00:00:15 ◼ ► It's actually funny. I'm reading a book by the author Blake Crouch, who if you know at all,
00:00:23 ◼ ► And I've read several of his novels at this point. I've come to really, really like all of them.
00:00:31 ◼ ► Recursion, I believe is the name of the novel, coincidentally, which is a very on-brand.
00:00:55 ◼ ► And in fact, this was all stemmed by Marco asking, is the adorable capable of feeling sadness?
00:01:02 ◼ ► And unbeknownst to Marco, that was very on point given I was reading just before the broadcast tonight
00:01:13 ◼ ► I mean, you know that I have such a broad and deep knowledge of literature, especially.
00:01:43 ◼ ► How are you okay with this, but not okay with Merlin starting and then stopping and then starting a film?
00:01:48 ◼ ► Books are different. I can't anyway. I can't read them in one sitting. I don't read that fast.
00:01:55 ◼ ► Once you've started a different one, do you ever go back to one that you hadn't finished and actually return to it?
00:02:15 ◼ ► Now I read so much less that I'm running in parallel on these things and each one of them I'm dipping in
00:02:33 ◼ ► If you stopped murdering your brain cells playing that stupid video game with words that do not belong in the English language...
00:02:39 ◼ ► No, I like that video game. This is a conscious choice. I could read more and play Destiny less. I do not make that choice.
00:02:59 ◼ ► It is the... as this is being released, it will be the 27th or 28th of September, and September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month.
00:03:08 ◼ ► We've done this pitch for several weeks in a row. I will spare the long version of it this time.
00:03:12 ◼ ► I will just say that, you know, September's running out and this is your last chance to get in under that big heave that Relay is doing for September.
00:03:19 ◼ ► And I would like to genuinely, genuinely thank everyone that has listened to us or even donated to St. Jude on account of all of our brow beating and whatnot.
00:03:38 ◼ ► And as I record tonight on the evening of the 26th, $266,000, which is absolutely incredible.
00:03:47 ◼ ► And genuinely thank you to anyone who has linked, who has talked about it, who has encouraged people to donate, who especially have donated.
00:03:53 ◼ ► It is not too late to get in on September, but really anytime you feel like it, definitely please donate.
00:03:59 ◼ ► And at least through the month of September, I'm not sure if it lingers on after that, stjude.org/atp.
00:04:04 ◼ ► Stjude.org, S-T-J-U-D-E dot org slash ATP, if you wanted to donate anymore. And we really, really appreciate it.
00:04:12 ◼ ► Yeah, I gotta say, like, it's the amount of money raised. Like, you know, we don't really do anything for this.
00:04:20 ◼ ► We don't set it up. We aren't the ones chiefly evangelizing it. Like, this is Relay's game here.
00:04:26 ◼ ► And they really deserve all the credit here. And we just do the minimum that we can, which is we publicize it.
00:04:40 ◼ ► And we're just, we're lucky that we are, like, you know, kind of nearby as they do great things.
00:04:45 ◼ ► But, like, all the credit here goes to Relay and to all of you who are donating. This is, it's really been incredible.
00:04:51 ◼ ► Yeah, so we've, I've recorded earlier today, in fact, I recorded this analog, which is Episode 166.
00:04:56 ◼ ► I'll put a link in the show notes. That link will be broken until Sunday. But nevertheless, Mike and I talked a lot about this whole heave that Relay has done
00:05:05 ◼ ► and what it was like for them to do their podcast-a-thon, which Jon was a big part of. And I quite enjoyed watching.
00:05:20 ◼ ► All right. Well, anyway, so you can check out Analog. And we'll also link the podcast-a-thon video, which is quite amusing as well, if you wanted to check that out, too.
00:05:30 ◼ ► But again, stjou.org/atp. Back to our regularly scheduled follow-up. A lot of people wrote in a couple of weeks ago, this has been, like, a lingering topic about me using a one-time use credit card number for SiriusXM.
00:05:44 ◼ ► And I don't think we had the time to talk about this last episode, or perhaps it hadn't come up since last episode, or until after last episode.
00:05:51 ◼ ► But one way or another, privacy.com is a website that I think for free will give you one-time use virtual credit cards.
00:05:59 ◼ ► I did not look into this very heavily, to be completely honest with you, but I got a lot of recommendations for it.
00:06:04 ◼ ► The only thing I will say is that it's tied to a checking account, so you're not like what I was doing where you're just getting a different number for your existing Visa or what have you.
00:06:12 ◼ ► This, it actually extracts the money from your checking account, so if you want to get, like, points or what have you, then it's not going to work in that sense.
00:06:20 ◼ ► But from what I understand, it is a very good service that is either free or low-cost in order to get these one-time use virtual cards.
00:06:25 ◼ ► This is not a sponsorship, mind you, it's just a lot of people have said it's good stuff. That's privacy.com.
00:06:31 ◼ ► Moving on, an anonymous former Apple employee wanted to clear up some things with regard to AppleCare+.
00:06:37 ◼ ► We had a few people write in, but this person, if they're right anyway, as being a former Apple Care or Apple employee, has the most clout.
00:06:44 ◼ ► And they said that AppleCare+ and virtually all service and support contracts for electronics, cars, and appliances have a US state-mandated refund policy.
00:06:54 ◼ ► So in AppleCare+, you can see it in section 9, and the short, short version is, if you want, at any time, you can cancel your AppleCare+, and they'll prorate the refund that they give you.
00:07:06 ◼ ► So if you buy AppleCare+ for $200 and use it for 10 months, you can call AppleCare and cancel it and get the majority of, well, maybe not the majority, but more than half of your purchase price back, minus the processing fee and any of the repairs that you may have used.
00:07:18 ◼ ► And so it's worth noting that. Additionally, when you trade in devices to Apple that have AppleCare service on them, typically they'll get a slightly higher value than those that do not have AppleCare+.
00:07:31 ◼ ► Also, finally, we were wondering what would happen if you bought without AppleCare+, and what's the window, and how do you buy AppleCare+ after receiving the device.
00:07:41 ◼ ► And someone in one of the slacks we're in noted that there's actually a prompt in iOS 13, or maybe it's 13.1 in settings, that says, "Hey, you have so many days left to get AppleCare+, which is, I don't know, on the one side I find that super sleazy, on the other side I kind of understand it.
00:07:57 ◼ ► But anyways, one way or another, you have 60 days after purchasing your device to get AppleCare+. And interestingly, if you do it on the device itself, I'm told that it will run like a full diagnostic suite on the device to make sure that you didn't like just destroy your screen.
00:08:12 ◼ ► I'm not sure how I can tell this, but one way or another, it will run a diagnostic suite on your device to see that it is okay at the point in which you enroll and you're not trying to like game the system.
00:08:22 ◼ ► One minor correction, I think this person was saying that the resale value of hardware that has AppleCare is better. I don't think you can get anything more on the trade-in.
00:08:30 ◼ ► If you're just selling it on the open market, obviously it's more valuable for someone if you still have like a year left on AppleCare. I'm assuming that means that it transfers. I don't know what the transfer things are, but this person is saying that...
00:08:39 ◼ ► AppleCare, I don't know if you're paying monthly if that would easily transfer, but any kind of prepaid, upfront AppleCare that used to be the only kind is just tied to the machine serial number. It's not tied to any particular owner. That's why you can go buy or sell laptops that have like a year left on them, for instance.
00:08:59 ◼ ► Paying month to month would be good if you're not planning on keeping it for you, but apparently you can buy the upfront one and just get your money back. Although it's probably a little bit more of a hassle than it is just canceling your month to month thing.
00:09:08 ◼ ► That's probably true. Additionally, we were wondering, you know, how does this work if you pay upfront but want to continue forevermore? And Willie writes that AppleCare+ can continue monthly for iPad, iPhone or watch even if you pay upfront.
00:09:21 ◼ ► So, you know, you let your two years elapse, but then after that you can renew it on a monthly basis, you know, and so that might make sense if you're holding on to like a phone for, I don't know, what is it, three plus years or whatever the case may be, and you really wanted to keep that service for that time.
00:09:37 ◼ ► And then finally, Phil Sutton writes, if you stop AppleCare monthly payments or miss a monthly payment, then it stops and you cannot start it again. So once you let your coverage lapse, that's a one-way street and that is it.
00:09:50 ◼ ► And so if you are going month to month, you're going to want to make sure that you don't have an oops with regard to payments or else it will cease forevermore.
00:09:59 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Linode, my favorite web host for running my servers. I've got to say, I've been a Linode customer for almost nine years now, since long before they were a sponsor.
00:10:10 ◼ ► And I wanted to get them as a sponsor just so I can tell you all honestly, I love them. I use them myself. I recommend them strongly. I love having servers at Linode.
00:10:19 ◼ ► So whether you're doing something that's like one server, which is how I started, just running my little play around Linux and blog server, all the way up to hosting all of Overcast.
00:10:29 ◼ ► They're all of my Overcast servers there. I think I have about 24 of them now. They're all at Linode. And from small stuff to big stuff, whatever you want to build, you can build it at Linode.
00:10:37 ◼ ► The servers are fast. They have enterprise-grade SSDs on all the servers. They have Xeon processors, so you get tons of great resources. And they're really affordable.
00:10:47 ◼ ► Their entry-level price starts at just $5 a month. They get to a server with one gig of RAM. And then they have lots of plans above that that are all very competitively priced.
00:10:57 ◼ ► I have servers big and small there. And I've got to say, over the entire eight or nine years I've been with them, they've always been either the best value in the business or tied for the best value in the business.
00:11:07 ◼ ► No one has ever been able to beat them. I don't know how they do it. Over time, as hardware gets better and cheaper, they even lower their prices or they increase capacity for the same price or whatever. So they really keep up.
00:11:17 ◼ ► Their support is also fantastic if you ever need it. I've used it here and there, as you need to with web hosts sometimes. And it's been fantastic every single time.
00:11:25 ◼ ► You can pick whatever data center you want your servers to be in. You can have a blend of different data centers. They have them all over the world and are constantly opening more.
00:11:32 ◼ ► Check it out today. Linode.com/ATP. I really recommend them. If you need to run a server somewhere, do it at Linode. Linode.com/ATP.
00:11:41 ◼ ► And get a $20 credit when you use promo code ATP2019. That could be four months free on that $5 a month plan.
00:11:48 ◼ ► So check it out once again. Linode.com/ATP for all your server needs. Get a $20 credit when you use promo code ATP2019.
00:11:59 ◼ ► I don't know if now is as good a time as any to bring up my AppleCare experiences because I received my iPhone 11 Pro, which we'll be talking about more later.
00:12:12 ◼ ► I received it at roughly 8.30 in the morning on Friday and by 8.30 in the evening I had dropped it on my driveway and have a humongous crack in the back of it.
00:12:21 ◼ ► Case-less. Casey-less. I was going to say you didn't last the whole day, but how many hours did you last?
00:12:26 ◼ ► It was approximately 12 hours. 12 hours for case-less, Casey-less. What have we learned about case-less?
00:12:31 ◼ ► I would love to make fun of you for this, but it's just too painful. The idea of dropping my half-day old phone and cracking it.
00:12:39 ◼ ► Even though you had AppleCare, which that's good. It's a good thing at AppleCare. Even despite that, even knowing it's not going to cost you that much to get it fixed, it's still really painful.
00:12:50 ◼ ► It's like you drove your car off the lot directly into a telephone pole. Like across the street from the dealership.
00:12:56 ◼ ► Basically, yes. I really shouldn't be laughing about this, but yeah, that's basically true. I will put a link in the show notes. I am really, really disappointed in myself.
00:13:06 ◼ ► So I can tell you my tale of woe, and it is a long and sordid tale, but I don't think anyone actually cares.
00:13:11 ◼ ► Suffice it to say, I was washing Aaron's car, which is a big American SUV. Well, American in the sense that we live in America. It's actually a Swedish SUV, or Chinese, depending on how you look at it.
00:13:22 ◼ ► But anyways, I was washing your car. I was doing it in a rush for, again, uninteresting reasons.
00:13:29 ◼ ► And I was trying to listen to the relay, the podcast-a-thon. And I tried to get my AirPods to work with my phone, and for whatever reason they wouldn't work.
00:13:37 ◼ ► Then I tried to get them to work with my iPad, and for whatever reason they wouldn't work. And I was like, "Ah, screw it. I'm running out of daylight. I'm running out of time. I know what I'll do.
00:13:43 ◼ ► I'll just put the phone in my back pocket, speaker up, and I'll crank it, and I'll be able to hear it even without my AirPods, because I just don't have time to continue to mess with this."
00:13:51 ◼ ► And that plan was flawless up until the moment that I jumped up high in order to get some of Aaron's roof.
00:13:59 ◼ ► And then the next thing I heard was a smash. Well, not a smash, like a clack or a clatter on the ground. And I was like, "Huh, that's weird. What? Oh no. Oh no."
00:14:14 ◼ ► But anyways, so yeah, I looked down and realized that the back of my phone is not in good shape.
00:14:19 ◼ ► Now, with that said, it is aesthetically horrible. Truly and utterly horrible. But the funny thing about it is, it doesn't feel bad to the hand.
00:14:30 ◼ ► No, no, no, listen to me. I can't feel it at all. It's like it's under the matte finish.
00:14:37 ◼ ► Well, no, no, and I will get it fixed. I absolutely will get it fixed, without question.
00:14:41 ◼ ► But we're going on a vacation next month, and so I'm continuing to roll caseless Casey list for now.
00:14:49 ◼ ► And I figure subsequent to that vacation, if it will take damage, it is very likely that it will take more damage during that vacation.
00:15:07 ◼ ► I think because they just give you a refurb or, you know, like replace the whole darn thing.
00:15:17 ◼ ► And so I was kind of pissed off that it was $100 and not $30 until I saw that the no AppleCare cost.
00:15:56 ◼ ► Now, after you get your new one, so I understand you're going to be one of the cracked phone masses.
00:16:13 ◼ ► I don't think so because I'll have one more oops, and then if I do have a second oops...
00:16:31 ◼ ► But I don't know, I really love the screen, and I don't know if I really like the ClearCase,
00:16:47 ◼ ► This is the first phone I've broken since... it was my seventh, I think, I broke several years ago now.
00:16:58 ◼ ► Well, a pretty good record in terms of the amount of phones broken versus how many I've owned.
00:17:02 ◼ ► A terrible record in terms of the amount of time it took me to break this particular phone.
00:17:07 ◼ ► But yeah, if you go to support.apple.com/iphone/repair/service, we'll put a link in the show notes,
00:17:26 ◼ ► The only person who might have you beat is that... remember, this was like a couple of phones ago,
00:17:30 ◼ ► someone was like... there was some video going around on YouTube where he got the first phone from the store,
00:17:35 ◼ ► and he opens it up. He comes out of the store, and he opens the box right there, like on the sidewalk in front of the thing,
00:17:46 ◼ ► I don't recall. I know what you're thinking of. And actually, somebody tweeted at me that exact video.
00:18:02 ◼ ► Like, I understand that you said you couldn't get the AirPods to work with it or whatever, but I would have...
00:18:06 ◼ ► And I shouldn't have tried to do any of the things I did. Like, this isn't 100% my fault.
00:18:10 ◼ ► But my thought was this is a one-time thing that's streaming live, and I didn't want to miss...
00:18:38 ◼ ► Like, I feel like I know how to use them. For whatever reason, both these devices, they just would not work.
00:18:43 ◼ ► And I could have surely stuck with it a little while longer and found... figured out how to fix it.
00:18:56 ◼ ► So, for the AirPods, I usually put them back in the case and close the case and let them chill for a while,
00:19:10 ◼ ► I listen to podcasts while I make dinner, while I do dishes, and before the advent of AirPods,
00:19:16 ◼ ► I would have to have my phone on my body somewhere and then have a cord snaking two headphones in my ears.
00:19:27 ◼ ► It's in a different room on a piece of furniture, laying down, no fear of anything happening to it in the kitchen,
00:19:36 ◼ ► And second of all, if you are playing the speakers on your phone, that's even more reason to not have it on your body.
00:19:41 ◼ ► Just put it on a shelf on the side of your garage and point the speaker. They're very loud.
00:19:48 ◼ ► Did you ever see how people use their phones? Some people use their phones as a sound system for their entire house.
00:19:52 ◼ ► They just put their phone in the dining room, crank the volume all the way up, and then just wander around the house cleaning.
00:20:05 ◼ ► But they were made for somewhat good reasons. Like, I was washing Aaron's car. I wasn't even washing my own car.
00:20:16 ◼ ► That's the thing. I was rushing, so I didn't get the darn step stool that I always, always, always use.
00:20:23 ◼ ► You bought a car that's too tall for you. Like, this weekend I've washed this all the way down to why you even have this.
00:20:31 ◼ ► Anyway, but yeah, so instead of $550, it is $100 if you don't consider the fact that I paid $200 for AppleCare.
00:20:38 ◼ ► But nevertheless, I am both deeply relieved and thankful for past Casey not trusting future Casey,
00:20:45 ◼ ► and also deeply annoyed that I'm that dummy that within 12, it might have been 11 hours, it might have been 11 and a half hours,
00:21:11 ◼ ► John, can you take me through, if you don't mind, what we said and what the reality is, please?
00:21:16 ◼ ► Yeah, despite the fact that we're a couple weeks out now and iFix has actually done a full teardown on the Pro Max,
00:21:22 ◼ ► and like a live teardown on the regular Pro, this information is from the Chinese equivalent of the FCC,
00:21:35 ◼ ► But I don't even know if this is like official, official, but it's the best information I was able to find at the time of this recording.
00:21:40 ◼ ► So the things that we got wrong according to both this and the iFixit thing from last show is that the 11 Pro battery is actually a 15% increase over its predecessor, not 20.
00:21:57 ◼ ► So the 11 Pro Max battery is apparently way bigger than we thought it was, and the 11 Pro is a little bit smaller than we thought.
00:22:05 ◼ ► And the other thing is RAM, even the iFixit teardown, you should go through the teardown of the Pro Max.
00:22:10 ◼ ► They're trying to figure out how much RAM there is. Apparently there's some rumor about RAM dedicated to the camera, but they couldn't find it.
00:22:15 ◼ ► Like they're just looking at the chips. I don't think they had sliced the tops of the chip or anything, so they have limited ability to figure this out.
00:22:23 ◼ ► And of course the reporting that you get from inside the OS is the thing that was giving us 6GB numbers and people were confused by it.
00:22:32 ◼ ► So there's no 6GB model, it's 4GB across the board, which is, that's 1GB more for the 10R replacement.
00:22:40 ◼ ► The 11 has 1GB more than the 10R did, but then the 10S and the 10S Max have the same amount as the 11.
00:22:52 ◼ ► For some reason I had no problem with 10S and 10R, but I cannot mentally jump from a Roman numeral letter to number.
00:23:06 ◼ ► The A13 performance, this is somehow part of follow-up, even though we're about to talk even more about the iPhone 11.
00:23:16 ◼ ► And I recall a show a while ago where both of you took such glee in telling me that your phones were faster than my Mac.
00:23:23 ◼ ► Well, guess what? Guess what? Your time has come, Mr. iMac Pro, Mr. Awesome Computer that I Love, Mr. 2017 Computer that I tried to make Casey buy last show.
00:23:36 ◼ ► That computer, and in fact every single shipping Mac, has slower single-core performance than Casey's broken phone.
00:23:44 ◼ ► That is, all kidding aside, that is absolutely bananas. How is this thing in my pocket, shattered as it may be, faster than Marco's beloved iMac?
00:23:56 ◼ ► Yeah, now this is Geekbench and benchmarks aren't real-world performance and yada, yada, yada.
00:24:01 ◼ ► And here's the actual numbers. You can look it up on Geekbench's site if you don't believe us.
00:24:04 ◼ ► The fastest single-core performance for an iMac is not even the iMac Pro because it's like the regular iMac with the really fast low-core count thing
00:24:12 ◼ ► where you can make one core go turbo up to high speed or whatever. Anyway, it's 1262. That's the fastest Mac score, period. Any Mac that you can buy right now.
00:24:28 ◼ ► Who knows, maybe the Mac Pro that they introduced still won't beat it. Because again, the Mac Pro's forte is not going to be "I want the best single-core performance."
00:24:35 ◼ ► It's all about huge numbers of cores and everything, which is why Marco's iMac is still way better for building overcast, obviously, than your phone.
00:24:42 ◼ ► But, boy, our Macs. Any day now, right? Because this is really embarrassing for Intel and just absurd and ridiculous and the thing that no one is thinking about.
00:24:59 ◼ ► Alright, and John, if you wouldn't mind, can you continue with the iFixit teardown and tell me about whether or not bilateral charging is in the hardware?
00:25:09 ◼ ► Yeah, that's the thing where you can stick another device on top of your phone and it will charge from your phone through the coil that's hidden in the back of it.
00:25:18 ◼ ► It was rumored to be a feature. It was not an announced feature when they did the teardown. Like many other things in the teardown, it was inconclusive.
00:25:26 ◼ ► There's some hardware in there that wasn't in the XS and XS Max that extra wires going from the coil to the battery and stuff that could be used for that.
00:25:36 ◼ ► But on the other hand, there's also a bunch of features to better manage the battery and report on its authenticity and stuff like that.
00:25:43 ◼ ► Just by physically looking at it, they couldn't tell. So there is a physical difference. It could mean that bilateral charging is there but disabled, but maybe not.
00:25:53 ◼ ► But anyway, the one thing we can say is they didn't crack it open and say there is nothing in here that would even remotely lead me to believe that it has bilateral charging.
00:26:02 ◼ ► Because it does look different than the predecessor phones in ways that could make sense with bilateral charging. So inconclusive, but we are still not able to rule out the possibility that all of our phones can eventually charge our AirPod cases or whatever.
00:26:16 ◼ ► That would be kind of neat. Like I said, I think last episode, I'm more interested, especially with my new watch, I'm more interested in charging the watch than I am AirPods.
00:26:25 ◼ ► And we'll talk about that more a little bit later. But that would be super cool if it was possible to do this via software and just magically turn that on.
00:26:34 ◼ ► Which actually, as much as I love pooping on Tesla these days, one of the very cool things about Tesla is how you do get over-the-air updates.
00:26:40 ◼ ► And actually, to that end, you actually have podcast art that friggin' works now, don't you?
00:26:45 ◼ ► My car hasn't gotten the update yet, but that is apparently in the new beta or it's doing a slow rollout.
00:26:59 ◼ ► So finally, it'll stop doing that terrible fuzzy matching against its music album database.
00:27:05 ◼ ► Where it would just find whatever music album artist and title were semantically closest in edit distance or something from whatever your podcast title was that was playing.
00:27:19 ◼ ► Which was often times, comically not close at all, often times ridiculously inappropriate or weird to be showing on your car display.
00:27:28 ◼ ► There were a number of times when it would match whatever my podcast title was to some piece of artwork from some obscure album that had people in bikinis in the front.
00:27:39 ◼ ► And I'm trying to pick up my kid at preschool. And on the screen of my car is this giant picture of this bikini-clad woman.
00:27:51 ◼ ► So finally, Tesla is adding Bluetooth artwork support. I'm looking forward to my car getting that finally.
00:28:06 ◼ ► I don't know how I even got into this. Probably just the algorithm led me there as to a YouTube video series where people rebuild totaled cars.
00:28:13 ◼ ► I think I posted a whole big thread about the first one that I got into in one of our slacks.
00:28:17 ◼ ► But I'm watching all of them, including ones where people buy total Model S's and rebuild them.
00:28:22 ◼ ► And I know a lot more about how that car was put together than I really wanted to know at this point.
00:28:27 ◼ ► Well, I was going to say, does that make you more or less likely to ever, I mean, I know you would never buy one, but hypothetically, you know.
00:28:33 ◼ ► I mean, just about neutral because it's just like, it's not worse than I thought, but it's not better either.
00:28:44 ◼ ► And the main attraction of these rebuild things is watching what awful things these people who are rebuilding the cars do where you're like,
00:29:04 ◼ ► Especially with Teslas and other things where these people don't understand the cars and are doing all sorts of hacks to get around the fact that lots of things in the Tesla,
00:29:12 ◼ ► like any electronic device or your printer, are out to not let you do an unauthorized repair on them.
00:29:26 ◼ ► But anyway, I guess I probably can't put the links in the show notes to those because there's just too many videos.
00:29:31 ◼ ► But if you're interested in that type of thing, or you think you might be, check out car rebuilding videos on YouTube.
00:29:39 ◼ ► And they're really long. And I found myself, I watched like four hours of car rebuilding videos.
00:30:05 ◼ ► Alright, in a kind of transition from follow-up to our actual main topics, I would like to give everyone an update on my iMac, if that's okay.
00:30:15 ◼ ► First and foremost, I would like to genuinely thank the handful of listeners who are in a position to, and did offer me, the Apple Friends & Family discount.
00:30:28 ◼ ► I had a handful of people reach out and say, "Hey, you can use my Friends & Family discount if you would like."
00:30:42 ◼ ► It went into Apple the day that we recorded last, coincidentally on iPhone release day, when my iPhone still was not shattered.
00:31:03 ◼ ► But anyway, so I went back, I don't know, like four hours after I had left in order to pick up the iMac, and that went fine.
00:31:16 ◼ ► I, honest to God, have no idea why. I did not try to call in any favors. I never asked anyone about it.
00:31:31 ◼ ► But when I went to pick it up, the gentleman that was helping me out was using his fancy Apple iPad, and he was saying, "Okay, well, this is the bill of materials."
00:31:47 ◼ ► And then he goes to the payment screen and whatever internal iPad app he's using, and it says, "I owe nothing."
00:32:02 ◼ ► Well, see, but I'm too nice, and so I was like, "No, no, no, are you sure? Because I really don't want to be stealing stuff from you guys."
00:32:08 ◼ ► Hey, no, no, look. They tell you you owe nothing, you say, "Okay, thank you," and you owe nothing.
00:32:24 ◼ ► Either they decided that you shouldn't have been charged for this, because it should be covered for whatever reason,
00:32:30 ◼ ► or someone called in a favor, and in which case you shut up and you say, "Thank you," and that's it, and that's the coolest thing ever.
00:32:38 ◼ ► Yeah, fair enough, and Jelly is sending me a text saying, "Please, largest company and richest company in the world, please take my money," which is basically what I was saying.
00:32:46 ◼ ► But anyway, but yeah, so he progressed the payment screen and said, "I don't owe anything," and I said, "Are you sure?" blah, blah, blah.
00:32:51 ◼ ► And he said, "No, no, no, worst case, we'll call you, but get out of here," basically, so that's what I did.
00:33:01 ◼ ► That took from Friday late afternoon until the time I went to bed Sunday, which was not delightful.
00:33:07 ◼ ► As it turns out, I love my Synology, I still love my Synology, but maybe not the best Time Machine backup destination in the entire world.
00:33:19 ◼ ► I had thought at the time that the hard drive was out of town, it actually wasn't, because I send them off with my parents and move them off site for real safekeeping.
00:33:27 ◼ ► As it turns out, it was not out of town, I didn't realize that it was local, but either way, it was several weeks old, I only do that once a month, and the Time Machine backup was several hours before everything took a dump.
00:33:38 ◼ ► And so I did restore, it has been working just about flawlessly, as far as I can tell, so I think all is well.
00:33:45 ◼ ► That being said, this machine is now tainted twice over, and so I am still casually in the market for a new computer, but thankfully I do not need to do a desperation purchase now now now, which is what I thought I was going to have to do.
00:33:59 ◼ ► So, ultimately it has worked out well, and I am pleased to have my beloved iMac back, even though I don't feel like I can trust it at all anymore.
00:34:06 ◼ ► So, anything that was hanging out on my desktop, usually I'm a very devout, clean desktop kind of person, I usually don't have stuff strewn all across my desktop.
00:34:14 ◼ ► But over the course of the last three years, there was plenty of cruft that had accumulated, and so the first time I really had a chance, you know, when the kids were either in bed or out or what have you,
00:34:25 ◼ ► I went through the iMac and like, made sure I filed away all these things that were in the "to file" category on my desktop.
00:34:32 ◼ ► And so, hopefully if this thing takes another dump, it won't be quite as ruinous, but we'll see what happens.
00:34:37 ◼ ► We got some good feedback from people trying to diagnose your problem. In particular, one person reported that they had a problem, not with their RAM itself, but with the compatibility between third-party RAM and first-party RAM.
00:34:49 ◼ ► And the RAM vendor was like, "Oh yeah, sometimes we hear that, that for whatever reason, our RAM doesn't like to play nice with the Apple RAM, and the only solution is to just either use all Apple RAM or all third-party RAM."
00:35:01 ◼ ► Again, I don't know if that was your problem, maybe it really was your logic board, but it's just one more thing to look out for, because we were trying to deal with third-party RAM, you had the bad RAM and they replaced it, but if you still had some wonkiness, that's one more thing to look into.
00:35:15 ◼ ► Additionally, this sounded like it was mostly around Fusion drives, but we did get a handful of people writing in saying that there were very weird lockups and so on and so forth, that ultimately they convinced themselves and/or they were traced back to a completely borked APFS volume.
00:35:32 ◼ ► And I don't want to mess with your beloved APFS, Jon, but people seem to believe, whether or not it's true, that occasionally APFS will just get confused, and when that happens, there is no turning back and no recovery.
00:35:44 ◼ ► I haven't had that happen yet, but it's possible. It's a new file system. File systems do take a while to sort of mature and settle down, but so far so good for me with APFS.
00:35:56 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Channels. Do you want to cut your cord? You should get Channels. Do you want to get rid of your cable box? You should get Channels. Do you want to watch TV outside of your house? You should get Channels. Do you want to have a full-fledged DVR on your Mac, PC, or even a Raspberry Pi? You should get Channels.
00:36:11 ◼ ► Channels is an iOS app and, if you want, server software that is made by people who really care from top to bottom. It's an app made by nerds, but made for everyone. Their iOS app has an API. That's how serious this is.
00:36:25 ◼ ► So let's start with the iOS app. If you have a network tuner, like an HD Home Run in your house, and it's attached to an antenna, you can actually pull TV from the freaking air and watch it on Channels.
00:36:36 ◼ ► Channels Plus, however, makes things really interesting. Channels Plus is server software, much like Plex Media Server, that enables full DVR functionality, including recording all the episodes of a series, every game for a team, and more.
00:36:49 ◼ ► You can even watch while recording, and automatic commercial skipping is included if you're into that sort of thing, but you're listening to this, so I guess not.
00:36:56 ◼ ► You can stream live TV away from your house. All of this does require the server software, but it runs on everything, including the Raspberry Pi 4. Channels, the app, is easy to use, even for non-nerds, and your family will love you for it.
00:37:09 ◼ ► It's so serious how much they care that when you set up the server software on your computer or your Raspberry Pi, it will automatically go and get a Let's Encrypt certificate to install on itself so all of your communication is secured.
00:37:23 ◼ ► That's how much the Channels folks care. You know what, kids? I didn't think that there was any point in this because I still have a cable subscription, but as it turns out, once you plug in your subscription information into the Channels server, it actually works better than ESPN's own app.
00:37:37 ◼ ► I was streaming ESPN from Channels quicker and better and more reliably than I could from the ESPN app.
00:37:42 ◼ ► So let me tell you, you should definitely give it a shot. ATP users can get their first month of Channels Plus for free by visiting getchannels.com/ATP. Getchannels.com/ATP, and you can cancel anytime. Kids, give it a shot. You know you want to. Channels, thank you very much for sponsoring this episode.
00:38:05 ◼ ► Alright, let's move on. I would like to briefly talk about the Apple Watch Series 5 because I don't think that'll take too long and then we can talk about the iPhones Pro.
00:38:12 ◼ ► I did get to recap. I moved from a Series 3 cellular 42mm Apple Watch to a Series 5 40mm, so I went to the small size cellular Apple Watch.
00:38:26 ◼ ► Hmm, which of your friends who has good taste in watches told you to do the small size?
00:38:30 ◼ ► Oh, that's right. Yes, indeed. And I regret it, and let me tell you why. I think this is a temporary regret, but I cannot overstate how f*cking terrible the battery is on this watch. It is atrocious.
00:38:56 ◼ ► Humorously enough, as we recorded, it is 9.38pm, and at 9.37pm my watch turned off with 0% battery.
00:39:07 ◼ ► Not only have I been wearing it all day, I've been wearing it all week, and we can talk about that.
00:39:13 ◼ ► But I wore it today as my all-day watch, and I put it on at about 8 in the morning, and I've been wearing it all day, and at 9.37pm, died.
00:39:26 ◼ ► Before you two pile on your watch quite so much, I have one other interesting related story, which is my wife has got a watch and a phone, right? And the day she set up her phone, she was complaining that her watch battery, the life wasn't as good, and she expected to have much more.
00:39:50 ◼ ► Well, this is the thing, no, because her watch hadn't come yet. This is the old watch, the same watch that she'd been wearing that has not changed the Series 4.
00:39:59 ◼ ► And she complained about it for multiple days because it took a while for her watch to get here, because she got the phone basically on day one, but the watch just came yesterday.
00:40:12 ◼ ► But it was a dramatic change, and the change coincides with her getting a phone with iOS 13 on it.
00:40:17 ◼ ► So, my pet theory now is there's something going on between phones with iOS 13, especially phones with iOS 13 that have just been set up, and watches, period.
00:40:29 ◼ ► Now, going to a smaller watch, yes, Casey, in your case, you should expect to get less battery because there's less battery in there, and the always-on screen is probably not great.
00:40:37 ◼ ► But the battery inside these watches is a little bit larger, so I would say that there is a possibility that you're both getting screwed by iOS 13 more than you're getting screwed by your watch battery.
00:40:48 ◼ ► But we'll just have to wait until like 13.3 or whatever to see if this resolved itself.
00:40:52 ◼ ► So that's the thing, is that, as a regular consumer, this is a really, really bad experience.
00:41:00 ◼ ► Now, again, let me reiterate what you just said. I understand and totally agree that I am absolutely going to have worse battery life on account of it being a smaller watch.
00:41:10 ◼ ► I understand and totally agree I will absolutely have worse battery life on account of it being always-on.
00:41:15 ◼ ► But I have gone from my Series 3, 2-year-old battery on the Series 3, which, again, was the big one, that would last all day, every day, without even thinking twice about it.
00:41:26 ◼ ► Including on occasions when I would do a half-hour run on cellular, with my AirPods, paired to the watch, listening to either overcast or music.
00:41:35 ◼ ► It would go to the end of the day, no sweat, every day. There were maybe 10 times in the two years I owned that watch that I didn't make it to the end of the day.
00:41:43 ◼ ► Now, in this brand-new watch, with a brand-new battery, where I feel like I have actually been pushing it less hard than I did my Series 3, I can barely make it to dinner.
00:41:54 ◼ ► And that just seems wrong to me. Now, the frustrating thing about Apple is they never say anything about anything until it's like a big kerfuffle.
00:42:02 ◼ ► And this apparently is not a big enough kerfuffle for them to say anything, but I have been whining to every little birdie I can talk to about this.
00:42:10 ◼ ► And the rumblings I've heard is that things will get better. I don't know when. I genuinely don't know when. I wish I could tell you.
00:42:17 ◼ ► I've heard that watchOS 6.1 will fix everything. I genuinely don't know. But I have heard that there are things that are coming that will make this better.
00:42:29 ◼ ► Some suggestions on how to deal with this. One of them obviously is, and you can try this experiment, the always-on watch face is an option.
00:42:39 ◼ ► And it's on by default, but you can turn it off. So that's, you can try that experiment and see if it works.
00:42:43 ◼ ► The other things are things related not to your new watch again, but just to iOS 13. Check to make sure your phone is not more aggressively trying to shove stuff onto your watch.
00:42:53 ◼ ► Check to make sure that your settings on your watch haven't changed and now it's trying to transfer massive playlists all the time and in a much more aggressive manner.
00:43:02 ◼ ► Because again, I remind you both of the example. My wife's Series 4 suddenly got way worse battery life when she set up her new iPhone.
00:43:10 ◼ ► There is no Series 5 watch in this equation and she is not changing sizes. The same watch she had, same unmodified Series 4.
00:43:17 ◼ ► So I feel like there's something going on with iOS 13 that is doing this. And her solution to this was to try to see, is there a bunch of stuff on my watch that I shouldn't have there?
00:43:27 ◼ ► It doesn't make any sense. So I am very suspicious of iOS 13 on the phone, not the watch.
00:43:34 ◼ ► Now from your little birdies, I can also totally believe that the Series 5 and watch OS 6 or whatever is on it, there are some wonky problems in the .0 release and they need to get straightened out or whatever.
00:43:50 ◼ ► I mean, trust me, the wonky problems extend to the .1 release as well. In fact, it introduced some new ones that affect apps with navigation bars.
00:44:02 ◼ ► Anyway, this very much could be software. Even in the best versions, the most mature, stable versions of these OSs, even in those scenarios, watch OS in particular is way buggier than iOS in my experience.
00:44:18 ◼ ► And also, the process between phone and watch communication, anything with watch connectivity, framework, anything where the phone and the watch are transferring information in either direction is the buggiest part of the Apple Watch software stack by far.
00:44:34 ◼ ► And I don't care which side it's on, whether it's the watch OS's fault or iOS's fault, it doesn't matter. The transfer process between the two is always horrendous.
00:44:41 ◼ ► It became even more horrendous this summer during the betas. So I know major stuff changed there, basically.
00:44:48 ◼ ► Something about watch connectivity changed so much that it was literally broken, I think, until beta 3.
00:44:53 ◼ ► And so there is very likely to be a software problem here that can be fixed, hopefully, with software fixes if they ever fix the software.
00:45:03 ◼ ► But I also think, if we think back to, if you remember the Series 0 Apple Watch, the very first one.
00:45:16 ◼ ► If you got the 38mm, the small one, the battery life was not very good to last through the day if you ever used workouts.
00:45:25 ◼ ► Because workouts put it in a higher power state and it has a little light on the bottom and all the sensors are full blast and everything.
00:45:33 ◼ ► But if you did workouts much during the day, the smaller one would not have a great battery life.
00:45:38 ◼ ► And I think what this has done by adding the always-on screen, which we'll get to in a few minutes, because I actually very much like the always-on screen.
00:45:47 ◼ ► And it's a huge feature. It's like a category-defining feature that other watches were adding and Apple didn't have.
00:46:03 ◼ ► All the gains that we've gotten over the last few years have now been spent on the always-on screen.
00:46:32 ◼ ► And before today, it was fun. I would end other days with way less than my Series 4, which was the same size.
00:46:48 ◼ ► And it would often still have more than half of its battery life left after all day of wearing it.
00:46:53 ◼ ► Whereas the Series 5, again, same size, is ending most days with no workouts at like 25 or 20%.
00:47:03 ◼ ► So, no question, the always-on screen is a significant change to how much it uses the battery.
00:47:11 ◼ ► Like, we had kind of too much battery life before, which was great. It was a great problem to have.
00:47:18 ◼ ► And honestly, I think it was the right move to spend the surplus this way because it's awesome.
00:47:34 ◼ ► And we heard those reports, which is basically, if you plan to use either workouts or cellular, get the big one.
00:47:47 ◼ ► But honestly, if you use workouts or cellular and you don't want to take it off in the middle of the day to charge it, you're going to want the big one.
00:48:04 ◼ ► Now, the reality is, in my usage of the watch, I'm not frequently running two hours of workouts a month.
00:48:13 ◼ ► But for those of you out there who do want to do those things or who do want to use cellular while you're out and about a lot, that should be a strong consideration to get the big one.
00:48:25 ◼ ► I have been posting about this on Twitter, and everyone has had their own theories as to what it is.
00:48:35 ◼ ► I assure you that whatever it is, listener, that you're thinking of, it is all but guaranteed that I have tried it.
00:48:48 ◼ ► Additionally, if you look at my mentions over the last few days, there are, I would say, exactly half the people that say, "Oh, you are crazy. This is great. It works flawlessly. No problems here."
00:48:58 ◼ ► And exactly half the people have said, "Oh, it's a disaster. It's a disaster on the old stuff. It's a disaster on the new stuff. Everything's a disaster."
00:49:04 ◼ ► And there was a brief window of time earlier today when it sounded like only the cellular models really got hit bad with this.
00:49:10 ◼ ► But I've heard other people say, "No, no, no. I have a non-cellular model, a GPS model, and it's still garbage."
00:49:16 ◼ ► So, I don't know. I really don't know. But I am really, really hopeful that it gets better.
00:49:21 ◼ ► And ultimately, one way or another, I am of the opinion, and this is like, I think, was it you or Mike?
00:49:28 ◼ ► I think it was Mike was getting very upset about everyone telling him to restore his phone or what have you, reset his phone.
00:49:34 ◼ ► I think that's true. If you look at this on a broader level, I spent $500 to get a watch that Apple promised to me would last all day and could have the screen on all day.
00:49:46 ◼ ► I shouldn't have to micromanage my power. I shouldn't have to treat this like a Tesla going across the country, worried if I can make it or not.
00:49:58 ◼ ► And it's just a really, really crummy experience for a brand new user to have to worry about this sort of thing.
00:50:11 ◼ ► Her old watch, she would use her watch face was the photo space, and it would be pictures of the kids that were coming off of a shared album on iCloud.
00:50:20 ◼ ► And I cannot for the life of me get her brand new watch, her Series 5, to get photos onto the watch.
00:50:28 ◼ ► Because when you go to that watch face, it says, "That's lovely. I would love to show you pictures, but there aren't on the watch."
00:50:32 ◼ ► I've done everything I can think of outside of a start from fresh, which I was planning on trying tonight but didn't have time.
00:50:38 ◼ ► I cannot figure out how this works. And so Erin has been really and justifiably fired up that this thing that she spent $400 on, because it's not cellular, it isn't working.
00:50:49 ◼ ► It's just not working, and it's so frustrating. And the thing that frustrates me even more is I freaking love this thing.
00:51:00 ◼ ► Well, first of all, I do like the rounded display, or the new kind of display in the Series 4 and the Series 5, because remember I was coming from the rectangular display.
00:51:10 ◼ ► The California face is extremely customizable, which everyone else under the sun knew, but I did not because I didn't have it before.
00:51:16 ◼ ► I am loving the California face. Is it the Meridian that's also really good? Yeah, I really like that one too.
00:51:23 ◼ ► And I genuinely do want to hear it. So this short segment, as ATP History tells you, is going to run very long.
00:51:29 ◼ ► But the always-on face, it really is delightful. And I mean that word, I choose that word deliberately.
00:51:36 ◼ ► And what I found myself doing in the first couple of days of having it on is I would like...
00:51:41 ◼ ► Say I was eating lunch or something and my hand is just, or my arm is just resting on the table.
00:51:50 ◼ ► And my internal monologue would say, I would just say to myself, "Oh, I got lucky. It happened to be on."
00:52:01 ◼ ► And it was like this really delightful feeling. And then when I realized, "No, no, no. It's always on."
00:52:33 ◼ ► I wanted to really give it an honest shot in a way that I haven't given the Apple Watch an honest shot in years.
00:52:45 ◼ ► "Oh, I'm wearing a watch," which I haven't done since middle school. And I like wearing a watch.
00:52:57 ◼ ► That's like most of what I want. It's like 90% of the value that I get out of a watch is the time,
00:53:25 ◼ ► It still is not much of a fashion piece, a little bit, but not as much as most good watches.
00:53:38 ◼ ► The way that a mechanical watch can be beautiful in some of the ways that the light reflects off the various facets of the hands
00:53:54 ◼ ► just like the way that you play with light and look at a watch that the Apple Watch can't do because it's just a screen.
00:54:00 ◼ ► There's also a lot of value to the Apple Watch, and I feel like I should be more familiar with it being in this ecosystem,
00:54:18 ◼ ► I've wanted to get back into it for years, and every time I would, I would buy the newest watch,
00:54:24 ◼ ► and I would enjoy it from a development perspective because the new watch has always been significantly faster than the one before it,
00:54:31 ◼ ► and so development cycles were always a lot easier and a lot faster because watch development is still pretty painful,
00:54:57 ◼ ► and I wouldn't see the time, or there would be like a half-second delay before it would light up,
00:55:02 ◼ ► and then I would start looking at the time. And that annoyance just adds up for me so quickly,
00:55:07 ◼ ► especially once I got accustomed to regular watches where they are just always showing the time, as you said.
00:55:14 ◼ ► So the reason why I was so interested in the Series 5 is because that always on screen.
00:55:28 ◼ ► but this is why I think that's an important thing because it really radically improves the watch
00:55:34 ◼ ► in a very critical way for a lot of people. To me, the always-on display is bigger than cellular.
00:55:39 ◼ ► I know not everybody will agree with that, but to me, cellular is a nice-to-have feature
00:55:53 ◼ ► And most watches aren't even equipped with it because most people just buy the aluminum
00:55:58 ◼ ► and half of them don't have it. And also, of all the ones that have it, how many are activated?
00:56:04 ◼ ► It's probably not a great percentage there either. And then of the few that have cellular,
00:56:10 ◼ ► and the few that are activated, what percentage of those people are actually using the cellular connection?
00:56:16 ◼ ► Cellular effects, in reality, I think are probably a pretty small percentage of Apple Watch usage.
00:56:22 ◼ ► Whereas the always-on screen makes the Apple Watch between a little and a lot nicer for all of them all the time.
00:56:31 ◼ ► So that, to me, is a way better use of the power budget. And it's the way more impressive feat to me.
00:56:40 ◼ ► I know technically cellular was hard and everything, but to me, the always-on screen is a much bigger deal
00:56:46 ◼ ► because it makes the watch just overall significantly nicer in use for every single person using it all the time.
00:56:54 ◼ ► You may change your opinion on that once you start strapping your hand-me-down watches onto your children
00:56:59 ◼ ► because when they have cellular, you can track them when they're just wearing the watch.
00:57:08 ◼ ► My kids don't want to take their phone anywhere. My daughter leaves the house and says, "Take your phone with you,"
00:57:16 ◼ ► because that's the most reliable way to track her and get in touch with her. It's got a big battery.
00:57:21 ◼ ► It's got more powerful radios, all the other stuff. She doesn't want to take her phone.
00:57:24 ◼ ► But the watch, once you get it strapped onto the wrist, as long as they like it there and put it on every day,
00:57:30 ◼ ► they just forget it's there. I would not trade always-on for cellular for my kids' watches, but for my own, maybe, if I wore one.
00:57:37 ◼ ► The good thing is we don't have to make this trade. But anyway, it's a really big deal.
00:57:43 ◼ ► And there are a lot of implementation details and things to work out. Some things about it are a little bit weird.
00:57:57 ◼ ► Yeah, well, but again, battery issues, I think it's very similar to the Series Zero, where if you push it hard, it's not going to make it through the day.
00:58:05 ◼ ► And I think we've been spoiled with some of the recent generations that have had just way more battery life than anybody really seemed to need.
00:58:15 ◼ ► So much so that sleep tracking with the watch became a thing, which Apple has never really advertised, has never made easy,
00:58:22 ◼ ► because the whole thing was you're supposed to take your watch off and charge it overnight, according to Apple.
00:58:27 ◼ ► And there was so much surplus battery life that this whole sleep tracking thing has come up on the side,
00:58:32 ◼ ► because people can wear their watch almost 24 hours a day, and if you charge it for a couple of brief periods, you can get enough charge to last the whole day.
00:58:46 ◼ ► Anyway, so as I've now come back to it for the week, and I don't know how long I'm going to stick with it as a daily wearer,
00:58:52 ◼ ► but I do want to keep doing it for a little while longer so I can really get myself into this world and be able to talk about it more intelligently and everything else,
00:59:03 ◼ ► A lot of my Apple Watch complaints have been partially resolved or mostly resolved with this change, but a lot of those complaints are still there.
00:59:21 ◼ ► Telling time on the Apple Watch before sucked, because again, you turn your wrist and it might not be there, or it would take a minute.
00:59:28 ◼ ► It was terrible. Now I enjoy telling time on it, but there is one giant asterisk on that.
00:59:40 ◼ ► I know everyone loves the new California and the new Meridian faces. You're grading on a curve.
00:59:52 ◼ ► They have lots of design flaws, many of which are really easily avoidable, but they didn't.
00:59:56 ◼ ► Apple watch faces seem like they're designed by people who have never worn analog watches and really don't understand them at all.
01:00:04 ◼ ► It's like the same way, to me, the analog watch faces on Apple Watch are like Game Center to video games.
01:00:20 ◼ ► It's not good analog watch design. At heart, the Apple Watch is a digital watch through and through.
01:00:29 ◼ ► So for me, I have found, for multiple reasons, I have come to peace with this fact that this is never going to be a good analog watch,
01:00:38 ◼ ► unless Apple lets us do third-party faces, which honestly, I think, now that the faces are even more complex in the way they have to deal with the sleep versus wake state
01:00:49 ◼ ► of the dim screen, I think the chances are lower than ever that we're ever going to get third-party watch faces.
01:01:25 ◼ ► And so I have come around to this fact, and I have come around to the fact that I'm never going to get the analog face I want.
01:01:36 ◼ ► Solr is the old face that has, like, the sun going through the sky with the digital clock on the corner, complication on top and bottom.
01:01:51 ◼ ► I like the way they look. And I buy them based on how they look and how they make me feel.
01:01:55 ◼ ► And I love the Solr face. The Solr face is not only incredibly attractive, but it is, to use a Johnny term, it is unashamedly plastic. Is that what you said?
01:02:16 ◼ ► And it's not perfect. Like, it still does that weird time travel thing where if you turn the crown, it enters, like, the time travel-like mode that has been kicked out of WatchOS for, like, two years now.
01:02:26 ◼ ► But it's still on the Solr face so that you can scroll through and see, like, what sunset time is and stuff.
01:02:32 ◼ ► And that's annoying because if you, like, accidentally brush the crown, it goes into this mode and everything.
01:02:35 ◼ ► But it is unapologetically digital, and the Apple Watch is a way better digital watch than it is trying to fake analog watch.
01:02:44 ◼ ► It's so much better at that. And, again, not perfect. There are things I would edit, but so many fewer things. And there's such smaller things.
01:02:58 ◼ ► Number one, when you are in bright sun and the screen is in the dim mode, you can see the -- you can read the digital time a lot more easily and with a lot less of the screen very visible to you and a lot more quickly than you can read analog hands.
01:03:13 ◼ ► Because, like, one of the reasons why Apple's analog faces are so mediocre is that they really have been pretty poor on time legibility, especially if you use any complications.
01:03:24 ◼ ► And some of the faces are a little bit better or worse than others, but, like, the analog faces are not very good at letting you quickly see the time and figure out what time it is.
01:03:32 ◼ ► The digital faces that just put the time, like, in the upper right corner or something, a lot less of the screen has to be visible.
01:03:40 ◼ ► And for a lot less time, and it's a lot easier to see -- if you're in, like, a bright light and there's a dim screen, it's a lot easier to see that time.
01:03:46 ◼ ► Like, I just -- I spent a few days at the beach again, walking around outside in the bright sun and everything, and it was totally fine reading the digital time in all conditions.
01:03:55 ◼ ► There were sometimes where it was a little close, like, I could almost not read it, but I could read it.
01:03:59 ◼ ► And, you know, or if I'm, like, hanging my arm, like, on the window while I'm driving, you know, like, you have very bright sun hitting your wrist there, but you can still glance at it and see the digital time in no time at all.
01:04:09 ◼ ► So that's one major advantage. Like, I think in the dim screen mode, having a digital time makes it much more readable more of the time.
01:04:18 ◼ ► And then secondly, there's this weird thing where, you know, people who have Series 5s know this, where if you have an app open and it goes into dim mode, the app doesn't dim unless it's the workout app.
01:04:32 ◼ ► And if it's any other app, it blurs out the app with, like, a big blur effect and just puts a digital time in the upper right.
01:04:41 ◼ ► And so if you are normally using an analog face, but you happen to have put the watch to sleep while an app is running, congratulations, you now have a digital watch.
01:04:56 ◼ ► And maybe this is just because the, you know, the dim face software is super young, probably, right?
01:05:02 ◼ ► Because it's a brand new hardware. Like, I'm sure the software's going to improve and there's going to be, you know, better transitions and smoother things like that.
01:05:08 ◼ ► But, like, right now, it's like the Apple is going to force you to see this digital face pretty frequently anyway.
01:05:14 ◼ ► So if you're already accustomed to one of the faces that puts the digital time in the upper right corner, like so many of them do, then this, it looks a lot less different when it does this than other times.
01:05:26 ◼ ► So I have dramatically improved my enjoyment of the watch by just making it a digital watch only.
01:05:35 ◼ ► I'm not using any analog faces right now. I've just been using digital and that just makes it a lot nicer for me.
01:05:42 ◼ ► Now, I know you would never give up your beloved mechanical watches, and I don't say that to poke fun, believe it or not.
01:05:48 ◼ ► But in the past, it sounded like you would use an Apple watch only for the things it was uniquely well suited for.
01:05:57 ◼ ► So something like exercise as an example. But now it sounds like you're less, I don't know, bitter isn't the word I'm looking for, but less, and disgusted is too strong a word, but, you know, less grossed out by it.
01:06:08 ◼ ► So the question I'm meandering toward is, do you see yourself wearing, like, electing to wear this at times when it isn't necessarily the best suited for the job at hand?
01:06:19 ◼ ► I mean, that's a hard thing to judge. Like, choosing what you wear, for the most part, is mood and fashion and situation based, right?
01:06:31 ◼ ► So, like, I'm not going to be that analytical about it. To me, like, it used to be this annoying thing that I had to wear sometimes for my job, basically.
01:06:47 ◼ ► And I really like the way it looks when I configure it my way. Like, I love the solar face. I once again got stainless steel.
01:06:55 ◼ ► I love the 40mm size, although we'll have to see about the battery thing, but, like, you know, I love the size, I love the stainless steel, and I love my white sport band.
01:07:05 ◼ ► Like, it's, I love the look of this thing. I think it looks very nice, especially now when, by having always on faces, you can make much more of a fashion decision about what your watch looks like.
01:07:16 ◼ ► Because before, you would have, well, you could choose the strap and the metal, and then you're going to have a big black square most of the time, and that's going to be your look.
01:07:23 ◼ ► Alright, well, now I have more control over that. And I just, I, God, I wish so much for third party watch faces.
01:07:33 ◼ ► Or for Apple to put a lot more effort into the number and customizability of their watch faces.
01:07:41 ◼ ► But neither of those seem likely. It seems like Apple is treating watch faces just as these afterthoughts, which is crazy to me, because it's like the interface to one of their most important products.
01:07:59 ◼ ► Do you feel like if the software enabled you to do it tomorrow, do you feel like you, Marco, could design a pretty good or maybe even perfect watch face, analog watch face?
01:08:13 ◼ ► Or is it more like you know the things you don't like, but you don't know if you personally are capable of generating something that you do like?
01:08:21 ◼ ► Definitely the latter. Like, you know, it's like, you know, like film critics don't have to know how to make movies, right?
01:08:27 ◼ ► Which is a common argument, actually. But like, you know, I feel like you can be a critic of something without necessarily being able to make a really good version of the thing yourself.
01:08:36 ◼ ► And so, and I can critique any watch style design. And I know what I like, and I know what I don't.
01:08:49 ◼ ► The digital faces are a lot better, and there's less about digital faces to be offended by, because it's just, you know, the time is just condensed to this little group of numbers, and then you have the whole rest of the screen to kind of just play with.
01:09:02 ◼ ► So, you know, as opposed to like, you know, regular analog face design where you typically have the entire surface of the watch is responsible for the time.
01:09:10 ◼ ► You have these big broad hands going across it, and you gotta indicate the hour somehow in some kind of legible way. Like, there's a lot more that goes into the design of analog faces than digital faces.
01:09:22 ◼ ► And so, yeah, I know what I like. I can look at something and tell you why I do or don't like it.
01:09:29 ◼ ► But I don't think I would, I would like to try making them myself, but I don't think I'd be very good at it.
01:09:35 ◼ ► You know, on that topic, you know, it's obvious that you're not in love with any of the analog faces that Apple makes, but I'm not sure what the overall public opinion is.
01:09:44 ◼ ► Like you mentioned that Apple is bad at making analog watch faces. I mean, they're bad at making analog watch faces that you like, but you're a watch nerd.
01:09:51 ◼ ► Is the general public, are they satisfied by the watch faces? Do they think the amount of configurability is adequate? Is it legible to most people?
01:10:00 ◼ ► How many people care about the hands blocking the date window? Like, I don't, I'm not in touch with enough regular people who have Apple watches to know.
01:10:07 ◼ ► Mostly I don't hear about complaints about the Apple watch, except for from watch nerds.
01:10:14 ◼ ► And I did remember hearing some complaints when they moved to the, whatever the thing is with the, I don't know the names of these stupid watch faces, the one with like the three dials.
01:10:25 ◼ ► Yeah, Infograph was the first time I heard complaints from people, mostly because that was so heavily pushed.
01:10:32 ◼ ► And it was, and it was confusing. But other than that, I feel like they've had enough watch faces that I think most people who really, who basically don't care about watch faces can find something that not only that they tolerate, but that they're actually happy with.
01:10:45 ◼ ► So I'm not entirely ready to say Apple is bad at making analog watch faces. Apple seems like they're bad at making watch faces that watch nerds like, and they're definitely bad at making watch faces that you like.
01:11:04 ◼ ► Yeah, I know. I'm saying like this, you know, I don't, I'm not sure if they're like bad at it, right? Like, like, like they are making keyboards. Oh.
01:11:12 ◼ ► Because it is so much of a taste thing. Like there is legibility, right? But even on that front, I don't feel like it's a common complaint that I can't read the time on my watch, unlike, you know, my spacebar is acting wonky or I get too easy when I press the key, right?
01:11:26 ◼ ► And very quickly, because it is so subjective, it goes into, well, what do you like? What appeals to you? And then everyone, you know, has their own taste.
01:11:36 ◼ ► The number of watches I see where it's got a picture of someone's kid's face, like they use the picture face.
01:11:42 ◼ ► Like it boggles my mind. It's like you're complaining about details, legibility of your thing. And they're just like, nope, giant picture of my kid. Like that's, that's the one.
01:11:50 ◼ ► I know. But like legibility wise, it's just, it's just a big giant picture with no thought for legibility whatsoever. I mean, it might even be the same color as the letters and the, you know, the numbers for the time in the background. It's, people have strange tastes.
01:12:06 ◼ ► I know. I know. I mean, obviously like third party watch faces is a solution here and you know, maybe like one or two watch faces with extreme customizability for the watch nerds is definitely an area where they need to branch out.
01:12:17 ◼ ► And maybe they'll never make a watch face that you personally like. But like I said, I'm not quite sure that they are actually bad at making watch faces because if most people can find a watch face that they're actually happy with, I think they're probably doing okay making watch faces.
01:12:33 ◼ ► Still should, still should definitely do third party watch faces for a whole bunch of other reasons, but I don't know.
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01:14:34 ◼ ► We should finally talk about iPhones and our iPhone's 11 Pro. So, Jon, you personally did not get a phone this year. Is that correct?
01:14:48 ◼ ► Right. But my wife did. She got the 11 Pro in space gray on day one and slapped it into another funky colored silicone case and has been messing with it since then.
01:14:58 ◼ ► Okay. And Marco, you and Tiff, what was your agenda for this? That you both got 11 Pros?
01:15:03 ◼ ► Yep. I got the, what I said, you know, the white one with regular size 11 Pro and a red apple leather case.
01:15:17 ◼ ► Alright. So I obviously, like we discussed, I got the 256 Pro in green and I am running caseless, which I somewhat regret. I wanted to quickly cover a couple of things and if you guys have stuff to add, please feel free to jump in. Otherwise, I'll just blaze forward.
01:15:33 ◼ ► My pickup experience, I wanted to briefly talk about. For the last several years when I've gotten new phones, I did not get the XS series. So last time I got a phone was the X.
01:15:42 ◼ ► But the phones leading up to that, with the exception of whatever one it was that they did not do pre-orders, I've always had them shipped to the house and I've never done a store pickup.
01:15:51 ◼ ► And I didn't do, I've never done a like schedule a pickup time in advance store pickup. But I did do that this time.
01:15:58 ◼ ► You know, again, I ordered a phone for Aaron and me, one phone a piece, I ordered a watch a piece for Aaron and me.
01:16:04 ◼ ► Interestingly, the watch did not let me set a time earlier than 10, which is when the store usually opens. But the phone, because it knew it was launch day and the store was opening early, the phone let me set a time for 8 a.m.
01:16:19 ◼ ► 8 to 830 was the time I chose. And I was a little, I don't know if worried is the word, but I was curious whether they would let me do my 10 o'clock watch appointment at the same time I did my 8 o'clock phone appointment.
01:16:30 ◼ ► And they did. And it was no problem. Pick up, you know, granted, you know, the short pump store here in Richmond is not overwhelmingly busy.
01:16:38 ◼ ► It is the only store in a surprisingly large geographic radius, but it is not a terribly busy store.
01:16:44 ◼ ► And I got there about 815 and I was out of there by like 830, 845, something like that. It was pretty easy, pretty painless. No big issues.
01:16:55 ◼ ► I was picking up Aaron's phone, which I believe I ordered just as like, you know, an AT&T otherwise untethered, so to speak, phone.
01:17:05 ◼ ► I also picked up her watch, which she ordered under her own Apple account and so on and so forth. And she sent me as a pickup person for it. That was no problem. I just had to show my ID.
01:17:14 ◼ ► The pickup experience for me was really, really good. And I think, especially because my UPS driver loves to comment like 6 o'clock at night on iPhone day, I'll probably continue to do pickup where possible for the future.
01:17:31 ◼ ► Yeah, some people have to go to jobs during the day, so it's kind of hard to go to an Apple store.
01:17:40 ◼ ► I did the order for delivery, you know, at the 8 a.m. I ordered them for delivery. But I happened to be next to an Apple store doing like shopping errands that day.
01:17:52 ◼ ► And I thought, well, you know what, I didn't order a case. And I think I want a case. I think I'm a little scared to go caseless on this one.
01:18:00 ◼ ► So I was next to the Apple store, and so I went over and of course they have all the big lines set up outside, and there's like three different lines for whether you have an appointment or not and everything.
01:18:10 ◼ ► And they were probably, this was pretty early in the day still, so there were probably about 100 people out there in line.
01:18:14 ◼ ► And I went up to the agent who was assigning people which line to be in, and I'm like, I just want to buy a case.
01:18:22 ◼ ► And she's like, oh, okay, hold on. And I had to wait for like, you know, five minutes from then she let me in. So it was great.
01:18:27 ◼ ► All right, so I go over to the cases, and I'm looking at the wall, and I'm like, all right, I wanted the red leather 11 Pro case.
01:18:45 ◼ ► And it looks like behind the little things, like all the little boxes to see like, you know, maybe they just got miss shelved or something.
01:18:55 ◼ ► So I'm standing around, I'm like, you know, on iPhone day inside the Apple store, almost every employee is talking to somebody, like setting up their phone.
01:19:09 ◼ ► One of the employees was walking by like between things, and he's like, do you need any help?
01:19:19 ◼ ► And he's like, I'm going to go back and look. And, you know, eventually he comes back out and he's like, he actually found one like in the back somehow.
01:19:37 ◼ ► Like once you're in, once you're assigned to a person, they don't care how many things you have them bring out from the back.
01:19:46 ◼ ► So they happened to have what I wanted in stock, which of course online I couldn't reserve it.
01:19:53 ◼ ► And so I got an Apple Watch, exactly what I wanted, by waiting in line for five minutes.
01:20:02 ◼ ► It's about, I don't know, five, it's like four or five at night, and the UPS truck comes.
01:20:08 ◼ ► And we ordered two phones, but it was two different orders, because I wanted to like, you know, just go fast through the process, right?
01:20:28 ◼ ► So I'm like, I want my new phone for my trip, and the tracking still said it was on that truck.
01:20:41 ◼ ► And I waved down the driver, who was of course delivering other people's iPhones to their houses down the street from us.
01:20:47 ◼ ► And he checked, he's like, look, I'm sorry, it's not on this truck, whatever it is, it's not here.
01:20:54 ◼ ► I called them, he's like maybe got mis-dispatched or whatever to a different truck, I'm like, oh God.
01:21:04 ◼ ► I try to call UPS's national call center on iPhone day, saying, uh, you know, where is it?
01:21:12 ◼ ► And I'm like, you know what, I had kind of an easy evening, I'm like, let me just go back to the store.
01:21:22 ◼ ► - Right, so I went back to the store, and I go to the line person, and by this point the lines were much shorter,
01:21:31 ◼ ► but I knew I'd have to actually wait on the real line this time, I couldn't press my luck twice.
01:21:36 ◼ ► So I go wait on the real line, but I told the dispatcher, I'm like, just so you know, I know exactly what I want,
01:21:52 ◼ ► - Yeah, so I went again with no reservation, got myself in a much shorter line, this one was only like 15 minutes,
01:22:03 ◼ ► I get in there, and you know, I get a purse, and they start looking stuff up, and oh, yeah, they have one in the back, okay.
01:22:10 ◼ ► And they go, and after like 15 minutes, I get a message from Tif saying, your phone just arrived on a different truck.
01:22:22 ◼ ► - And about two minutes after that, the employee comes back, I am so sorry, but the manager just told me,
01:22:30 ◼ ► Like we're actually out, even though they had created a reservation for me, but I guess that didn't work somehow.
01:22:53 ◼ ► Chasing the truck down the street, where's my phone, I'm going to the store, oh, I got a phone, alright.
01:23:04 ◼ ► So again, I came from the iPhone X, and so I didn't have any of the XS Super HDR goodness.
01:23:11 ◼ ► Obviously, none of us have had night mode, and none of us have had the supposedly better battery,
01:23:21 ◼ ► I went to this really interesting festival that's here in Richmond called Field Day of the Past,
01:23:31 ◼ ► And I was taking a few pictures here and there, and I didn't bring my big camera, even though I usually do,
01:23:39 ◼ ► And I took a picture of, I think it was just the landscape, but I was pointed directly at the sun.
01:23:54 ◼ ► And it came out beautifully, and that was one of the first pictures I took with my then unbroken phone.
01:24:05 ◼ ► I also have noticed that I am trying to go wide on all the things, which is exactly what Mike has talked about.
01:24:14 ◼ ► But he said, you know, I think everyone's going to be doing wide shots of everything just because we can.
01:24:36 ◼ ► because something I've noticed myself doing more and more often is taking pictures of all four of us
01:24:46 ◼ ► Maybe I'm just a bad selfie taker, but it's hard to do on the X, because there's just not a lot of width to these shots.
01:24:59 ◼ ► I haven't played with night mode very much, but I did take a really pretty picture of my car in the driveway
01:25:20 ◼ ► I had this, in retrospect, completely bananas thought that you could take pictures with almost no light whatsoever,
01:25:27 ◼ ► and they'll be perfect and noise-free, and that is not at all my experience with night mode.
01:25:31 ◼ ► Night mode definitely requires some amount of light. It just requires quite a bit less light than you would expect.
01:25:39 ◼ ► And I gotta say, it is extremely impressive, and I am loving the cameras on this phone as someone who came from a X.
01:25:52 ◼ ► Any thoughts on the camera specifically, and then we have some other things we can talk about, but what about the camera?
01:25:57 ◼ ► I love these cameras, I gotta say. I mean, it's funny, I believe I said on this show a week ago that,
01:26:05 ◼ ► "You know, I wish they would have done a more telephoto, the wide, I'm not gonna have much use for the wide."
01:26:14 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly. Now, I think some of that is just because it's new and fancy, but yes, I completely agree.
01:26:22 ◼ ► so when you have actual optics, like an actual optical zoom that is moving elements in a lens forward and back to achieve different zoom levels,
01:26:32 ◼ ► you get differences in the perspective. Like, if you take the super wide shot, if you just crop the middle section out,
01:26:49 ◼ ► There's a certain amount of perspective, compression, and distortion in different ways that,
01:26:55 ◼ ► so what I kind of wish is that I very rarely need the entire ultra wide, 13mm out zoom,
01:27:11 ◼ ► And they simulate it, but it's not quite the same. It doesn't have the right optical characteristics,
01:27:22 ◼ ► So I kind of wish for that, but I know that's probably out of scope for what they're doing here.
01:27:45 ◼ ► but I would suggest if you're going to shoot something ultra wide, you don't want it to be very close to the camera.
01:27:56 ◼ ► but if you're shooting ultra wide of people or things, those people better love you very much.
01:28:14 ◼ ► and some of the photos I've gotten have just been incredible, and I've put like no effort whatsoever into them.
01:28:21 ◼ ► Just like casual snaps of like, you know, snapping like the sign of where I parked in the parking lot,
01:28:33 ◼ ► Like my typical like, you know, like boring, like I know like Merlin was talking a lot about this,
01:28:47 ◼ ► Like we're all like shooting pictures of like models and on vacations and these incredible scenes.
01:28:52 ◼ ► Like no, like the way I use my phone camera is I shoot mostly very boring things like everyone else.
01:29:02 ◼ ► And yet, even for all the stupid stuff, these cameras look fantastic, and they take no effort.
01:29:13 ◼ ► Like this is not a brand new thing that it can do this at all, but this is a significant leap forward.
01:29:19 ◼ ► And the XS was also, the XS was also a fantastic leap forward on the camera in most ways.
01:29:29 ◼ ► So I am very happy with these cameras so far, and I'm looking forward to using them more.
01:29:35 ◼ ► You know, I don't think I talked about this on the show, but I was talking to somebody about this.
01:29:40 ◼ ► It's interesting to me that I'm finding myself less and less enthusiastic in taking my big camera.
01:29:59 ◼ ► and it was one of those instances where like her leg was out and made like a, there was an empty space
01:30:15 ◼ ► But outside of when I really want that beautiful background blur for pretty much any other kind of picture,
01:30:23 ◼ ► I genuinely think my iPhone is considerably better than my micro four thirds camera I bought
01:30:36 ◼ ► If I understood and knew how to edit a photo like you or TIFF does, I might be able to take a similar shot
01:30:43 ◼ ► or maybe take one shot and underexpose it, you know, take another shot and overexpose it, you know,
01:30:47 ◼ ► and do this basically the magic that the phone does on my behalf. Maybe I could do that by hand.
01:30:59 ◼ ► And it does it in a fraction of a second. And night mode, good grief, there is no way I would get anything night mode like
01:31:06 ◼ ► out of my micro four thirds camera. Now maybe if I had one of those bananas full frame cameras like you and Stephen have,
01:31:12 ◼ ► maybe I wouldn't need night mode at all. But for me, with my equipment that's in my house,
01:31:18 ◼ ► about the only time I'm going to turn to my micro four thirds is when I know it's really important to me to have that beautiful background blur.
01:31:26 ◼ ► And it is important to me a lot, I'm not going to lie. But it is unreal how good these cameras are.
01:31:33 ◼ ► And I think some of that is just new shiny, but so much of it is just they are so flexible.
01:31:38 ◼ ► And the computational photography that Apple does is so good that it makes me reluctant to bring my big camera.
01:31:51 ◼ ► Well and there's aspects of this that big cameras can't match. Like the night sight mode or whatever it's called.
01:32:01 ◼ ► Yeah, night trap, whatever. So the night mode here is so good in ways that big cameras don't do.
01:32:09 ◼ ► Because big cameras, you know, you can have a giant sensor and you can have amazing optics.
01:32:14 ◼ ► And you can have an incredibly high sensitivity on that sensor so you can crank the ISO way, way, way up.
01:32:19 ◼ ► And or you can put it on a tripod and go to crazy lengths to maybe have a timer release so you don't have the shake of pushing the button to really keep it steady.
01:32:32 ◼ ► But what big cameras can't do is give you a pretty good shot in pretty minimal light while you're hand holding them.
01:32:42 ◼ ► Because it's like night mode is not just a long exposure. It is a combination of a bunch of stuff.
01:32:48 ◼ ► And it especially handles hand held motion way better than any regular camera can because they're not doing that kind of smart.
01:33:08 ◼ ► So they're using software and tricks instead and they're really effective tricks and really smart software and really incredible computation there.
01:33:15 ◼ ► That, you know, the big cameras can do a lot of things better but they can't do like the night mode stuff.
01:33:23 ◼ ► Like in real world, real life, like when you're not having a tripod, you're not setting up some big, you know, pro photo shoot with tripods and gimbals like in an Apple commercial.
01:33:31 ◼ ► Like if you're just a person holding your phone trying to take a picture like the rest of us, you will actually get way better pictures out of the iPhone under a lot of circumstances than you'll get out of even the best big cameras.
01:33:43 ◼ ► Yeah, and that's so bananas to me that this thing in my pocket that we all laughed about in 2007, 2008, whenever it was, that the first iPhone came out.
01:33:52 ◼ ► You know, the internet connection was slower than dirt and it didn't have copy paste and, you know, so much of it was such trash back then but it was still so much better than what we had.
01:34:01 ◼ ► And now, you know, the LTE connection on a good day is not as fast as what I have at home but more than ample enough.
01:34:10 ◼ ► This camera is arguably better than the one I spent, you know, almost equal money on between the camera body and the lens.
01:34:18 ◼ ► Actually, I spent about the same money between the camera body and the lens. It might be better than that camera.
01:34:22 ◼ ► Like so much of this is just phenomenal and while we're gushing over these new phones, I need to basically take all the whining and complaining I just did about the Apple Watch, which really is chapping my hindquarters, and everything is reversed for these phones.
01:34:38 ◼ ► I can't, well for me anyway, I can't tell you, I don't know what your experience has been like Marco or what Tina's experience has been like, but I've been using my phone on and off all day long and it is 1035 in the evening and I am at 53%, which is nuts.
01:34:55 ◼ ► It is insane how good this battery is. It is as good as the Apple Watch battery appears to be bad right now.
01:35:03 ◼ ► I cannot get over, I mean this genuinely, I cannot believe, well I guess it was two years for me, but really from my understanding that the XS wasn't too much different than the X, but the difference between a two-year-old X battery and this battery is bananas.
01:35:21 ◼ ► I cannot believe they've gotten this much juice out of this and I know we've learned that there's a bigger battery as we talked about earlier and we've learned that there, or we knew that there was much better power management, but this is absurd how much battery power this thing has and I am loving it.
01:35:40 ◼ ► Yeah, so far I haven't been using it so much like without being near a charger that I have a good idea of it, but so far it feels pretty good.
01:35:49 ◼ ► Yeah, I cannot gush enough about how good this battery life is. It's to the point that, I mean we'll see what happens next time I do like a trip or a conference or what have you, but you know when I'm at a conference like WWDC, basically any occasion I have to charge my phone, because I'm not one to use a charging case, I have no problems with it, I just am too cheap to buy them.
01:36:11 ◼ ► Anytime I have an opportunity to charge my phone at dub dub, I will absolutely take that opportunity because you never know the next time you're going to be able to charge unless it's bedtime.
01:36:20 ◼ ► And that to me is like number one pro tip of WWDC. I, sitting here today, I feel like I would probably make it a day or it would be close to making it a day without charging, whereas with every other iPhone I've ever had, there is not even a prayer of me making it through a day at WWDC with any of them.
01:36:44 ◼ ► Both better and worse than I expected. There are places that it drives me insane like on the lock screen. It drives me insane on the lock screen.
01:36:57 ◼ ► I don't know, I guess they don't want to do momentary touch on the camera and the flashlight buttons because maybe you'll hit them by accident, but I feel like the delay is long enough that it's frustrating.
01:37:10 ◼ ► It's really frustrating. Yes, I know you can slide for the camera, but I don't think you can slide for the flashlight.
01:37:17 ◼ ► Yeah, well you never know. But nevertheless, I find I'm annoyed with it being missing there. I don't like the text selection. You have to be more deliberate and do it on the space bar.
01:37:31 ◼ ► I do like that there's still an option because I would be eight times more furious if there was no option for the touchpad text selection or text placement thing.
01:37:40 ◼ ► But I am glad there's something I don't like that I can't just mash anywhere on the keyboard and do it.
01:37:47 ◼ ► Aaron pointed out something interesting to me, which maybe has been in iOS 13 the whole time and I just never noticed.
01:37:54 ◼ ► But it used to be, say you've composed a text message and you tap and hold on a word. It would bring up the little loop or whatever and you would be able to shimmy the cursor around by starting that with a tap and hold.
01:38:09 ◼ ► Now a tap and hold selects the word. And sitting here today, only a week or so into having that change, because I believe that's a change anyway, I don't particularly care for it.
01:38:21 ◼ ► I bet you over time I'll get used to it. But Aaron was like, "What the hell is this? Why can't I tap and hold and get the loop and do it the way I used to do it?"
01:38:30 ◼ ► And I was like, "I don't know. I'll just hit the space bar. Maybe that'll work." And after she showed me the arrow and the FedEx logo, I realized that it is kind of annoying me too.
01:38:41 ◼ ► But that one I think I'll get over. The space bar thing, man, that's frustrating. I might get over it, but God, those lock screen buttons are driving me nuts. How do you feel about it?
01:38:51 ◼ ► I feel pretty similarly. I never did the word selection thing. And the keyboard cursor movement thing doesn't actually bother me very much in practice because with 3D Touch, I had a pretty high error rate with trying to mash it to get the cursor to show up and to drag it around.
01:39:14 ◼ ► I actually had a pretty high error rate, and my error rate with doing the space bar is almost zero. So it is a little bit slower, but it's more consistent, and so I actually prefer that.
01:39:24 ◼ ► The flashlight and camera buttons and the lock screen though, I definitely don't like that. And as Jon mentioned, you can swipe. I actually forgot about that.
01:39:32 ◼ ► Ever since moving to the 10 series of phones that added those buttons, I actually totally forgot that you can swipe to get to the camera. So I'm trying to retrain myself now, but it's taking undoing two years of muscle memory here.
01:39:46 ◼ ► But I assume that'll be fine eventually. But that's where I felt it the most is that camera button because it's making me miss shots because it takes a little bit longer now. I hope I can fix that.
01:40:01 ◼ ► I think for the camera, you and I will retrain ourselves over time. But yeah, I agree with you. The other thing I actually meant to bring up and I forgot was the lack of peak and pop, or the change, I should say, in peak and pop.
01:40:13 ◼ ► So let's say I'm reading Twitter on Tweetbot or what have you, and there's a URL there. Well, I used to be able to mash down kind of medium strength, and it would pop up like a preview of what I was about to lower, what the URL shows.
01:40:27 ◼ ► And then if you push down even harder, it will be as though you had tapped it, and it will open up this Safari view controller and show you what that URL is.
01:40:38 ◼ ► Now, if you long press on a URL, you get a snapshot of what that web page looks like. But you also get a whole bunch of actions.
01:40:48 ◼ ► And I kind of miss peak and pop, but I am really liking having quick access to all those actions in that kind of pop-up menu. And so I think I'm on board with this overall, even though I would have told you I use peak and pop a lot, which I did, and I would miss it, which I do.
01:41:05 ◼ ► But having all those actions there is really, really nice, and I'm really digging that.
01:41:09 ◼ ► Oh, and one other thing really quickly. The NFC reading I am really enjoying. So when I was at WW this past year, I genuinely don't remember who it was, but somebody gave me a Shortcuts sticker, actually with the Shortcuts logo on it.
01:41:21 ◼ ► That is an NFC sticker. And so now with 13.1, you can go ahead and set up a shortcut automation that is triggered by an NFC sticker.
01:41:30 ◼ ► And so now if my phone is unlocked and I wave my phone over the sunglass holder on the roofline of my car, it will automatically, without any intervention from me, send a text to Aaron saying, "I'm on my way home. I'll be home at 4.15," which is in 12 minutes, which I think is super cool.
01:41:47 ◼ ► Truth be told, I can also just say to the robot, "Hey, robot, I'm on my way home," and it will also accomplish the same thing. But that doesn't use the future technology, man.
01:42:01 ◼ ► That's like, I keep trying to say the name. That's the old assistant stuff from like six years ago. I want to use the future in my NFC card reader. I think that's super amusing.
01:42:10 ◼ ► And I was talking to actually one of the people that works on channels, which is a sponsor for this week's episode, and he was telling me that he's put a tag near his receiver at his house, you know, his stereo receiver or surround-zone receiver.
01:42:25 ◼ ► And so I haven't tried this myself, but apparently what you can do is you can set up a shortcut triggered by NFC that will basically tell the phone to pipe audio to a specific AirPlay speaker.
01:42:36 ◼ ► So the thought is if you're near this receiver and you want to hear whatever you're listening to on the living room stereo, you just wave your phone in front of the sticker, and the next thing you know, it's playing on the living room stereo, which I want to try that real bad because that sounds super awesome.
01:42:52 ◼ ► Apple should do that for their AirPods because I've spent so much of my day going to the various menus to, you know, on the lock screen or on the control center to switch the AirPods because I have one set of AirPods and one set of ears, but I go back and forth from, you know, Mac, phone and iPad.
01:43:07 ◼ ► One of those things, too. I would love to be able to, and the problem is I don't have a case. Like, I'd love to be able to just rub the AirPod against the device I want it to pair with, right, but I understand due to the nature of NFC that's probably not feasible, but maybe the case, like if I had the case in my pocket, if I could just rub them together, I don't know.
01:43:24 ◼ ► It's probably not a great solution, but I'm open to the idea of like sewing NFC things into my clothing and having all sorts of weird gestures. If I take my phone and put it on my chest, it does this, but if I put it on the side of my arm, it does this, and then if I put it in my pocket, it does this, or, you know, putting them around the house.
01:43:39 ◼ ► If I put my phone down here, it plays through my stereo speakers. If I put my phone over here, it's time for the TV. You know, yelling out to your digital assistant is actually probably faster, but I like the idea of having a silent physical way to do it rather than just yelling into the air.
01:44:04 ◼ ► I have to give you an update on the Pokémon Go situation because I don't think my wife is working on it yet, but that's obviously the ultimate stress test. She's still going to need to have her giant arsenal of batteries. She's just going to say, "How much better is it? Is it better in a noticeable way?"
01:44:21 ◼ ► Or, you know, "Can you bring a smaller battery? Can you actually go out and do a thing and not kill the battery entirely?" But I don't have any reports yet. We did bring the camera to one of my son's cross-country meets. I brought my big camera, obviously. This highlights another place where phone cameras are just not up to the job.
01:44:38 ◼ ► People are running, and they're far away, and they move fast. You don't have to reach with a phone. You can get a wide shot. Every shot is a wide shot. There's a little blurry speck. Yeah, that's my son. You need a longer lens, bottom line.
01:44:53 ◼ ► But the landscape pictures that came out of it looked good. I think it is a better camera, but I'm not ready to give up my big heavy thing quite yet.
01:45:02 ◼ ► All right, thanks to our sponsors this week, Squarespace, Linode, and Channels. Emi will talk to you next week.
01:45:09 ◼ ► Now the show is over, they didn't even mean to begin, 'cause it was accidental. Oh, it was accidental.
01:45:22 ◼ ► John didn't do any research. Marco and Casey wouldn't let him, 'cause it was accidental. It was accidental. And you can find the show notes at ATP.FM. And if you're into Twitter, you can follow them at C-A-S-E-Y-L-I-S-S.
01:45:47 ◼ ► That's Casey Liss, M-A-R-C-O-A-R-M, A-N-T, Marco Armin, S-I-R-A-C, U-S-A, Syracuse. It's accidental. They didn't mean to. Accidental. Tech podcast so long.
01:46:12 ◼ ► So a little while before the iMac had its near-death experience, I actually decided to use a brand new mouse. And I have for years, basically since the Magic Mouse came out, I've used the Magic Mouse.
01:46:27 ◼ ► It is an ergonomic disaster, but I do love the ability to swipe two fingers side to side to do things, and so on, in the scroll with the inertial scrolling I really like.
01:46:39 ◼ ► So leaving aside the fact that it is a terrible ergonomic mouse, functionally I've always really liked it. But a couple of weeks ago, maybe even a month ago now, I don't know why, but I just spontaneously decided I'm gonna start using my Magic Trackpad and just see what I think.
01:46:56 ◼ ► And I've always hated trackpads. Well, that's a little strong. I've never really liked trackpads that much. If you recall from years and years and years ago, I grew up on Thinkpads and it had the little trackpoint, which I was the only human in the world that loved, but I loved it.
01:47:08 ◼ ► Hey, I loved it too. The little ready racer? Yep, yep, yep, yep. Yeah, those things are great. You and I were the only ones that loved it.
01:47:13 ◼ ► Now to be fair, in today's world with gestures and so on and so forth, I don't think I would love it the way I did then. But back in my day, when things were simple and we walked uphill both ways to school, when you only had two mouse buttons and maybe like a scroll, it actually worked really, really well and I really liked it.
01:47:29 ◼ ► But I've been using Magic Mouse for years and I started using the Magic Trackpad just to see what I thought. I think I might stick with it and I don't know what to think now. It's like me telling you I bought an automatic because I wanted to. Like, what is happening right now?
01:47:46 ◼ ► And so I guess I bring this up only to share because maybe somebody would find it interesting, but also to ask you guys, like, what is your mousing situation? I'm assuming, Jon, you're still using the mouse from back at Vietnam.
01:47:57 ◼ ► Yeah, and interestingly, when I found myself once again in Staples during the first week of school with a thousand other parents, I took some of the time to look at the collection of mice they have there or mouses if you prefer.
01:48:13 ◼ ► And first of all, I noticed the selection was way down. They used to have like a giant long table with like a million mice and trackpads all set up. Now the selection was much smaller, but I did get to it.
01:48:24 ◼ ► This is the only way you can really tell that you have to actually, like I said about the game controllers, you have to actually put it in your hand. You can look at the pictures online all you want, but you have to actually feel how it feels in your hand and just accept that you're getting all people's germs.
01:48:35 ◼ ► So I did that and I looked at a bunch of other ones. And I think when I get my new Mac Pro eventually, I think I'm going to get a new mouse.
01:48:47 ◼ ► I'm in the market for a mouse. These old mice are getting really gross. And they're not great. And you know what's done mostly because my wife has like a modern mouse.
01:49:00 ◼ ► And although I don't like her mouse and wouldn't buy it for myself, using her modern mouse a lot has said, you know, I can tolerate this. Like there are advantages.
01:49:10 ◼ ► So if I just get a, you know, like because the options for I don't want something with a million buttons and I don't want, you know, but I want maybe I don't know if I'm going to bite the bullet and get something with horizontal scrolling.
01:49:24 ◼ ► I definitely don't want the gesture thing because I'm not into that. But maybe I'll get one of those momentum wheels, you know, the wheels that spin freely.
01:49:31 ◼ ► I love those things. But as soon as I had a need for horizontal scrolling, I immediately went to the magic line for Apple because it's just way better.
01:49:41 ◼ ► I was recently using an app that makes shift scroll wheel will be horizontal scrolling, which is actually kind of neat because, you know, this is affinity designer.
01:49:49 ◼ ► And if you're using that kind of app, your hands are always on modifier keys anyway. So it's really actually pretty easy to flick a scroll wheel and then all done shift and flick the scroll wheel to go sideways.
01:49:58 ◼ ► Yeah, maybe I would be into a gesture mouse if there was ones out there that worked as well as apples but weren't really low because I don't like a low mouse.
01:50:05 ◼ ► Anyway, all that is to say is I still have my old mouse. I still have my own mouse at work. I still like it, but they're getting kind of gross.
01:50:13 ◼ ► And so I'm in the market for a new one. I mean, like here's the thing with my new Mac Pro.
01:50:21 ◼ ► Everything is on the table for newness. I'm not getting a new house for the new Mac Pro, but that's pretty much where I'm drawing the line.
01:50:28 ◼ ► I got like a new, you know, new ups, you know, new. I've already got the new chair, new mouse, new keyboard.
01:50:35 ◼ ► And yet you're saying you're going to have a old monitor with it. Your old non retina monitor.
01:50:40 ◼ ► We don't know what I'm going to do for monitors. We don't know yet. There's no configurator.
01:50:47 ◼ ► Well, so all kidding aside, John, are you soliciting recommendations from mice? Would you like?
01:50:52 ◼ ► No. In case you haven't noticed, when most of the time when I want to buy a new thing, I don't solicit recommendations.