MacBreak Weekly 456 (Transcripts)
Leo Laporte: It's time for MacBreak Weekly, Andy Ihnatko,
Rene Ritchie are here. Myke Hurley from Relay.fm
joins us, we will talk, I'm sorry yes, about the Apple
Watch. I might even buy one during the show. The Macbook changes to iOS and OS 10 and a whole lot more, MacBreak Weekly is next.
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Leo: This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 456. Recorded, Tuesday, May 26th,
2015.
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your first $50,000 in transactions fee free go to braintreepayments.com/macbreak. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, the show where we cover the latest Apple news. And there is much Apple
news to talk about today, we welcome to the panel as always Mr... I shouldn't
take this for granted, Mr. Andy Ihnatko. I may say
it's always, but we are thrilled that each and every time I turn to my left and
I see your smiling face.
Andy Ihnatko: I'm just
very grateful for this weekly scheduled two hours in which I know that I have
to be able to be able to use my words and from the safety of not having a
physical face to face interaction with a human, I still get a chance to test
out the social software. It's like an air raid siren, I don't like to be able to use my social software, but...
Leo: But you have to.
Andy: Occasionally you've just
got to blow that horn to make sure it's still working and this is my chance to
keep the larynx, the tongue, everything limbered up and in good operation.
Leo: That's what Paul Shaffer...
Andy: Yeah exactly.
Leo: Paul Shaffer said he's
going to miss the fact that he knows... he used to know exactly what he was
going to be doing every day at 4pm.
Rene Ritchie: He had to take a shower once
a day.
Leo: Right. Hey, that's Rene
Ritchie, iMore.com. Great to see you, Rene. New haircut.
Rene: Thank you Leo.
Leo: New shave.
Rene: Yeah, I shaved my beard
because I couldn't compete with Myke. But I also want
to thank and congratulate Andy on his new title of chief sideburn officer.
Leo: (laughs) Those better never go away Andrew.
Andy: I've got a... well,
actually I accidentally... I did the... a few months ago I did the rookie move
of the beard trimmer that I used that usually has like the attachment that like
keeps the sideburns the right length, I had removed it so that I could like do
some other grooming, forgot to put it back on and then two days later like
(makes whooshing noise.) Okay, so this is what it's like without sideburns for
the first time in 20 years, we'll see how that works.
Leo: Fortunately your hair is
suit enough that it didn't really...
Andy: I think during the
commercial I'm going to have to say that I forgot to shave this morning.
Leo: Shave a little more...
Andy: I look like a bum, and I'm
going to have to...
Leo: Need to do a hair...
Andy: I don't feel as though I
have the credibility of... there like, Rene is fine because you know, Steve
Jobs is fine, these people that like... the stubble makes them look dashing, I
just look like... oh, look who decided he'd much rather sleep an extra six
minutes in the morning rather than actually groom himself.
Rene: Nah, you've got a Wolverine
thing going Andy. Total Wolverine thing going on.
Leo: I love it.
Rene: At last the stainless steel arrived Leo.
Leo: Ooh, I know. Let me
introduce Myke and then we'll talk about it. Speaking
of beards, Myke Hurley is here from Relay.fm, hey Myke.
Myke Hurley: Hello, it's great to be
back. Thank you so much for having me today.
Leo: Myke with a “Y.” You Brits don't... you have a new, you call “Z” zed, you don't have
a strange way of saying “Y” do you?
Myke: Yee?
Leo: Yee. Myke with a yee.
Myke: No, it's just the “Y.” Just the “Y.”
Leo: You may as well get the
whole alphabet while you're at it, why just one letter?
Myke: It is ours.
Leo: Actually... okay. Thanks.
Rene: It's the Roman's!
Leo: It is ours you know. Why is it that Americans say “Z” and every other culture,
English speaking culture in the world says zed?
Rene: Cultural deviance.
Leo: Do you say, you say zed in
Canada too right?
Rene: Yeah, and we have a “U”
after our “O's” like all good-hearted colorful people.
Leo: What is, actually I know
about the “U's.” That really goes back to the days of the founding fathers,
where they decided we're not going to do it the way those Brits do it. Who was
it that decided that?
Rene: Yeah, they kept “PH's” but
they got rid of “U's,” it's a very strange language.
Leo: Well, we're not zeds. But I
use zed a lot because “Z” frankly is ambiguous a little bit sometimes when you
say it. It could be an “E.” Could mean I just fell asleep.
Andy: Zed is dead, Leo.
Leo: Zed is dead. Jony Ive. Kicked
upstairs, chief design officer. The announcement was I think originally
made by Stephen Fry, an interesting but quite discursive article in, on The
Telegraph. And then a memo came out from Tim, Tim Cook, confirming that. Jony Ive is now chief design
officer. Not sure how that... well, I guess he doesn't do hands on.
Rene: He got rid of his managerial
duties.
Andy: Yeah, that's...
Leo: Yeah.
Andy: All of the stuff that I've
read in any case that it's more of a now he can... he can just be the
free-floating cloud of design that descends... that floats over the entire
planet of Apple stuff including retail and just simply descends to rain design
upon something and doesn't have to like... “Oh and now we need... someone needs
their $10.99 counter signed, yeah there's other people who can do that now.
It's just basically how many times should the fork in the Apple cafeteria on
spaceship campus be right now?
Rene: There was like three really
different reactions. One from the people who are optimistic was “Wow he's
finally ascending, he's shedding all those managerial duties he doesn't like
and he can focus entirely on design.” The pessimists were like “Well this is
his first foot out of the door, he's giving over his responsibilities, he's not going to be at Apple forever.” And then the
analysts were like “Oh super clever way for Apple to hide his salary because he
has no management duties, he's not a policy maker, and there's no disclosure
needed under FCC guidelines.”
Leo: Ohh. Ohh that's
an interesting twist on all of that.
Andy: Yeah.
Leo: What was his... do you know
what his salary is until July 1st?
Rene: They haven't reported it
since 2009 even though it looks like they should have because he had managerial
duties when he was promoted to senior vice president. I forget what it was, but
it was one of the people on Forbes was saying that there was probably a
negotiation going back and forth with the FCC saying sort of... sorry, SEC.
Leo: SEC.
Rene: SEC, yeah. Saying that
while you have him on your corporate front page, and that's not matching your
disclosure statements and he does have all these direct reports and that's not matched, and that is a policy making job. And maybe they
decided to move him out before that became an issue.
Leo: Why hide it? Is it because
it's like $40 million or something?
Rene: It's competitive
information. They said it's like the highest paid trader at a hedge fund. He's
not an officer of the company, but is one of the most valuable assets of the
company.
Leo: You don't need to know what Jony makes to know Jony is
critical to Apple. He's just as poach-able now as ever.
Rene: Yeah but no one has..
Myke: Who could poach him?
Leo: But who could poach him?
Right, Myke.
Andy: Yeah.
Myke: Like, I don't think it has
to do with money. Like, the guy probably owns quite a chunk of stock in Apple
so the money is just going to build forever. But you've got to have like...
there has to be a reason that he would want to join your company and as a
designer, what better job is there than his?
Rene: Disney or Lego.
Andy: I've heard some interesting
talk...
Leo: Lego??? I don't see Jony Ive...
Andy: That's the ultimate thing.
You talk about quick turnaround prototyping.
Leo: (laughing)
Andy: There's Lego and there's
nothing else.
Leo: These are the thinnest
bricks we've ever made. Richard Hallworth will become
VP of industrial design, that means he's hardware
design. He's part of the original iPhone team. Alan... this concerns me a
little bit more. First of all, I was concerned when they say Jony was in charge of software; that worried me a little
bit. Alan Dye is now going to be VP user interface design, that's both desktop
and mobile devices. That's software. That's... he's the guy who did the
fabulous Apple Watch UI. I'm being sarcastic.
Rene: And he did iOS 7. He was
brought over from marketing which is why there was all that hubbub at the time about marketing taking over. But he was doing marketing
design at Apple and he moved over. Greg Christie was a long time head of design
at Apple and he started phasing himself out. He was more of the Steve Jobs
skeuomorphic era and originally pioneered the iPhone interface and all those
things and that was Christie and... I'm forgetting his last name... Earling started winding down. Alan Dye started moving in
and he was doing it... working with Jony on this new
flatter, simpler, more Retina friendly design.
Leo: Well not against that. I
think that's all good, but do you think that the... maybe it's just me, but do
you think the Apple Watch is a paragon of incredible software UI design?
Rene: It's an experiment. I would
say it's a playground right now.
Andy: Well it shouldn't... for
$400 minimum it shouldn't be a playground. But it's... interesting to look at
some of the history behind these guys Alan started off in like just in fashion
design. He was... I forget what brand it was for but he was of like a high end
sort of accessories maker. He started at Apple in 2007 and he was working
exclusively pretty much on iTunes and the iPod. So he... if you're getting
started on the iPod in 2007, you were definitely being slotted in on the top
products to start off with.
Leo: Well he did the box for the
iPhone.
Andy: Yeah.
Leo: Let's be clear. (laughing) He did the box.
Andy: But... you know, in every
single unboxing video I've done, most of them are tongue in cheek because I
think...
Leo: It's a good box.
Andy: I think unboxing videos are
sort of ridiculous, but every time you look at the packaging that anything
Apple makes comes in, it's like... here is the box for Apple Watch and the
corners are completely sharp, you can't... every time I open up a box it's like,
look how tightly this is fitted, and how long it takes to get gravity to simply
drop the thing off of the, out of the container. This is just beautiful... I'm
really not a fan of the Apple makes sure that the other side of the fence is
painted just as well. I'm not a fan of that statement but there are times when
you say “Man, they put so much work and effort into just how nicely this box is
going to be, given that it's going to be your first introduction to this thing
you've just paid a lot of money for, that's pretty cool. Where was the story
about how I think for the first iPhone boxes that they wanted... it's a black
interior and they couldn't make like the joints on the inside, there was always
going to be some exposed paper that causes tiny little seam of not block and so
they had all of those seams hand painted because they didn't want that thing to
be anything other than black.
Leo: You know, I'm mad about the
watch though because remember one of the things Apple's been big on is reducing
waste. Now you showed the sport, but the stainless and gold come with, in a
ridiculous...
Rene: Yeah I have it here.
Leo: The stainless comes with a
plastic box that is absolutely not recyclable. I mean it's exactly the
opposite, it's beautiful packaging I'm not saying
that. But it is not reducing...
Andy: It's not disposable. If
you're charging that kind of money for a watch, it's crazy stupid to not
give...
Leo: But I just threw out my
plastic box, what am I going to do with that?
Andy: Well I mean, even... the
sport model, that's...
Rene: At least the edition one
has a charger built in.
Leo: It doesn't though.
Andy: That's just the outer
sarcophagus, and then you go inside here.
Leo: (laughing)
Andy: Again, it's in my unboxing
video which I haven't posted yet, but it's like... King Tut was not packaged
as...
Leo: I know, it's beautiful.
Andy: As extravagantly as this
thing was.
Leo: But it's wasteful.
Rene: It's a perception of value,
Leo.
Andy: Well. Okay, you can also
say that $900 for a gadget watch with $150 watch band...
Leo: That's true. (laughs)
Andy: That's kind of wasteful
too.
Leo: He was at Kate Spade by the
way. Here's our...
Andy: Yes.
Leo: It's so smooth, you could just sleep on it. It would be...
Andy: I'm serious. Like, as I'm
like unpacking this I'm thinking I need to find something that I own that's
this shape that is the perfect... like tennis balls or something, or like
squash balls.
Rene: What's the thread count
Andy?
Leo: I kept mine for almost a
month and finally, this morning we had two of them recycled because I thought,
it's just sitting in my office not doing anything.
Andy: I bet you could have sold
it, Leo. I'm not even joking.
Leo: The box?
Andy: If you put that up for
sale, someone would have bought the box. I'm not joking.
Leo: (snorts) Anyway he was at
Kate Spade and he did, and I think you'll be glad to see this; unless this is
an ad. He designed Molson Beer logo, Mr. Rene Ritchie. Now how do you feel?
Rene: I feel 10% happier.
Leo: (laughs) He was at Ogilvy
& Mather's Brand Integration Group. He was at Landor Associates, which is
here in San Francisco. And that's where he, unless that's just a small part,
division.
Rene: I've heard nothing but
really good things about him, especially at his recent role in Apple.
Leo: But I wonder, how does
physical design, and admittedly he's great at boxes, and Molson logos. But how
does that help you with UI? UI, I'm sorry. I'm an old-fashioned guy. UI is a
very specific kind of design that is not the same thing as designing industrial
artifacts. It is software, it is... and Apple by the way, was born... the DNA of Apple is... started with the Mac OS UI guidelines that
were really great. I mean really specific. They've drifted far, far away from
those.
Rene: If you go back further
though Leo, it was Steve Jobs' fascination with typography.
Leo: Typography.
Rene: And I know, I started off
in print design before I went into digital design, I know Mark Edwards from Bojano was in print design first. There's a lot of people who bring their love of typography and design and layout and
white space and all of these things and just express it in a digital medium.
Leo: That's fine.
Rene: That's part of what Jony wanted, was that sort of a take on iOS.
Leo: That's fine, and it's great
for static documents, but UI design is not static documents. It is something
very special.
Andy: There would be people who
are saying that design is design is design. That the basic principles that
make...
Leo: Mostly designers.
Andy: Well... or professionals
who work in that job. It's the fact that they're not simply dictating how
something is going to look, but they're working hand in hand with engineers
that at that level, at that corporate level have been designed to simply push
back at any bad ideas. Given that every designer has a lower case engineering
qualification on their business card and every engineer has a lower case design
qualification on his or her business card, you're basically looking for someone
who thinks the right way as opposed to someone who has the right tech sort of
product development in their portfolio. Once they get to Apple they're going to
have to re-learn how corporate structure and product development works anyway,
you may as well get a brain that's already round, that's going to fit in that
round hole.
Leo: Outlook, nobody complains
about Apple's typefaces or use of white space.
Rene: San Francisco.
Leo: We're going to talk about
that in a second. But I have... in the last few years been very unhappy with
Apple's direction with UI. I feel like it's not, it's gone the wrong way. By
the way, Andy just sent me a link to an original packaging, box-only eBay
listing. $50! I just threw out $100 worth of boxes.
Rene: Well you had the, the
stainless steel one Leo, that's probably $200.
Leo: D'oh! Is it too late to
recall the recycling bin?
Andy: There hasn't been any bids
on that one, but I'm continuing to do like searches and here's one that there's
already four bids up to $10, here's another one with...
Leo: Who would buy the box?
Rene: It's free money.
Andy: People are fans of Apple,
and it's a cool box and people like to be completists.
Leo: I should have wrapped them
up and given the empty boxes to my kids for Christmas.
Rene: (laughing)
Andy: The one thing you can
definitely say, you will definitely, unlike the contents you will definitely be
able to use that box in two years.
Leo: (laughs)
Andy: Maybe it's the better
value. So am I wrong? Myke, let me ask you. Am I wrong? Does Apple's UI design really
kind of, has it kind of gone downhill? Is it less usable
than it was in the... 1984 Mac. I'll give you an
example and then you can answer, I'm not through talking. There was a concept,
and this, by the way, came from early research from Alan K and others at Xerox park and SRI. In some of... they called monotony, the idea
that there should be one and only one way to do everything because the brain
paths learn that way, and everything will be easier and that... and this is, to
me, one of the reasons I would prefer OS 10 to Windows. Because in Windows it's
exactly the opposite, there should be 53 different ways of doing anything, and
many of them would involve obtuse keystrokes. The idea that there was this pure
path, modal dialogues were issued because modality meant it stopped you from
being able to work, and all of those things I think have been thrown out
completely. Alright now you may speak. I'm sorry. I had to get up on my soap
box, I feel like it's not as easy to use as it was.
Myke: I think it's difficult as
these products are getting a lot more complex, and that maybe it's time that
Apple re-looked at some things, and then from like a taste perspective, I don't
like the transparency stuff in Yosemite. I turn that off, that's just not
something that I like. I do like the overall look of iOS 7/iOS 8. I think that
is nice to look at and I find easier to maybe not necessarily to understand,
because...
Leo: You misunderstanding me.
I'm not debating the look. The typeface choice, the buttons. I'm debating usability. That's where I think they fall down.
Rene: Affordance.
Leo: Affordance, thank you.
That's the word.
Myke: I think it's just a lot
more complex now.
Leo: Yeah.
Myke: And I think that that is a
user experience and user interface problem, and I think that that is something
that is difficult to fight because we want more from our devices which means
they will get more complex, and I guess part of it is in the decisions that are
made and it might be down to individual users and the way that they like to do
things, and the types of controls and settings that they want them to have. I
don't know. It is difficult, it is more difficult, but I think it's going to to naturally be more difficult if these things get more
powerful.
Leo: I'll grant you that, I mean
that's why it's so important to have good UI designers, because you have to
look at what Microsoft did with the ribbon. I mean, office became so
complicated that people were only using 5% of the features because they
couldn't... they didn't even know they existed, and then they did this ribbon
thing which is debatable whether that was good or bad.
Rene: Now it's hamburgers and
basements for everybody.
Leo: You use the word
affordance. What is, could you define that Rene?
Rene: Yeah, so affordance is a
user interface term and it means the action is hinted by what it is. For
example, a door knob; you look at it, you know to turn it. It's got a high
level of affordance. With the original versions of iOS they also wanted a high
level of affordance, so the slide to unlock. Nobody knew really what that was
so they made this big graphical groove and put a big slider on it so that it
looked like a real world object, that's how skeuomorphism came about too. They
made it look like what it would do in the physical world because that hinted
how you should react to it. You should touch this button, and slide it along
the groove. Now on iOS 7 and subsequently 8 they believe that we're now...
there's this whole theory about digitally native and digital immigrants and you
have to move people from newspapers and books to things like tablets and
phones, but now they're saying that more people either have moved over or are
just born into this age and they don't need to be told how to swipe to unlock,
it's just one of the natural actions that they'll perform while they're picking
up and touching something and playing with it and discovering things. And this
is a huge argument inside Apple, inside the design world, about what level of
affordance. Because you don't want to make it child-like or childish, or you
know like game center used to be. But you don't want to make it too difficult
for someone who is a beginner to pick up and use immediately because their
brain just understands how it should be used.
Leo: Andy, it sounded like you
had some thoughts there.
Andy: Only that... I think that
Apple's in kind of an unusual situation in which they are not like... they are
not building their products the way that Google is trying to deploy Android
towards multiple platforms. They're not like Microsoft that's finally trying to
unify the Windows experience across multiple devices, they really do want to have a consistent language that they can apply to
everywhere. Something that really got promoted a lot on social media was,
they're making... the design book for the New York subway system, when they
redesigned the subway system, I think it was in the 60s maybe, that they were
going to have all the signage completely consistent, and they had to make sure
that no matter where these instructions are, whether it's on a post, whether
it's on a printed material, whether it's on something like that; it has to be
consistent so that every time someone sees this language they don't know what
the content is but they know what it's related to and they know that that's
where they're going to get their information from. I think that Apple's facing
the exact same problem, where they're not as disposed as other companies are to
say well this is a watch so we're going to have to make it more... we're going
to do something special for the watch, or we're going to do something special
for the iPad, or we're going to something special for our desktop interface. We
really want to have one language that's consistent across so many different
experiences that it's hard to optimize for any one sort of device. So, there
are areas in which I agree with you, I'm on day I think 12 or 11 of using the
Apple Watch and there is still some basic user interface elements that I feel
as though I don't understand. I think I am still learning the language of what
the user interface wants to tell me and how I should say things back to it. But
it's a large scale problem and I think that it's not... I really do think that
Apple is going to have to keep their head down and make a whole bunch of
mistakes before they can solve it. It's only when they put these things out in
front of millions of people and they figure out here is what people are not
reacting to, here is what people are picking up immediately. Just to wind it
up, I mean I'm amazed that Apple has put so much attention towards digital
crown and I could definitely see, again, in that three ring
binder that explains the design process of why they decided to make this part
of the language, it makes perfect sense; but nonetheless I almost never
use it. For me it's just a clicky button that takes
me to the app launcher, because every time I want to scroll something I'm
always doing this because that's what I do on all these other devices that I
use.
Leo: You're scrolling it wrong.
Andy: Yeah, so... I usually
assume that whenever there is lack of understanding it's because I'm a dope.
It's not always right, but it's usually...
Leo: Don't you see that your big
fat finger is obscuring and the only real way to scroll is through the crown?
Andy: I don't want to mock them,
but I do think that it's going to be...
Leo: I do think that maybe
that's an example of the loss of monotony. The fact that
there are two ways to do it.
Andy: Yeah, I think it's going to
be interesting to see a year from now, when Apple has the ability to not only
do the next version of the watch operating system but also to do the next
version of the watch hardware. I'm not expecting this to be radically
different, I'm not expecting to see a round Apple Watch but I think that they
are going to listen to a lot of what people are telling them and what people...
when they've got these wired up devices that let people, let them see what are
people gravitating towards, what are people not gravitating towards. I'm sorry,
I'm blathering on but it's such an interesting topic. I notice that now you see
a lot of people who are wearing it with the digital crown on the outside and
not the inside, even though like... you're sort of taught on a watch that the
crown should go like towards your fingers, and I think it was Hawkenbury who really talked about this a lot, that a lot
of people find that once they start wearing this upside-down it's a more
natural place to put that button. It's easier to grab it, it's easier to like
sort of brace the other side of it with the other two fingers as you're
tapping, so many things that Apple's not going to figure out until millions of
people are using this device.
Leo: Credit to Apple, they make
that easy to do.
Andy: Yeah, exactly.
Leo: Is there anybody doing
better? I guess would be the question.
Rene: There was one thing that I
wanted to add to Andy's comment because, Apple... you know why Apple is
different. Microsoft wants to put that one metro interface across everything.
They want it to work on computers, on tablets, on phones. Google wants to have
material design working on the web, on Chromebooks, in Chrome and on Android.
Apple, while Alan Dye is leading all this, the people who designed Yosemite
were different than the people who designed iOS 7,and the people working on the watch team were different as well and they didn't...
they wanted them to have a similar feel in some ways, like there's... there's
similar concepts behind them, but Yosemite is actually quite different than iOS
7. It's got shadows and depth and different design criteria. And the watch also
has different criteria, they want to build specifically for the device in many
ways, and to Andy's point, the watch is brand new. And they had a lot of
people, thousands of people inside Apple using it for months before they
released it, and they changed it a lot over that time. But it's only going to
be those millions and millions of people hitting it that show them where the
actual rough points are.
Leo: I feel like...
Andy: It's civilians. You have the problem of you have thousands of people that Apple has
trusted, and people who work for Apple, as opposed to... the finest test that
any of us, when we're trying to figure out again, an opinion that's useful to
other people, is when you are at a Panera Bread, and this is the first time
someone has seen an Apple Watch and they want to see how it works, and they
actually want to put it on their own wrist, and you see at what point do they
go... because they thought something would work one way but it doesn't. That's
the only user testing that's really going to refine and prove the concept.
Rene: Yeah.
Leo: I, in some ways I feel
like... I don't want to, people are going to get mad
at me when I say this. Android Wear is taking advantage of Google's decision to
go with cards.
Andy: Yeah.
Rene: Yes.
Leo: And I feel like cards is an
interesting choice. Do you think it works as well, or to me I feel like it
works better.
Rene: It was designed for that
purpose, the guy who designed it meant for it to be able to scale from things
like the phone to the watch, that was its intended
purpose.
Andy: Yeah. It's, I mean... I'm
only day 11, I'm only on day 12, I'm not at a point where I'm comfortable
reaching any conclusions about Apple Watch yet. One thing that I do miss from
Android Wear is the simplicity and the directness of this card concept, where I
never feel as though I have to drill down to get information, I don't feel as
though I ever... I have to interact with this piece of software any more than
is critically important for me to interact with it to get that sort of thing.
It's an interesting... it's...
Leo: There are limitations. I
mean it's not... I also sometimes feel like, god I want to swipe fifteen more
cards to get to what I'm looking for.
Andy: I wish that once there's a
notification, I wish that there were an easier way to say “Okay, I'm done with
this notification, never want to see it again.” I wish there were a really easy
and trivial way to get rid of it, I haven't found it yet. In about a week I
start actually reading the how-to book, I'm reading the reviewer's guide that I
have. For the first two weeks I want to just sort of figure it out on my own.
Something as simple as that, I'm a little surprised that I don't know how to
get rid of a notification that doesn't involve surfacing a dismiss button and
then tapping that button.
Leo: Yeah. Look, nobody's...
this is new. This is the smallest interface we've ever had to deal with.
Andy: Yeah.
Leo: And everybody's trying
different things. Myke...
Rene: And they have to satisfy
two agendas. People who want it super simple, and people who want a high level
of functionality, but that's the really hard problem that we expect Apple to
solve, like it's their job.
Leo: For four seconds I tried
the crown on the left Andy and I hate it, so I've moved it back already.
Andy: Okay.
Rene: It's the same thing,
because really you have to embrace either way.
Leo: It's easy to change thank
goodness.
Andy: It's like... this is why I
keep saying to myself an to others that you can't
really trust any opinion of the Apple Watch that comes before at least two to
three weeks of news because...
Leo: I agree, I agree.
Andy: I do have on my Evernote, I
have a long long list of like impressions, pro and
con and it's easy to see in the first two, three, four days, every single thing
that drove me up a tree about it was like “Okay let's go into the app on the
phone and see... oh yeah there is a way to turn that off. Okay, there was a way
to turn that off. Okay, there's a way to switch that from one way to another.”
So I still haven't read any reviews but I imagine that once I start reading
them I'm going to see a lot of yeah, you really should have given it another
day.
Rene: Mine took three weeks Andy,
so hopefully it won't be that bad.
Leo: Yeah. And I never read the
reviewer guide because I feel like that's an advantage that we get that others
don't.
Andy: Well, but then again I feel
as though I need to have a clean consumer experience for my getting acquainted
period, at the time where I'm actually writing the review though, it's very very handy.
Leo: That's true.
Andy: I accept that it's
controversial because, again, it's information that I'm getting that the
consumer isn't, but nonetheless if there's a feature I was unaware of that's
important enough that the company says “Look, here is how we believe that this
phone or this device or this computer should work. Here is who we designed it
for, and here is what our imperatives were as we designed it.” That can clarify
things a lot, and this is why I really do, most consumers also don't get... you
know, 45 minutes with the CEO of the company or one of the chief designers of
the device, but that's time where I can say look, you tell me the story of
this, what was going through your mind, what did you think was really really important about it? And that's where a lot of things
become a lot more clear. You feel as though if you're
complaining about Jimmy Fallon is not as good an interviewer as Letterman was,
or isn't quite as sharp a wit, you realize that oh well the point is not for to
have host interactions, it's for prepared comedy and it's for sketches and
things that are easy to assimilate. It's like, okay in that case I'm not going
to say he's bad, I'm just going to simply say it's a different style of comedy.
Leo: It's all about getting to
the clip. Come on, face it. We're going to take a break, come back with more.
Andy Ihnatko is here from the Chicago Sun Times, one
of the things that I appreciate about you Andy and that I love is you really
spend time thinking about your job. And what best way to do it.
Andy: I will only say that I am
inspired by Roger Ebert, I'm inspired by David Letterman, I want to be doing
this for many more decades and when the ball game is all over, I want people to
see that “Okay, he was... here is the body of work he created and none of it
was terribly bad.” Unfortunately that's what you have to do.
Leo: Yeah. Also here, I'm really
glad to have Mr. Rene Ritchie from... I gave Andy props for showing up for
every show, you do the same and I'm so grateful that you're a regular on this,
from iMore.com, one of the smartest guys in the business, and for his... I
think your second time right Myke Hurley from
Relay.fm.
Myke: Yeah, second.
Leo: We've got to do it more
than that. It's great to have you as well.
Myke: Thank you.
Leo: We are talking Apple, we're
going to talk San Francisco font. The new font is here!
Andy: (laughs)
Leo: In just a second.
Andy: I knew there was a reason
why the kids were in the street laughing and cheering.
Leo: But first, a word from
Trunk Club. It's pretty clear I think that most, not all, some guys like to
shop. Andy loves shopping for his... fisherman's... whatever hell that jacket
was last week. But, by the way, I've been trying to find one in my size and I
can't because I want one too. Thank goodness though, I have a stylist now.
She'd probably say “You know, you might want to think
about wearing the safari helmet and pith jacket, or whatever it is.” Trunk Club
gave me a new way of shopping, and it's fun. Zero
work, great advice, premium clothing, and it's free.
So what happened? I signed up for Trunk Club and Robin my wonderful stylist and
I spent about half an hour on the phone talking about my style, my size. I was
blunt. I'm fat. And everything she needed to know to help me pick great
clothes. That conversation was not hard work, it was fun. Then she put up a
website with like a hot or not thing on clothing that I got to pick what I
liked and not, that helped her narrow it down, then I got my trunk. This is how
it comes. By the way you will never get a trunk you don't expect, this is not
like every month I get a new trunk, no. You talk to your stylist, she says... you know, you tell her. I'm ready for another trunk. Thank you
John, appreciate it. And then new Trunk Clubs, I'm excited. I'm excited. By the
way you only pay for the clothes you keep, so I didn't pay for the trunk, I
didn't pay for her time, didn't pay for anything in this trunk. When you're
done trying it on, you've got 10 days to try it on, you ship back the stuff you
don't want and you keep only the stuff you keep is the stuff you pay for. So
here it is, my new trunk. I am so excited! I don't
know how I can show you this though. Because it's so big. Oh, there's a message from Robin. There's a packing list and return
instructions, prepaid return label. They even, isn't this nice? They give me replacement tape. And they give me three because they
know I'm kind of a doofus. (laughs)
And so here's what we got today. A Harrington jacket. Oh look, these are beautiful. They tie up with these beautiful ribbons. This is
like Christmas every time a new Trunk Club comes. Oh, oh, she started to do bow ties, I said I want bow ties. Oh, that... you know
what, I might... I'm going to put this on today. I'm going to wear this today,
I like this tie. Neck ties, shirts. From the best makers, this is Connecticut
American Sportswear from New Haven. Did you tell her I went to a school in New
Haven? Look at that, oh Lisa you helped? Oh, Lisa gave her... that's the other
thing, your wife can talk to your stylist and say... oh look at this, this is pretty. I love this. So here's the idea, now I'm
going to try these all on. They're all in my sizes, sometimes Robin has included two like two different jackets and says which one
fits better. She'll keep track of that information, so from then on she knows.
Oh I'm loving... oh, feel that. Anyway... you don't
need to watch me try this stuff on. You get the point. Great stuff, she picked
it for me, I try it on, 10 days. I keep what I want, I send back what I don't;
postage paid. That's it. TrunkClub.com/twit. You've
got to look good for your girl, or for your job, or just for yourself. Only pay
for what you keep, there's no ongoing subscription, no hidden charges. Just
great clothes handpicked for you. TrunkClub.com/twit. And I'm keeping this bow tie, I'm putting this bow tie
on now. Now. We thank them for their support of MacBreak Weekly. This is so pretty. Look at that. That is
sharp. And look, even the lining is... whew. This is the dawning of the ages of
Aquarius! These are pretty, 100% silk, look at that. What do you think Lisa,
can I put that on? Oh it's reversible! Oh my god it's both!
Lisa Laporte: I actually picked that one
out.
Leo: Which do you think, paisley or dots today?
Lisa: I like paisley, it matches your...
Leo: Paisley is going on. Back
we go to San Francisco ladies and gentlemen in the new typeface for the Apple
Watch. This is... is this going to be the typeface for more than the watch, is
this OS 10 now?
Rene: Seems to be everything.
Leo: Everything?
Rene: I mean they worked on
Apple... there was rumors of them working on Apple
Sans for a long time and I don't know what relationship if any this has.
Leo: Right!
Rene: This might be a derivative
or something based on Apple Sans.
Leo: This could be it.
Rene: Or it could be something
they like better than Apple Sans. But it's something they've been moving
towards for a while, sort of having that distinctive, Apple-owned look to their
software.
Leo: Right. What do you think?
Here's the... this is Ben Lovejoy in 9to5 Mac. Let me describe some of the
features of this new font, the moderate aperture double story form with flat
topped bowl on the “A,” the flat middle apex diagonals meet a little above the
base line and the capital and the large x-height makes it legible even in small
sizes. Type designers are a different breed aren't they.
Rene: Mhm.
Leo: Thank goodness. Minimal
contrast, straight stress angles, stroke is thinner in intersections. Oh that's
kind of cool, see you'd never notice that. Look at the
“h.” Yeah because it's tiny.
Rene: Yeah.
Leo: Large eye. I don't know...
oh, oh. This is, for instance look at the “e” the lowercase “e.” This is how
you solve that issue of small, small type by making a large gap between the
bottom stroke of the “e” and the top edge there. Makes it
more apparently an “e.” Single story “g.” Oh
you wouldn't want a double story “g.” Interesting. I
think it's actually quite lovely. The designer, Wenting Zhang. Um. Alright.
Andy: It's so hard for me to...
every time I see... I will not make fun of these articles that talk about a
font in such close detail because I recognize that this is... that these people
have an understanding of something that I do not have. To me it still comes
down to pretty or not pretty. Or works for this device, does not work for this
device. And so it's... everybody is an expert on something and usually there is
a very very fine point on every pencil that you can
pick up.
Rene: It's just interesting that
Android had Roboto and Microsoft, I forget how you pronounce it... Segoe. And yet the
company that prided itself on bringing typography to the digital age didn't
have their own typeface. Now they do.
Leo: Well they did have a San
Francisco as you well remember from the first Macintosh.
Rene: They didn't have a
modern... yeah, modern typeface.
Leo: Wow, that is a good looking tie. I'm liking that.
Rene: They were using Apple...
what's it called... Apple Myriad and then Helvitica Neue.
Leo: Was the San Francisco...
Rene: So different.
Leo: What did it... I forgot what it looked like.
Rene: It was a...
Myke: It was all kinds of crazy.
Andy: Yeah. Eclectic.
Leo: Eclectic. So this is a
great site, typedetail.com. Is this Apple's site or...? No, it's just a site
where it shows off type. And then you can see all the different ways it looks.
I'm not crazy about the choice of microphages as the word.
Andy: Macro.
Leo: Aren't those like...
disease vectors?
Rene: But it gives you a lot of
letters to look at.
Leo: Yes.
Myke: I like San Francisco. I
wouldn't mind seeing it. Especially on the iPhone. It's quite crisp looking, I like it. I like the small camps as well.
Leo: Mhm.
Myke: It's pretty, it's nice to look at. I mean we're not going to see an iOS 7 like UI design
overhaul in a long time, but doing something like just changing the font will
make it feel very very different, which will keep
feeling nice and new.
Rene: You can preview it in the
Apple Watch app because I believe that uses San Francisco already.
Myke: There's all kinds of font in that.
Leo: Oh, are there? That's
another thing we want to stamp out, right? Is all of the...
Rene: Well like you said Leo,
consistency is a user facing feature.
Leo: Yeah. I have mentioned
before, and I'll mention again this is a book that came out in 2002. If you're
at all interested in typefaces, Eric Spiekermann wrote a great book in 2002 called, which I've read and I actually keep around,
Stop Stealing Sheep & find out how type works. And it really is a great
book to read if you're at all interested in the subject.
Myke: Well the whole Helvetica
documentary is a good one too.
Leo: That's a great one too.
Isn't it Helvetica that Apple's abandoning? Wasn't it Helvetica Neue that they were using?
Myke: Yeah.
Leo: It's time. Helvetica is a
great font, but you can... you know, it's a little plain. A
little vanilla.
Andy: Also, it's a little bit
squat for the devices that are going to be using it.
Leo: Yes.
Andy: It's something that didn't
occur to me until I was reading one of these articles about the new San
Francisco font is that it echoes the shape of the Apple Watch, in a very very subtle way. And so this is why... I mean, type design
is a form of alchemy because you... to you it's, again it's either a clear font
or it's not a clear font. You either think it's pretty or you don't think it's
particularly pretty. But then you talk to the person who designed it, and you
realize that they put as much thought into the development of this as anybody
did into any large commercial work process. Here is my theory about design,
here is the function that this letter form is designed to create, here are the
influences from forms that go back 100 to 200 years and you're like. “Oh my
god, I had no idea.”
Leo: Yeah.
Andy: I was just typing. I was
just blowing away at that, there's a curly thing on the “T” and here it is, the
whole long story about it.
Leo: Yeah. It's kind of cool.
Myke: And when you think about
it, a company like Apple who cares so incredibly about design and sweats every
detail, the fact that they don't control, like the typeface of their like UI is
kind of... it seems kind of, in hindsight now it seems a bit crazy. You'd think
that they would definitely have their own fonts and typefaces for their like,
for their UI.
Andy: I think... I can understand
why they wouldn't, only because it would be a project to where Apple
particularly, this would be a project on the same scale as we don't have a word
processor, let's have a word processor.
Myke: Sure.
Andy: And so if they can
choose... if they have people there who can say here are nine faces that we
think highly of, any one of which would be a really great selection, all the
while thinking “When can we actually get our hands on the idea of developing
our own font.” I think one of the things about Microsoft and Google is that it
really does become part of the trade dress, so when you have your own unique
typeface that is not going to be available in any other form, it's a powerful
way to link all of these devices and all the experiences that you're presenting
to a consumer, so you're absolutely right. It seems like it's long overdue, but I would never myself think about... I can't imagine how long
this has been in the works and how much money and time and actual money it cost
to put this together.
Rene: First Swift, then San
Francisco, it's a big banner couple of years.
Leo: Yeah. Really.
Myke: Maybe they'll only be able
to program Swift in San Francisco, that's the next foot, the next shoe drops.
Leo: Let's talk about, speaking
of next shoes, the next versions of both OS 10 and iOS. I presume that we're
going to find out more next month at WWDC about both. But of course Mark Gurman would never wait for an official announcement. He
has an article at 9to5 Mac, iOS 9 and OX 10.11, which is not a major point upgrade,
it's still Yosemite. To bring quality focus, smaller apps, rootless security,
legacy iPhone, iPad support. What do you think?
Rene: He is so good. He called me
and told me what my Christmas presents were going to be this year.
Leo: Well that's them isn't it?
Isn't this them? So what do you think? Let's start with iOS 9, code name
Monarch.
Rene: I've heard... I haven't
heard all of the stuff that he's heard but I've heard the same thing about the
focus on core stability and the focus on core stability, those are two big emphasis Apple has this year. And they both make a lot of
sense because security and privacy has been a Tim Cook level, you know. First
slash feature on Apple.com and in all the pitches they've been making and
they've got an incredibly good team working on security, so making that front
and center just makes a ton of sense, especially when you consider things like
jailbreak and things like lock screen exploits, and how they've made the system
much stronger, especially in iOS 7 and iOS 8 were both huge steps forward, so
carrying that forward makes a lot of sense, and they got their big projects out
of the way, I know people are pained by what happened with Yosemite and iOS 8
and things like Discovery D and a lot of things but all of that had to come
together and had to work. Because if you look at the Apple Watch, all those
technologies were not developed for the Apple Watch were serendipitous for how
it turned out to do everything from apps to extensions. And it's a big, painful
transition but now that's that's over they have the
time to go and kind of button everything down and polish it and make it rock
solid for the next couple phases of those launches.
Andy: Yeah.
Leo: But they fixed Discovery D?
Rene: They... it is always being
fixed so every version of Yosemite has had fixes for Discovery D.
Leo: (laughing)
Rene: I mean they did a lot, they
rewrote Discovery D, they rewrote Launch D which is another one of the major...
they... there was a, when you look at Yosemite the design is what sticks out,
but the amount of actual important code that changes is pretty phenomenal.
Leo: Discovery D, we mentioned
this I think a couple of weeks ago, Craig Hockenberry reported at furbo.org in no uncertain terms, a little bit explicitly, but I was
with him; and by the way, my Apple TVs are unconnected at home because I don't
know if it's Discovery D, but I suddenly lost my network over the weekend.
Rene: Bracket 2, bracket 3,
bracket 4. That's how Discovery D... Rich Siegel I think had bracket 99 on his
at one point.
Leo: So I unplugged the Apple
TVs, I unplugged all the routers because I have a three airport system for
extenders. And then I've left the Apple TVs off, rebooted the routers, the
network rebuilt itself, WDS worked and everything is fine. But I'm very...
there may be, it must be right because I have an older OS 10 version somewhere
that it's re-infecting it, I don't know. But I've left the Apple TVs unplugged.
Rene: Almost like a cache
poisoning.
Leo: Yeah.
Andy: I am hearing that... I agree
with what Rene is saying, I agree with the overall tone that stability is going
to be a big goal. One of the key mark features of OS 9, I have been hearing
that although no company has ever un-moved by reports of how unstable a
software release is or a bad time that users are having, they... Apple has
particularly heard all of these complaints and it is a source of pain that they
wish to... for themselves, that they wish to solve, so I do believe that if
there's anything for the next release that is not off the table, it is in
getting, making sure that the people who review, that are sort of saying this
is the most stable and secure and problem-free version of iOS we've had in two
years.
Rene: And there was this great,
we did a great episode of Debug where we had Nitin Ganatra and Don Melton who were both directors at Apple on the software side talking
about how you see bug fixes and their priority P1 bugs and P2 bugs and a lot of
time as a matter of pride the engineers want to fix those P2 bugs because you
know, their families use it. They use this stuff, and they simply don't have
time.
Leo: It's got to be
embarrassing.
Rene: Well it's embarrassing and
it's also painful for them and they want to spend their time on it but they've
got a priority one bug that's crashing some important system, and there's
just... Nitin was talking about shoveling stuff into bags. You can either get
bigger bags, which is more people or you can shovel less stuff into which is less tasks. And now it seems like... and the key is to
get the people at the higher levels to understand this, and I think the media attention helped everyone sort of realize that... and a
lot of the engineers I think are super happy about this too, that it really is
worthwhile. Not only doing what was scheduled to be done, but maybe doing a
little bit more of that as well.
Myke: Is it ethical to market
this as like a... the key marquee feature though? Because one you've got to
stand on stage and say “Yeah, okay things kind of sucked.” And then if your big feature of iOS 9 and the next version of OS 10 is
like...
Leo: It sucks less.
Myke: Stability? Great... like, it's not really very sexy.
Leo: Should be the baseline in
fact.
Andy: Well, they did that with
Snow Leopard. Not necessarily saying “We know that boy did we crap all over the
rug with the last one. Oh boy, we got Febreeze spraying in every single office...” There's a way for them... there is a way
for them to address it as saying that this is not going to be... we're putting
as much features on... I think that the phrase that kept coming back to me
during my briefings and stuff was that there are always things that are left in
the drawer after... with every OS release and today, with this release we've
decided to simply try to empty out that drawer as much as possible.
Leo: Yeah.
Rene: Yeah there was a great
story about market...
Myke: I feel like that's the
easier way... go on Rene.
Rene: No no,
please.
Myke: I think it's easier, it's
easier with OS 10 than that message though, I think. And I think iOS is a more
widely consumer oriented thing. It's something that people expect every year,
they look forward to the next OS release to the updates and for the new
features and I think with OS 10 you can get away with it a little bit easier
but I think with iOS, if this going to be the biggest feature of iOS... whilst
I would welcome it, I think it's going to be interesting to see how it's
reported widely.
Rene: There was a great story
about Snow Leopard because a lot of people say we need a Snow Leopard moment,
but Snow Leopard was in a way a huge lie. They had things they wanted to do
like exchange and grand central dispatch, Open CL which were major engineering
undertakings and there was concern from Steve Jobs and the marketing department
that you can't market this. Like, you guys want to build it but we can't sell
this. And then Phil Schiller and one of the guys in marketing said “Wait a
minute, what if we just say no new user features?” Which wasn't true, there
were a bunch of new user facing features, but it's hard to sell a few of them.
It's easier to make a story about no features, we're really digging deep. And I
think that's the kind of marketing acumen you bring to this. You make your line
in the sand and you say that we've heard you and we're really going to focus on
this, and I've heard they've actually moved... there's stuff that they haven't
had a chance to do on iOS 7 that got pushed to 8 and was supposed to be pushed
to 9 and maybe now that will get pushed to 10 to make more time, to solidify
things. And I think that's the sort of message that you sell, that yeah there
will be a couple really cool things like bringing force touch to the new
iPhone, major feature, some of the cool stuff they're going to do is going to
be really customer facing, but then underneath that instead of ten tent poles,
you make one of those. Increase stability and you have like a nice moment about
that, and I think that's how you sell it.
Andy: You make it as one of the
four to eight icons that lines up lined up at the last card when they give the
presentation about what they've added to iOS 9, one of those icons is just
simply... the ongoing slow grinding of hard boards that is software
development, particularly at this level.
Leo: Or...
Andy: Just quickly, Apple is...
it's interesting that the position they ran particularly with the iPhone
because Microsoft looks like they're starting to find the key... they've lost
the keys to the car for the past three or four or five years in terms of
mobile, but it looks like they've at least found the keys. They're not in the
car yet, but they've found the keys. Android is now at the level where you
could really have a very very serious discussion
about which user interface is better designed, and that's something you would
never have considered talking about two years ago with Android. And it's so
much harder now to find areas of differentiation between an iPhone 6 and not
even something like the Galaxy Nexus, the Galaxy S6 but even talking about here
is a phone that costs $300 and it's contract free, and put them side by side
and tell me what is in the iPhone... what the iPhone can do that this one
cannot, and it's not going to be a relevant feature list for a lot of people.
And I think where Apple has the greatest opportunity, because today is to put
in features, software that actually makes it more compelling a buy to run iOS
rather than to have the actual iPhone itself. So it's interesting... it will be
interesting to see during the keynote if Apple tries to really pump up here are
ways in which we are making the iPhone materially better for users, despite the
fact that we can't really... we can't put three cameras in it now, and we can't
now make it like hexagonal screens, we can't do things that make it really
spectacularly different. But we can at least change the experience for people
and what they would do to make that experience better.
Leo: Well it's like a magician.
So there is hand waving. Look over here, and the hand waving including,
according to Gurman, the new split screen iPad app
views, they're finally going to get a HomeKit app. Right?
Andy: Yeah.
Leo: Mass transit directions.
There's plenty of... look over there. Look over there.
Andy: Well, but these are really
big deals, I mean...
Leo: Well not to diminish it
absolutely.
Andy: Oh no no, I'm sorry. I didn't mean that you were dismissing
it, but I think that the most interesting... obviously we're all talking about
the Apple Watch because it's cool, it's so different and now we actually have
them, but I think the most interesting conversation for the next year is going
to be whatever is Apple going to do with the iPad? Because, are they... clearly
are not, the sales figures are saying that people are responding to larger
screen phones more strongly than they're even responding to smaller sized
tablets. But does that mean that Apple puts iPad on let's say an iPod track
where they will continue to have it in the product line but it will definitely
be a second tier product, or do they find a way to reinvent it and re-present
it not as the device has been for the past five years, which is... you tell us
what it does! We'll agree with you, because it does everything and it does all
those things very well. And if they can start to present it as here is a 12”
version of it that runs multiple apps, why would you even consider buying a
$500 or $600 Windows notebook if you're a Windows user when you can have
something that is much more mobile than this, it is much more stable than a
$600 Windows notebook and it's a lot more delightful to use. It's going to be
interesting to see how they solve that problem of declining iPad sales.
Leo: I, for one, am very much
looking forward to an iPad Pro. 12.9” with pressure
sensitivity.
Myke: Mhm.
Leo: I'll buy that!
Andy: I've actually been thinking
about that a lot, I mean I did buy an iPad mini because my personal iPad was a
3rd generation, like the first Retina one which was not a great iPad
and was really starting to feel long in the tooth. And one of the reasons why I
decided to replace it with an iPad mini instead of an Air 2 was in anticipation
of there being a pro later this year or next year that I would be more
interested in having as a workhorse, take it with you when you travel computer.
But now I've been... it's interesting to see what these... what Intel's new
processors are doing on both sides of the fence. That now for... if Apple...
how much are they going to charge for an iPad Pro? Would they replace the iPad
Air with it, or say that the minimum buy-in is going to be around Macbook territory. It's going to be about... minimum buy in
is going to be around $850, $900 for this. And then when you... I can't, every
time I approach this whether as a reviewer or as a consumer I think okay, I've
got $900 in my hands to solve the problem of I need a powerful computer that's ultra ultra ultra ultra portable. What can I spend this on that might not
necessarily be an iPad Pro and then you look at some tablets from Dell and
Lenovo that can do a lot of what... it of course doesn't run iOS so it doesn't
run tablet mode as well as iOS will but here is an ultra
ultra ultra portable machine that's more
portable than my 13” Macbook Pro but it weighs about
only a little bit more than an iPad Pro, it costs a little bit less and I will
not have any problems running desktop apps with it, and I get a free keyboard
with it. And a touch screen, and all this sort of cool stuff. It's going to be interesting to see how everybody navigates that question.
Leo: Is the Macbook in that equation at all? The new Macbook?
Andy: No, because... it's a...
now you're talking about a $1300 computer.
Leo: Yeah, price. Yeah.
Andy: I actually think it's a
very good machine. I know I promised last week that my review would be on the
Sun Times, it's actually just been filed so it won't be out for another day or
two yet. But for $1300 it becomes... it's at that interesting balance point
between it is not... it is a machine that is optimized to be the Mac that you
use when you travel, but it's priced as the one that you have to do all your
work on because not a whole lot of people have $1300 to spend on a second Mac.
Leo: Yeah, it's a shame. Yeah.
Andy: So that's why it's got me
thinking about, again, these $600, $700, $800, $900 Lenovo transformers that I
mean... the Lenovo has a model that is a little bit lighter, even a little bit
thinner than the 12” Macbook. But it has a better
keyboard, it has more ports to it, it's easier to travel with, the battery life
kind of stinks compared to the new Macbook but that's
not something that a lot of people... that some people are going to like to
have as an option.
Leo: What model is that?
Andy: I don't have it in front of
me, but it's the...
Leo: Let me see if I can find
it. I know people, when the Macbook came out people
said “Well you know, Lenovo already did this.”
Andy: I think it's the Lenovo V
I'm thinking?
Leo: V. I'll have to look and
see...
Andy: I could be wrong. It's a V
something.
Leo: The problem is you have to
use Windows.
Andy: I've got review hardware
coming but I can't...
Leo: Who wants to use Windows?
Rene: I'm boycotting Lenovo
still.
Leo: Because of super fish?
Rene: They have about a year in
the penalty box for me.
Leo: Is it okay if I suck my
thumb and fondle the box?
Rene: It's your security box Leo.
Leo: (laughs) Hey Rene, let me
see your black watch.
Rene: Oh, yeah. I love this Leo. It's space black so it's diamond-like coated and I can't
describe it other than it... because it's metal but it doesn't... it feels like
some Kryptonian or Bat Mobile like substance. It's
so... blacker than the blackest black.
Leo: Is that stainless?
Rene: Yeah.
Myke: That does really good.
Rene: And the bracelet is so... I
mean it pops right open and you can take it right off.
Leo: I bought the wrong watch!
Rene: The way you pull the little
bands apart is pretty awesome because you really do just push the thing in and
pull it and it...
Myke: Don't break it on the air
Rene.
Rene: No it comes right open and
then you can take out the links on each side.
Leo: It's so much prettier. Can
you have more than one Apple Watch or is that considered...
Rene: You can, but it's not set
up for that. So you actually have to un-pair and re-pair.
Leo: Oh.
Rene: Because the backup is on
your phone, though. It's much easier to have two Apple Watches than to have an
Apple Watch with two iPhones.
Leo: They really have to
understand that watch people never have just one watch. I mean if you're into
watches you always have... I saw Ray Donovan, he pulled out a drawer and
there's all these watches, right?
Rene: It's a constraint, it's
just they couldn't... I don't know if they... there was not a lot of time to
get all of the stuff done.
Leo: It was a Bluetooth issue?
Rene: Well they, it's a 1:1
relationship because there's a lot of things that have to... we've all talked
about our dissatisfaction with messages for example when you have multiple
things and the ability to make sure that one iPhone and one Apple Watch worked
really well together was a priority.
Leo: Yeah. That looks so pretty.
Myke: I may anticipate that with
the bands, right? Maybe they thought maybe people will buy one body and a ton
of bands, but I guess yeah, when you look at...
Rene: Spoilers for my...
Myke: Some days I like sport, but
some days I want to wear space black steel, you know. It's...
Leo: One month in, my Milanese
is already looking ratty.
Andy: (laughing)
Leo: No, this is all...
Andy: They get inside your head,
they sell you the expensive thing and then they make you feel bad for not
having the more expensive thing.
Leo: See the wear on that?
Rene: That's stainless steel
though, Leo. I have other stainless steel like real stainless steel watches and
you can go to a jeweler and have that buffed out or you can get some product of
your own.
Leo: Or I could buy a space
black...
Rene: Yes.
Leo: Watch with the black band.
Rene: I like where this is going.
Leo: I really like that.
Rene: So DLC is really hard to
scratch but once it scratches you basically... you've got a sharpie and that's
the only option.
Leo: Oh so yours, not scratchable. Mine scratches but buffs.
Rene: And I also have an
addiction.
Leo: Oh, stop it!
Rene: Which I will talk about
later in picks of the week.
Leo: Oh stop it!
Andy: Oh man.
Myke: The man has a problem.
Rene: Yes.
Leo: I'm just... I'm trusting that Mobile Nations is paying for this, right?
Rene: No, it's mine.
Andy: Those problems include
paying his rent this month.
Leo: Rene, I think you have a
problem. For those listening... he just held up four other bands.
Rene: I don't have any other
expenses Leo. I mean, I've payed off everything else
so now just all my money goes to buying technology.
Leo: To Apple, as it should. I
shouldn't complain.
Rene: Yeah. And
ancillary companies.
Leo: I shouldn't say anything
because I played with Lisa's, she got the good Macbook.
And I played with it and I said “I have to have this.” So I'm just as bad as
you. Apple's so good at getting us.
Rene: They make lust worthy items.
Leo: Lust, Techno lust. Isn't that the hash tag Phil
Schiller actually showed on stage?
Rene: Maclust.
Leo: Maclust.
Rene: #maclust, yeah.
Andy: Yikes! $1,099 for the Space Black
40 Stainless Steel case with Space Black Stainless Steel Link Bracelet.
Rene: You say that like it's a bad thing, Andy.
Andy: That's a horrifying thing, Rene! That's terrible.
Leo: Now, don't give him a hard time.
Rene: Compared to an Edition, it's cheap!
Andy: Holy crap!
Rene: I actually like it more than the Edition, don't tell
anybody.
Andy: I'm sorry.
Leo: Show it again, because it really does look nice. Oh
man. And that band is like expand-o-band, right?
Rene: Yeah, this has four of the, by the way, I just took
it open before, and you can just open it up and pull the links off.
Leo: Yeah, but I mean once you sized it, it kind of hugs
your wrist with a gentle, kind of loving embrace.
Rene: Yes, yeah it's like an armored bracer.
Leo: Oh, I want it.
Rene: But, I'm just super happy with it.
Leo: I should wait until you scratch it and then maybe I
won't want it.
Rene: Rupert got his the same day, I think he got his the
day before mine, and we both spent a few minutes being incredibly kiddish about how great they were.
Andy: I apologize, I should not
have (unintelligible).
Rene: I need that more (unintelligible).
Leo: No, no. We need-
Andy: I was trying to, I had one
of those moments where I remembered it as being-
Leo: I know.
Andy: -more than a thousand dollars, and no it can't possibly be more than a thousand dollars. Yeah it is more than
a thousand dollars.
Rene: And I paid for it in Canadian dollars, Andy.
Leo: No, and I should make sure Mike understands, we have
a pact amongst hosts not to give each other a hard time about what we spend on
technology.
Myke: Right.
Rene: Or beard maintenance.
Leo: Or beard maintenance! Okay, I'm sorry about the beard
maintenance thing, I violated that, I think, early on.
Myke: I support your decisions, Rene, I just want you to know that I support you.
Leo: That's right, Mike, that's the way to do it.
Rene: Mike and I are companions in iPhone 6+ acknowledgment
as well. We have a lot of things in common.
Leo: No, see I'm still with the 6. I feel like the +
doesn't do anything. Has that changed, by the way, because when it first came
out it didn't do anything but make everything bigger.
Andy: The battery kicks butt.
Rene: It's slowly.., yeah.
Leo: The battery kicks...but I don't have battery problems
with this!
Andy: I'm telling you, I've been an exclusive iOS user for
a full week now-
Leo: Yeah, you have to be right?
Andy: -my Android phone is not even charged, I'm not even
carrying it. I'm exclusively iOS for the first time in 2 years. And the one
thing that is like, the most delightful thing ever is, I've got the iPhone 6+
and I didn't have the right power adapter for my car and so for two days I was
driving for three hours GPS active, streaming audio, and coming back after
three hours of driving all on battery, still got 86% battery left. And I would
not have made that, oh, and the Android battery life stinks to high heaven.
It's the most humiliating thing ever! If Apple decided to spend fifteen minutes
talking about the battery life of everything they do, game over, game over.
Rene: I don't know if you guys have found this, but I'm
using the Apple Watch, and the Apple Watch I routinely have 40-50% left at
night now, but I also have way more battery life on my iPhone because all of
the little tasks that would otherwise light up the screen. And an iPhone is an
LCD screen, it's either on or off, there's no battery savings to letting up a
few pixels. The minute that lock screen goes lit, there's power being consumed
and because I use it less I now have so much battery left on my iPhone, I don't
often charge it overnight anymore.
Leo: Yeah.
Rene: It's a winning combination.
Leo: It's true, Andy, mine had the exact same. But even
with the 6, I have yet to use it up before the day is done.
Andy: Yeah it’s, I'm sorry, it’s not just about the size of
the battery, it's like, remembering exactly how good
and how holistic Apple's approach towards power management is. It's not that,
hey well we want more battery life so we'll put in a bigger battery, and it's
not even, we'll slap down certain apps, it's that they designed this thing from
the first time they connect one copper molecule to another copper molecule in
designing this, they're thinking about power management between those two
copper atoms.
Rene: It's millimeters and milliamps, and the just in time
multitasking I think is going to be the future because they've done all of this
coalescing and update stuff so it knows you usually check Twitter at 6 o'clock
so it doesn't need to check Twitter any time before you wake up, it'll just
wait and do it a few minutes before hand. And I think as technology gets
smarter, more and more things will just act that way. It'll be the way things
are done.
Andy: Rene, you've written 22,000 words more about Apple watch
than I have at this point, does, is the Watch supposed to do similar things
like that? Because one of the things that still frustrates me is that I'll
think “Okay, you know what, I'll find out what the score of the Red Socks game
is”, I'll use a glimpse at MLB at Bat, and then I'll flick up to get to the MLB
at Bat and then updating, updating, updating. And in the time that I'm updating
it's like, or I could take the phone out of my pocket and unlock it and launch,
“Oh yes, you know what? I got it on the phone faster than I got it on the
Watch”. Does the Watch learn what apps you tend to use and try to pre load
information, or is it all when you ask for the information that's when you get
the information?
Leo: It's just magic, Andy.
Rene: Yeah, I don't believe it's as sophisticated as that
yet. What it does do if you use something frequently it keeps it alive in cache
and updates it more frequently, and if you don't, it winds that app down and
then it has to go through that cycle again. I think that with the Apple Watch,
this generation, and I think actually Apple went overboard, giving how much
battery life I'm getting. Everything is a slave to battery, everything powers
down.
Leo: As it should be.
Rene: Which is why you have to reboot when there's power
reserve because it literally shuts off to humans and those things have to be
restarted. So it is a complete slave to battery life, and every little inconvenience that... So we've talked about this before, the
currency of mobile is battery life. Every feature you pay for with battery
life, and they've been incredibly conservative and again I think maybe a little
too much giving how well it's working.
Leo: Well, I have to give them credit because, I'm with
you Andy, that's the first thing I noticed when I... And like you I have to use
an iPhone if I'm going to use the Apple Watch. And, boy you sure do notice
that. On the other hand I struggle a little bit with the iPhone UI and stuff,
but you know what, maybe that's worth it to have good battery life and a Watch,
that isn't as good looking as Rene's is.
Rene: Well that's part of the discussion we had earlier
when we talked about, you know, people were worried about the iPhone battery
life, and there were reports that it was good and reports that it was no good.
But that's just concern and stress until it actually ships and you can see what
it is. And if you're interested in that kind of thing maybe you want to watch
that drama, but if you're a normal customer, not worrying about that stuff, and
just waiting to see how it works for you, I think is way more valuable.
Leo: Just for, let me plug in my laptop here,
informational purposes alone, Rene. Not that I would ever consider buying one,
but which exactly on here, is it this 42MM Space Black Stainless Steel Case,
it's that one?
Rene: Yes, and I got the 42mm.
Leo: Not that I would ever consider adding that to my cart
or anything.
Rene: That and the pink bracelet took a long time to ship.
Leo: Pink?! You bought that?
Rene: I'm guessing deals. The pink sport
band. My mom got the pink sport one and hers originally said June and
then it arrived the same time as me, and it looks like these were amongst,
except for the Editions, the Editions shipped afterwards, but these were the
two longest shipping.
Leo: Are you guys getting Apple Care? I've been getting, I
don't normally do the extended warranty thing, but I have been buying Apple
Care.
Rene: I do because I drop stuff, Leo. And I've gotten
almost every iPhone replaced at least once.
Leo: So really, Andy, you shouldn't think $1099 now, more
like $1168.
Rene: And for me, the Canadian exchange, so.
Leo: In America, yeah.
Rene: Yeah.
Andy: I will say that it's as I'm starting to sketch out,
well, I'll be writing about this in a couple of weeks, and...
Leo: I did not click “Add to cart”, that was a mistake.
Andy: Will you believe I'm trying to get the buttons not to
click!? Holy crap, don't click! Who's doing that?! I guess the simplest way to
do it is to wait for the order to ship and then return it. Aw dammit! That's
what I'm telling you about, about User Interface design, they've got to catch these bugs on the web end! That's a (unintelligible).
Leo: I did not click “Check out”! It just did it by
itself!
Andy: Now what am I going to do with this gorgeous watch
that will make me look like some sort of international playboy?!
Rene: I'll make it worse, Leo. Here's some photos.
Leo: Hey, and let’s not forget, you get two boxes now!
Rene: Yes!
Leo: I can replace the boxes I inadvertently recycled this
morning. I'm sorry, Rene, you said there's more
pictures?
Rene: I put some in Google Doc for you.
Andy: You could play Apple Watch Jenga!
Only $1000 per brick!
Leo: That's terrible!
Rene: I think John Siracusa was talking about the hotel prices for WWDC and he was saying every night was
an Apple Watch.
Leo: Yikes! Alright, let's take a break, because I've got
to pay for this Watch. But uh, um, uh we will continue and I want to talk more
about new OS 10, you know 10.101011. Whatever, it's getting hard now. Yosemite 1011.
Rene: Gala. Just call it Gala, Leo.
Leo: Gala. Is that the code name?
Rene: Yeah, g-a-l-a.
Leo: That's an apple, gala apple.
Rene: Yeah.
Leo: They're going to run out of those, too. Actually no,
because you know what, the apple industry continues to bat new apple breeds
every day practically.
Rene: OS 10 Granny Smith.
Leo: Is there a Granny Smith?
Rene: Not yet!
Leo: I just, I'm sorry I'm a little distracted because I,
somehow this machine seems to have entered my password onto the Apple site and
I checked out.
Andy: You've been hacked, Leo! You should let the
transaction complete so the FBI will have more information on base on which to
track and prosecute.
Leo: How can that happen? That seems impossible.
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Leo: I fortunately can't remember my Apple password, so.
Rene: I bet Lisa changed it.
Leo: You know, I thought I was entering it correctly. I
may have dodged a bullet there. Okay, so we've got Yosemite 10.11. This I
presume again is going to be all stuff they'll talk about in a couple of weeks
at WWDC, right?
Rene: Yeah.
Leo: Tell us again what you know about that, or what Mark
Herman knows about that.
Rene: I've heard very little about it, and Mark has posted some stuff about it, but I think it's still far less than
iOS 9 so either there's less to talk about, or there's more in terms of the
structural stuff than we would have anticipated.
Leo: Right.
Rene: I'm sure a lot of the stuff will be the same because
they're doing a lot of things that are on both sides of the OS's now.
Myke: Yeah, my iMessages stuff,
and Map stuff, that kind of stuff you can, it just goes across both.
Rene: Security. Yeah, Mark mentioned that, I forget what he
called it, Rootless, where it's going to be a new system and I don't know if
that's iOS only, but where even if you're an administrator, you don't have Root
access which would protect you against another slew of security threats.
Leo: That's interesting, is there any way to get Root?
Rene: I'm sure there's a way you can escalate to Root,
probably in the terminal or for apps that really need it. Especially
non App Store apps. I think a lot of the stuff is to protect most people
most of the time, and advanced users will still, especially on the Mac, they'll
have a lot of things that they can do outside of that protection. But for
people who don't need it or never think about it, just not running in root or
not running with full administrator privileges it's a huge win.
Leo: We had a guy, just happens, I won't name your name
and I won't show a picture of you, who works in iOS forensics. You think, I
guess this is only desktop, but Rootless seems to me to be, I don't see how you
could do that. Ultimately, something has to have super user permissions on an
operating system.
Rene: They've got some super smart people, people who
created sand box and people who created Core Security now at Apple are super,
super smart and I'm guessing that they'll, I don't know anything about the
engineering, but I'm guessing there's a way to give you a certain select amount
of privileges without giving you full access. Whether that's
a virtual environment, or whether it's a pseudo environment or something.
Leo: Hm.
Rene: Who knows if it'll be ready because all of this stuff
is just, you know, always a work in progress until it ships. But the idea I
think is super interesting.
Leo: Got a tweet from Scott Gilliland, @FlyerScott on Twitter, @leolaporte @reneritchie @Ihnatko Leo,
we all support you in your purchase of the space black
stainless steel watch! #ItNotAProblem.. Thank you for your support!
Rene: People are here for you, Leo.
Leo: But it's the wrong kind of support.
Myke: Be glad she couldn't be with us at this time.
Andy: You're all enablers. You just wanna see the drunk guy drink some more and then act crazy. That's all you want.
Leo: That's exactly it!
Rene: If the money doesn't go to Apple, it'll go to Lenovo.
We're just trying to direct him at this point, Andy.
Leo: It's true, the Lenovo, you know. Ooh, eesh.
Rene: You're in a time-out.
Andy: It's not necessarily even Lenovo. I was chatting a
couple of days ago, about the, of course, the conversation has to be about the
Apple Watch. And I'm saying “Or, I could have like the Sport Edition with a
black band, and take someone out, including airfare to the highest rated
restaurant in Los Angeles for an 18 course chef's tasting menu, and still have
the Watch. It's like, okay...
Rene: A real time follow up, Leo. 9-5 Mac just posted an
article about some people who are flipping their boxes for more money than
Android wear watches.
Leo: Now see, this costs more than an Android Wear watch
does!
Andy: This is about a journalistic point of view. It's
like, rather than, on other sites would be “Isn't it great for the amount of
crazy money somebody wants to spend on a box, you can actually have a fully
functioning working Android Wear watch”.
Leo: This seller is asking $59.99 for their plastic and
fabric Apple Watch box. Holy cow!
Rene: Just the headline makes the story (unintelligible).
Leo: The thing that's depressing to me is that I literally
recycled those boxes! I kept them for a month! But here we are, you know, it's
exactly one month since I got my Apple Watch and I thought,
it's time.
Rene: Your black stainless steel will come with a whole new
box.
Leo: Oh, that's right! Let me press “buy” now.
Andy: You're practically getting the Watch for free. Just
make sure you rehearse that in a mirror two or three times before you talk, you
say that to the accountant.
Leo: Yeah, the twitch might give me away.
Andy: Speaking about boxes, I got a box of premium, like
these, in Thailand they have these, like, pineapple cookies or whatever and so
the box that they came in was also maybe even better than the Apple Watch
because look at how hard it is to get that one kind of separated.
Leo: Ooh, that is better.
Andy: So, there is packaging if you want
to, like, sell a box of cookies for more than $2.99, you do have to
upgrade the boxing, I suppose.
Leo: Andy just sent us a link “Fire breaks out at Apple
facility in Arizona. It is out now, it was confined to
the solar panels on the roof.” Is this the Sapphire plant?!
Andy: Yeah, that is the former Sapphire plant.
Leo: Son of a gun!
Andy: Rumored to be converted into a data center. It was a
two-alarm (unintelligible).
Leo: They must have built it on an ancient Indian burial
ground or something. I mean they really, this thing is a snake pit.
Rene: Sometimes, dead is bettah!
Andy: I don't know! Or maybe it's people on break realizing that, it's about lunch time over there right now, so you
know it's got to be a super-hot surface-
Leo: Maybe that's it!
Andy: -Memorial Day weekend you probably got some hamburger
patties left over.
Leo: A little grilling.
Andy: It just got away from them a little bit.
Leo: Two alarm fire, the new Apple plant. Elliot and
Signal Butte solar panels on fire, the fire is now reported out. But, there you
go.
Andy: Or, maybe that's part of like when Tim Cook was
talking about, “Well we do have plans for the facility”, it includes burning it
down for the insurance money.
Leo: Burning it to the ground. Oh man.
Andy: Tim Cook, who an Apple spokesperson said, was
hundreds of miles away from the incident when the fire broke out.
Leo: Apple will put in subway trains and bus guides for
iOS 9 maps. Something Google maps has had for a while
but something you could use, and is now using robots for indoor mapping. Again,
this is catch-up for Apple, but it's interesting that Apple is not succeeding
in any way the map market to Google. They're gonna-
Rene: Put the rest in how important it is.
Leo: Yeah.
Rene: They've been trying to do transit for a while, the
problem with transit, and Google did a really good job of overcoming this, is
that it's owned by all these little five tems in
different little municipalities, keep the rights to their transit information
you have to go and literally municipality by municipality, town by town and get
that information, and then aggregate it. And they don't want the same thing to
happen that happened with Maps, which was largely bad data aggregation, and
cleansing and sanitization. So they want to do a really nice job with this and
they bought a couple, I think, two or three transit companies to sort of speed
that process up but it takes a while, Google spent a long time doing it.
Andy: It's very telling that Nokia has their own, their Nokia Here maps trucks that do their own mapping.
There's Bing that has their own mapping trucks. One of
the greatest, it was working out to be one of the greatest acquisitions that
Google could have possibly made was to buy Ways because they have 15 million
people across the world that are essentially deputized into the remapping
system, and also 6 or 7 thousand people that just for fun like to update their
own local maps to make them more accurate for construction things. This is such
valuable information that this is well under the category of something that
Apple wants to own for themselves as opposed to being
beholden to another company to provide this data, because it's non-negotiable.
It's almost like buying the, buying your buttons for the phone, on screen
buttons from an outside source. It's such an intrinsic part of the mobile
experience that, why would you not own the data that you're using for this?
Leo: We've heard over and over that Nokia wants to sell it's Here Map division. Microsoft licenses those maps for
Bing Maps but does not own them.
Rene: Bundle it with Blackberry and have a fire sale!
Leo: I'm wondering why Apple, I mean Apple's got more
money than they know what to do with. This seems like such a natural. It's over-seas money right? It would go to Finland. I would,
I don't understand why it's just not a done deal.
Rene: They have a license agreement, there used to be two
companies, Tele Atlas and I forget what the other one was called.
Leo: They bought Tele..
Rene: Yeah, Tele Atlas, and one of them was bought by
TomTom and one of them was bought by Nokia and Apple licenses the TomTom maps.
But, you know like, to Andy's point, that might not be
where they need to spend their money. Maybe they need to spend their money on a
company that does what they were already doing which is massive aggregation of
user base, traffic data, or may be it is in the internal
mapping or in the transit area. Because the map area, they're getting better
at.
Andy: Yeah, and also the scale of the problem of buying an
existing map company and integrating it into your existing software, it's not
as though it costs as much as launching your own mapping service, but it's
close enough that why would you buy a home and then put $200,000 worth of
upgrades into it when you could build the house for $240,000 that from the
ground up is built to fit exactly what you want.
Leo: Right.
Myke: What does he have that Apple
needs? I don't think I'm familiar with..
Leo: So they bought, is Tele Atlas what they have, Rene?
Rene: Tele Atlas, Navteq and Tele
Atlas are the two companies. And I forget which one they bought.
Leo: Navteq, I forget too. But
they would no longer have to license stuff from TomTom.
Rene: Yeah
Leo: So they would own their own deep map integration.
Here does have traffic, I think. It certainly could be added. It's an excellent
mapping system. It's not that it'll replace Apple Maps but boy,
that would give them a leg up. The problem is that Google's been doing
this for ten years before Apple got into the business.
Andy: Yeah. Mapping really is a Zeno's paradox sort of
thing, where the first step is you get 50% of the data you need, and that's
easy. The next big step is you're only getting 25% of what will remain, and
then getting, the closer and closer you get to having 100%, the harder the
remaining data is. When you get to the level of Here Maps or what Nokia was
doing, you have to get to the level where you are actually sending people out
to physically check out every building that your map data tells you is a
hospital, so that you're verifying that if you're going to send somebody to an
emergency room, that that emergency room is there and also verify that I'm
going to tell people is on this block, I'm going to steer them to exactly where
the emergency room entrance of this place is. And that's just one example of
this sort of data where you need good, detailed, fine grained boots on the
ground. Data that is really hard to just, you know, buy a whole bunch of Ford
Explorers and put a bunch of goofy stuff on the top that, and send people
driving around from street to street.
Rene: They're doing that, Andy.
Leo: They're doing that too. But, just as you say, the
Zeno's Paradox you never get to the end. Apple continues everything, buys Here
Maps. I think, I mean, how much could it cost? Could ten billion? It can't cost
that much.
Rene: You should get a brokerage fee if it works now, Leo.
Set up the deal, take 10%.
Myke: Why not buy TomTom? If they're
already, like, licensed in TomTom. I mean, in theory Apple can buy
whoever they want.
Leo: Maybe, I don't know if TomTom's in play. Well, but
Here's in play, we know Here's in play. And the problem is, what you also want
to do, is make sure Here doesn't fall into the hands of Microsoft or Google, or
Yahoo, or a variety of other players who would like to be players.
Myke: Uber, I heard Uber.
Leo: Uber. Uber wants to buy them and Uber, we were talking about this on Twitter about a month ago with Jason Calacanis. Uber is heavily reliant on the Maps application
on the device you're using whether it's Apple Maps, Google Maps, and that
reliance is a problem for them. It's a vulnerability.
So owning their own mapping software would be hugely valuable for them.
Rene: And you never know, Facebook wants to buy it and they
made a, they had a tentative flirtation with Maps.
Leo: But see it would be smart, if Apple wants, look, it's
not an offensive play, it's at least a defensive play.
Andy: Yeah, and Uber is an interesting target for all the
good reasons that it's a very, very well known and
well accepted system that is doing really well. But also you realize you have
how many thousands of drivers that are retracing popular routes through all the
biggest cities in the entire world now. That is a lot of great data. If
Facebook wanted to suddenly have access to data for restaurant recommendations,
business recommendations, traffic information, they could get a lot of stuff
with just one company but, to a certain extent, you can't make the assumption
that every company is for sale, or that every company wants to be acquired by
Apple. You get into a Elon Musk situation where I will
let you buy me so long as all you give me is money and I don't have to do
anything you tell me to do. I built this company not to sell it for a profit,
but because I have a vision and I want to pace the stage holding my hands like
this and stand in front of a big map of the world and talk about my world view.
This is not something that could be gotten by a check for 17 billion dollars.
Leo: Yeah, I don't know if TomTom is one of those or, but
I do know Here is, according to everybody in play. Nokia wants to get out of
that business. Benchmarks coming in from the French site MacGeneration.
Thanks to MacRumors for the translation. Looks like
Apple's claims that the SSD in the new MacBook Pros are twice as fast are true! QuickBench reporting read speeds of 2 Gigabytes, not
bits, 2 gigabytes per second. Sheesh!
Rene: It's just silly.
Leo: And write speeds of 1.25 Gigabytes per second. I
think that's got to be as fast as anybody really, really would want.
Andy: Yeah.
Leo: What, the problem is of course, buses get saturated.
You can have faster SSD's, they're really fast, but the buses have to keep up,
and I guess that's what Apple's doing putting these SSD's on a very fast PC
(unintelligible).
Rene: Their hardware team, I mean as much as their design
team and other teams get credit, their hardware team does amazing work.
Leo: That makes it, that is not a, you know, a lot of
benchmark numbers, oh big deal you're not going to see the difference, you will
see that difference. That's a significant...
Rene: That's a lot of i/o bound tasks
still, especially, you know, if you're doing heavy duty computing.
Leo: I think that's the frontier. We all have enough RAM,
processor speeds are very, very fast except on something like a MacBook. But
I/0, disc I/o has really been the hold up so this
makes a big difference.
Andy: Yeah, it's sick. Every time people ask me about, “Hey
I've got a 2008, 2009 or even 2010 MacBook or iMac and I'm considering either
just upgrading it or limping it along or buying a new system, and I keep
telling them it's not just, you're thinking about how about a CPU upgrade when
I tell you having an SSD inside your system, and having an operating system
that's optimized for SSD, and optimized for all of the special little nooks and
crannies of little features they're putting into the hardware, the first time
that you do a backup, and you sort of turn away because you know that you've
got three hours to go out and get waffles and come back and you realize “Oh,
the drivers bar is actually over halfway there! Okay! This is good!”.
Leo: By the way, they're not even at the fastest they can
go according to 9 to 5 Mac. The new MacBook Pro uses a Solid State Drive
manufactured by Samsung but MacGeneration says it
does not use the faster NVM Express SSD Protocol that the 13 inch was updated
to. I bought the 13, so I should see that difference on my,
I'll go run some benchmarks and get back to you. But it sounds like they could
even go faster.
Rene: Wait, did you just do it, Leo? Did you just finish
the benchmarks, I couldn't tell.
Leo: Oh yeah, I did it five minutes ago, but it's so fast
it went backwards in time. No, I don't have it with me.
Andy: Can you think of another marginal upgrade to the MacBooks that has had so much significance.
Leo: Huge.
Andy: I'm talking about they didn't change the body, they
didn't change the design, they didn't do it as a Keynote level upgrade, it is simply...
Leo: They're still using Haswell,
they didn't even..
Andy: Yeah, exactly! I mean, imagine, and already they've
done SSD improvements that are trans-formative, they've done Force Touch which
I think is trans-formative, and now we still have this lurking in the
background, here's what's gonna happen when we have
the real latest generation CPU in there, it's almost as though they don't even
need to shave another 3mm off the thickness of the thing and start pushing
everything to USB-C because we're trying to make a desktop that's so thin you
can't see it from one edge. It's just enough simply to keep what they have but
just make it internally better, better, better.
Leo: Apple Watch orders, this was deceptive, but now I
feel like I have learned my lesson. I bought the headline that the Apple Watch
orders plummeted dramatically after the first pre-orders. Yeah they plummeted
to 30,000 a day. Um, that's a lot! That's like more than the iPod or the iPhone
when they first came out. So that's almost a million a month, ten million a
year. Okay, that's a terrible flop!
Rene: Yeah, I mean it goes back to that statement that only
5% of eligible iPhone users bought one.
That's still an incredible, it's like 20 million or some ridiculous number.
Leo: When you have that math, exactly. Gold watches are
now arriving. I saw an un-boxing, an anonymous unboxing. If I had a gold watch
I would probably do it anonymously as well.
Rene: I feel like Beyonce missed
a beat by not doing an unboxing, Leo.
Leo: What! Beyonce, don't you
understand?! Don't you. Hers probably did not come in a box. Hers came in a
Rolls-Royce limousine with five Apple executives. I don't think hers came in a
box. But, yeah, you wanna show the unboxing? Do we
care it has a gold, even the screen is gold when you turn it on.
Rene: It's like the Virtu, where
the guy flies it to you personally.
Leo: Yeah, uh.
Myke: For $17,000 the entire thing needs to be gold,
because everything any gold, so it's all gold.
Leo: Yeah, it should all be gold. And I love that whoever
is doing this obviously is not going to keep the watch because they're wearing
rubber gloves.
Rene: They're going to sell the box though, Leo, don't
worry.
Leo: Yeah, maybe that's it, they
want to keep the box clean.
Andy: Do you still have a 2 week return on it?
Leo: Do you?! I guess you'd have to.
Andy: I honestly don't know.
Leo: Imagine the stink eye you'd get when you bring it
back.
Andy: Oh, but for the YouTube clicks you'd get for nicely,
commercially done (unintelligible).
Leo: Remember we heard they are going to examine it with a
microscope when you bring it back, to make sure you didn't shave gold plate off
of it.
Myke: So that box that you see out of the box, the blue
lining. That's actually a charging box. You can plug, I think it's a lightning
connector into the back and the little disc that's inside is actually the
magnetic disc, so you can just plug it right in there, it's a sort of leather
feeling box, and just charge it.
Leo: Oh, yeah, and there's about 50 kick-starter projects
to do the same thing for a lot less money.
Rene: Yep. Well, they're (unintelligible) you can get for like
the $300. It's very handy.
Andy: How much can you get on E bay for the little plastic
tab he just pulled off the back of the Edition Watch?
Rene: More than I make in a month.
Andy: It would be worth trying!
Myke: How big is that charging cable? It's huge!
Leo: It's pretty long even on the regular one, it's like 6
feet.
Rene: There are one meter and two meter versions.
Leo: They ship the two meter version though, I think. At
least they do with my stainless. Yeah, because I know because I have it all
looked up on my screen.
Rene: I'm not sure. Yeah, I think you're right.
Andy: What a beautiful plastic band it comes with, too.
Leo: What! They ordered the plastic band?!
Andy: That really says elegance to me.
Rene: I made fun of that, and then the new Rolex came out,
which was $25,000 and had a fluoroelastomer band. So
I'm guessing my idea of trendiness does not commensurate with popularity.
Leo: It's kind of a...
Andy: Well, but Rolex makes more than one watch don't they?
And this isn't their first impressing, we've suddenly decided to make luxury
watches, here's, we may not ever get to make another one if we muff this one,
here's your rubber band that you get for $10,000.
Rene: If you have $7,000 more dollars you can get a modern
buckle, Andy.
Leo: There ya go.
Andy: That's just crazy pants. That's just crazy.
Leo: Cult of Mac says Pebble sales are dropping like a rock
because of the Apple watch. I don't know if that's true. The Pebble Time comes
out this week, right?
Andy: Yeah.
Rene: Well, nobody could get an Android Wear for iOS, so
Pebble I think was a defacto smart watch for people
who had an iPhone and wanted a smart watch.
Leo: Oh, that's who's going away, the people who have
iPhones. It didn't really, I never tried it with and iPhone, it probably didn't
work all that, I mean...
Rene: It wasn't as good as Android,
it couldn't do, it didn't have the hooks in the system that it could into
Android.
Leo: Right, right.
Myke: I read an article on Tech Crunch that apparently
Pebble needs more money, and they're struggling to find any funding. People
don't want to invest.
Leo: But how much did they raise on Kick-starter for the
time, a huge amount!
Myke: Yeah, but I mean, that might fulfill the orders, but
if they want to continue, I don't know, they have a really high burn rate right
now. And it seems like they're struggling to get funding, which kind of makes sense
if they can find the NVC well one place I'm not putting my money right now is
Pebble. Even though they're an interesting company and do really interesting
stuff, but looking at it right now they aren't a wearable company.
Andy: They get clobbered for, I think the smartest thing
they did to drop the price on their introductory model down to under $100,
because that's a wonderful value for less than $100. That's a great consumer
choice say, I just want to have a cool watch, and oh wow, it really does cool
things with notifications, and stuff like that, too. It's so difficult when
they're trying to make money off of higher margin products where, I think
they're being squeezed certain, I think that the person who is eager to spend
$400 on an Apple watch isn't going to care about a $200 Pebble Time, but people
who are interested in spending $150 on a good fitness band might not want to
buy it, and the people who have $200 to spend on a smart watch are, maybe are
going to be looking more at Android Wear, especially because of Google I/O,
their big developer, Keynote, is in a couple of days on Thursday, and there are
a lot of announcements expected about updates to Google Wear, and this is also
good, it's interesting that Motorola seems to be making a lot of Moto 360
available at really, really good discounts now, which provokes someone to think
that perhaps they have 2nd generation hardware on the dock and ready to
ship sometime really, really soon. And so if they manage to ship something as
good as Moto 360, or better, at $200 you start to wonder why my recommending,
and if Google as rumored is preparing to ship a new version of the Google App
that allows people to use the Android Wear watches with iOS, I try to put
myself in the mind of, in what circumstance would I recommend someone to get a
$200 Pebble, and for now I'm coming up blank. So it's a tough situation for
them to be in for sure.
Leo: Microsoft is probably annoying Microsoft Windows
users by it's attention to iOS in Android, but here's
something for you, if you get Windows 10 you will be able to sync up with your
iPhone or your Android phone. A phone companion app will come with Windows 10.
You will launch it and pick the kind of phone you have, and Windows phone, of
course, is the preferred choice but Android and iPhone are right in there. And
it will sync music, it will you know, do your One Drive thing, that's the
storage including the photo app on your Windows 10 PC.
Rene: It will lure you away from iTunes?
Leo: Yes! No.
Andy: All of these people who are now standing on the
sidewalk watching iTunes burn in front of them, and holding a gas can in their
hand. Now know that their other hand they can have a Windows machine. This is
such a strong move, I'm so.. Every time Microsoft
comes out with new news about Windows, I'm, whether it's the right one for me
or not, probably not, it's wow that's a strong move. Realizing that a lot of
people who have iPhones don't have Macs, and still they've got the most popular
desktop operating system on the planet. And if you simply say, we don't care
what phone you use, we will make sure that Windows works great with whatever
you have. And putting Cortana, which in many way is one of the crown jewels of
Windows 10 and making it available, at least in some fashion, on iOS and
Android, that just, it provokes someone to say, hey Siri, excuse me, hey Shlomo, and say hey Cortana-
Leo: It's too late, there's no point in backing out of it
once you say it.
Andy: I don't want to trigger peoples faults.
Leo: But you did, and then the first thing it said was
“Hey Shlomo” on it.
Andy: I did hear from one Shlomo by email say, “Please don't, I've already been hearing this around and it's
making my life a little bit more difficult than it needs to be”.
Leo: Oh rats!
Andy: So, I apologize to any Shlomo out there. But it's interesting, giving that Cortana's the thing that people
like to play with, and it's a really strong effort in many ways. It's superior
to Siri in terms of being a digital personality that you interact with, and
this agent does things for you, it's hard to see where it's flagging compared
to Siri. Of course you run into the same thing that Pebble ran into, where if
you, the only person who has access to the full features of the iPhone is Apple,
and so you're never going to be able to produce a third party product that can
integrate as nicely and as tightly as anything that Apple ships. It's kind of
sad, I would love to, in an ideal world, and I realize this is just
hypothetical ideal, I would love Apple to say, “You know what, we will release
the API's to everybody because we feel as though if people were to compare
Apple watch or Siri or anything that we make to any competitor they would still
use our products because, it's not because we're relying on proprietary
information, it's because we've engineered this so well. I'm not complaining
about that with Apple, but I do sometimes reflect upon the fact that people
don't have a choice in the matter that they are taking the products that are compatible
with iPhone, because it's the only product that is compatible with iPhone.
Leo: Actually Windows 10 fixes so many problems that I had
with Windows 8. I actually kind of like it. And I would be very interested,
anyway, as you say, many people use it by choice and many others use it because
somebody else made that choice for them. If the upcoming version of the Music
app will store and access music from One Drive, which by the way offers
unlimited storage-
Rene: The only thing I suggest is that if you like this
stuff, really support it. Because I have this feeling that Microsoft is trying
everything right now, they're doing like the OS 10, like the COCO support,
objectives sorry, they're doing all of these different things. And they'll
probably put the wood behind the arrows that do the best, and let the other
stuff linger or disappear. So if you like these things, a lot of people just
use iCloud now. They don't even bother with iTunes. If that is something that
appeals to you, use it and be loud about it because that will encourage
Microsoft to double down on things that are popular.
Leo: Yes. The Cortana App, which will be available on
Android and iOS isn't out yet, I don't think. In fact it's going to come out
for Android first. But it will be out for iOS later, let me see. Available for Android June 1st,
iPhone later this year. But remember, Windows 10 doesn't come out
officially until, they said end of summer, Paul Thurrott and Mary Jo Foley, our Windows experts on Windows Weekly say end of July. End
of July's not so far off. You know what, it's smart, if you're Microsoft,
acknowledge, as they have, people use a variety of devices, and support it.
You're much more likely to succeed in an environment where you do that, then
where you say no, you have to use Windows.
Rene: When you're in Microsoft's current position, this is
a wise move to do.
Leo: Yeah.
Andy: But also to be fair, if Windows Phone were an
actually successful product, maybe they would protect access to Windows Phone
as they've got nothing, with 2% of the market they've
got nothing to lose by simply saying “We will make all Windows Phone products
software available anywhere we can put it”.
Leo: Let's see, I think we're going to wrap this up here.
I think I had one more, no that was it. Let's take a
break, when we come back our great guests from Replay.FM, I'm sorry Relay.
Myke: Relay.
Leo: I always get that p. Relay, because you're listening
for the first time. Myke Hurley. Tell us about
Relay.FM.
Myke: So, I mean we've been around since August. We've got
a nice little stable of shows. We have the great Jason Snell, Federico Viticci to name just a few. We're growing all of the time
and we've got some great tech stuff. We've got The Pen Addict, which I know
you'd love the idea of, Leo.
Leo: Yes, I'm a pen fan.
Myke: We have recently Mac Power Users.
Leo: Oh, and David Sparks, that's great!
Myke: Yes, David Sparks and Katie Floyd joined us recently.
Leo: Nice.
Myke: We're moving on, and we're doing great. We have some
great tech stuff, gaming stuff, and I think this show would really dig some of
our shows. So check them out, Relay.FM.
Leo: Very good! Also here from
iMore.com. They have podcasts too, Rene Ritchie. Everybody's got a
podcast now. Rene, you've got to (unintelligible).
Rene: It is a part of all of us, Leo.
Leo: Yeah, yeah. That means you've got good microphones,
that's all. It's good! I like it.
Rene: We have Paul Kafasis from
Rogue Amoeba on this week.
Leo: Oh, love Rogue Amoeba stuff.
Rene: It might go three hours, the
final edit's not done yet.
Leo: How long did you actually talk for?
Rene: Um, about three hours. Our record's about six hours,
but this was three hours and twenty minutes.
Leo: I don't feel so bad anymore, that's awesome! Uh,
iMore.com and the podcasts are there on the top right there. Actually they used
to be, I don't see them anymore. Did you run out of room?
Rene: iMore.com/podcasts.
Leo: So you just go directly to iMore.com/podcasts?
Rene: Yeah. I think it's one of those things where it's
responsive and more stuff populates it as the wider it gets.
Leo: Right.
Rene: And then things drop off.
Leo: Believe me, I know how this is. There ya go. Look at em! Look at all of
the podcasts! Andy Ihnatko is also here, he's from
the Chicago Sun Times! Thank goodness he sticks to print! Or
maybe not.
Andy: Although, you can get it on phones and on the web,
too. I'm not just simply an ink stained wretch. I'm not selling matches on the
street yet.
Leo: Then there's Ihnatko's Almanac and Fivebyfive. We're just having a great
time.
Andy: I'm a podcasting gadfly.
Leo: You're a gadfly.
Andy: From my beloved home base here at Twit.
Leo: Whateva, whateva. Let's take a break, when you guys come back, Picks
of the week. But first, I've got a pick for ya!
Braintreepayments.com. Braintree is a really great
solution for anybody who is working on a mobile app. So many
developers looking for a way to put payments in their mobile app. And
you can hand-code something, I think everybody by now
realizes that is the worst idea. Or with just a few lines you could integrate
Braintree Payments and start taking everything! Not just credit cards, Apple
Pay, even Bitcoin, Venmo, Paypal,
it's all in there! And boy, so many people now are using Braintree. You really,
I mean, you get some confidence when you know that Uber and Lyft use Braintree.
Air B&B and Hotels Tonight use Braintree. Github started with Braintree. That was how they began taking payments and now it's
massive. In fact, you could do the same, you could
scale your business with Braintree Payments from your first dollar to your
billionth. No matter how your customer wants to pay. Take a look at the v.zero SDK, they even have a sandbox, you can test the code
on your own app, and get a sense of what it's going to feel like. Very easy to integrate. Supports all of the major platforms
like Node.js, Python, Ruby, you know. I don't have to go through this with you.
You know what I'm talking about. But I do want you to do one thing. Go to
braintreepayments.com/macbreak to log in because if
you do, if you decide to sign up for Braintree, you get your first $50,000 in
transactions fee free and that's a pretty penny! I haven't done the math but
that's not an insignificant amount of money. Braintreepayments.com/macbreak. Just the feeling, takes all currencies,
the feeling you get of how easy was that! Just makes it worthwhile. Braintreepayments.com/macbreak. We're so thrilled that they support us just as we support them on MacBreak Weekly.
Leo: Let's start with Myke's Pick of the Week!
Myke: So I have an app that I want to talk about today
called HighBall, which is a great app to share and
collect your cocktail recipes.
Leo: Indeed!
Myke: I'm a big fan of this app. It's made by Studio Neat,
who are behind the Glif, and Cosmonaut, and the Neat
Ice Kit. They're a great company and they make little companion apps that go
along with their physical products, and they make little cocktail products. So
you can create your own recipes, they have some ones that you can find and you
can change the ingredients, you can change all of like, so you can put the
names in but you can also change like the measurements and stuff that what you
want to add. They have a great way to add a little drink image. You kind of get
to choose from different elements of a drink, and stack them up together, to
make a nice little image that you see on the page.
Leo: Oh that's pretty, yeah!
Myke: It's very nicely designed.
Leo: It's like clear a little bit.
Myke: Yeah, it is it's got that kind of like, it's got a
nice playfulness but it's not really flat, it's got nice colors and stuff. But
my favorite thing about this app is, once you create your recipe that you like,
you can share the, like the recipe card on social networks and stuff like that.
And if you see somebody, like you see on Twitter they've shared their drink,
and you take a look at the drink, you can save the image that they've shared on
social media, open Highball, and it will import. You can open the image from
the photo picture, and it will then import all of the ingredients into your
recipe book that you can then go and amend. So it will use QR codes and all of
that. Magical photo scanning stuff, so you can end up with,
you can share them with your friends, and then they can save your recipes and
stuff like that. It's a really cool app and it's free, and if you like
any kind of mixed drink it should be something you take a look at.
Leo: And who doesn't, after all.
Myke: Indeed.
Leo: And it's free, Highball! Share and collect cocktail
recipes. Available for, it looks like iPhone only. Yeah, iPhone.
Myke: Yes, iPhone, yep.
Leo: Who wants to being an iPad
to a bar though, really. Let's face it. Thank you Myke! Great to have you. Myke Hurley. Relay.FM. Rene is going to share his jones.
Rene: Yeah, I've got an obsession for bands. I'm not as bad
as some people, I've seen some people buy bands for hundreds and hundreds of
dollars, and using those, and I haven't done that yet. But I have got all the
ones that you can use with the Watch and the fluoroelastomer ones, these I really like because they're water proof and they really do work
really well when you're exercising. Even as George likes to point out, sort of
a concave inside so that it doesn't keep the moisture stuck on your skin.
Leo: Oh, I like that!
Rene: I thought that was super clever. They have leather
ones too that I really like. We have the classic buckle here which really is
nice. It's sort of stiff when you first get it, I've only worn it for a couple
of days, but it does soften down as you wear it, and that gives you a really
classic sort of a look. And because Apple has this really smart slug in groove
system, it takes literally a couple seconds, maybe 30 seconds to swap out the
bands. The leather loop, we've talked about before. It's the stretch pants,
like the Milanese loop of bands. And this just goes on both sides and then you
adjust the loop magnetically, like you would the Milanese band, and it just
locks down. And then you can keep adjusting it during the day and it is leather
so it feels really nice. It's not water-proof, but it doesn't keep water next
to you either. And I've been enjoying that. It's sort of like a casual band.
And then the one that Leo and I got originally, which is the Milanese one,
which is metal but it's such a nice weave that it actually feels like material.
Leo: It's not it's fault that it
starts to look like an old DeLorean after a few
months.
Rene: No, again, I mean I've had stainless steel watches
before, and that's what happens. Especially the bottom of the band which hits
your computer, or hits a table or the things you're working on. And you can get po, I mean this is an age old watch problem and they
know how to fix it at jewelers, or you can get stuff to fix it on your own. And
then-
Leo: I have to say though, the Watch hasn't done that. I
guess it's coated, right?
Rene: I believe they're both coated the same, it's just the
Watch isn't on the bottom of your hand so it's not knocking it against the
table and the computer when you're typing,-
Leo: Oh, okay.
Rene: -and all of those things. And then
of course the DLC Link Bracelet, which I really like. You can get it in, I don't know if they sell it separately in silver, they
don't in black yet. But Apple will tell you it takes about 9 hours to make each
one of these because all these links are actually slightly different. The ones at the top, and the ones at the bottom, and the ones that
go in between. And I love that I've had link bracelets before and you've
actually needed a jeweler or a special set of tools to make any adjustments to
them. And this I just pop them in and pop them out.
Leo: Oh, it's so easy.
Rene: I had friends who wanted to try it, I just did it quickly for them. Steve Aquino wrote a great article, I think on MacStories about how great it is to have accessible watch
bands because he has slight palsy, and my mom has arthritis, and because of the
loop bracelets and some of the other ones, it's way
easier to put on than traditional watch bands have been. And so it's sort of really
great design that happens to also be really accessible design which is a nice
plus.
Leo: Yeah, I agree. Every time I would get a new watch I
used to make a trip to the jeweler to get links removed, it was a pain in the
butt.
Rene: Yeah, me too.
Leo: Do you carry extra links in your pocket?
Rene: I put them in the box, Leo. So I can make sure I
don't throw them away.
Leo: And then you carry the box with you, and that way
people can try on watches.
Rene: I've taken them out and kept them very carefully, I
haven't ever added any back in. I just put them back in right away.
Leo: I have just discovered something very horrific. Now
that I look at it, my stainless steel for some reason the left side, not the
right side, is all scratched up. You probably can't see that on camera if
you're watching.
Rene: And you can buff that out.
Andy: As they say on the Antiques Roadshow, that's good
honest wear.
Leo: You can buff that out!
Rene: Yeah, it's the Indiana Jones look, Leo. It goes..
Leo: Well, thank goodness, my pick of the week is the
black Watch that I'm going to get in a month.
Rene: Now it's a deduction.
Leo: It's a deduction! Actually it said July! But they-
Rene: But they have been shipping fast.
Leo: -they've been shipping faster than, that's like
they're sandbagging you a little bit. They're saying, “Oh yeah, you're not
going to get this til July”, and then you get it
earlier.
Rene: Yeah, they would rather exceed expectations then...
Leo: Okay.
Rene: My mom's was supposed to come in June and it arrived
in May, so that was nifty.
Leo: Oh! Alright. You know the
good news is I just got a notification from American Express, Apple forgot,
they only charged me a dollar. So, lil tip!
Rene: Oh, speaking of which, we were just talking about the
interaction model before. My mom got her Apple watch and I was busy working,
and by the time I got there she set the whole thing up and she was using most
of the features.
Leo: Wow!
Rene: Yeah, she's mostly an iPad user.
Leo: Nice!
Rene: She went through and just pressed the buttons and
followed the directions and she got herself going I think on almost everything.
She didn't notice set-up activity but once I showed her she got that going as
well.
Leo: The on-boarding is nice.
Rene: Yep.
Leo: We had to, Lisa's Watch stopped responding. She had
the 38 stainless. So I went through the usual troubleshooting steps, I wiped
it. Which is no big deal because it's all backed up. That was not connecting, you know you're getting the
phone with the slash through it. Then I tried to pair after wiping, it still
wouldn't pair! You know where it gives you that little space cloud and you
point the phone at it. The phone never would see it, even though it should have.
And then I tried the manual pairing and that didn't. It was like the Bluetooth
wasn't working. So I said, “Hm, I don't know. We're
going to have to bring it to the Apple store I guess”. And then in the middle
of the night I woke up, like 2 in the morning. Wait a minute, reboot the phone!
So we rebooted the phone, not even resetting the phone, just turn it off and on
again. It all works!
Andy: Yeah if you try just cycling Bluetooth, it often
works as well.
Leo: Yeah, I think it was some weird Bluetooth thing. Her
phone has always been a little sketchy. She's a 6+ and she's always.
Andy: You still have the store page open, you should buy her a new one!
Leo: Nooo!
Rene: Apparently you can get it in rose gold this fall.
Leo: Oh yeah, with Force Touch right! Well, you know, the fall's going to have new phones. Can we wait until
then?
Andy: You're not going to buy her a rose gold phone, and
then force her to wear a watch that doesn't match?
Leo: Oh, Andy Ihnatko, your Pick of the Week!
Andy: Uh, my pick is the sort of app that I really, really
like. It's an iOS app for the iPhone called One Shot. If you've been on
Twitter, for the past three months, there's a certain vogue where if you're linking
to an article you used to try to figure, okay, what 120 characters am I going
to quote to convince people that this is a good article that you should read?
And people start saying, “Well actually, I'm on my phone, why don't I just take
a screen shot of a paragraph I really like, I'll highlight it with a text
selector, and then attach that as an image”. One Shot is a app that tries to make that experience absolutely perfect.
Leo: Oh, I like that! It looks good!
Andy: Where you're on your iPhone or your iPad, you're
looking at the thing you want to quote. You just take a screen shot, then you launch One Shot. It captures that most recent
screen shot. It will do OCR on the contents of it and basically create a
graphical quote from it. It will also then, because it's done OCR on the text
of that screen shot, it will then search the web, and automatically generate
the correct link. If it spotted it in more than one place it will give you “Do
you want it link to this New York Times site thing, this thing on Gawker, or do
you want this quote in Gadget. Formats it nicely, you can choose the font,
excuse me, you can choose text color, you can even highlight text within it,
and then because you've connected it to your Twitter account, you just press
one button and it gets tweeted out as all in one thing. And you can add text to
it. It really is, all of this happens in that one app, and it's so easy to use
that this really is the way that you're going to want to recommend articles
online to other people. It's a free app because it was created by a couple of
people who were ex Twitter staffers and they just wanted to build something
cool, and maybe they'll add features to it as they go along, but they really
just wanted write a really cool app for doing this sort of stuff. And I'll be
darned they absolutely did that. It's really, really fun to use.
Leo: I'm installing it right now! Although-
Andy: Yeah, it's free..
Leo: -it's so ironic, because Twitter really made it's bones because it was 140 characters, that's it.
Rene: It makes the new tweet longer.
Leo: -and now everybody's doing this, you know, work
around where you post pictures of much longer..
Andy: Well, because it's hard to, like, that's one of the,
I will say that it's not like I spend as much time devising the tweet to a link
of something that's just been posted on the Sun Times, as I did writing the
actual thing, but it's so hard with them once the URL eats up some space, and
after New On Sun Times eats up some space-
Leo: Yeah, hash tag, yeah.
Andy: -what remaining 11 words am I going to choose that convinces
people this is going to be interesting enough that it's going to be worth your
linking, and it's so cool like, whether I'm linking into my own stuff, or other
peoples stuff, to simply say “Here is the paragraph, that said, oh I've got to
tweet this out, this is such a good article”.
Leo: You know, it actually
mirrors my work flow, because when I go through news every day, looking for
stuff for this show and all of the other shows, I will highlight just as you
did, this alien paragraph or one that I think is important, and then I use Pinboard to bookmark it, and that paragraph gets copied
over. And by the way that Twitter feed is links_4_twit. I often use Twitter to
do that. I might start doing that with links_4_twit because..
Andy: Yeah, I really hope that if I have a request, before
they move onto the Android version of this, if they want to porter to the
things, I hope they do it as a Chrome plugin because I do so much of my morning
and afternoon reading on Chrome, and for the thing that I tweeted out this
morning, it was a really cool article about a Digital Security Summit, top
secret at Ditchley Park, between government spy
agencies, and representatives from Apple and Google and stuff like that. And I
thought it was such a good article, and I so wanted to tweet it, that I
actually turned away from my keyboard and picked up my iPhone because I wanted
to use this really cool app to tweet it out and not a cut and paste from this
other thing.
Leo: You actually make an excellent point, this would be a very nice thing to have as a Chrome extension.
Andy: I would be using it, like, if it costs me 3 cents a
try to use it, I would be using it all of the time, and I'd be billing about
$15 a day maybe.
Leo: Yeah, because you know, it's true...
Andy: Okay, well maybe not that bad but I'd be willing to
spend money per use of it, is what I'm trying to say.
Leo: We didn't talk about that story, because I really
didn't know what else to say. But the picture of the mansion is cool where
Apple and Google and GCHQ got together to plan our futures.
Andy: I understand the catering at that place is very, very
good. They have those, it looks like a mini taco, but it's not a taco. It's
actually a Portobello mushroom sort of thing with a...
Leo: Now you're just dreaming. Yeah, I don't...
Andy: Although, what I'm doing is I'm quoting, I was at the
launch event for the Asus Zen Phone 2, and oh my, the catering at this
function. It was like, first it was like, lobster, and then the portobello mushroom thing, and then like crab, and then
like steak. And I was like “Yes-sir, keep the entire can of Dr. Pepper!” Wow!
Leo: They know how to get those ink stained wretches in
line. Feed em!
Andy: They know that we need to economize at any place, if
we can get free protein, we will show up for that
event.
Leo: That's what show stoppers learned long ago.
Andy: With zip-lock baggies.
Leo: All it takes is a chocolate fountain and I'm there.
Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun Times,
that is where you'll find him. He is the king of Mac Journalism and
generally, I think. I can't wait to read your Mac Book. So that will be out
tomorrow in the paper but today online.
Andy: It should be out tomorrow, I've just given them about
3300 words and a bunch of pictures. I had it ready to go last week, to be
frank, it was actually on word press, and then I took it back, only because
reading it after two days of not reading it, was like “Oh, here's a way I
should rewrite that introduction.
Leo: Always a good idea.
Andy: Fortunately, I don't have the responsibility that
Rene has to be, like, news all the time. So it's, that's why I have so much
respect for what Rene does. It's like, I cannot form a
good, valuable piece of opinion-age on something, on quick turn-around. It's
like, let me think about it! Let me take a trip with something!
Rene: That's because you have the requirement for value, that changes it.
Leo: There's room in this world for both, we need you
both! Absolutely! Uh, just give me the bottom line though, I can still cancel my MacBook order, should I?
Andy: But the bottom line on it is that, I don't think that
there's another MacBook like it that is this good to travel with, because I
took it on a couple of different trips-
Leo: That's what I want it for, yeah.
Andy: -that's where it really, really shines. I don't think
there's another MacBook that requires so much adjustment, mostly because of the
keyboard. Which to me it's not a failure, but you do have to adjust to using
this different keyboard.
Leo: Lisa said the same thing, yeah.
Andy: But at the end of the day, the bullet quote that I'll
probably quote with One Shot, is that I do think it's the most exciting Mac
that Apple's released in the past three to four years.
Leo: (Whistles) Alright!
Andy: Just don't expect it to be the daily driver Mac,
that's all.
Leo: No, it's for travel. It's a lightweight.
Andy: For people, whether you're traveling a thirty minute
bike ride to the coffee shop in the morning or three thousand miles across the
coast to a conference, it's, there's no, it's not even close to the 11 inch
MacBook Air, it's not even close to the 13 inch MacBook Air. It's better than
both of those, and that sort of thing. So if you have the specific need, and
you have $1300 to spend on that, that's a good place to put that money.
Leo: Well, as you know, Lisa and I are going on our yearly
vacation in about a month we're going on a river cruise and I wanna have something like, for travel,
that looks good. That and a black Apple watch would be good.
Rene: It's phenomenal.
Andy: It's not just that, I mean, on top of it being
really, really small, not to open a new discussion, but the ability to simply
say I've got the, we talked about how bad the battery life is on an Android
phone, that's the reason why I have this 16,000 Amp power, like carton of
cigarette sized Anchor battery charger. So when I plug that into the MacBook
Air, you can charge it from this device. And you can actually run it-
Leo: Wow!
Andy: -the battery will not deplete, the internal battery
on this MacBook will not deplete when it's plugged into a good high capacity
battery. And so now you go from having 8 hours of battery life to having 16 or
17 hours of battery life, and that's like ohhh,
that's such a great travel thing.
Rene: I took it to show Georgia, Leo, and she has the 11
inch MacBook Air, and she was upset first that it was smaller than the 11 inch,
but then you open it, and the screen has as many pixels as the 13 inch.
Leo: Right!
Rene: And it's another one of those optical illusions, it's
just amazing.
Leo: It's like a Tardis.
Andy: I always thought the 11 inch screen was very, very
weird. I could never get used to the fact that it's squatter. And also the
fact, that not only is it squatter and smaller, but it also has that, it's the
one screen that I really can't work with, because I think that 13 inch is the
minimum size for a non-retina screen, or at least for me to be comfortable
using it, and that's why I think that it's even better than the 11 inch even
though, it's credible to ask well, why not get the 11 inch MacBook Air because
it'll have standard ports, and it has a better keyboard, and it has equally as
good battery life. Again, if you have the extra $400 to spend on this, I do
think that it's a better solution.
Rene: I agree with Andy.
Leo: And, best yet, with a nice black..
Andy: My goodness, Rene, we ought to start a podcast for a
website together.
Leo: A space black-
Rene: We'll call it “I agree with Andy”.
Leo: -Apple watch, this would work so well.
Andy: We'll have that sort of calligraphy where it means
the same whether you're turning it upside down and the back can read “I agree
with Rene”.
Leo: I did order the gold MacBook, maybe I should just get the gold Watch to go with it.
Rene: Black and gold look good together too, Leo.
Leo: Oh yeah, good, thank you. Whew, dodged that bullet!
Rene Ritchie, iMore..
Andy: This is just like every YouTube video where they're
saying, Oh my, no! You could totally jump over that running car, you should
totally do that! Here we go!
Leo: It's the Jackass of MacBook podcasts.
Andy: Jeff, Jeff, Jeff, Jeff!
Rene: It's the most expensive MacBreak every, Leo.
Leo: Oh no, not by a long shot! I believe I ordered a MacPro on the MacBreak.
Rene: Well, if we get you up to the $10,000 Watch...
Leo: Well, the you would be,
yeah.
Rene: Yeah.
Leo: Rene Ritchie, love ya,
great to have you, iMore.com. And so glad to have Myke Hurley here, come back soon! Relay.FM.
Myke: I will!
Leo: We do MacBreak Weekly, a
little programming though. We've got some changes coming up, we got a new
website launching, I'm hoping, if all goes right, and I feel good, Monday, June
1st! At that time we're going to make some changes to how
we do the live stream. In the past, for the last 8 years, we've operated with
unprecedented openness. I've allowed everybody to watch how we do these shows,
watch the sausage being made! And I really love doing that, it's something that's been great for me. And I probably would if it were just
me, continue it. Unfortunately, there are some real harassers out there who've
given us a very hard time and used our live stream to do so. And it's not just me, it effects my family, my kids, and all of our other
hosts. So we've had, unfortunately, decided to stop the behind the scenes
stream. That will be effective June 1st as well. Now what that means, it's not going
to be a change for you, you'll still be able to watch the stream on our
website, but what you'll be seeing is the final version of the shows, the
edited version of the shows, and I'm sad to say, no more behind the scenes
stuff because that is what was providing them with ammunition. We will continue
to give you live streaming during breaking news, it's
going to be kind of like a regular television station. Where you're watching
shows, they will now be on schedule, Leo time no longer will apply. We'll be
able to put those shows out on a regular schedule so you'll know when to tune
in. We'll have lots of small interstitial bits to pad, which is great, gives us
a chance to do some fun stuff. And Breaking News will break in just as a
television station would, and give you breaking news. And the minute there is a
car chase outside of 1 Infinite Loop, you'll see it live from the Twit
helicopter. You will also get to see breaking news events, like the Google I/O
and WWDC. We'll do those live, live, as always. But it also has an unfortunate
side effect, one of the great things about doing Live,
Live is interaction with our audience, the chat room. That is also been an
attack factor for these bad actors and unfortunately we're going to discontinue
that as well. And I hate to do this, it's breaking my
heart, because I know some of our community loves being in chat. But it's very
hard on our moderators, you don't know the behind the scene stuff they're
doing. We have been able to keep chat pretty clean and good but that's only by
a bit of a extreme effort.
And frankly some personal sacrifice on part of our chat mods, and I just can't
let that continue. So, we will discontinue the live chat as well. I'm telling
you now so those of us, and I say us in the community, can find another place
to interact and hang out together because I know it's important to many of you
to talk to each other in the chat, and I don't want you to stop doing that. And
there are plenty of other chat places you can do that, but there will, IRC@twit.tv server will be discontinued
on June 1st. So just a little
heads up on that one. Sorry to have to do that. I don't think it will
impact those of, almost all of our audience doesn't watch live. Those of you
who download our shows there will be absolutely no change to what you hear. In
fact I think it might even be better. Because I noticed today, I was paying a
little more attention to what was going on, and a little less to the chat room.
Thank you Andy, Rene, thank you Myke for being here,
thanks to all of you! We will probably have a new schedule starting June 1st.
We will continue to tape live, just for our host information, at the same time
11 am Pacific. Generally speaking it takes us maybe two or three hours to get
the feed, the download out. We're going to readjust our stream schedule to
match that, so you can get the final produced version. So I would guess, and
don't hold me to this, but we'll have a schedule published on the new site June
1st. But I'll guess you'll be able to watch MacBreak Weekly, it's first run
will be probably be evening, Tuesday early evening sometime. Add four or five
hours. We'll get you the details. But roughly for all of the shows add four or
five hours to guarantee that we have a produced version available for download,
and the first live feed of it will be on the Twit Network. Thank you all for
being here, we'll see you next time! And, oh, one more thing, very important,
somebody asked me in Twitter and I absolutely want you to know this, we welcome
live studio audience, we'll continue to do that. So if you want to watch Live,
Live. And those guys get to see all the weird stuff like my Michael Jackson
shoe collection, you can go to tickets@twit.tv and email us. We'd love to host you live in our studios in Petaluma. Thanks for
joining us, we'll see you next time, remember something important! Get back to
work! Break time is over! We'll see you next time.