◼   ► boy, I'm really – I'm going to have to trash the four-inch screen.

00:13:03 ◼   ► I really thought it was a disaster the first day, for exactly the reasons that I had worried

00:13:08 ◼   ► about all along ever since it was rumored, because I kept missing the buttons in the

00:13:13 ◼   ► top corner.

00:13:15 ◼   ► And by Tuesday, it was way less of an issue.

00:13:18 ◼   ► And even by now, a week later, it's really almost a non-issue.

00:13:23 ◼   ► Yeah, I didn't really have any trouble with it after about an hour.

00:13:28 ◼   ► I guess my grip adapted well for it, I guess.

00:13:32 ◼   ► I think if there's one thing I would change, if I could go back and change my review, I

00:13:35 ◼   ► would probably actually lessen that criticism. Even now, in another week later, I find that

00:13:40 ◼   ► the thumb coverage is a lot less.

00:13:43 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:13:44 ◼   ► And I really do think. And in a way, and I've used, like I've used the Galaxy Nexus. I always

00:13:53 ◼   ► forget if it's the Nexus Galaxy or whatever the hell it's called.

00:13:55 ◼   ► Doesn't matter.

00:13:56 ◼   ► But I've used it for two weeks, at least two weeks, where it was my primary phone. And

00:14:00 ◼   ► And I never ever got used to the screen size on that device.

00:14:03 ◼   ► But I will say, but also to Android's credit, they don't have as much stuff at the top of

00:14:08 ◼   ► the screen.

00:14:09 ◼   ► Their back button is down low.

00:14:11 ◼   ► So it actually is, it's an operating system that is better suited to bigger than four-inch

00:14:18 ◼   ► screens than iOS would be.

00:14:20 ◼   ► But I never got used to it.

00:14:21 ◼   ► But that causes other problems like with the keyboard.

00:14:23 ◼   ► I never got used to it.

00:14:24 ◼   ► The space bar.

00:14:25 ◼   ► to use one-handed or to thumb-type one-handed.

00:14:29 ◼   ► And I think that this should and probably will

00:14:33 ◼   ► affect people's design decisions with iOS apps. In particular,

00:14:37 ◼   ► and we talked on my show, do you hold your phone in your left hand?

00:14:41 ◼   ► No, well I use it both ways. Usually right-handed

00:14:45 ◼   ► though. I keep it in my right pocket and if I'm using it one-handed

00:14:49 ◼   ► generally it is in my right hand. But sometimes I'll use it in my left hand.

00:14:53 ◼   ► So I mentioned on my show that even though I'm right-handed, I keep my phone in my left

00:14:57 ◼   ► pocket and I use it, and when I'm using it one-handed, it is with my left hand holding

00:15:02 ◼   ► the phone and using my left thumb across the screen. Apparently, I've gotten so many

00:15:07 ◼   ► crazy Twitter replies from people either saying, "That's really weird. Why do you do that

00:15:11 ◼   ► when you're right-handed?" or people saying, "Oh my God, I do the same thing." So it

00:15:15 ◼   ► seems like people are very split on this. But if you hold your phone with your left

00:15:18 ◼   ► hand, the most difficult spot to reach with your thumb is probably the upper right corner.

00:15:22 ◼   ► And I guess, see it's a big problem if you hold it with your right hand because then

00:15:28 ◼   ► you're missing all the back buttons in the upper left corner. That would be a bigger

00:15:32 ◼   ► problem I think.

00:15:33 ◼   ► But that's exactly the problem that I had.

00:15:37 ◼   ► Like I wouldn't design an iPhone app anymore that has anything important in the upper corners

00:15:42 ◼   ► if I can help it. But unfortunately, as you said, the navigation bars do. I wonder which

00:15:47 ◼   ► hand is more common for people to use.

00:15:48 ◼   ► Oh, it's got to be the right hand. It has to be.

00:15:50 ◼   ► You think so?

00:15:51 ◼   ► - Yeah, I think so. - I don't know.

00:15:53 ◼   ► - I think so, but I'm weird.

00:15:54 ◼   ► My handedness is weird.

00:15:56 ◼   ► Like, I'm right-handed and very much right-handed.

00:15:59 ◼   ► I play all sports right-handed,

00:16:01 ◼   ► but I use the mouse left-handed.

00:16:04 ◼   ► - Oh, that's crazy.

00:16:06 ◼   ► - Well, long story short, it was an RSI issue way back.

00:16:10 ◼   ► I mean, I was in college, and my right wrist was just,

00:16:15 ◼   ► both wrists were really killing me,

00:16:16 ◼   ► but my right wrist especially, and even my right shoulder.

00:16:21 ◼   ► I mean, and I really hate going to doctors and stuff like that, but I really thought

00:16:24 ◼   ► I got to go to a doctor and I thought you know

00:16:26 ◼   ► I thought I was me with somebody who had to have surgery or something because and I was sort of terrified because I thought I

00:16:31 ◼   ► Don't know what I'm gonna do with the rest of my life if I can't use a mouse and keyboard

00:16:34 ◼   ► So I switched to the left-handed mouse and spent like two days where my mouse cursor was just

00:16:42 ◼   ► ying-yang from one corner of the screen to the other

00:16:45 ◼   ► But then you know within three days it got pretty good, and I think I really do think long term

00:16:51 ◼   ► It's actually made my left hand significantly more. What's the word dextrous?

00:16:56 ◼   ► Than it was it you know before I made that switch

00:16:59 ◼   ► But I should try that but when I use a trackpad I'd use it with my right thumb

00:17:04 ◼   ► Well I mean hey make both hands great, but anyway, so I

00:17:09 ◼   ► Used the mouse I used the iPhone you know whichever hand is

00:17:14 ◼   ► convenient. But I do agree though. I also find myself, over two weeks, I grip the iPhone

00:17:21 ◼   ► differently. I do less of a rested on the pinky and more of a complete side grip.

00:17:28 ◼   ► So I'm always afraid of it falling downwards if I move that pinky out of there and don't

00:17:33 ◼   ► support it from the bottom.

00:17:34 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't – I feel like the texture of the metal really lessens that.

00:17:37 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe.

00:17:38 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe.

00:17:39 ◼   ► Anyway, my other thing that as I've used this more and more, that the metal, the metallic

00:17:46 ◼   ► feel to me, it just grows fonder and fonder as the weeks have gone by.

00:17:51 ◼   ► And it really does harken back to the original iPhone in a very, very positive way.

00:17:57 ◼   ► See, I wish the back surface was a little bit more textured.

00:18:02 ◼   ► Like even if it was just like a little bit less smooth metal, just some kind of slight

00:18:06 ◼   ► grit on it I think would be welcome.

00:18:08 ◼   ► now it almost feels like glass. Well, I don't know if I would say it feels like glass, but I could see

00:18:14 ◼   ► it being ever so slightly even more textured. It's actually more slippery than the glass with

00:18:20 ◼   ► your finger. So you got a black one? Yeah, I did. What do you think about this scratch gate?

00:18:25 ◼   ► You know, I was disappointed to learn, which this appears to be true, I was disappointed to learn

00:18:33 ◼   ► that the black covering is really a very thin layer on top.

00:18:38 ◼   ► - Right.

00:18:39 ◼   ► - But otherwise, I don't really care

00:18:41 ◼   ► because every Apple product from like the last decade

00:18:44 ◼   ► has had polished metal surfaces somewhere.

00:18:47 ◼   ► And I don't, you know, if people are saying,

00:18:49 ◼   ► oh my god, this scratches, well, you know,

00:18:52 ◼   ► that's the life of a cellphone.

00:18:53 ◼   ► You know, you can put it in a big rubbery case

00:18:56 ◼   ► and attempt to prevent scratches

00:18:57 ◼   ► and those don't always work.

00:18:59 ◼   ► Or you know, you can just enjoy it naked.

00:19:02 ◼   ► And I like to enjoy mine naked.

00:19:03 ◼   ► I like how small it is, how easily it goes in the pocket.

00:19:07 ◼   ► And I just, I chose a couple years ago

00:19:10 ◼   ► to just stop worrying about scratches.

00:19:12 ◼   ► And it turns out myself doesn't really get

00:19:14 ◼   ► that scratch anyway, 'cause I'm still careful with it.

00:19:16 ◼   ► I'm just, you know, I'm not gonna be totally crushed.

00:19:19 ◼   ► And in fact, I hope this doesn't become

00:19:21 ◼   ► some kind of scandal, 'cause you've heard of people

00:19:24 ◼   ► like opening up and they say

00:19:25 ◼   ► that it's scratched out of the box.

00:19:28 ◼   ► I actually had, on my iPhone 5, a very, very small,

00:19:32 ◼   ► like a dot, a very small spot of seemingly unpolishable surface on the back. And now

00:19:42 ◼   ► I'm looking, I can't even find it now. But I tried like rubbing it and I could not

00:19:46 ◼   ► get that out and so I assumed it was some kind of like tiny little nick in the finish

00:19:50 ◼   ► and I just decided not to care. I was like, you know what, it's even fresh out of the

00:19:54 ◼   ► box if it has this little spec that doesn't look quite right, I don't care. And now

00:19:58 ◼   ► I'm looking at it, I can't find it.

00:20:00 ◼   ► Mine has my personal one that arrived yesterday is black and

00:20:04 ◼   ► the demo from Apple was white and I always prefer black and I

00:20:09 ◼   ► I'm so happy now that I have this black one. I like it so much more

00:20:12 ◼   ► But I'm glad that the review unit they gave me was white because I got to see it

00:20:16 ◼   ► And Amy had pre-ordered a white one. I think we still could have canceled

00:20:22 ◼   ► Although I guess if we would have canceled she would have would have put her order in the back of the queue

00:20:26 ◼   ► But, at the very least, though, she did get to see it and know that, you know, feel like

00:20:30 ◼   ► she made the right decision by pre-ordering a white one.

00:20:35 ◼   ► Mine has a weird thing that I haven't seen anybody else talk about.

00:20:38 ◼   ► And I don't care because I'm not that obsessive about it.

00:20:40 ◼   ► But you know the – I don't even know what material is, but it's like some kind of plastic

00:20:45 ◼   ► or rubber between the antennas and the side.

00:20:49 ◼   ► The little lines on the side?

00:20:50 ◼   ► Yeah, the little lines on the side.

00:20:53 ◼   ► And they're black, too.

00:20:55 ◼   ► But on the right side, on the left, there's just black, black, black.

00:20:59 ◼   ► On the right side, and this is – it's so subtle.

00:21:02 ◼   ► There's no way I could photograph it.

00:21:05 ◼   ► But on the chamfered part, it's not black.

00:21:10 ◼   ► It's like clear.

00:21:11 ◼   ► It's like clear plastic on both the top and the bottom.

00:21:16 ◼   ► Just on the little –

00:21:17 ◼   ► So if you're looking at the phone's front, it's the right edge?

00:21:20 ◼   ► Yes.

00:21:21 ◼   ► And so it's not –

00:21:22 ◼   ► And the front or the rear chamfer?

00:21:24 ◼   ► front.

00:21:25 ◼   ► Oh, man. All right. I can't see this online, but I'm going to try to photograph it later

00:21:29 ◼   ► because that's the kind of challenge that I enjoy spending time on.

00:21:32 ◼   ► I don't care. In fact, it's one of those things where I feel like it makes my iPhone

00:21:35 ◼   ► a unique snowflake.

00:21:38 ◼   ► I don't think mine has that.

00:21:40 ◼   ► No. And it's only on the one side. And it's definitely not… And it's not like it's

00:21:47 ◼   ► glaring out at me, but it's the sort of thing that obviously though there are some

00:21:51 ◼   ► poor people out there. And I sympathize. I do not mock them because I have my own obsessions.

00:21:57 ◼   ► I actually sympathize. But the people who are truly obsessive about having a truly perfect

00:22:02 ◼   ► iPhone, it's the sort of thing where I feel like they would take it back to the store

00:22:05 ◼   ► and see if they could get it swapped out.

00:22:09 ◼   ► I did just discover a very small chamfer scratch on one of my corners. But I still can't make

00:22:14 ◼   ► myself care that much.

00:22:15 ◼   ► It's just – I don't even know what you call that. Just that little plastic buffer

00:22:18 ◼   ► between the antenna and the frame.

00:22:20 ◼   ► On the front chamfered edge on both the top and bottom one, it's not black.

00:22:26 ◼   ► It's like clear.

00:22:27 ◼   ► Like you can kind of see that it's made out of plastic.

00:22:30 ◼   ► But I don't care.

00:22:31 ◼   ► And on the other side, it's totally black.

00:22:34 ◼   ► I think if they – now that I'm seeing it in person and now that I've owned the

00:22:38 ◼   ► black one for – I don't know, what is it, a week or six days?

00:22:42 ◼   ► I think it's a little bit too dark on the anodized aluminum.

00:22:46 ◼   ► I would have if they sold one that had black glass

00:22:50 ◼   ► You know a black front and black glass panels, but the regular polished aluminum like from the white one. I think I'd get that one

00:22:58 ◼   ► And it would actually it would look more like the original iPhone

00:23:00 ◼   ► They would well and it would also look a lot more like the iPhone 4 and 4s

00:23:06 ◼   ► Well, the back would be all silver though, right? But from the sides would yeah the sides would like

00:23:12 ◼   ► Maybe that's why they had to make it more different so that people would say oh now it's a new iPhone 5

00:23:16 ◼   ► No, I don't think they really want people to say that I really don't I don't think that's something they're interested in and I you

00:23:21 ◼   ► Know I think I said this last week on the show with MG that I

00:23:25 ◼   ► Just used it out and about and nobody ever said anything because people it looks so much like it

00:23:31 ◼   ► I mean and like mg said that like in San Francisco

00:23:33 ◼   ► he got a few looks because it's a little bit more tech savvy of a

00:23:37 ◼   ► crowd like so he'd be using it on Bart or something and

00:23:40 ◼   ► He'd get like maybe somebody kind of like who is that the new one a week in a week ahead

00:23:45 ◼   ► But you know here in Philadelphia nobody noticed

00:23:47 ◼   ► So my problem with the dark with the darkness of the of the black metal is

00:23:53 ◼   ► That I can't I can't really see many of the details in most indoor lighting

00:23:57 ◼   ► Like I can't like it just looks like one big black slab

00:24:00 ◼   ► I did like I can't really tell much of a difference between the black glass and the aluminum which is not quite black

00:24:07 ◼   ► you know what is charcoal or slate whatever they call it like I wish there

00:24:10 ◼   ► was a little bit more of a difference there I think it would look nicer what

00:24:13 ◼   ► do you think about my theory that the home button has been improved

00:24:15 ◼   ► technically well you're at that you're right I think I fix it probably somebody

00:24:20 ◼   ► I when they disassemble it they found it like a big metal bracket now it's really

00:24:23 ◼   ► reinforced and it and it does it feels clicky er I think it feels fantastic it's

00:24:28 ◼   ► it's a it's a much more satisfying click although you were wrong about one part

00:24:32 ◼   ► of that you said that they kept the vibrator motor from the iPhone 4s and

00:24:36 ◼   ► that's incorrect. They reverted back.

00:24:38 ◼   ► I don't know that I, did I say that or did I just say that it vibrates?

00:24:42 ◼   ► Well, I think you speculated.

00:24:43 ◼   ► Right.

00:24:44 ◼   ► Yeah, but anyway, that's wrong. They actually changed back. And remember, you and I discovered

00:24:47 ◼   ► this at Singleton last year, that if you take an iPhone 4S and if you hold it like a seesaw

00:24:53 ◼   ► and you tap a certain part on the back, then you can feel the vibrator vibrating loosely

00:24:59 ◼   ► in there.

00:25:00 ◼   ► Yeah.

00:25:01 ◼   ► And it kind of makes it feel cheap or, you know, somehow wrong.

00:25:03 ◼   ► Or broken.

00:25:04 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

00:25:05 ◼   ► Exactly. But the iPhone 5 does not do that anymore. The type of vibrator motor they switched

00:25:10 ◼   ► to from the 4S does that. And now they switched back to the old kind, because it's like

00:25:15 ◼   ► a counterweighted motor that just spins with this offset weight. So it doesn't have that

00:25:22 ◼   ► weird vibrating feel anymore when it's not supposed to be vibrating. So I think it's

00:25:27 ◼   ► an improvement.

00:25:28 ◼   ► My right thigh has gone totally defective over the last five years. And so when I feel

00:25:32 ◼   ► something vibrating and it's generally not. And when my phone does vibrate half the time

00:25:38 ◼   ► I do miss it.

00:25:39 ◼   ► Let's – the phantom vibrate is actually a thing that's like a real –

00:25:43 ◼   ► And I'm severely afflicted.

00:25:45 ◼   ► Yeah, me too.

00:25:46 ◼   ► I'm totally afflicted. I also have a – well, I don't know how to describe it, but I tend

00:25:54 ◼   ► to sleep late. You know, I usually wake up around 10 or 11. I have a thing where at least

00:26:01 ◼   ► once a week. And our bedroom is on the third floor. I have a thing where at least once

00:26:08 ◼   ► a week, I would say easily four times a month, I will be woken by the doorbell and know that

00:26:13 ◼   ► there's, you know, like a delivery, you know, FedEx or UPS or something like that, and quick

00:26:17 ◼   ► throw on a pair of pants and run down three flights of stairs and there's nobody there.

00:26:21 ◼   ► And sometimes Amy will already be in the kitchen and she'll be like, "Doorbell?" And I'd be

00:26:25 ◼   ► be like, "Yeah, did it ring?" And she'd be like, "Nope." And I'd be like, "Well,

00:26:29 ◼   ► I'm up." But that's how I get up. And I hear it.

00:26:32 ◼   ► Well, how do you know that she's not just ringing it to wake you up? I'm just telling

00:26:35 ◼   ► you.

00:26:36 ◼   ► Well, because a lot of times I do it and she's at the gym or something and she's not even

00:26:41 ◼   ► home. No, I mean, she couldn't be bothered to do that. But I hear it. I hear doorbells

00:26:50 ◼   ► in the sleep.

00:26:51 ◼   ► Phantom UPS.

00:26:52 ◼   ► Well, and then the other thing is, you know, half the time it really is, it is FedEx or

00:26:59 ◼   ► UPS.

00:27:00 ◼   ► That's like a true nerds problem right there.

00:27:02 ◼   ► Because it—

00:27:03 ◼   ► You get so many deliveries.

00:27:04 ◼   ► It's so easy.

00:27:05 ◼   ► I think about it.

00:27:06 ◼   ► We get so much stuff mail ordered to us now.

00:27:09 ◼   ► It would be so easy to be a hermit.

00:27:12 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

00:27:14 ◼   ► No, the UPS guy stops at our house almost every day.

00:27:17 ◼   ► Like it's very strange when we see him drive past us.

00:27:21 ◼   ► The very rare, 'cause we get everything online

00:27:25 ◼   ► for the most part, especially now that we have the baby,

00:27:27 ◼   ► like there's even less reason to go out shopping.

00:27:29 ◼   ► So Amazon, we have stuff coming,

00:27:32 ◼   ► we have stuff from Soap.com, all the baby supplies

00:27:34 ◼   ► and toiletries and stuff, and Apple products

00:27:38 ◼   ► come every week or something, I don't know,

00:27:39 ◼   ► whenever they release new stuff.

00:27:41 ◼   ► - I like Merl, - Seriously,

00:27:42 ◼   ► he's here every day. - I like Merlin's bit

00:27:43 ◼   ► where I know Merlin's got like a thing

00:27:45 ◼   ► where he signed up where they get paper towels delivered on a regular… they don't even

00:27:49 ◼   ► have to order them. They just show up. They know how many paper towels they go through.

00:27:53 ◼   ► And so every two weeks, a new thing of paper towels comes from Amazon. But he thinks that

00:27:58 ◼   ► instead of bringing it to their house, they should drop it off X number of blocks away

00:28:01 ◼   ► so he still has to walk to get them. Because it's just so decadent having all this stuff.

00:28:09 ◼   ► Tim Cynova The big thing about the Amazon subscribe stuff,

00:28:12 ◼   ► one of the things I found that was really good to use that for, and I think it's the

00:28:15 ◼   ► The only thing I'm using it for is the water filter in my fridge.

00:28:19 ◼   ► Because they say, like, "Oh, change it every X months."

00:28:21 ◼   ► I think it's six months.

00:28:22 ◼   ► And of course, nobody ever remembers to do that.

00:28:24 ◼   ► But with mine, if you don't change it for a while, it starts slowing down and clogging

00:28:27 ◼   ► up.

00:28:28 ◼   ► So I just did the subscribe and save thing with Amazon, where I just have them deliver

00:28:31 ◼   ► me a new water filter every six months.

00:28:32 ◼   ► I don't even have to think about it.

00:28:33 ◼   ► When it arrives, I replace it, and that's it.

00:28:36 ◼   ► Dave: I want to look something up.

00:28:38 ◼   ► I'm going to look something up here.

00:28:40 ◼   ► Hold on a second here.

00:28:41 ◼   ► I remember this from last night, and I forgot to look it up before the show.

00:28:44 ◼   ► we go. What do you think about the iPhone 5 camera?

00:28:49 ◼   ► You know, I haven't had a chance to use it that much. I mean, so far it seems, it

00:28:56 ◼   ► seems so far like it's good. I don't, it doesn't seem in my usage so far that it's

00:29:01 ◼   ► that different from the 4S. It's a lot faster to take pictures. Mostly, I don't know if

00:29:05 ◼   ► that's the A6 or what. But that's like, like when Tiff was deciding whether to upgrade

00:29:10 ◼   ► upgrade or not. She wanted me to get mine first so she could see it and then decide.

00:29:15 ◼   ► And at first she was thinking she wasn't going to upgrade. But what sold her on it

00:29:19 ◼   ► was the weight and, I mean, the lack of weight, and the speed of the camera. That, you know,

00:29:26 ◼   ► it's because, you know, with the baby, if you've got to take a good picture of the

00:29:30 ◼   ► baby, you've really got to take 20 pictures and pick the one where he's looking at you,

00:29:34 ◼   ► know, and not making a sour face. So the speed of the camera really matters to us right now.

00:29:41 ◼   ► And even if you don't have a baby, it's just convenient to have fast response time. And

00:29:47 ◼   ► it is way faster. But the actual image quality, I can't tell a difference. I saw those comparison

00:29:54 ◼   ► pictures you posted, and it seems like the differences might only be in software for

00:30:00 ◼   ► the most part.

00:30:01 ◼   ► Well, and in low light, although that is partially software, partially hardware, because I've

00:30:09 ◼   ► noticed that, and I don't know if it's an API that they can be updated to take advantage

00:30:13 ◼   ► of, but the new low light stuff, I only see it when I'm using camera.app.

00:30:19 ◼   ► Like if I take a photo in Instagram, I don't get it.

00:30:22 ◼   ► Oh, that's interesting.

00:30:25 ◼   ► And it's, you know, I forget how they described it, but it's more or less that they're sampling

00:30:28 ◼   ► 4 pixels at once. It's sort of like they're sacrificing resolution and crispness for…to

00:30:38 ◼   ► get it. Brightness.

00:30:39 ◼   ► Jared Polin To get low noise.

00:30:40 ◼   ► Steven

00:30:40 ◼   ► Well, and it is kind of noisy, but it's, you know, it's to open it up, effectively open

00:30:45 ◼   ► it up more. And they say you get two full stops, and I believe it. I really do. I think

00:30:50 ◼   ► you get two stops, and it's a, what is it, like an f/2.2 lens now?

00:30:54 ◼   ► I think 2.0, something like that.

00:30:57 ◼   ► I think, or two, is it a 2.4 lens? But two stops from 2.4 I think would take you down

00:31:02 ◼   ► to like 1.8, which is serious, you know, low-light camera area. And the other thing, and they

00:31:07 ◼   ► they didn't even mention this, it goes to much higher ISOs.

00:31:10 ◼   ► Right, yeah, that's the thought. That's why the low-light pictures look so much brighter,

00:31:16 ◼   ► because they're just cranking it up. But it sounds like if they're actually doing

00:31:19 ◼   ► that kind of super-sampling, or whatever the term would be for that, where they combine

00:31:23 ◼   ► the light from four different pixel sites, that would be remarkably effective.

00:31:28 ◼   ► And it is, it's definitely noisy. I mean, you know, high ISO and the sampling and this

00:31:35 ◼   ► really tiny lens. I mean, it's definitely noisy. But you get exposures like, you know,

00:31:41 ◼   ► wow, you can see what you're looking at, exposures in the low light that on all previous iPhones

00:31:46 ◼   ► would have just been black, or you would have to use the flash, which is horrible. Especially

00:31:50 ◼   ► like the darker it is, the worse flash makes things look.

00:31:53 ◼   ► Oh, yeah. I think it was one tip we can give photographers using the iPhone 5, never use

00:31:58 ◼   ► the flash.

00:31:59 ◼   ► Right.

00:32:00 ◼   ► Or any, that's true.

00:32:01 ◼   ► love to have an option in settings app to just turn off the flash just don't

00:32:06 ◼   ► ever turn it on well that is one of the options you have in the camp in camera

00:32:11 ◼   ► app you can you can set it you know auto off or on you I just keep mine on yeah

00:32:15 ◼   ► but every once in a while that gets reset I don't know if I it's like a

00:32:17 ◼   ► phantom touch that you know if I accidentally touch that and do it or and

00:32:21 ◼   ► sometimes other apps like if I'm taking a picture with Instagram or something

00:32:24 ◼   ► like that somehow the flash gets turned on and I accidentally shoot a flash

00:32:29 ◼   ► photo and then I'm all, "Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry." To me, that's one of the--

00:32:32 ◼   ► I get so embarrassed when that happens.

00:32:34 ◼   ► I know. That's what I want. I want a thing in settings that says, "Don't turn the flash

00:32:37 ◼   ► on for any photograph in any app, period. Just take the option."

00:32:41 ◼   ► Except for the flashlight apps that kind of hack a camera into display.

00:32:44 ◼   ► Right. Let apps turn the LED on if they want, but don't let the camera apps do it. I don't

00:32:49 ◼   ► know. Something like that. But anyway, I never do it. And you get pictures you never did.

00:32:53 ◼   ► Now this drives me nuts. This is crazy. I just saw this last night. Consumer Reports

00:32:58 ◼   ► iPhone 5 review. Here's what they say.

00:33:02 ◼   ► What did they pick this year to jump on?

00:33:06 ◼   ► The claimed improvements of the iPhone 5 in handling low light shots were not apparent

00:33:10 ◼   ► in our tests. In overall quality, both still and video images shot in low light on the

00:33:15 ◼   ► iPhone 5 were of comparable quality to those shot in the iPhone 4S, though they did appear

00:33:19 ◼   ► little cooler with a bluish hue. The shutter delay for both iPhones seemed all but instantaneous.

00:33:26 ◼   ► What the hell camera are they using?

00:33:29 ◼   ► That's interesting.

00:33:30 ◼   ► Now, there's a picture next to it. Here, let me send you the URL.

00:33:37 ◼   ► Did they not go into low enough light to trigger this new mode, maybe?

00:33:40 ◼   ► I think what they did is they used some sort of third-party app to take the pictures, because

00:33:47 ◼   ► a picture of them taking pictures.

00:33:49 ◼   ► Oh yeah, the same with like the clock on the left?

00:33:52 ◼   ► Yeah, I don't think that's camera.app, is it? It looks like there's like a status bar

00:33:58 ◼   ► at the top.

00:33:59 ◼   ► No, that's just, that's the…

00:34:01 ◼   ► Or is that just…

00:34:02 ◼   ► No, that is camera.

00:34:03 ◼   ► Oh, it's the picture. I see it. It's actually what's in the picture.

00:34:07 ◼   ► Yeah, that is the picture.

00:34:08 ◼   ► I don't understand how they could have written this. I don't understand how they could

00:34:11 ◼   ► say that the... I think it is true that in regular light, broad daylight, typical lighting

00:34:18 ◼   ► situations, the camera is very much equivalent to the 4S. You know, very, very hard to say

00:34:23 ◼   ► one is better than the other. In some of my comparison shots, I think the 4S one looked

00:34:27 ◼   ► better. And just because I tapped, you know, just the luck of the draw of getting slightly

00:34:32 ◼   ► better sunlight or tapping a better target in the building I was shooting.

00:34:36 ◼   ► Yeah, it seemed like sometimes the iPhone 5 was overexposing the bright areas and blowing

00:34:39 ◼   ► the highlights. You know, and I don't really think that they tried to make it sound at

00:34:44 ◼   ► any point that in regular lighting situations that the new camera is all that much better.

00:34:49 ◼   ► I mean, the old one was really good. But for Consumer Reports to say that it's not better

00:34:55 ◼   ► in low light, I don't understand, I really don't understand how they could say that.

00:34:58 ◼   ► I mean, to me that's crazy. Yeah, that's, I mean, I wonder really what

00:35:05 ◼   ► what their testing was here.

00:35:07 ◼   ► What were they taking pictures of?

00:35:09 ◼   ► 'Cause it looks like in this picture

00:35:11 ◼   ► that they're taking pictures of a computer screen.

00:35:13 ◼   ► Is that accurate?

00:35:13 ◼   ► - Yeah, it looks like it.

00:35:14 ◼   ► It's very hard to tell.

00:35:16 ◼   ► - So it looks like a Windows computer.

00:35:18 ◼   ► You can see in the,

00:35:20 ◼   ► it looks like the clock window that they have there

00:35:22 ◼   ► has a Windows title bar on it, maybe.

00:35:25 ◼   ► Like that gray style, I don't know.

00:35:27 ◼   ► But it looks like they're definitely taking a picture

00:35:30 ◼   ► of a screen there.

00:35:32 ◼   ► And so I have to wonder,

00:35:33 ◼   ► how did they do low light comparison?

00:35:36 ◼   ► Did they just turn the screen,

00:35:38 ◼   ► like have the screen show dark gray or something?

00:35:40 ◼   ► - I don't know.

00:35:42 ◼   ► - I'm curious to know, 'cause you're right,

00:35:44 ◼   ► there is a noticeable difference in how low light

00:35:48 ◼   ► you can shoot in with the iPhone 5.

00:35:50 ◼   ► And I think any review would have noticed that

00:35:53 ◼   ► if they looked at the camera.

00:35:55 ◼   ► - Yeah, I really, I would like to see

00:35:57 ◼   ► one of the camera sites, like dpreview.com

00:36:00 ◼   ► or somebody like that review.

00:36:02 ◼   ► Honestly, I think Apple should seed those sites with review units.

00:36:05 ◼   ► I think that the iPhone and Apple, I think Apple is, I think one of the stories of the

00:36:11 ◼   ► next five years, honestly, is that Apple, and truth be told, Samsung, really, are going

00:36:18 ◼   ► to become the top camera companies in the world.

00:36:21 ◼   ► And I don't think that, you know, like Nikon is being completely taken by surprise here,

00:36:27 ◼   ► because I know Nikon has like an Android-based phone.

00:36:31 ◼   ► I don't think it's out yet, but I know that they were previewing it.

00:36:36 ◼   ► So they're aware of that.

00:36:39 ◼   ► But I really do think that the cell phones are going to just blow away the standalone

00:36:46 ◼   ► camera industry.

00:36:47 ◼   ► I mean, I think they already have for a lot of it.

00:36:51 ◼   ► But even, like, you know, now they have this whole category of these small, mirrorless

00:36:56 ◼   ► prosumer cameras.

00:36:58 ◼   ► And so you have the micro four thirds and Canon's making a new one.

00:37:02 ◼   ► And I actually preordered the Canon one, the EOS M, because I figured that might be useful.

00:37:07 ◼   ► I have these Canon lenses even though you need an adapter and blah blah blah.

00:37:11 ◼   ► I ordered a thinking, you know, I would love to carry around a small camera sometimes that's

00:37:18 ◼   ► way better in quality than the iPhone.

00:37:21 ◼   ► And it turns out, I did that two years ago with an S90 and I just never used the thing

00:37:26 ◼   ► so I ended up selling it.

00:37:28 ◼   ► And I have my big SLR.

00:37:30 ◼   ► And the question is, what do you do to solve times when you don't want to bring the whole

00:37:37 ◼   ► SLR with you or you don't have it with you, but you want something higher quality than

00:37:41 ◼   ► the iPhone?

00:37:42 ◼   ► And the problem is that gap keeps narrowing.

00:37:45 ◼   ► And it's narrowing to the point where if you get one of those middle cameras, it's like,

00:37:52 ◼   ► how often will you actually use that thing?

00:37:54 ◼   ► often will you have that but not the SLR? And for me, this is why I'm thinking I'm

00:38:01 ◼   ► probably going to cancel that pre-order, because that solves a problem that I don't have

00:38:08 ◼   ► anymore. I know in reality, instead what I did was I got the little 40mm pancake lens

00:38:14 ◼   ► that Canon released a couple months ago. And it's not amazing, but it's decent. And

00:38:19 ◼   ► so I got that little pancake lens and I just keep that on the 5D. And so whenever we take

00:38:24 ◼   ► a trip somewhere where I'm bringing like a backpack with the computer and everything,

00:38:28 ◼   ► I toss the whole 5D in there with that lens on it.

00:38:30 ◼   ► Yeah, and it makes it—I have the exact same camera too, and it makes a big difference

00:38:33 ◼   ► because my other go-to lens is my baby. And you know what I'm talking about. I'm talking

00:38:37 ◼   ► about that— The 1.250?

00:38:38 ◼   ► Yeah, the 1.250. I mean, I've blacked out. I've already blacked out on my memory. What

00:38:43 ◼   ► did I pay for that? What is that? I think it's $1600.

00:38:46 ◼   ► Yeah, it's a $1600 camera lens. That's my baby. But it's—

00:38:50 ◼   ► It's a great lens, but it's huge. It's huge. It is—

00:38:54 ◼   ► how do you get f1.2 with a lot of glass?

00:38:57 ◼   ► - Oh yeah.

00:38:58 ◼   ► - So it's a lot of glass which means it's really heavy

00:39:01 ◼   ► and it's a lot of glass and you know it's made of glass

00:39:03 ◼   ► and so you do not want to drop that.

00:39:05 ◼   ► (glass breaking)

00:39:06 ◼   ► - Oh yeah.

00:39:08 ◼   ► Whereas like the little pancake lens,

00:39:10 ◼   ► it's 40 millimeter, it's 200 bucks.

00:39:11 ◼   ► - Right.

00:39:12 ◼   ► - And it's a pancake prime and it fits any Canon EOS mount

00:39:15 ◼   ► and it's great.

00:39:16 ◼   ► - If you're gonna wear your camera around your neck all day

00:39:18 ◼   ► it makes a huge difference.

00:39:20 ◼   ► - And also if you're putting it in a bag,

00:39:22 ◼   ► The problem with a camera is if you're putting it in any kind of thin or rectangular bag,

00:39:26 ◼   ► like a messenger bag, the shape of a camera with a lens mount on it is like this big bulbous

00:39:31 ◼   ► shape.

00:39:32 ◼   ► It's not just flat.

00:39:33 ◼   ► And the 40mm pancake makes it a lot flatter.

00:39:36 ◼   ► Like it makes it so that the...

00:39:38 ◼   ► Here, let me see.

00:39:39 ◼   ► I have one right over here.

00:39:42 ◼   ► Yeah, see the 40mm lens extends out from the 5D Mark II just about maybe a half of a second.

00:39:52 ◼   ► of an inch beyond the little blob on top that says Canon points outward.

00:39:58 ◼   ► But that usually would be a flash if it wasn't a professional camera.

00:40:01 ◼   ► Yeah, so I think it's really short.

00:40:03 ◼   ► And so it makes it fit into bags a lot better just to have the reduction of lens depth with it.

00:40:09 ◼   ► Yeah, throw that thing on your 5D and it kind of is your gap camera.

00:40:12 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

00:40:14 ◼   ► And it's, you know, that's why I like, I mean sure, like the EOS M and these mirrorless cameras,

00:40:19 ◼   ► they are a lot smaller, the 5D body is pretty big and chunky, so these things are a lot smaller,

00:40:24 ◼   ► but it's still relatively the same size class. It's like

00:40:28 ◼   ► comparing a 13-inch MacBook Air to a big MacBook Pro.

00:40:34 ◼   ► Yeah, the Air is a lot smaller, but it's still the same general size class of object,

00:40:40 ◼   ► so chances are if you are somewhere or in some situation where it's

00:40:45 ◼   ► impractical or impossible to carry

00:40:49 ◼   ► a 13 inch MacBook, or to carry a MacBook Pro,

00:40:53 ◼   ► you probably also won't be carrying a MacBook Air.

00:40:57 ◼   ► Similar kind of thing as this, if you're in a situation where you can't carry

00:41:01 ◼   ► an SLR with the 40mm lens on it, you probably also won't have

00:41:05 ◼   ► any little mirrorless camera with you. Because they don't fit in pockets. Unless you have

00:41:09 ◼   ► really big pockets. But for the most part they don't fit in pockets. So they still have to go

00:41:13 ◼   ► in a bag or something. So it's still the same portability class.

00:41:17 ◼   ► Absolutely agree. And I used to, as an amateur photo enthusiast, certainly not a serious

00:41:27 ◼   ► photographer but I enjoy taking pictures. And Dan and I used to talk about it all the

00:41:33 ◼   ► time. My Ricoh, oh geez I forget what the hell it was called.

00:41:37 ◼   ► GR something, GR1?

00:41:39 ◼   ► GR1, which I paid, I think in 2006 I paid 800 bucks for, which is a lot for a little

00:41:46 ◼   ► point-and-shoot camera but I loved that camera. It's one of the greatest $800 I've ever spent

00:41:53 ◼   ► in my life. It has sadly given up the ghost. It doesn't really work that well anymore,

00:41:59 ◼   ► like power it on and sometimes the lens gets stuck and stuff like that. And like, I don't know,

00:42:05 ◼   ► and the software gets stuck sometimes where it's on but it won't take pictures. But I just,

00:42:11 ◼   ► even if it worked perfectly, I would never carry it around anymore though because

00:42:14 ◼   ► The whole reason I loved it was that it took such great pictures for a point-and-shoot,

00:42:19 ◼   ► and it took such great pictures in low light without a flash.

00:42:22 ◼   ► And that is the one thing that I'd like for the last year or two I'd been on the fence about

00:42:29 ◼   ► replacing that, either with the latest Ricoh GR whatever, or probably with the one that I think

00:42:36 ◼   ► has probably taken its place, the Canon S100, and before that the S95, which actually looks a lot

00:42:42 ◼   ► like a little black point and shoot from Canon which is a fantastic camera really

00:42:49 ◼   ► is really fast lens and it shoots nice video and stuff like that but it's

00:42:54 ◼   ► really gotten to the point and the five the iPhone 5 really has gotten to the

00:42:57 ◼   ► point now where with the low-light performance so that you know you can

00:43:01 ◼   ► take pictures of people at dinner and stuff like that it's not as good it does

00:43:07 ◼   ► definitely is not as good it doesn't take pictures as good as the s100 but

00:43:10 ◼   ► it's close enough and so much more radically convenient that what's the, you know, it's just,

00:43:20 ◼   ► there's no way I'm ever going to buy a point and shoot again, I don't think.

00:43:22 ◼   ► Jared: Exactly. And, you know, and it's easy for us, you know, I think a lot of people took a similar

00:43:30 ◼   ► path that we did, or at least that I did, where you kind of, you discover photography through

00:43:34 ◼   ► these awesome SLRs over the last five, six years that have existed. And I've heard

00:43:40 ◼   ► a lot of people in our circle of nerds and nerd friends that are like us who have done

00:43:46 ◼   ► this path. And once you get used to the quality from an SLR, even a bad SLR, even the lowest

00:43:52 ◼   ► end ones, I guess bad is the wrong word, but even the lowest end SLRs.

00:43:56 ◼   ► Right. Bottom of the line, Cannon Rebel.

00:43:59 ◼   ► Yeah, basic Cannon Rebel, even the S series I think is the cheapest one now.

00:44:03 ◼   ► Even that has way better quality than what you get from the S90 and S100 series.

00:44:09 ◼   ► Exactly. Exactly.

00:44:10 ◼   ► Because the sensor is so much bigger, the optics are so much bigger, the tolerances are way different.

00:44:15 ◼   ► Even that is way better quality.

00:44:17 ◼   ► So, like I found with the S90, one of the reasons why I didn't really care for it, besides that I would always forget to bring it with me,

00:44:24 ◼   ► was that optically it didn't hold a candle to what I had at the time was the Rebel.

00:44:30 ◼   ► Right.

00:44:31 ◼   ► and it didn't even compare.

00:44:34 ◼   ► - So if you're gonna, basically,

00:44:35 ◼   ► if you're gonna compromise on quality,

00:44:36 ◼   ► and all point and shoots are severely compromised

00:44:39 ◼   ► on quality compared to SLR. - Yes, even your beloved

00:44:41 ◼   ► S100, everybody, that's, even those--

00:44:43 ◼   ► - Right, I would rather compromise with the iPhone camera

00:44:46 ◼   ► and make up for that with software, right?

00:44:50 ◼   ► So you can put filters on it,

00:44:52 ◼   ► you can diddle with it right there,

00:44:53 ◼   ► and you can Instagram it right away, right?

00:44:56 ◼   ► It doesn't, it hardly even makes sense anymore

00:44:57 ◼   ► to have a camera that you can't upload

00:44:59 ◼   ► the picture immediately.

00:45:01 ◼   ► Oh yeah, that's why, like you see the new Canon, what is it, the 6D? I think it's,

00:45:07 ◼   ► yeah, the 6D. They just announced it like two weeks ago, they're releasing it soon,

00:45:13 ◼   ► and it's the first Canon camera that has, as far as I know, at least the first SLR that

00:45:17 ◼   ► has Wi-Fi built in and GPS. So they're kind of getting towards a smartphone, like obviously

00:45:25 ◼   ► there's still a long way to go there, but I feel like it was kind of a waste to not

00:45:29 ◼   ► put that in their high-end 5D Mark III or in their portable EOS M. But anyway, I think

00:45:37 ◼   ► going back to your original point that you're right, and it seems obvious, but I think it's

00:45:42 ◼   ► really worth pointing this out that the market for non-professional cameras is pretty much

00:45:49 ◼   ► gone. It's like the market for PDAs. No one's buying PDAs anymore.

00:45:55 ◼   ► And the store shelves like when you walk into Target, they don't reflect that yet

00:45:59 ◼   ► There still is a counter where you can go and choose from 30 different point-and-shoot cameras, but I think that's going away

00:46:06 ◼   ► I really do and you know and people still are buying them like, you know, my mom has a point-and-shoot camera

00:46:11 ◼   ► but how many more years like

00:46:13 ◼   ► When the current one dies will she replace it?

00:46:16 ◼   ► Maybe by that time she'll be using a smartphone that has a better camera in it, right?

00:46:21 ◼   ► You know, I don't know and like I think everybody can point to people in their lives

00:46:25 ◼   ► they know who have point-and-shoots now, but if you think about it, all right, well, let's

00:46:28 ◼   ► say that last another three or four years, then what phone will they be using in three

00:46:33 ◼   ► or four years?

00:46:34 ◼   ► And will it become worth it for them to replace that camera or not?

00:46:37 ◼   ► Right.

00:46:38 ◼   ► It's like non-smartphone phones.

00:46:39 ◼   ► Right.

00:46:40 ◼   ► Exactly.

00:46:41 ◼   ► I mean, they are there.

00:46:42 ◼   ► And I guess point-and-shoot cameras will never truly go away, but they're going to become

00:46:44 ◼   ► like this little thing that only a very handful of people use.

00:46:49 ◼   ► I mentioned this a few weeks ago, where I was actually had to go in.

00:46:52 ◼   ► I didn't have to but I wanted to, sounds weird, go into a Verizon retail store here.

00:47:00 ◼   ► Long story short, because we were switching from AT&T, we could only buy, we could only

00:47:05 ◼   ► pre-order one iPhone from Apple.

00:47:10 ◼   ► Which makes sense, I think it has stuff, you know, it might even be related to the unlocked

00:47:15 ◼   ► sim thing where they don't want to sell you subsidized iPhones before they know that you're

00:47:23 ◼   ► you know not gonna take them all to China.

00:47:26 ◼   ► Right I actually I actually don't blame them for this even though it was a bit of an irritation

00:47:30 ◼   ► and that's why my iPhone didn't get here till yesterday instead of on day one.

00:47:37 ◼   ► But we had to pre-order one and then get it set up before we could add another one to

00:47:42 ◼   ► the account. And so I went into a Verizon store just to see if there was any way that

00:47:45 ◼   ► I could shortchange that and just say, "Here, can you just charge my credit card now and

00:47:50 ◼   ► let me open an account? Or do we have to have the device?" And the bottom line was you

00:47:54 ◼   ► have to have the device. And I actually even thought about buying just a burner, just get

00:48:00 ◼   ► like a $40 whatever so that I could have a Verizon account and then I could add iPhones.

00:48:05 ◼   ► And then I honestly, and it was like a moment of like wisdom.

00:48:10 ◼   ► I was like, you know what, don't throw another $40 away.

00:48:15 ◼   ► Just wait, just wait.

00:48:16 ◼   ► It's not gonna kill you to wait.

00:48:17 ◼   ► And so I did it.

00:48:18 ◼   ► - I love how the option you never considered

00:48:21 ◼   ► was getting an Android phone.

00:48:22 ◼   ► - Right, but I did know.

00:48:23 ◼   ► Here's the thing that makes me bring it up right now is

00:48:26 ◼   ► there's, it was actually hard.

00:48:29 ◼   ► When the idea occurred to me in the store

00:48:31 ◼   ► of maybe I'll just buy the cheapest phone I can get

00:48:33 ◼   ► open a Verizon account, it was actually hard to find them. I mean, there are very few of

00:48:37 ◼   ► them left. It's really – Verizon retail store is really a smartphone and even tablet

00:48:44 ◼   ► store. The tablets are more prominent. And of course, they want – they're higher

00:48:47 ◼   ► priced and it makes sense that the cheap phones aren't – actually, I think they really

00:48:52 ◼   ► rip people off on those cheap phones. They're actually expensive. I remember –

00:48:56 ◼   ► Oh, yeah. You pay like 100 bucks for one. Yeah. I remember 10 years ago, they were free

00:48:59 ◼   ► free or almost free. My phone that I had before the iPhone was just this POS Nokia thing,

00:49:07 ◼   ► although it did make good phone calls. I very distinctly remember that I did get it on a

00:49:12 ◼   ► contract I guess, but I paid like $19 for it. It was like $19.95 with a two-year contract

00:49:17 ◼   ► and a very reasonable all I was paying for it. There's no data. It was just minutes.

00:49:21 ◼   ► Yeah, you're paying like 40, 50 bucks a month for it.

00:49:23 ◼   ► You couldn't get – if they had a $19 phone, I probably would have done it and just bought

00:49:27 ◼   ► the $19 Verizon phone and opened an account. But they didn't. They were all like 50 bucks,

00:49:34 ◼   ► like 100 bucks.

00:49:35 ◼   ► Jared Ranerelle>> I bet the reason why is because they know, because they don't require

00:49:39 ◼   ► you to buy data plans for all the random Android smartphones, do they? I think that's still

00:49:44 ◼   ► optional. But they know that if you buy this flip phone for 40 bucks or 50 bucks, you're

00:49:51 ◼   ► spending 40 bucks a month for that contract. But they know that if they can upsell you

00:49:56 ◼   ► you to a smartphone that there's x percentage chance that you're going to opt for a data

00:50:01 ◼   ► plan.

00:50:02 ◼   ► And that's going to get them way more money over the course of that contract.

00:50:05 ◼   ► So I think it's in their best interest to price those flip phones fairly unappealingly

00:50:09 ◼   ► close to a smartphone.

00:50:11 ◼   ► So it's like, "Well, you can get this flip phone for $129 or you can get this low-end

00:50:15 ◼   ► Android phone for $50."

00:50:16 ◼   ► I don't know if they'll sell you one without a data plan.

00:50:19 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:50:20 ◼   ► It would seem weird to sell you a smartphone without a data plan.

00:50:24 ◼   ► But maybe they do.

00:50:25 ◼   ► I don't know.

00:50:26 ◼   ► - Well, either way, if they don't require it,

00:50:28 ◼   ► they know that some percentage of people

00:50:30 ◼   ► will be able to be upsold to it.

00:50:32 ◼   ► And if they do require it, then that's 100%.

00:50:34 ◼   ► So it's either way, they know that if they can get you

00:50:37 ◼   ► into an Android phone rather than a flip phone,

00:50:40 ◼   ► they have a much better chance of making more money

00:50:42 ◼   ► from you in the long run.

00:50:43 ◼   ► - Hey, let me take a break, and it's actually a good point

00:50:45 ◼   ► 'cause we were just talking about cameras

00:50:49 ◼   ► and the advantage of having software right on your device.

00:50:52 ◼   ► Let me take a break and tell you about our first sponsor.

00:50:53 ◼   ► Game Your Video. It's from our friends at Global Delight, the most frequent talk show

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00:51:01 ◼   ► They're great.

00:51:02 ◼   ► Game Your Video, they call it the ultimate video creation app. In a lot of ways, it really

00:51:09 ◼   ► is, it's almost like the anti-iOS iMovie, like where iMovie has a zillion little controls

00:51:13 ◼   ► on screen, very complicated. Game Your Video, super simple. You open it up, you either shoot

00:51:18 ◼   ► the video or you grab one from your library and you just have this simple little stuff

00:51:23 ◼   ► at the bottom of the screen for doing things like slow motion and Instagram style filters

00:51:31 ◼   ► that all get applied live. You don't pick a filter and then sit there and wait while

00:51:35 ◼   ► it renders. You can just, you can actually change the filters while you're playing the

00:51:39 ◼   ► video or while you're shooting the video in the app. It's kind of amazing considering

00:51:45 ◼   ► how putting filters like that on still photos in apps like Hipstamatic takes like 30 seconds

00:51:52 ◼   ► to render an image. They're doing it live in video. Really, really cool stuff.

00:51:58 ◼   ► **Ezra Klein:** That's impressive.

00:51:59 ◼   ► **Ezra Klein** It really is. You play with it and it's like,

00:52:03 ◼   ► "I kind of can't believe this is possible." And this works on all the iPhones too. It

00:52:08 ◼   ► works on iPhone 4, 4S. It's not like you need the iPhone 5 for it. They call the interaction,

00:52:16 ◼   ► what do they call it here? They call it "play and change." So, the whole point is that

00:52:20 ◼   ► you can change the stuff while you're playing the video on the fly to see how it looks.

00:52:25 ◼   ► Really, really cool stuff. I first saw it. I saw this app this year at Macworld Expo

00:52:32 ◼   ► in San Francisco. And it won. The app won a Best of Show award from Macworld magazine.

00:52:39 ◼   ► Well deserved. And I just remember thinking on the show floor, I remember thinking that

00:52:44 ◼   ► it really seemed fake. I didn't want to accuse them of it, but I really wanted to play with

00:52:49 ◼   ► it in my hand to make sure that I wasn't watching a canned demo of these filters being applied

00:52:55 ◼   ► to video as it goes without any kind of hiccup or pause or rendering mode or anything like

00:53:01 ◼   ► that. Really, really cool app. So here's the URL. Bitly, you know Bitly, bit.ly. Go to

00:53:09 ◼   ► bit.ly/gameyourvideo, all one word. Bit.ly/gameyourvideo. Or just go to the App Store and search for

00:53:22 ◼   ► game your video. One last thing, through October 7th. Now today as we record it is September

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00:53:36 ◼   ► Jared Polin Nice.

00:53:37 ◼   ► Tim Weiss Great app. See me on Charlie Rose last week?

00:53:42 ◼   ► Jared Polin Yeah, I did. That was pretty cool.

00:53:44 ◼   ► Tim Weiss It was pretty cool. I'll tell you what. My

00:53:45 ◼   ► one regret, speaking of camera apps, is my one, the one answer I wish I had back was

00:53:50 ◼   ► when he asked, "What does this not do that you wish it did?" And I said, first thing,

00:53:57 ◼   ► you're under the gun, you're on live TV,

00:53:59 ◼   ► I thought, well, I wish it had like double the battery life.

00:54:02 ◼   ► Instead of like one day of battery life,

00:54:03 ◼   ► I wish it had double.

00:54:05 ◼   ► Two days of typical use, and then I could get through

00:54:07 ◼   ► one day of like heavy use at a conference.

00:54:11 ◼   ► Like in theory, just blue sky,

00:54:13 ◼   ► what do I wish the iPhone had that it doesn't?

00:54:16 ◼   ► In hindsight, what I wish I'd said was,

00:54:19 ◼   ► I wish it shot near SLR caliber photographs.

00:54:24 ◼   ► Like that's my dream for like where I hope

00:54:26 ◼   ► the iPhone is five years from now. I hope that it can take, I don't know, the laws of

00:54:34 ◼   ► physics are actually hurting them with regard to how thin these things are and the way that

00:54:38 ◼   ► cameras really need big, big glass and big sensors and distance from the glass to the

00:54:44 ◼   ► sensor. But they've got smart people. I don't know. They can figure it out somehow. That's

00:54:48 ◼   ► just pie in the sky. I wish that the iPhone could shoot, I won't say SLR quality, but

00:54:54 ◼   ► near SLR quality.

00:54:56 ◼   ► I wonder if there's some way and please email John, I wonder if there's some way

00:55:01 ◼   ► that to combine a bunch of small sensors and small lenses like a mosquito eye, like just

00:55:07 ◼   ► like in like a grid, that way, you know, and somehow combine all those into one coherent

00:55:12 ◼   ► image. I don't know if that's possible or if the results would be good or not. Isn't

00:55:16 ◼   ► that, that's kind of what that little, what was that little box camera that was the novelty

00:55:20 ◼   ► with the 3D focusing?

00:55:21 ◼   ► Lycra, Lycra, Lytro?

00:55:23 ◼   ► Lightro, that's it, yeah. Kind of like what they were going for, but not quite. I'm

00:55:29 ◼   ► sure people have tried this. I wonder if that's a direction Apple could go in the future,

00:55:34 ◼   ► to basically have like, you know, like it wouldn't, they'd probably make it look

00:55:37 ◼   ► like one big camera on the back, but to have like, you know, an array of maybe four sensors

00:55:42 ◼   ► with four little micro lenses on them, and then one big lens in front of it kind of masking

00:55:46 ◼   ► it all.

00:55:47 ◼   ► Well, and I really do think that that sort of pushing the limits thinking is exactly

00:55:51 ◼   ► what's going on with the low-light photos here in the iPhone 5, you know,

00:55:55 ◼   ► where they're doing this thing where they're sampling four pixels at once to

00:55:58 ◼   ► get a pixel of the image and yeah I maybe there is something they could do

00:56:03 ◼   ► like that where you know somehow I guess I could just be one big sensor just

00:56:08 ◼   ► with just with different lenses on the front like right an array of lens just

00:56:11 ◼   ► really doesn't need to be separate sensors yeah just rethink the way that

00:56:13 ◼   ► all that's you know all that stuff works and I really do think I do get the

00:56:17 ◼   ► impression that I mean they don't pitch it that way they pitch it as hey it's a

00:56:21 ◼   ► great, great, great, never better, better than ever before camera in your phone. But

00:56:28 ◼   ► I really do think that Apple sees itself now as a camera company. That that's one of the

00:56:33 ◼   ► things that's like a top-tier priority for them. I really do. And it's this combination

00:56:39 ◼   ► of camera hardware and lens and, you know, the sapphires, you know, coding and stuff

00:56:46 ◼   ► like that combined with software.

00:56:48 ◼   ► And you know, in the APIs for controlling the camera, they don't give developers access

00:56:56 ◼   ► to raw settings like ISO or aperture. As far as I know, I know there's no ISO control.

00:57:01 ◼   ► As far as I know there's no aperture control. There might be exposure control.

00:57:05 ◼   ► Yeah, there's definitely exposure control. You can at least, like, you can set where

00:57:08 ◼   ► it focuses in the photo. But, you know, I wonder if the reason why they haven't exposed

00:57:13 ◼   ► this yet, you know, at this point, if there's something missing in iOS or the APIs at this

00:57:18 ◼   ► this point, it's probably a conscious decision not to offer that, rather than, "Oh, they

00:57:23 ◼   ► just haven't gotten to that yet."

00:57:25 ◼   ► You could say they haven't gotten to it yet for iOS 1 through 4 or so, but now it's

00:57:30 ◼   ► like if they don't offer something now, they probably have decided not to offer that.

00:57:35 ◼   ► I think maybe with the camera manual fine-grained controls, maybe they aren't offering that

00:57:41 ◼   ► to be able to then rely more on software optimizations.

00:57:45 ◼   ► optimizations. I definitely think so. I think it's, you know, that to them the camera is this black,

00:57:50 ◼   ► from a developer standpoint, it's this black box, and inside the black box is hardware and software

00:57:57 ◼   ► together. Right, and they don't want developers to be setting the controls themselves. You know,

00:58:02 ◼   ► Apple wants to be able to say, for this device and for this hardware and for this lighting situation,

00:58:07 ◼   ► we know better, and we're going to do our optimizations, and we're just going to hand

00:58:11 ◼   ► you an array of a finished pixel image here. Here's another crazy thing from that, just

00:58:18 ◼   ► while we're on the consumer report story. Here's the next paragraph. We also tried out

00:58:22 ◼   ► the new panorama feature. And I bring this up because it's related to this software as

00:58:27 ◼   ► part of the camera, which is all, you know, the panorama thing is software. We tried out

00:58:32 ◼   ► the new panorama feature to the camera, which allows you to take a 240 degree wide angle

00:58:36 ◼   ► still image. It worked well and comparably to similar features now

00:58:41 ◼   ► found on Android phones. One quibble. The feature only works in portrait model. I

00:58:48 ◼   ► guess I guess sick. And there's no alert when you shoot in landscape which can

00:58:57 ◼   ► mean trial and error when you shoot your first panoramic shot. So they devoted a

00:59:03 ◼   ► whole... is that true? Well, no. It does work in... when you hold the camera in

00:59:09 ◼   ► landscape, but then you have to move up and down. So you can... it's so you, you

00:59:13 ◼   ► know, you can shoot a panner... they're complaining that you can't go side to

00:59:17 ◼   ► side when you hold it sideways. And it does... it is a little counterintuitive at

00:59:22 ◼   ► first, because you think, "I'm shooting this crazy wide image. I'll hold the

00:59:25 ◼   ► camera wide too." But if you think about it, it actually makes more sense that you

00:59:31 ◼   ► hold it in portrait to shoot these things because then you're getting

00:59:36 ◼   ► significantly more data vertically. Right. Yeah. Right? Because you don't have to

00:59:43 ◼   ► worry about how much data you're getting with each sample of the camera

00:59:47 ◼   ► horizontally because you're gonna pan. You're panning your hands. You're gonna

00:59:50 ◼   ► get it all anyway. It's up and down where you're getting more. You're actually

00:59:54 ◼   ► getting, you know, it makes total sense that they do it this way. Although it is

00:59:57 ◼   ► true that the first time you use it, the very first time you shoot, one time with panoramic

01:00:02 ◼   ► thing, you're very likely to make a mistake and hold the camera sideways.

01:00:07 ◼   ► So what – but if it – everybody, you do it one time, you think, "Oh, okay, I get

01:00:12 ◼   ► it." You throw that – you scrap that one and then you'll never do it again. Like,

01:00:16 ◼   ► why complain about it? And –

01:00:19 ◼   ► Well, if they didn't copy edit this sentence –

01:00:21 ◼   ► Yeah. And if it worked –

01:00:23 ◼   ► You're like, "How much effort do you think they put into this?"

01:00:24 ◼   ► It obviously didn't think about it. And if it worked the way they are saying that they

01:00:29 ◼   ► think it should, then you wouldn't be able to take a vertical panorama. And I've seen

01:00:33 ◼   ► some pictures people have taken like out of skyscrapers where you're like looking down

01:00:38 ◼   ► out of a window or something like that, and a panorama where you move your hand up and

01:00:42 ◼   ► down and it looks fantastic. Like a, you know, an up and down panorama.

01:00:47 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:00:48 ◼   ► Anyway.

01:00:49 ◼   ► Anyway, it just it seems like you know Consumer Reports has I

01:00:53 ◼   ► lost a lot of respect for them over the last couple years with their various iPhone hijinks and and

01:00:59 ◼   ► It just seems like

01:01:02 ◼   ► They look for problems first and and I know that's kind of their job in most of their product reviews

01:01:08 ◼   ► It's like find what's wrong with this car, you know find out what sucks about this air conditioner

01:01:12 ◼   ► but

01:01:14 ◼   ► With phones it you know it there. It's such a complex

01:01:17 ◼   ► landscape of you can't sum up a phone in three paragraphs and a bulleted list of five criteria.

01:01:24 ◼   ► Like you really can't sum up any phone that way. Android, iOS, even Blackberry for God's

01:01:29 ◼   ► sake. But it seems like they approach phones the same way they would approach testing a

01:01:35 ◼   ► dishwasher and it just doesn't work. They pick three or four criteria ignoring everything

01:01:42 ◼   ► else and they make judgments based on those things that they don't really have anything

01:01:47 ◼   ► to do with it or might only apply to a very small portion of its users or things like

01:01:53 ◼   ► that. It's just kind of weird how they approach these things. It also seems like they judge

01:01:59 ◼   ► iPhones with far more scrutiny than the other phones they review. The things they complain

01:02:05 ◼   ► about with iPhones, like Android phones they review, have many problems like that and they

01:02:10 ◼   ► don't mention them.

01:02:11 ◼   ► And people say, you know, the people who hate Apple say, you know, that,

01:02:15 ◼   ► you know, like Antennagate is ground zero of this debate, with no doubt, because I don't think

01:02:22 ◼   ► Antennagate happens without Consumer Reports. I really don't. Consumer Reports made that happen.

01:02:27 ◼   ► And it ends up, they made a mountain out of a molehill. The iPhone 4 on GSM

01:02:36 ◼   ► remains a best-selling phone. It's like still the third best-selling phone at AT&T.

01:02:41 ◼   ► **Matt Stauffer** Oh yeah, they haven't changed that since then.

01:02:43 ◼   ► **Ezra Kleinman** Now there was room for improvement in that antenna design, no doubt. And they

01:02:48 ◼   ► improved it six months later in the CDMA version, and they improved it again in the 4S, and

01:02:53 ◼   ► they've improved it again now in the 5. But they're still using that antenna, you know.

01:02:57 ◼   ► And all the people who said that this was a huge mistake, Apple doesn't, you know, there's

01:03:02 ◼   ► There's a reason that none of the people who really know how to make phones like Nokia

01:03:05 ◼   ► and Samsung have ever done an external camera antenna.

01:03:11 ◼   ► You know, what a disaster, you know, looks over functionality, you know, all those complaints.

01:03:21 ◼   ► Here we are three years later and they're still using that antenna design in the iPhone

01:03:26 ◼   ► 5.

01:03:27 ◼   ► I mean, of course, you know, it's better than it was.

01:03:29 ◼   ► Did you hear that?

01:03:30 ◼   ► One of the…

01:03:31 ◼   ► No.

01:03:32 ◼   ► I told you it was. I found one that didn't have the mute switch on. They blew it. And

01:03:41 ◼   ► I do think that they absolutely look for… and they don't do it with other devices.

01:03:45 ◼   ► They really don't.

01:03:46 ◼   ► Yeah, it seems like the iPhones under way more… and by the way, in retrospect, having

01:03:51 ◼   ► an iPhone 4 with both me and my wife, the proximity sensor was way more of an issue.

01:03:57 ◼   ► Yeah, totally.

01:03:58 ◼   ► And they didn't even really mention that.

01:03:59 ◼   ► Right.

01:04:00 ◼   ► I think if anybody was going to make a big deal out of something being poorly designed

01:04:04 ◼   ► on the iPhone 4, it's the proximity sensor, because a lot of people had issues with that.

01:04:09 ◼   ► My wife, it hit her constantly.

01:04:12 ◼   ► I hit me sometimes even.

01:04:15 ◼   ► And they quietly fixed that, I think with the 4S.

01:04:18 ◼   ► I don't think the CDMA version really fixed that, but with the 4S, they definitely had

01:04:21 ◼   ► fixed it by then.

01:04:22 ◼   ► And that got almost no attention at all.

01:04:28 ◼   ► Speaking of antennas, I wanted to ask you about the iPhone 5 LTE and battery life thing.

01:04:34 ◼   ► Have you looked at this much?

01:04:35 ◼   ► No.

01:04:36 ◼   ► Have you seen people talk about this?

01:04:37 ◼   ► I haven't heard anything about it.

01:04:38 ◼   ► So of course whenever any Apple hardware or software product gets launched, everyone says

01:04:44 ◼   ► it makes their battery life worse.

01:04:45 ◼   ► And sometimes it actually does, and sometimes it just doesn't and people think it does.

01:04:50 ◼   ► And so some background here, as I'm sure you know, but for listeners, when a cell phone

01:04:57 ◼   ► cannot get a good signal, what it usually does is start amping up its transmit power

01:05:02 ◼   ► so that in poor signal strength, it turns up its power to try to reach more towers and

01:05:08 ◼   ► try to get better signals. So it burns through battery life faster in areas of poor or no

01:05:13 ◼   ► coverage.

01:05:14 ◼   ► And that is probably also why it tends to get hotter when you have poor signal.

01:05:19 ◼   ► Yes, exactly, because it's using more power. So I've seen some reports of, I think yesterday

01:05:26 ◼   ► and today of people saying the iPhone 5 is having bad battery life because it is trying

01:05:32 ◼   ► to reach LTE signals in areas like where I live, I have LTE on some blocks of my neighborhood

01:05:39 ◼   ► and not others. My house does not have LTE because my house is not worth covering for

01:05:44 ◼   ► any wireless carrier very well, but at least AT&T covers it partially. So I'm in an area

01:05:51 ◼   ► with spotty LTE coverage.

01:05:53 ◼   ► And by the way, I live like 10 miles from Manhattan,

01:05:56 ◼   ► and this has spotty LTE coverage.

01:05:58 ◼   ► Thanks, AT&T.

01:06:01 ◼   ► It's a long 10 miles, though.

01:06:03 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:06:05 ◼   ► So I've seen these reports from people speculating.

01:06:10 ◼   ► Now, I don't know how they design the LTE radio.

01:06:12 ◼   ► I don't know if that's doing the same thing, where

01:06:15 ◼   ► if it has a 3G signal, that's perfectly fine,

01:06:19 ◼   ► but it can't get an LTE signal.

01:06:20 ◼   ► Does it amp up transmit power for a while and look for one and then give up?

01:06:23 ◼   ► Like I don't know how they've programmed that

01:06:26 ◼   ► um

01:06:26 ◼   ► but I think that that could have an effect on battery life and

01:06:29 ◼   ► Like if you're somewhere where there's just no LTE coverage at all, or it's very very spotty

01:06:34 ◼   ► maybe turning off LTE in the settings might give you better battery life, I don't know but

01:06:38 ◼   ► I I assume they would have designed the radio software a little bit better so that it was more tolerant of that

01:06:45 ◼   ► I

01:06:48 ◼   ► I can't say that I've had better, if anything, the longer I've used the iPhone 5, I've had

01:06:54 ◼   ► better battery life than I did on the 4S, which blows me away because it's thinner and lighter.

01:06:59 ◼   ► And so I can't help but think that the battery is smaller and it's on LTE, not 4G. But I get through

01:07:07 ◼   ► the day easily. And the other day, and I don't even know why I did this because I'm going to send it

01:07:12 ◼   ► back. I'm going to pack it up and send it back by the end of the week to Apple, the review unit. But

01:07:17 ◼   ► But I did the thing where you're – I don't even know.

01:07:19 ◼   ► Apple still does recommend it.

01:07:20 ◼   ► Every once in a while, you should use the whole thing.

01:07:22 ◼   ► Run the battery down to zero and then recharge it.

01:07:25 ◼   ► Like their how to get your best battery life suggestion page for iPhone still says to do

01:07:30 ◼   ► that.

01:07:31 ◼   ► So I did it.

01:07:32 ◼   ► Even though it was the review unit, so who cares if the thing is – I don't know.

01:07:36 ◼   ► I just wanted to see what happened because I had never once run it all the way down.

01:07:40 ◼   ► And I got the 20 percent warning and I kept using it.

01:07:43 ◼   ► And I wasn't doing anything.

01:07:44 ◼   ► I wasn't doing something specifically to run the battery life down.

01:07:46 ◼   ► I wasn't like playing video or something or streaming stuff.

01:07:49 ◼   ► I was just using the phone.

01:07:52 ◼   ► And then I got the 10% warning about when I would expect to and I couldn't get the damn

01:07:58 ◼   ► thing to run all the way down.

01:08:00 ◼   ► After the 10% warning, it just kept going and going and it was getting later at night

01:08:03 ◼   ► and I was like getting ready to go to bed and I kind of wanted it to go down before

01:08:07 ◼   ► I went.

01:08:08 ◼   ► I wanted it to just go all the way down and then go to bed.

01:08:12 ◼   ► And it wouldn't – it took forever.

01:08:14 ◼   ► It was amazing.

01:08:16 ◼   ► I just think that those 10% things, it's like that's all sort of, it's guessing, I think.

01:08:22 ◼   ► Oh yeah, because battery chemistry is very complicated, and yeah, those are all just

01:08:27 ◼   ► estimates.

01:08:28 ◼   ► But I got, I found, usually though, once you get the 10% warning, you really better find

01:08:31 ◼   ► a charge, in my experience.

01:08:33 ◼   ► Oh yeah.

01:08:34 ◼   ► You know, and maybe that speaks to the fact that the brand new phone, it isn't as calibrated

01:08:39 ◼   ► as well as you'd think.

01:08:40 ◼   ► It isn't as accurate.

01:08:41 ◼   ► But anyway, I've had great battery life.

01:08:43 ◼   ► I had trouble running the damn thing down to zero.

01:08:46 ◼   ► See, I've had a little bit less battery life,

01:08:48 ◼   ► or so it seemed, but then I realized,

01:08:51 ◼   ► and I think this might apply to a lot of people,

01:08:53 ◼   ► the reason why my phone kept getting lower and lower

01:08:55 ◼   ► is because I don't really have anything around the house

01:08:57 ◼   ► with the lightning port that I rested in to plug it in.

01:09:00 ◼   ► So like before, we had these speaker docks

01:09:04 ◼   ► in a couple of rooms, and so like every time

01:09:06 ◼   ► we did eat a meal, or if I'm like washing the dishes,

01:09:08 ◼   ► I got one in the kitchen, so I would put the phone

01:09:11 ◼   ► in the speaker dock and play a podcast or something.

01:09:13 ◼   ► - And just sip a little bit of charge, right?

01:09:16 ◼   ► And it was charging, it's an AC-powered dock, so it would charge.

01:09:20 ◼   ► And it would be charging there for like 20 minutes at least, 20-30 minutes.

01:09:24 ◼   ► So throughout the day, my phone would keep getting these little sips of power, and that

01:09:28 ◼   ► would power it up.

01:09:29 ◼   ► And now I don't have lightning ports anywhere really, except I went to the Apple store the

01:09:36 ◼   ► other day and finally got some extra cables.

01:09:38 ◼   ► But I'm not putting it in docks all day in various different locations.

01:09:43 ◼   ► So I think that might be happening to a lot of people who you think this has worse battery

01:09:49 ◼   ► life, but in reality this effect is biting you.

01:09:51 ◼   ► Yeah, maybe.

01:09:52 ◼   ► This effect is saying, "Oh, wait a minute.

01:09:54 ◼   ► It's just because I'm not plugging it in as much."

01:09:56 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:09:57 ◼   ► It was a real pain for the first couple of days when I only had one lightning cable.

01:10:03 ◼   ► And it was like, "Where the hell is it?"

01:10:04 ◼   ► And it's like, "Oh, it's upstairs.

01:10:05 ◼   ► Damn it.

01:10:06 ◼   ► I got to go upstairs."

01:10:07 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:10:08 ◼   ► I kept moving mine around the whole house to my computer and then upstairs for charging

01:10:12 ◼   ► overnight.

01:10:13 ◼   ► The one day I was actually walking around the house with it around my neck, like just

01:10:17 ◼   ► like a scarf. Maybe it was like, "You look like such an asshole." And I was like, "I

01:10:23 ◼   ► need this cable."

01:10:24 ◼   ► That's great. That's like the calculator watch and the modern day equivalent.

01:10:30 ◼   ► I also spent one day over the weekend, the first weekend I had it at a family thing way

01:10:36 ◼   ► outside the city where there is no LTE it was on Verizon 3G and I was in fact

01:10:41 ◼   ► and there was a Yankees game on so I was streaming it over 3G and I battery life

01:10:48 ◼   ► was excellent now maybe it was so far outside LTE range that it wasn't even

01:10:52 ◼   ► doing that if this hypothesis is correct that if you're on the cusp of LTE

01:10:57 ◼   ► coverage it'll spend too much energy trying to get on LTE rather than just

01:11:02 ◼   ► using the 3G or whatever is available. Maybe I was so far outside of LTE range that it

01:11:08 ◼   ► wasn't even trying. I don't know. But I had to – I was streaming live video over

01:11:12 ◼   ► 3G and got excellent battery life.

01:11:14 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:11:15 ◼   ► Do you ever go to the Wirecutter? That's Brian Lamb of formerly –

01:11:19 ◼   ► Yeah, sometimes. I like it. It's a good site. I don't always agree with their recommendations,

01:11:24 ◼   ► but I like the site.

01:11:25 ◼   ► But they do things – they do this the way I think Consumer Reports should be. I think

01:11:29 ◼   ► There's room for somebody to come in and be like the new consumer reports.

01:11:35 ◼   ► Maybe the wire cutter is that for technology.

01:11:38 ◼   ► But I like the way that they do this, where instead of giving you this stupid matrix of

01:11:42 ◼   ► seven different criteria rated from zero to five circles and half circles and blue circles

01:11:49 ◼   ► and blue half circles and all this shit, they just say, "Here, TV is the best TV.

01:11:54 ◼   ► Here it is.

01:11:55 ◼   ► It's the Panasonic TCPS T50.

01:11:58 ◼   ► TV under $600? Oh, we'll get this one. Best small TV? Get that one. And that's it. That's

01:12:04 ◼   ► their TV section. The best one, the best one under a certain price, and the best one that's

01:12:09 ◼   ► small.

01:12:10 ◼   ► Jared: It's certainly a lot more helpful.

01:12:11 ◼   ► John: It really, I think it really is.

01:12:14 ◼   ► Jared; Because that's, you know, that's really what you want. Like, you don't, you

01:12:16 ◼   ► don't necessarily want to see, you know, and, you know, I should say, before last year

01:12:21 ◼   ► when their 4S review annoyed me, I was a Consumer Reports online subscriber for like six years.

01:12:27 ◼   ► And I would go there and check whenever I want.

01:12:29 ◼   ► And during this time I've gone through many different apartments and we finally bought

01:12:31 ◼   ► a house.

01:12:32 ◼   ► So I bought a lot of small appliances, dishwashers, air conditioners, even a washer/dryer, usually

01:12:38 ◼   ► window air conditioners for the various apartments.

01:12:41 ◼   ► And we would always check consumer reports, vacuum cleaner, anything I bought that was

01:12:46 ◼   ► an appliance type thing I would always check there.

01:12:48 ◼   ► And it was usually not very helpful.

01:12:52 ◼   ► And partly because it was the stupid thing where you can't buy the same air conditioner

01:12:57 ◼   ► two years in a row because they changed all the models and each store you go to has different

01:13:00 ◼   ► models because they have their own exclusives and blah blah blah.

01:13:02 ◼   ► But even when I could find the ones they recommended, they would do one report every three years

01:13:12 ◼   ► on which humidifier was the best and it wouldn't even give you a conclusion.

01:13:17 ◼   ► It would be like, "Well, this is kind of good.

01:13:19 ◼   ► This one's kind of good.

01:13:20 ◼   ► This is kind of good but loud and this one's too expensive."

01:13:22 ◼   ► And that's not really what I want.

01:13:24 ◼   ► You know, just tell me which one to buy.

01:13:26 ◼   ► And that's what the Wirecutter does.

01:13:27 ◼   ► It's like just bite through all the bullshit

01:13:29 ◼   ► and just tell me which one to buy.

01:13:30 ◼   ► - Yeah, I really wish more people would take that route.

01:13:33 ◼   ► Now we're an hour into the show,

01:13:34 ◼   ► we're over an hour into the show,

01:13:35 ◼   ► and we haven't even talked about maps yet.

01:13:37 ◼   ► I feel like we gotta talk about maps.

01:13:39 ◼   ► - Do we?

01:13:40 ◼   ► - I don't know.

01:13:41 ◼   ► Maybe just briefly, I don't know.

01:13:43 ◼   ► - All right.

01:13:44 ◼   ► - You know, and now I've got Dan Lyons.

01:13:48 ◼   ► Dan Lyons is back, he's over at Gizmodo now.

01:13:50 ◼   ► he says that MG, Sigler, and I are, what did he call us?

01:13:55 ◼   ► - Who knows?

01:13:55 ◼   ► - Spoke spots, something like that,

01:13:59 ◼   ► that were paid spoke spots for Apple

01:14:01 ◼   ► or something like that because we're not--

01:14:03 ◼   ► - Is that even a word, spoke spot?

01:14:05 ◼   ► - He's, you know, it's a gizmodo.

01:14:07 ◼   ► I don't really understand,

01:14:11 ◼   ► I feel like there's some people who because,

01:14:12 ◼   ► okay, so the maps data is not good

01:14:16 ◼   ► in the new maps from Apple, right?

01:14:18 ◼   ► I've never said otherwise, right? I've linked to people's criticism of it. I've,

01:14:26 ◼   ► you know, I don't know what I'm supposed to write that would make people

01:14:31 ◼   ► think that I'm doing this, that somebody like that, that I'm doing this

01:14:36 ◼   ► right. I'm not sure there is such a thing that you could write. Right? I mean, what

01:14:40 ◼   ► are you supposed to do? You have to say what? That this is doom and gloom and now

01:14:45 ◼   ► Apple, you know, don't upgrade your phone and, you know, don't buy a new iPhone. I mean,

01:14:52 ◼   ► it doesn't make any sense. I can't say that honestly. Right? They were screwed. I feel

01:14:58 ◼   ► like the way, it's one of those things where I kind of figured it out as I wrote it. By

01:15:02 ◼   ► writing about it, I really thought about it. That Apple really only had three options.

01:15:07 ◼   ► Go another year with the old deal, which would have still meant all of the same missing features.

01:15:12 ◼   ► turn by turn, no vector maps. The vector maps thing is a big deal, because they load faster

01:15:18 ◼   ► and they zoom faster. It's a huge difference. Like, say what you want about the quality

01:15:24 ◼   ► of the data or the searching on the new Apple maps, but I don't see how anybody can deny

01:15:30 ◼   ► that it's a hell of a lot faster, and that's because of the vector-based maps. And maps

01:15:36 ◼   ► on Android, where they do have the Google maps that get vector-based tiles, are a lot

01:15:41 ◼   ► faster than Maps was on iOS. So option one, to go another year with the old deal. No turn

01:15:48 ◼   ► by turn at all. None. You don't have any of it. And you couldn't use. If you were by yourself

01:15:55 ◼   ► in a car, you could not use your iPhone for directions, or else you'd be risking your

01:16:00 ◼   ► life in the texting. No joke. In the way that texting while driving is reckless and kills

01:16:06 ◼   ► people every year. Using your iPhone by yourself without a co-pilot to tell you what to do,

01:16:12 ◼   ► you're risking your life. I mean that without any exaggeration.

01:16:15 ◼   ► So you had no turn-by-turn. No help at all. So every single person who gets successful

01:16:22 ◼   ► turn-by-turn directions in iOS 6 is a person who wouldn't have had it in that option.

01:16:29 ◼   ► I think they were really hurt by that competitively. It is a useful feature.

01:16:35 ◼   ► know, I think it's turning into one of those Antennagate things where with Antennagate

01:16:39 ◼   ► it was the iPhone 4 can't make a phone call. Right? And now I think that it's in large,

01:16:48 ◼   ► it's like the Dan Lyons angle is that iOS 6 maps doesn't work. That no matter what you

01:16:54 ◼   ► do, it's not going to work. Whereas, that's, you know, obviously there's a lot of cases

01:16:59 ◼   ► where it doesn't. But in most cases it does work just fine.

01:17:02 ◼   ► Yeah, honestly, I mean, one of the reasons I haven't really written about the maps

01:17:05 ◼   ► thing myself is that I'm just not seeing these problems, because the data around me

01:17:09 ◼   ► is fine.

01:17:10 ◼   ► Right.

01:17:11 ◼   ► And, by the way, and this is a lot like, like when, when the Verizon iPhone first came out,

01:17:15 ◼   ► everybody in our, you know, world who switched to AT&T could not wait to get back to Verizon

01:17:22 ◼   ► because it was going to be perfect and solve all their problems.

01:17:24 ◼   ► But Verizon is not perfect, and they have problems too.

01:17:28 ◼   ► They're just different problems, and we'd forgotten about them for a while.

01:17:30 ◼   ► Right.

01:17:31 ◼   ► iOS 6 maps, you know, Google Maps data sucks in a lot of ways. And I have been bitten so

01:17:37 ◼   ► many times by, usually the way it sucks is not the road data but the business data, where

01:17:42 ◼   ► it'll tell me that some store is somewhere and that store will have closed down six years

01:17:46 ◼   ► ago and they haven't updated their data and stuff like that. And I had tons of problems

01:17:52 ◼   ► with Google Map data, but nobody thought about it because it was Google. Of course, it's

01:17:57 ◼   ► the best. That's just the reality of having it. And now with Maps, with Maps and iOS 6,

01:18:04 ◼   ► I think people are, again, they're applying a lot of scrutiny to it because it's new,

01:18:07 ◼   ► and in some ways it is worse. But I think not all of the scrutiny, or not all of the

01:18:12 ◼   ► criticism is justified as something that Google Maps does better, because a lot of them aren't.

01:18:17 ◼   ► Right. So what I, and the other thing that helps spread the meme, if you will, is that

01:18:25 ◼   ► it does demo well. Like when you search for the Washington Monument and it shows up in

01:18:30 ◼   ► the wrong space. You know, you could take…

01:18:32 ◼   ► Right.

01:18:33 ◼   ► It screenshots well. The mistakes screenshot well. And, you know, the amazing iOS 6 maps

01:18:39 ◼   ► Tumblr site is funny. Although it's starting to get old. I feel like…which I think kind

01:18:43 ◼   ► of shows that it's not that bad. Right? Like it's, you know, how many melted bridges,

01:18:49 ◼   ► you know, can you laugh at?

01:18:51 ◼   ► Right.

01:18:52 ◼   ► Now, what I call option three is the option Apple went with, which was to kiss Google

01:18:56 ◼   ► Goodbye and go out on their own with the trade-off.

01:18:59 ◼   ► And it is a trade-off.

01:19:00 ◼   ► This is the thing that people can't – I feel like every single one of these incidents,

01:19:04 ◼   ► these gates, is always about trade-offs.

01:19:07 ◼   ► And the people wanting to blow it up refuse to acknowledge that there's anything – that

01:19:12 ◼   ► it's a trade-off, right?

01:19:13 ◼   ► It's – iOS 6 maps is a total bag of dog shit.

01:19:16 ◼   ► That's it.

01:19:17 ◼   ► That's the argument from the other side.

01:19:19 ◼   ► It's total shit and anybody saying otherwise is wrong.

01:19:22 ◼   ► Whereas it's not.

01:19:23 ◼   ► It has vector-based tiles, which look great and are much faster, and it has turn-by-turn

01:19:29 ◼   ► directions, which is a great feature that it didn't have before.

01:19:34 ◼   ► And this is the route Apple went.

01:19:36 ◼   ► Now, I think the problem is that the critics, what I call option two, which was give in

01:19:43 ◼   ► to Google and let Google have what it wanted to get turn-by-turn and vector maps from Google

01:19:49 ◼   ► that that's what Apple should have done. And the concessions would have been

01:19:53 ◼   ► significant. It would have been, you know, Google wanted and a couple people

01:19:57 ◼   ► have reported this. It's not just from one site. It's like the Times had it. I

01:20:00 ◼   ► think somebody else had it too. But Google wanted more branding, more Google

01:20:05 ◼   ► branding in the app, more control over the design of the app. You know, I think

01:20:10 ◼   ► that the, I think people listening to our show know this, but I think in the large

01:20:13 ◼   ► world when people write about this, they think there's a lot of people who

01:20:17 ◼   ► probably think Google wrote the old iOS Maps app, which isn't true. Apple wrote the app

01:20:24 ◼   ► and worked with Google on how they were going to do the APIs for the back. It was like an

01:20:28 ◼   ► API call to get the map tiles themselves.

01:20:30 ◼   ► And if you look at the iOS apps that Google has written, you might not want them to write

01:20:35 ◼   ► the maps.

01:20:36 ◼   ► Exactly. No, it's very true. And some of them aren't bad. The new YouTube app is like a

01:20:45 ◼   ► plus and minus in certain ways, I think.

01:20:47 ◼   ► I would say the new YouTube app is just as good and bad as the iOS 6 maps app.

01:20:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:20:53 ◼   ► But, you know, it's less important to people.

01:20:57 ◼   ► But the big one is the privacy angle that Google wanted.

01:21:01 ◼   ► I don't even know if they still call it Latitude, Google Latitude, or if that's been rolled

01:21:05 ◼   ► into Google Plus, the Google Plus umbrella.

01:21:07 ◼   ► But in other words, though, you log in with Google credentials and then Google tracks

01:21:12 ◼   ► where you go.

01:21:14 ◼   ► you do check-ins, it's like foursquare type thing where you check into places and stuff

01:21:18 ◼   ► like that. And you know, if you don't mind that, and I'm not saying that Google's collection

01:21:26 ◼   ► of user identifiable data, your search queries and your location and all of this stuff and

01:21:31 ◼   ► indexing your email to serve you ads based on the content of your email and stuff like

01:21:37 ◼   ► that. I'm not saying it's wrong, but I'm saying though it's something to think about and I'm

01:21:42 ◼   ► not comfortable with it personally.

01:21:44 ◼   ► And there are.

01:21:45 ◼   ► Right?

01:21:46 ◼   ► Millions of people are, obviously.

01:21:49 ◼   ► And I feel like the tech-minded people who don't mind it, who are totally embracing the

01:21:57 ◼   ► Google angle on this, you know.

01:22:00 ◼   ► And Dan Lyons is a perfect example, a guy who loudly and publicly and happily switched

01:22:06 ◼   ► to an Android phone years ago.

01:22:08 ◼   ► You know, people who are totally into the whole Google lifestyle, Google Docs for all

01:22:11 ◼   ► of your writing and stuff like that. Obviously don't mind it because they're into it, but

01:22:17 ◼   ► they don't seem to be willing to concede that there is another angle on this that, you know,

01:22:23 ◼   ► other people wouldn't want that stuff to be collected, and that Apple has an interest

01:22:28 ◼   ► in not allowing Google to build a location monopoly similar to their web search monopoly.

01:22:36 ◼   ► >> Oh, sure. And, you know, it's important also for people to realize, and, you know,

01:22:42 ◼   ► you outlined this too, but it's important to realize that, you know, I think Apple would

01:22:47 ◼   ► have had to move away from Google eventually. Like, there was no question that this could

01:22:51 ◼   ► not last that much longer, especially given the relationship between the two companies

01:22:55 ◼   ► breaking down so much over the last five years. And I think, especially, you know, Apple does

01:23:02 ◼   ► not like when somebody else has them by the balls over anything. And they always consistently,

01:23:09 ◼   ► you know, in the Steve 2 era and beyond, they have always worked to eliminate ways in which

01:23:17 ◼   ► other people had them by the balls.

01:23:18 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:23:19 ◼   ► And like the retail stores were a huge thing in that regard. You know, the iPhone, to launch

01:23:26 ◼   ► a cell phone you have to be willing to be controlled by the carriers to some degree,

01:23:30 ◼   ► but Apple did a pretty good job of negotiating themselves out of that, and now their demand

01:23:33 ◼   ► is propelling that.

01:23:34 ◼   ► The switch to Intel?

01:23:35 ◼   ► Yeah, the switch to Intel, exactly.

01:23:37 ◼   ► Because they were really – IBM had them by the balls on PowerPC.

01:23:41 ◼   ► Right.

01:23:42 ◼   ► And even you think, well, then Intel has them by the balls, but they don't really because

01:23:45 ◼   ► their Intel had – there's AMD.

01:23:47 ◼   ► Now Apple's ever –

01:23:48 ◼   ► And now there's ARM.

01:23:49 ◼   ► Right.

01:23:50 ◼   ► Apple's never bought – used AMD chips, but it was always on the table.

01:23:55 ◼   ► Right.

01:23:56 ◼   ► And so now, you know, I think, hold on, my dog's about to bark.

01:24:00 ◼   ► That's alright.

01:24:01 ◼   ► The male's here.

01:24:02 ◼   ► Well, and the other thing too about Intel is that, you know, because everybody else

01:24:06 ◼   ► is using them too, they're never going to be behind.

01:24:09 ◼   ► Unless they want to be behind like they are with the Mac Pro.

01:24:12 ◼   ► Like that's my choice.

01:24:13 ◼   ► And now Apple has arm to hold over Intel, so even that is something that they've kind

01:24:16 ◼   ► of insured themselves from.

01:24:18 ◼   ► Right.

01:24:19 ◼   ► You know, but, you know, the Google Maps thing on the phone, like, web search is honestly,

01:24:25 ◼   ► Apple is finding, web search is not as important on smartphones as it is on computers for the

01:24:30 ◼   ► most part. And so I think Apple is willing to let Google have that. Plus they could always

01:24:34 ◼   ► just make a deal with Bing or they could buy DuckDuckGo and do their own thing on starting

01:24:39 ◼   ► out small, just kind of what they're doing with Maps. Stuff like that. They have options

01:24:42 ◼   ► in search and it isn't that important to them. And that just goes to the browser anyway.

01:24:48 ◼   ► So Google can change their website to do whatever they want. Whereas in Maps, it's this native

01:24:54 ◼   ► integrated thing that's, in the context of a smartphone, extremely important. And

01:24:59 ◼   ► so if they would have just kept going with Google for more years in the future or indefinitely,

01:25:06 ◼   ► Google would have always had them by the balls with this Maps thing.

01:25:09 ◼   ► Right. And that would have made Apple very vulnerable

01:25:12 ◼   ► in that way, and as their relationship with Google is going sour, that would have been

01:25:17 ◼   ► really uncomfortable. Kind of in the same way that Samsung is a little uncomfortable

01:25:22 ◼   ► with Apple because of their component relationship.

01:25:25 ◼   ► Yeah, very true.

01:25:26 ◼   ► Which they're also, as you can see, Apple's also trying to diversify a lot of things there.

01:25:29 ◼   ► Right.

01:25:30 ◼   ► But, you know, this maps transition, I think, any way you look at it, Apple had to take

01:25:36 ◼   ► this on their own at some point.

01:25:38 ◼   ► This was inevitable.

01:25:39 ◼   ► The only choice was timing.

01:25:41 ◼   ► Right.

01:25:42 ◼   ► And—

01:25:43 ◼   ► And as you wrote, the timing, even that, the timing here is actually kind of the obvious

01:25:47 ◼   ► choice.

01:25:48 ◼   ► Right.

01:25:49 ◼   ► to go another year without, if they would have gone

01:25:52 ◼   ► another year with Google, they would have had to renew

01:25:54 ◼   ► for another year on top of that.

01:25:56 ◼   ► - Right, exactly. - Right, they need,

01:25:59 ◼   ► the transition has to take place during the year

01:26:01 ◼   ► when the deal expires.

01:26:03 ◼   ► It can't take place at the end when the deal does expire.

01:26:06 ◼   ► - Right, and Google was under, Google had no incentive

01:26:10 ◼   ► to keep the terms Apple-friendly over time.

01:26:14 ◼   ► - Right, I don't blame-- - If they were gonna

01:26:15 ◼   ► keep reopening with Google, they would just keep

01:26:17 ◼   ► making the terms more and more Google friendly because they could. They had all the power.

01:26:21 ◼   ► Right. Yeah, I don't even, you know, and like this Dan Lyons piece, it's, you know, that,

01:26:28 ◼   ► I don't know, I think he says that we said Google's evil or something like that. I'm

01:26:31 ◼   ► not, I don't even say Google is evil. Google was acting in its own interest too. Like,

01:26:36 ◼   ► both companies were acting in their own interest. I guess the other thing though that lay people

01:26:41 ◼   ► kind of vaguely wish is for something that just, you know, it's sort of like a people

01:26:45 ◼   ► and hell-wanting ice water situation is what they wish is for the alternate universe where

01:26:51 ◼   ► Google didn't decide to become Apple's arch rival for the future of mobile computing.

01:26:58 ◼   ► Right, like iPhone 1.0 and then they were best friends.

01:27:01 ◼   ► Right, that the Eric Schmidt on stage at the iPhone introduction, Kumbaya laughing and

01:27:07 ◼   ► singing and talking about what a great future Apple and Google were going to have together,

01:27:10 ◼   ► that that would have kept going and that, you know, Apple could have just kept going

01:27:17 ◼   ► and let Google handle the mapping backend and just do the app and have vector tiles

01:27:23 ◼   ► and turn-by-turn directions from Google in the iOS Maps app and have, you know, none

01:27:30 ◼   ► of the privacy or any of the other stuff in there. But that option wasn't on the table.

01:27:36 ◼   ► Google wasn't offering that.

01:27:37 ◼   ► that would never have happened because Google's not stupid.

01:27:41 ◼   ► They would have seen that these integrations with the iPhone,

01:27:44 ◼   ► you know, on the computer, the computer's kind of a fluke.

01:27:47 ◼   ► On the computer, they have the web browser,

01:27:49 ◼   ► and, you know, people can choose to go to Google,

01:27:51 ◼   ► and then Google made their own web browser for the same reason.

01:27:53 ◼   ► Um, on the smartphone, it's this kind of,

01:27:56 ◼   ► this more, quote, "curated environment,"

01:27:58 ◼   ► this more controlled environment

01:28:00 ◼   ► where things are more customized and less, quote, "open."

01:28:03 ◼   ► Uh, I use air quotes a lot when talking about Google,

01:28:06 ◼   ► Google because you have to.

01:28:07 ◼   ► But with the iPhone, Google could see that Apple had a lot

01:28:14 ◼   ► of control on this new platform.

01:28:16 ◼   ► And at any point--

01:28:18 ◼   ► let's say things were still in iPhone 1.0 relationship days.

01:28:21 ◼   ► At any point, Apple could have said, you know what, Google?

01:28:24 ◼   ► We're going to switch to Bing Maps now, and

01:28:26 ◼   ► you're just screwed.

01:28:27 ◼   ► So Google had to make their own platform to be able to

01:28:30 ◼   ► control their own destiny.

01:28:31 ◼   ► They have to.

01:28:33 ◼   ► That's the same reason why Amazon has their tablets now.

01:28:36 ◼   ► because they have to do the same thing to control their media sales.

01:28:38 ◼   ► I disagree with you there. I do. I think that there was a hypothetical path for Google to

01:28:44 ◼   ► take based on trust. And think about how much trust there was circa 2006, 2007 between Apple

01:28:53 ◼   ► and Google. Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board. In hindsight, that's…

01:28:56 ◼   ► He didn't last forever in business.

01:28:58 ◼   ► In hindsight, that's…

01:28:59 ◼   ► Because people don't last forever in business.

01:29:01 ◼   ► Isn't that mind-boggling, though, in hindsight? Thinking about how long five years is, could

01:29:05 ◼   ► Did you imagine now if they put Eric Schmidt back on the Apple board?

01:29:10 ◼   ► I mean, you would honestly think that Tim Cook had had a stroke or something.

01:29:13 ◼   ► That would be amazing.

01:29:14 ◼   ► Or imagine if Tim Cook joined Apple's board, or Google's board, I mean.

01:29:18 ◼   ► Right, exactly.

01:29:19 ◼   ► Right?

01:29:20 ◼   ► How nuts would that be?

01:29:21 ◼   ► You would not believe it.

01:29:22 ◼   ► You would just automatically assume that whatever website you were reading was doing like an

01:29:26 ◼   ► April Fool's thing early.

01:29:27 ◼   ► You would never believe it.

01:29:28 ◼   ► You couldn't believe it.

01:29:30 ◼   ► No, but Google, you know, in that 1.0, in those 1.0 days, Google was totally, they were

01:29:37 ◼   ► replaceable on iOS. You know, if anybody else had a good enough map service or a good enough

01:29:43 ◼   ► video service or all the other things they were integrated with, anybody else could have

01:29:47 ◼   ► been swapped in.

01:29:48 ◼   ► Now, you know what? All they would have had to do is make sure that their maps were still

01:29:52 ◼   ► the best. And if their maps were still the best, they would have been in good shape.

01:29:57 ◼   ► So their destiny would have been in their own hands.

01:29:59 ◼   ► Like if they had either A, not even done Android, or B, kept Android as a sort of blackberry

01:30:05 ◼   ► killer, low-end, you know, third world, open source sort of.

01:30:12 ◼   ► Really?

01:30:13 ◼   ► Not attacked iOS head on.

01:30:14 ◼   ► Right.

01:30:15 ◼   ► Everything, you know, just wipe out all the low end of the market platform.

01:30:21 ◼   ► I think the only thing they would have had to do is the same thing they've done with

01:30:24 ◼   ► web search.

01:30:25 ◼   ► has an Apple replaced Google as a default for web search because Google is still the

01:30:30 ◼   ► best by far. It really is.

01:30:32 ◼   ► Well, and because that doesn't really impact Apple having Google there.

01:30:35 ◼   ► No. No.

01:30:36 ◼   ► It doesn't really do it. It doesn't really harm them. They might even be getting paid

01:30:38 ◼   ► for it still.

01:30:39 ◼   ► Oh, I'm sure they are. I don't know, but I would be flabbergasted if they are not getting

01:30:47 ◼   ► paid a nice chunk of change for that because it is extremely valuable.

01:30:50 ◼   ► Oh, yeah. I mean, in reality, that might not matter too much to Apple's financials.

01:30:54 ◼   ► No.

01:30:55 ◼   ► It's probably not, but it's one of those things where there's a lot of little things that

01:30:59 ◼   ► don't matter a lot to Apple's financials, but there's so many of them that they kind

01:31:03 ◼   ► of, you know, they'd be sort of derelict not to cash the checks.

01:31:09 ◼   ► **Ezra Klein:** I still think that it was inevitable that Google was going to make their own platform,

01:31:15 ◼   ► because they also don't want anyone else to have them by the balls.

01:31:19 ◼   ► And in this case, Apple would have had them by the balls.

01:31:22 ◼   ► The whole industry is about balls these days.

01:31:23 ◼   ► I suppose you're right though.

01:31:26 ◼   ► I do, you know, maybe you're right.

01:31:27 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:31:28 ◼   ► It's hard to say.

01:31:30 ◼   ► But, you know, there's the other argument though

01:31:32 ◼   ► that they're like $20 billion in the hole on Android.

01:31:36 ◼   ► - That's true, yeah.

01:31:37 ◼   ► And Amazon I don't think is doing that well

01:31:39 ◼   ► in their efforts either, profitable.

01:31:40 ◼   ► - I think I linked that up.

01:31:42 ◼   ► Well, but they're breaking even though.

01:31:44 ◼   ► They're not in the hole.

01:31:44 ◼   ► You know, I feel like Bezos really wanted to emphasize that,

01:31:47 ◼   ► that they're not losing money on this stuff,

01:31:49 ◼   ► but they're not making money on this stuff.

01:31:51 ◼   ► Like that's what makes them,

01:31:52 ◼   ► That's what makes Amazon the crazy guy at the poker table.

01:31:54 ◼   ► That's kind of their whole business.

01:31:55 ◼   ► Right.

01:31:56 ◼   ► All their businesses are kind of like that.

01:31:58 ◼   ► If all you want to do is break even, but do it in great quantity, you are a crazy ass

01:32:04 ◼   ► competitor to compete against if you're trying to make money.

01:32:07 ◼   ► Right.

01:32:08 ◼   ► It's really crazy.

01:32:09 ◼   ► Especially against Apple, which is totally the opposite.

01:32:10 ◼   ► I think it was Brian S. Hall.

01:32:12 ◼   ► I think I linked to it a couple days ago.

01:32:14 ◼   ► Maybe I didn't, though.

01:32:15 ◼   ► But anyway, he just a back of the envelope argument about how Google is 20 billion in

01:32:20 ◼   ► in the hole on Android. Most of it is from the $12 billion acquisition of Motorola, which

01:32:25 ◼   ► still hasn't made them a nickel of profit.

01:32:28 ◼   ► Right, and probably won't.

01:32:30 ◼   ► Once you've spent $12 billion on Motorola, it's not that hard to figure out that maybe

01:32:34 ◼   ► they spent $8 billion on other stuff. Even if $20 billion is a little high, it's probably

01:32:39 ◼   ► at least $15 billion. They even admit publicly that the lion's share of their mobile advertising

01:32:46 ◼   ► still comes from iOS.

01:32:49 ◼   ► interesting from web traffic I guess not from local anymore

01:32:54 ◼   ► well whenever they said it might have been I don't know if they were ever

01:32:57 ◼   ► making much on the map stuff I get sponsored I used to get sponsored

01:33:01 ◼   ► results every once in a while but never that much

01:33:03 ◼   ► I can't yeah it was only only like in the last six months or so right it was

01:33:06 ◼   ► no I got some starting like a year ago

01:33:08 ◼   ► okay well still that's five years into the iPhone or four years at the iPhone

01:33:11 ◼   ► right

01:33:12 ◼   ► hey I would go crazy long but let me do the second sponsor and we have a couple

01:33:16 ◼   ► a couple other things I want to ask you about. Our second sponsor is one of my favorite companies,

01:33:21 ◼   ► long time sponsor of Daring Fireball, Mac Mini Colo. Mac Mini Colo is exactly what the

01:33:29 ◼   ► name says. They host Mac Minis as servers. You think, "Well, that's a crazy little…

01:33:35 ◼   ► What do you want a little computer like that as a server?" They're actually deceptively

01:33:40 ◼   ► powerful computers and they're really, really small and it actually makes for a great co-hosted

01:33:45 ◼   ► server. They've got SSD options. They can have up to 16 gigabytes of RAM nowadays. They

01:33:52 ◼   ► really do make for a good server. And Mac Mini Cola has been doing it for a long time.

01:33:59 ◼   ► And they're a big part of the Mac community. One of the things they do, they just do this

01:34:03 ◼   ► for free. They're the people who host Fireballed.org, the automatic caching site.

01:34:09 ◼   ► Oh yeah, I didn't know that.

01:34:11 ◼   ► So, any time that I link to somebody, they see it.

01:34:15 ◼   ► They immediately cache every single site that I link to from Daring Fireball.

01:34:19 ◼   ► And all you have to do is take the URL from Daring Fireball, take off my domain name,

01:34:25 ◼   ► replace it with fireballed.org, and you'll get the cached version of whatever it is I

01:34:31 ◼   ► just linked to.

01:34:32 ◼   ► That's running on a Mac Mini at Mac Mini Cola.

01:34:36 ◼   ► So, it's obviously, by definition, fireball proof.

01:34:41 ◼   ► They're actually in, this is actually interesting, I didn't know this until they sent me this

01:34:44 ◼   ► stuff for the sponsorship, but they're actually hosted in this place, this Switchnap in Las

01:34:53 ◼   ► Vegas, and they've got fantastic connections.

01:34:57 ◼   ► It's actually an old Enron bandwidth station.

01:35:00 ◼   ► You go to switchnap.com and you can find out more.

01:35:05 ◼   ► But it's actually like this crazy, crazy high power co-hosting facility, super high bandwidth.

01:35:13 ◼   ► Some of the people, they actually have people who, listeners of the show will know who use

01:35:17 ◼   ► them and recommend them and have given their permission to say this.

01:35:24 ◼   ► Michael Jurowitz from Black Pixel uses Mac Mini Cola.

01:35:27 ◼   ► Steven Frank at Panic.

01:35:29 ◼   ► Federico Vettucci of Mac Stories, great site too.

01:35:35 ◼   ► Will Shipley, never heard of him.

01:35:38 ◼   ► He's at a place called Delicious Monster, but I think Delicious Monster site hosted

01:35:43 ◼   ► at Mac Mini Cola.

01:35:45 ◼   ► You can send them a Mac Mini that you own, just send it to them and they will host it

01:35:50 ◼   ► for you.

01:35:51 ◼   ► rent one or buy one from them and they'll just set it all up. Great support. You just

01:35:57 ◼   ► call them. You have great options. Super, super easy and it's a great service. So if

01:36:03 ◼   ► you want to use Mac Mini as a hosted server, Mac Mini Colo, here's the URL to go to. And

01:36:11 ◼   ► you go to this URL, it'll help the show because they'll know you're coming from here. So go

01:36:14 ◼   ► Go to www.macminicolo.net/the-talk-show.

01:36:23 ◼   ► And you know that they love this show.

01:36:24 ◼   ► You know they love this show because the URL, it's slash the talk show, not slash talk show.

01:36:30 ◼   ► Jared Ranerelle Attention to detail.

01:36:31 ◼   ► Marc Thiessen Attention to detail.

01:36:33 ◼   ► And they know that I paid good money for that, the macminicolo.net/the-talk-show.

01:36:42 ◼   ► So while you're here, Marco, I want to talk about some Marco stuff before I let you go.

01:36:50 ◼   ► You've been doing a lot of stuff lately.

01:36:52 ◼   ► It seems to me like – well, Instapaper has always got new stuff going on.

01:36:55 ◼   ► But it seems like a lot of the stuff you've been doing recently has been accessibility-related.

01:37:01 ◼   ► And I won't even go into it because you've covered it so extent.

01:37:03 ◼   ► But you're a big proponent of voiceover and developing, and your thing is that you

01:37:10 ◼   ► I mean, what's your rule of thumb?

01:37:13 ◼   ► You assign triple tap the home button to voiceover on and off.

01:37:17 ◼   ► Right, but your rule of thumb is you can tell if somebody's a good iOS developer if you

01:37:20 ◼   ► triple tap their iPhone's home button and voiceover doesn't go on.

01:37:24 ◼   ► Yeah, somebody else had written that.

01:37:26 ◼   ► I quoted it.

01:37:28 ◼   ► And I don't know if I'm quite that extreme that I would say they're a bad developer,

01:37:31 ◼   ► but I think certainly if that does happen, you can tell they're definitely a good developer.

01:37:34 ◼   ► I mean, and we could literally do like a whole two-hour show just on accessibility stuff,

01:37:39 ◼   ► really, really important. And I feel like I'm in a weird space, because I do link to

01:37:43 ◼   ► our accessibility stuff, and I value it a lot at Daring Fireball. And so I often get

01:37:47 ◼   ► good links from people about accessibility-related issues. But I also feel like I do value it,

01:37:53 ◼   ► and I think it's so great that iOS has so many great accessibility stuff. I mean, if

01:37:58 ◼   ► you don't get choked up when you see those videos of blind people using an iPhone, like,

01:38:04 ◼   ► really, I mean, getting tons out of it, using all sorts of different apps.

01:38:08 ◼   ► And not just using it, you know, wasting time in their house, but using it to let them do

01:38:13 ◼   ► things they couldn't do before. Like Apple's promo video at WWDC had the guy walking through

01:38:17 ◼   ► the woods.

01:38:18 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:38:19 ◼   ► Having the iPhone navigating it.

01:38:20 ◼   ► If you don't, if that doesn't choke you up, you're not upright. I mean, I can't even,

01:38:23 ◼   ► I don't know what, you know, you don't have a heart.

01:38:25 ◼   ► Oh, yeah.

01:38:26 ◼   ► And you know, you can, you don't even need help setting these things up. I noticed when

01:38:29 ◼   ► I took my new iPhone out of the box yesterday, you triple tap home and it turns voiceover

01:38:33 ◼   ► on. So you can just, you can actually, you know, and...

01:38:36 ◼   ► And by default it does that?

01:38:37 ◼   ► Yeah, in the factory state, in the out of the box factory state, you can just by triple

01:38:47 ◼   ► tapping the home button, you get voiceover.

01:38:53 ◼   ► So you can configure your brand new right out of the box iPhone without any help from

01:38:57 ◼   ► a sighted person.

01:38:58 ◼   ► I found that out by – you know how I found that out?

01:39:00 ◼   ► I found it out because I wanted to see if the button was good.

01:39:03 ◼   ► So I was like doing a button and all of a sudden Siri started talking to me.

01:39:07 ◼   ► I was like, "Oh, that's awesome."

01:39:11 ◼   ► So just give me the…how does VoiceOver work?

01:39:16 ◼   ► I know, but you tell people listening to the show, because I do feel like for a lot of

01:39:20 ◼   ► sighted people they kind of, you know, they know iOS is good for this stuff, but they

01:39:24 ◼   ► don't really think about it because they don't have to.

01:39:26 ◼   ► Sure.

01:39:27 ◼   ► I mean, it's a screen reader.

01:39:28 ◼   ► And what that means is for somebody who's partially or fully blind, they can use an

01:39:33 ◼   ► iPhone or an iPad, and actually OS X has those too, but it works really well on iOS devices.

01:39:39 ◼   ► And it just reads to them in the "Siri" voice, which was actually before Siri, but it reads

01:39:45 ◼   ► to them in that voice the various interface elements that they're looking at, or that

01:39:51 ◼   ► they're not looking at, I guess.

01:39:53 ◼   ► And as a developer, iOS does almost all of this automatically.

01:39:57 ◼   ► If you use the built-in components, like the labels

01:40:00 ◼   ► for text and a button with text on it, or table views

01:40:04 ◼   ► that have titles and descriptions on each cell, it

01:40:07 ◼   ► will read all these things automatically for you.

01:40:09 ◼   ► You don't have to do anything.

01:40:11 ◼   ► And so having your app be friendly to voiceover is not

01:40:15 ◼   ► that hard.

01:40:15 ◼   ► And the reason why I've gotten so loud about it recently--

01:40:20 ◼   ► and I've not done this perfectly.

01:40:22 ◼   ► In the past, I've shipped lots of voiceover problems.

01:40:24 ◼   ► And for the most part, most apps,

01:40:28 ◼   ► you know, there aren't a lot of blind people

01:40:29 ◼   ► who will download your app

01:40:31 ◼   ► and tell you about the voiceover problems

01:40:33 ◼   ► because chances are they won't be able

01:40:36 ◼   ► to find your support email address in your app for one thing

01:40:39 ◼   ► but, you know, there aren't that many of them.

01:40:42 ◼   ► There's not like millions and millions

01:40:44 ◼   ► of blind people downloading your app.

01:40:46 ◼   ► So, you know, the chances that somebody who hits a problem

01:40:49 ◼   ► will find it worthy of emailing you

01:40:51 ◼   ► and be able to email you

01:40:53 ◼   ► and be willing to take all the time and effort to do that is low.

01:40:56 ◼   ► So you're probably shipping voiceover problems without knowing it.

01:40:59 ◼   ► But the reason why I've gotten so loud about it recently is that it's just so easy to fix.

01:41:04 ◼   ► And like,

01:41:05 ◼   ► like when I, I'm very fortunate to have a few

01:41:08 ◼   ► blind users of Instapaper who will

01:41:10 ◼   ► email me every time I screw something up.

01:41:13 ◼   ► And then, you know, I can go fix it. And it takes like ten minutes to fix. I mean, that's the thing,

01:41:17 ◼   ► like it's so easy.

01:41:18 ◼   ► All you have to do is,

01:41:20 ◼   ► if you're doing anything custom with the controls,

01:41:22 ◼   ► like if you have a button that's just an image

01:41:24 ◼   ► and doesn't have any text on it,

01:41:26 ◼   ► or if you're like custom rendering a cell or a control,

01:41:29 ◼   ► you have to just set a trait on that object in the code

01:41:33 ◼   ► to say what should VoiceOver say about this item?

01:41:36 ◼   ► And that's it.

01:41:38 ◼   ► It's like, it's typing in a string, like refresh button.

01:41:40 ◼   ► That's it.

01:41:42 ◼   ► It's so easy.

01:41:43 ◼   ► And that's so, it's just so embarrassing

01:41:45 ◼   ► when I learned that I was doing this badly in some cases

01:41:48 ◼   ► that that kind of stuck with me, like,

01:41:50 ◼   ► "Oh man, I gotta do better on this,"

01:41:52 ◼   ► because it's such a tiny thing for me to do,

01:41:56 ◼   ► and it can make such a massive difference

01:41:58 ◼   ► to somebody's ability to use this app,

01:42:00 ◼   ► that I just feel like it's like a social responsibility

01:42:03 ◼   ► for developers, like we should be really making sure

01:42:06 ◼   ► we're not screwing this up,

01:42:07 ◼   ► because it's so easy to do it right.

01:42:09 ◼   ► - The great irony is, and it sort of gets back

01:42:15 ◼   ► to the whole how important, you know,

01:42:17 ◼   ► It really comes back to the argument Steve Jobs gave on stage about why the iPhone was

01:42:24 ◼   ► just a touchscreen, was that it's the flexibility of software, that you don't know what buttons

01:42:30 ◼   ► you need, so you don't want to make the buttons hardware because you don't know what buttons,

01:42:34 ◼   ► you know, the buttons you want for the phone are different than the ones you want for a

01:42:37 ◼   ► web browser.

01:42:38 ◼   ► And we don't even know what buttons we're going to want next year for an app, the idea

01:42:41 ◼   ► for which we haven't even had yet.

01:42:43 ◼   ► But I think, and I do remember, I don't have any URLs, Hanley, but I remember, though,

01:42:49 ◼   ► that people were saying that the downside of this design, this is circa 2007, is that

01:42:53 ◼   ► this is going to be a disaster usability-wise, or accessibility-wise, because how in the

01:42:57 ◼   ► world is a blind person going to use a thing where there's no buttons, right?

01:43:00 ◼   ► Like, imagine, like, on a traditional old pre-smartphone cell phone, a blind person,

01:43:05 ◼   ► once they knew which buttons were which, could use it by feel, because you just, you know,

01:43:10 ◼   ► here's the place a call button and I know that if I go, you know, or if I long press

01:43:15 ◼   ► on the one button it's going to call my wife and if I long press on two it's going to call

01:43:19 ◼   ► Marco.

01:43:21 ◼   ► You could do that without looking at it.

01:43:24 ◼   ► But everybody thought with the iPhone because it's just this touch screen that it's not

01:43:28 ◼   ► going to be usable by the blind or the low sighted and it maybe even was going to get

01:43:34 ◼   ► Apple and legal problems because of certain requirements for accessibility.

01:43:39 ◼   ► it ends up, it's actually the most accessible device, I think, ever.

01:43:43 ◼   ► Yeah, and they didn't have it on day one, just because I think they didn't have enough

01:43:47 ◼   ► RAM to have all the stuff loaded. I believe it came in iOS 3.0 and on the 3GS and above.

01:43:53 ◼   ► I think you're right. And it was, and, yeah, because it was before Siri, but it was when

01:44:00 ◼   ► you could first start giving voice, I think it coincided with when you could give the

01:44:05 ◼   ► voice controls.

01:44:06 ◼   ► - Right, yeah, which was the 3GS,

01:44:08 ◼   ► because it was the first one that had more RAM,

01:44:10 ◼   ► and they needed more RAM to just fit these voices

01:44:13 ◼   ► in this code loaded up into RAM all the time.

01:44:15 ◼   ► - Right.

01:44:16 ◼   ► - But it's just so easy.

01:44:19 ◼   ► - Yeah.

01:44:20 ◼   ► - And I added these two fonts recently to this paper

01:44:22 ◼   ► that one of them is aimed at making it easy

01:44:25 ◼   ► for dyslexic people to read,

01:44:26 ◼   ► and the other one is aimed at people

01:44:27 ◼   ► with learning disabilities, making it easier

01:44:29 ◼   ► for them to read.

01:44:30 ◼   ► And the dyslexic font was free,

01:44:32 ◼   ► and the learning disabilities font was really inexpensive

01:44:34 ◼   ► far as font licensing for apps goes. It took almost no effort for me to add those things.

01:44:41 ◼   ► Just like VoiceOver. It takes almost no effort to do this, but it makes a huge difference

01:44:45 ◼   ► for somebody. It just seems like a no-brainer.

01:44:49 ◼   ► It's a great app. I have a good friend here in Philadelphia. He's like my Yankees boyfriend.

01:44:56 ◼   ► His name is Matt. He's got some kind of vision thing, but he doesn't see stuff close

01:45:04 ◼   ► real well. But he's a voracious reader and he's an enormous Instapaper fan. He's

01:45:11 ◼   ► ground zero for the Instapaper target audience because he's a voracious reader. But I almost

01:45:17 ◼   ► feel like he's friends with me just to try to get a connection with you because he just

01:45:21 ◼   ► loves it because you keep making it better and better. If you didn't, if the fonts

01:45:26 ◼   ► were always small and it only had a limited number of fonts, it'd be a lot harder for

01:45:31 ◼   ► for him to read. He reads better with Instapaper than he does with anything else on iOS.

01:45:38 ◼   ► That's great.

01:45:39 ◼   ► I asked him the other day, because he just got the iPhone 5 II, also said that he loves

01:45:45 ◼   ► the taller screen because it makes it easier to use bigger fonts to read.

01:45:52 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:45:53 ◼   ► Do you?

01:45:55 ◼   ► And even just like there's more, like you can use voiceover if you turn voiceover on

01:46:00 ◼   ► and there's like a whole bunch of things on screen, you can swipe left or right to kind

01:46:04 ◼   ► of go next in previous item.

01:46:06 ◼   ► Or you can just put your finger on something and move it around the screen.

01:46:10 ◼   ► And so a lot of blind people actually use iPads because it's just more area, more surface

01:46:15 ◼   ► area.

01:46:17 ◼   ► And initially if you don't think about it or if you don't know how this stuff works,

01:46:20 ◼   ► you might think that doesn't make any sense.

01:46:21 ◼   ► Why would they want a bigger screen?

01:46:23 ◼   ► But it's more area, and it makes it easier for a lot of people.

01:46:26 ◼   ► It just is interesting to me, and it's one of those things where I do try to be really

01:46:30 ◼   ► cognizant of it, but because I don't really have any vision problems to speak of.

01:46:36 ◼   ► I would have thought intuitively that something like Instapaper on the iPhone, reading, doing

01:46:42 ◼   ► long form reading on a tiny, tiny screen is something that's really sort of by definition

01:46:48 ◼   ► only for people with good vision.

01:46:52 ◼   ► not true at all. Which I think is so fascinating. To me it's counterintuitive, but it's

01:46:58 ◼   ► great.

01:46:59 ◼   ► Exactly. And with the iPad, again, I actually back in, I don't know, probably two years

01:47:05 ◼   ► ago, I had a guy email me and he said his father had very bad vision, very low vision

01:47:09 ◼   ► problems, and he was trying to get people to read on the iPad. And he said Instapaper,

01:47:14 ◼   ► he could almost read, but the maximum font size was just a little bit too small. And

01:47:20 ◼   ► So I sent him a beta build and I said, "Here, here's a beta build," and it had a little

01:47:24 ◼   ► label somewhere telling him the font size in points.

01:47:28 ◼   ► And I said, "Increase it," I removed the limit, I said, "Increase it as high as you can.

01:47:33 ◼   ► Tell me when he can start reading it."

01:47:35 ◼   ► And by working with this guy, I made the font size way bigger, the maximum font size, I

01:47:42 ◼   ► made it way bigger.

01:47:44 ◼   ► And I made it so big that it can pretty much only fit one or two words per line on an iPad.

01:47:50 ◼   ► Hmm possibly even only in landscape depending on how long the words are and

01:47:53 ◼   ► But I since not only did I make a huge difference to that guy but

01:47:59 ◼   ► I've since heard from so many of the people who said I can finally read because I can finally make the font big enough

01:48:04 ◼   ► That's and it's just it's so

01:48:07 ◼   ► Amazingly fulfilling to hear those stories that this stupid little change. I made that took me no effort

01:48:13 ◼   ► Made a difference in somebody's life. You know there's there's not a it's hard to it's hard to get those those

01:48:19 ◼   ► is helping people out in life connections

01:48:23 ◼   ► through the internet.

01:48:23 ◼   ► You know, you don't really,

01:48:24 ◼   ► it's hard to know how you're affecting people.

01:48:26 ◼   ► It's hard to know, like even here,

01:48:28 ◼   ► we don't know who's listening to this.

01:48:29 ◼   ► We don't, you know, we could be helping somebody

01:48:31 ◼   ► through a tough time,

01:48:32 ◼   ► unknowingly just by talking about iPhones and stuff.

01:48:35 ◼   ► You know, and you don't, but you don't hear about that.

01:48:38 ◼   ► So the few times that you do hear

01:48:41 ◼   ► about something positive happening

01:48:43 ◼   ► where you didn't even realize it was having

01:48:44 ◼   ► that big of an effect,

01:48:45 ◼   ► or where it's really easy for you to do it,

01:48:48 ◼   ► It's incredibly fulfilling.

01:48:50 ◼   ► - Yeah, you deserve it.

01:48:51 ◼   ► It's great.

01:48:52 ◼   ► And it's just funny too.

01:48:53 ◼   ► It's like you said, it's like by making the font size

01:48:56 ◼   ► so crazy big that you would think,

01:48:58 ◼   ► well, no one would ever want it this big.

01:49:00 ◼   ► - Right, but someone does.

01:49:01 ◼   ► - They actually do.

01:49:02 ◼   ► That's great.

01:49:03 ◼   ► I think I've made it through the whole show.

01:49:06 ◼   ► I think, correct me if I'm wrong.

01:49:07 ◼   ► Maybe you're too polite.

01:49:09 ◼   ► You probably wouldn't have said it.

01:49:10 ◼   ► But the over under was on me saying Instagram

01:49:14 ◼   ► instead of Instapaper at least three times.

01:49:17 ◼   ► - Really?

01:49:18 ◼   ► Because every time I talk about either one, I say the other. Like, if I start talking

01:49:22 ◼   ► about Instagram, I say Instapaper, and when I start talking about Instapaper, I say Instagram.

01:49:26 ◼   ► I didn't hear a single slip of this time.

01:49:29 ◼   ► Yeah. As I call it, it's like a hashing collision in my brain. I filed them both under Insta.

01:49:34 ◼   ► I know. I'm so mad at them for having that name and being so successful.

01:49:38 ◼   ► And now it almost looks like I copied them.

01:49:40 ◼   ► I know. Yeah, it does, because they've gotten so big. They, you know, billion dollar.

01:49:44 ◼   ► Exactly.

01:49:45 ◼   ► They're less than a billion dollar acquisition now because it was all Facebook.

01:49:49 ◼   ► Yeah, now it's down to like the 700 million range.

01:49:51 ◼   ► Oh no, you know.

01:49:53 ◼   ► But I wanted to bring this up to you because Instagram, which is an app I love, well, I

01:49:58 ◼   ► don't love maybe getting tough, but I like it a lot and I still use it.

01:50:02 ◼   ► But they updated for the iPhone 5 and took away live filters, meaning that you can't

01:50:12 ◼   ► the filter live in the camera as you're shooting. And it infuriates me, it really does, because

01:50:23 ◼   ► when they shipped version 2.0 like a year ago, they replaced all of their existing filters

01:50:29 ◼   ► with a new filters. And a lot of them had the same names, but they did not look the

01:50:33 ◼   ► same. They didn't even look close to the same. Some of them looked ridiculously different,

01:50:36 ◼   ► even though they had the same name. And the reason why was probably for some kind of technical

01:50:41 ◼   ► technical performance reason where like you know if they make the if they make

01:50:44 ◼   ► this hardware accelerated they can do it in in real time it was for live filters

01:50:49 ◼   ► because in the 1.0 you couldn't filter live you'd shoot first then apply a

01:50:53 ◼   ► filter and it took a while it took a bit like you know three seconds of lag right

01:50:58 ◼   ► on the iPhone 4 this before the 4s came out right but it would cache it though

01:51:02 ◼   ► so if you were like this one or that one this one or that one when you switch

01:51:06 ◼   ► between the two if it had already computed at once it you wouldn't have to

01:51:09 ◼   ► do it again. But I think the fact that it was a little bit computationally expensive,

01:51:14 ◼   ► you know, a second or two then, although it would probably be a lot faster now in the

01:51:18 ◼   ► five, they were just so much more aesthetically pleasing. They got rid of them because they

01:51:22 ◼   ► said live is better. And now they've gotten rid of live, but they've kept the same crappy

01:51:29 ◼   ► filters. So now we have crappy filters and no live. And they said, because it's still

01:51:38 ◼   ► If you upgrade to the new version of Instapaper, there I did it.

01:51:42 ◼   ► Instagram.

01:51:43 ◼   ► One time.

01:51:44 ◼   ► Instagram, on an older iPhone, you still have the live filters.

01:51:47 ◼   ► They've only taken it off on the 5.

01:51:51 ◼   ► But they said going forward, though, for consistency, they're going to do away with live filters.

01:51:56 ◼   ► And then I thought about that.

01:51:57 ◼   ► And here's what I did.

01:51:58 ◼   ► I fired up my Galaxy Nexus and opened Instagram there.

01:52:03 ◼   ► And guess what?

01:52:04 ◼   ► No live filters.

01:52:06 ◼   ► So I think by consistency, they mean consistency with other non-iOS platforms, cough, cough,

01:52:15 ◼   ► Android.

01:52:16 ◼   ► Because they don't have live filters there, now we can't have nice things.

01:52:19 ◼   ► And Android, one of the biggest challenges for Android development for fragmentation

01:52:25 ◼   ► is the GPU, and doing any kind of hardware accelerated thing with GPUs, because the GPUs

01:52:29 ◼   ► vary so widely on Android.

01:52:31 ◼   ► That's why games have a really hard time there, just working everywhere, because there are

01:52:34 ◼   ► so many different GPUs.

01:52:36 ◼   ► But I don't know.

01:52:37 ◼   ► I think--

01:52:38 ◼   ► and you're probably not going to agree with me on this--

01:52:41 ◼   ► I really think that Instagram would be better

01:52:43 ◼   ► without the filters.

01:52:45 ◼   ► And I think the reason why-- so a brief story, back when

01:52:48 ◼   ► Tumblr first launched, I had this brilliant idea, which is

01:52:53 ◼   ► the worst idea I've ever had.

01:52:55 ◼   ► Hey, why don't we have a feature that imports RSS feeds

01:52:59 ◼   ► onto your blog, so that every time somebody posts a link in

01:53:02 ◼   ► in an RSS feed, you automatically blog it on your Tumblr blog.

01:53:07 ◼   ► And this was back in 2006 or 2007.

01:53:12 ◼   ► So this was during the time when all these cross pushing tools were also coming out.

01:53:15 ◼   ► So by having this feature, even though this was this little side feature of Tumblr that

01:53:20 ◼   ► was barely even visible in the interface to enable, by having this feature at all, though,

01:53:27 ◼   ► everyone started thinking Tumblr was an aggregation service for all your different social networks.

01:53:31 ◼   ► And isn't that what FriendFeed was supposed to be?

01:53:34 ◼   ► I think it was.

01:53:35 ◼   ► Regardless.

01:53:36 ◼   ► It never was quite clear.

01:53:37 ◼   ► They never really had a clear, "Here's what you're supposed to use FriendFeed for."

01:53:40 ◼   ► But I think that's, if they had, that would have been it.

01:53:43 ◼   ► There were these aggregation services out there, these other ones.

01:53:45 ◼   ► So everyone thought Tumblr was that, that this aggregation service that would just,

01:53:49 ◼   ► you'd be able to combine all your other activity from other services onto this one

01:53:53 ◼   ► page.

01:53:54 ◼   ► And that's really not what we set out to build.

01:53:56 ◼   ► And in fact, as an aggregation service, it was a pretty bad one.

01:54:00 ◼   ► But just simply by having that feature, everyone classified it as that in their heads.

01:54:04 ◼   ► And that's how the press wrote about it, that's how people used it, because that's how they

01:54:07 ◼   ► saw other people using it.

01:54:09 ◼   ► And it was actually pretty problematic for a while.

01:54:12 ◼   ► I think with Instagram, the filters are that problem.

01:54:15 ◼   ► Whereas people, especially when Instagram was new and not as many people used it, but

01:54:20 ◼   ► a lot of people were hearing about it or seeing people posting these photos on Twitter and

01:54:24 ◼   ► stuff, I think everyone thought Instagram was all about the filters.

01:54:28 ◼   ► And it's really not.

01:54:29 ◼   ► Instagram is about the social network of sharing these photos with people.

01:54:33 ◼   ► That's what Instagram is about.

01:54:35 ◼   ► And that's why Facebook wanted it so badly.

01:54:38 ◼   ► That's why Flickr should be embarrassed that they didn't do it, and possibly to some degree

01:54:42 ◼   ► Tumblr also.

01:54:44 ◼   ► It really is the social network for sharing photos.

01:54:46 ◼   ► It's Twitter for photos, basically.

01:54:49 ◼   ► And the filters are really this distraction.

01:54:53 ◼   ► And they are useful occasionally, but I think, like, I've tried to not use filters for, like,

01:54:58 ◼   ► the last year or so and I really haven't missed them. I think I used one once or twice

01:55:02 ◼   ► to just amp up the brightness for a badly exposed photo but that was about it. I think

01:55:10 ◼   ► the filters are a fad actually. They really scream 2011 to me. I think that fad is maybe

01:55:20 ◼   ► going to end in like a year or two. I think if Instagram downplayed the filters, and maybe

01:55:27 ◼   ► Maybe that's what they're doing.

01:55:28 ◼   ► I don't know.

01:55:29 ◼   ► But if they downplay the filters a little bit, I think maybe then people will start

01:55:33 ◼   ► seeing this isn't just about making pictures look old.

01:55:36 ◼   ► It's about sharing pictures.

01:55:39 ◼   ► I agree to some extent.

01:55:42 ◼   ► And I'm a little conscious of the fact that while that's been filtered, filters, and

01:55:52 ◼   ► the ones that really make it look old per se are going to date poorly 10, 15 years from

01:55:59 ◼   ► now.

01:56:00 ◼   ► I think three years from now.

01:56:01 ◼   ► Yeah, but really going to stand out.

01:56:04 ◼   ► It's like bell-bottom jeans and stuff like that in disco.

01:56:08 ◼   ► It's going to stand out.

01:56:09 ◼   ► But I think though that the filters I like best and I think the ones that I use going

01:56:14 ◼   ► forward the most aren't about making it look like a crumpled up old Polaroid, but just

01:56:20 ◼   ► changing the color temperature and you know the way that you modify you know

01:56:27 ◼   ► more like what you do when you dig around with the exposure settings in

01:56:31 ◼   ► Lightroom or aperture or even iPhoto about making something look warmer or

01:56:35 ◼   ► making it look cooler you know or just black and white like black and white to

01:56:40 ◼   ► me is not a gimmick get black and white is like a serious way of doing

01:56:46 ◼   ► photography to really change a photo in an evocative way. Like I don't think there's

01:56:50 ◼   ► anything gimmicky about black and white, like in having good black and white filters. So I would

01:56:55 ◼   ► separate it there. I do think it's useful and I think that it makes a lot of their photos look

01:56:59 ◼   ► better. But again, though, I think that their new ones, the current batch of Instagram,

01:57:06 ◼   ► I swear to God, it's hard. Instagram filters are worse in that way, though, where like,

01:57:14 ◼   ► almost half of them are just like preposterously gimmicky,

01:57:18 ◼   ► and they're not really about making it look good,

01:57:20 ◼   ► but making it look hipstery.

01:57:22 ◼   ► I think there's-- - Yeah, I mean, I agree

01:57:24 ◼   ► with you that there is definitely,

01:57:26 ◼   ► there is value and there is a place

01:57:29 ◼   ► and a good reason to use filters

01:57:32 ◼   ► that do common post-processing type operations,

01:57:35 ◼   ► things like what you said,

01:57:36 ◼   ► like adjusting the color temperature

01:57:37 ◼   ► or adjusting the exposure curve a little bit.

01:57:40 ◼   ► There is certainly a place for that.

01:57:42 ◼   ► It just seems like so many of Instagram's filters so far have been not to make a photo

01:57:48 ◼   ► look better, but to make it look filtered.

01:57:51 ◼   ► Like to make it really obvious that this has had this filter applied.

01:57:54 ◼   ► See, I think they should, I think the way they should look at it going forward is less

01:57:58 ◼   ► as like a hipstamatic type thing and making it look kitschy and more like a one-touch

01:58:07 ◼   ► Lightroom type thing.

01:58:08 ◼   ► Yeah.

01:58:09 ◼   ► I keep meaning to tell people about this.

01:58:12 ◼   ► And I should disclose, of course, Adobe Revell has been a sponsor of my site a lot, and they're

01:58:18 ◼   ► sponsoring even more of it soon.

01:58:21 ◼   ► What they did, they explained this to me, and I verified that this is actually the case.

01:58:26 ◼   ► Adobe Revell is this whole photo sharing app from Adobe.

01:58:32 ◼   ► But what they did was they basically took the Lightroom processing engine and rewrote

01:58:38 ◼   ► it so it runs well on a phone. And so, it's the engine from Lightroom 4, I think it's

01:58:45 ◼   ► based on that, or the code base at least is based on that same code base from Lightroom

01:58:49 ◼   ► 4. And so, I've been using Revell not just to view my photos, which is what it's made

01:58:55 ◼   ► for, but I've been using it as an editing program on iOS. And in particular, what it's

01:59:01 ◼   ► really, really good at is changing the exposure. Because they, and people who play with Lightroom

01:59:08 ◼   ► know about this, or I think Photoshop CS6, I think it's in that camera raw version.

01:59:13 ◼   ► Adobe rewrote the exposure adjustments in these versions so that you can adjust the

01:59:18 ◼   ► exposure up or down and it doesn't blow out the highlights or blacken the shadows as much

01:59:24 ◼   ► as you go up and down.

01:59:26 ◼   ► They've always been good at that, and I do think that the one in four is radically better,

01:59:32 ◼   ► But even Lightroom 1 had amazing exposure controls.

01:59:35 ◼   ► And oh, the Ricoh.

01:59:39 ◼   ► This is bringing the show full circle.

01:59:41 ◼   ► So my Ricoh didn't shoot raw.

01:59:44 ◼   ► Or if it did, it was like a five-second write time.

01:59:47 ◼   ► It either didn't shoot it or it took like five to ten seconds to write, so I never ever

01:59:52 ◼   ► used it.

01:59:53 ◼   ► So I shot everything JPEG.

01:59:56 ◼   ► And then I got my 5D a couple years later, and I was already in the Lightroom.

02:00:01 ◼   ► I was so excited to start shooting RAW, and because everybody said the exposure, the things

02:00:06 ◼   ► you can do exposure-wise with a RAW photo versus JPEG, it's just night and day.

02:00:12 ◼   ► It actually didn't even seem that different to me because the Lightroom was so good at

02:00:16 ◼   ► adjusting exposure from 1.0, so good at adjusting exposures on JPEGs, not even RAW images, which

02:00:23 ◼   ► is what you're getting on the phone.

02:00:25 ◼   ► So I believe it.

02:00:26 ◼   ► I do believe it.

02:00:27 ◼   ► I think that is Adobe at its absolute best.

02:00:31 ◼   ► - Oh yeah, I really do think,

02:00:33 ◼   ► and I don't think they would do this

02:00:34 ◼   ► 'cause it's not really what they want out of Revel

02:00:36 ◼   ► or out of most of their businesses,

02:00:38 ◼   ► but I wish Adobe would just take that editing engine

02:00:41 ◼   ► and just make a dedicated editing app just for that

02:00:43 ◼   ► because with Revel, there's a few extra steps

02:00:45 ◼   ► 'cause it's not really made for that.

02:00:46 ◼   ► You have to import it and then export it back out.