Upgrade - 107: The Upgrade Programme

Episode Date: September 19, 2016

Myke and Jason have taken delivery of new iPhone 7 and 7 Plus models, so it’s time to detail the experience of buying, upgrading, restoring, and using the latest iPhone models.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 107 today's show is brought to you by text expander from smile fresh books and app care my name is mike hurley and i am joined by mr jason snell i'm very excited today mr snell Snell. I know you are, Mike. I know you are. It is iPhone review episode. It's my favorite one. It is the iPhone review episode. It's true. I have so many things to say later on in the show today. So many things. All the great things.

But we have some follow-up to address today before that. And I believe you want to kick us off. Yeah, a couple things. One one we talked a few months ago there was a we did a podcast sort of inside baseball episode or two we talked to lex friedman at the mid-roll uh who's a former mac world writer who now works at the at this podcast ad network and lex was talking about their strategy and why they bought stitcher and what they think about podcasts and podcast advertising and how the podcast industry works. And that was a good conversation. We didn't necessarily agree with everything that Lex said, but it was really great to get that other perspective.

And I thought that was a good conversation. I have a couple bits of follow-up. One is we were talking about Stitcher. And one of the knocks on Stitcher I know, Marco Arment uh had this as a complaint about stitcher and i think a lot of podcasters felt this way about why why a lot of us kept stitcher at arm's length was this feeling that stitcher um didn't really respect the the creators of podcasts and one way was that they would take our file download our file and then cache their own copy of it. So we couldn't actually see who else downloaded it from Stitcher, because we would only see that Stitcher downloaded it. And to make matters worse, they wouldn't just download it and take it away from us so that we can't see who else

is listening to it. They would re-encode it at a low, very low quality bit rate. So the shows on Stitcher sounded worse. And these are major complaints. And I just, as a matter of follow-up, I actually saw an email from Stitcher that they sent out in August, I think, so last month, that they have changed their system and they're no longer caching and re-encoding any podcast files.

So basically Stitcher is now a podcast app that downloads files like other podcast apps do straight from the server. So that was one major complaint that they were trying to create this closed ecosystem. And I think Stitcher, this is one of the funny things when people freaked out about mid-roll buying Stitcher is they were saying, they were sort of applying Stitcher's mindset to mid-roll. And I think what happened is rather the reverse, which is Midroll came in there and said, yeah, don't take all that closed stuff out and just open it back up. Because Midroll, in all my conversations with Lex, is a champion of the open podcast ecosystem.

And they like that. And they are fine with that. And Stitcher is not an attempt for them to create a closed ecosystem around Stitcher. So Stitcher is just a podcast app now it's good to him yeah yeah oh lex by the way uh he got a promotion he's now like the chief revenue officer at the mid-roll so i think he and they got a new their ceo left so they got a new ceo in it and and uh who's a longtime mid-roll person and then lex has now got got a promotion so congratulations lex i think he's not so big yet in this industry

that he wouldn't come back sometime to talk podcast economics. So I'd like to do that sometime down the road when we think the time is right for him and for us because this is a rapidly changing business. And we got some good feedback about that. I don't want to overdo it. This is not a show about the podcasting industry, but every now and then as this kind of window into what's going on,

I'm kind of fascinated by it. So I'd like to be able to do that every now and then. And another related note, Midroll is actually, I think, the prime mover behind this podcast festival that they're doing. It's in Southern California in Anaheim, Orange County. The weekend of October 29th, there are about 30 different podcasts that are going to be performing live at this festival, including The Incomparable. We will have a pretty – it's looking like a bunch of people from The Incomparable are going to be there. So if you like that podcast, my podcast, or other, there's some other amazing podcasts. Hello from the Magic Tavern is going to be there, which is really exciting for me because I love that podcast.

Anyway, it's called Now Hear This, like, huh? Listen? Anyway, so you can go to now to now hear this fast.com if you're interested in that that's the weekend of october 29th you can come and see us on the 29th we'll be performing live in anaheim awesome i'll put a link in the show notes what are you going to be doing remains to be seen might be a regular incomparable episode might be a weird mashup kind of game show draft something depends on who's there um the slot is 90 minutes i think um so we could just do a regular episode but i kind of kind of would like to make it a little bit wackier than that at macworld expo we often did drafts and i like those we did like the computer draft once at macworld expo live and that was fun so um i'm still figuring it out and

it really does usually with with The Incomparable, you pick a topic and then people say if they want to be there. But in this case, basically people are saying if they can come to Anaheim and then I'm going to have a list of who's going to be there.

And trying to pick something that everybody can participate in will be a little bit of a trick. But we're figuring it out. Yeah, yeah, it should be fun. It's not the first time we've done it. We're not going to do like a radio theater performance, I think.

I think that's not what the intent is here. I think it's going to be something else, but it should be fun. Oh, one other piece of follow-up for you. Are you ready? I tweeted about this this week that there's nothing... One of the fascinating things about podcasting is, and you actually get to find out when people listen to your podcast, is you say something wrong, and then throughout the week,

people helpfully tell you that you got it wrong. And so we posted that episode, what, Sunday night, Sunday afternoon. And from then through this morning, I have been getting notes from people about how I said something wrong sitting in an Airbnb in Portland, Oregon last Sunday. I expect it will still continue past today. I expect because yes,

because some people don't listen in the first week. They listen later. So this will continue. But now I can actually follow up and stop the flow of, at least from listeners who have listened to episode 107, as well as 106.

I said there was no now playing app in watchOS 3. And here's the story. In early betas of watchOS 3, there was no now playing app. And I filed a radar about it, a bug ticket with Apple. And they said that's closed as a duplicate.

One of the problems is like, there's a music complication, but if you tap on it, it only shows you the music interface. So if you're playing through a different app like Overcast, that is not helpful. But they added one, they added a now playing app. So it's no longer swipe up to the control center and be able to control what's playing on your iPhone, essentially, to your headphones. But an app lives in the dock. When audio is playing through your iPhone, it lives in the watch dock. You can keep it there, and I think it comes and goes as you're playing.

But it does exist. It's not as well integrated as I would like. I would especially like a complication actually that lets me quick access it or have it be part of the control center like swipe swipe up and then swipe right or left like like you do on the iphone in order to get that control but it is there and uh and i i said that it wasn't there and they did actually add that in like beta 3 or beta 4 of watch os 3 and uh and so it does exist and i said it didn't exist at all yeah it would be really good if uh it was maybe contextually aware in some way you know like when

i'm listening right something on my iphone like it knows and can do something a little bit more um a little bit more clever than what it does right now because accessing the now playing thing even when it's in a dock is not always the easiest thing to do because sometimes I'm swiping all the way to one side or something because I was just in an application so it's now on the end of the dock so I'm happy that it's there because if it wasn't there that would have been a real disappointment

but it's nowhere near as easy to get to those controls as it used to be and that's how I described it is that it's nowhere near as easy to get to those controls as it used to be. No, and that's how I described it, right, is that even on watchOS 2, this is one of the only regressions, but it's one I use, and when we talked about how the AirPods have no controls, really, this was one of the options. That was the context of that conversation, is, yeah, but if you've got an Apple Watch,

you actually have some controls for your playback on your wrist that you can use. Which, you know, it's not a solution to say you don't have an Apple Watch and you're having trouble with your AirPods, you should buy an Apple Watch. That's a little bit silly. But if you have an Apple Watch and you get AirPods or even other wireless headphones like the ones that I use, it's a way you could do it. headphones like the ones that i use um it's a way you could do it but on the old os i could swipe up and and literally like spin um the crown to change the volume or swipe up and tap to pause or go forward or back and now i have to tap to bring up the dock and then tap on the now playing app and then do my motion and it's just it's it's a little more fiddly and if it's not if it's not right visible in the dock you have to move to that one in the dock and tap

on it and it's one of those things that um i i'm glad that it's there uh but it still feels like it could be contextually like you said a little bit quicker access would be nice because i think this is actually a big feature that's only going to get bigger as people use uh airpods because a lot of a lot of apple watch people will probably get airpods and the apple watch is a great remote for airpods that gives you more control but it's not maybe as good as it could be that was like my my thinking would be like oh you know the fact that there isn't playback controls on the airpods is, but I can use my watch. I always have my watch on. It's like, yeah, I can still do that, but it'd be way better if it was super easy for me to access still, but it's not. That's a shame. Yeah. I want to talk about Samsung again. There was a really interesting article that I saw today from Bloomberg Technology about the battery problem that they're having.

And it kind of went into a little bit more detail from some anonymous sources as to why it happened. So, of course, take it with a grain of salt. It's anonymous sources, but Bloomberg has a pretty good track record. And I'm sure they know we speak about whenever we talk about any of the german reports they do a lot of work to try and make sure they're doing these things right they talk to a lot of analysts they're really kind of clued into this stuff so basically what um bloomberg is saying that they've heard is that samsung really rushed the note 7 to be out before the iphone because they had heard what was coming in the

iPhone. And because there was no device like hardware design changes, they wanted to get their product out quickly because it had some really interesting things and is incredibly good looking. The Note 7, in my opinion, the Note 7 and the Galaxy S7, I think it's called now, are the best looking phones on the market today. I think they are fantastic. I love the way the screens go edge to edge, especially on the ones where they wrap around to the point where you can get a phone

with the size of a plus, like a seven plus. You can get the screen size of that, but in the form factor of a seven. I think it's amazing. I really hope that Apple take a clue out of Samsung's book now and actually try and make something that looks a little bit more like these than what we have right now.

Because that is an incredible design. The edge to edge. Anyway, so they wanted to try and push it out so they would be out before Apple. So they shortened all their timelines, they shortened all their deadlines, they pushed a lot on their suppliers, they pushed a lot on their people. They were talking about people sleeping in their offices and stuff like that,

because they wanted to take all these risks to try and make sure that they could be out up front. This ultimately resulted in the phone not being completely designed correctly from a technical perspective and not adequately tested. And for as much as you can tell, there seems to be maybe two potential reasons as to why this may have happened. It may have been that the battery was too big for the housing and was causing some heat issues. And or the increased power from the battery, because they went from a, I think, a 3000 to 3500 milliamp hour battery. It was too powerful for the farm. So it was one of basically there are two schools of thought right now as to what exactly happened. But the idea of the fact that they rushed it is the overriding reason as to why this problem occurred.

So I think this is clearly a bad decision in hindsight, but you can totally see why they did it. From a business perspective, this was a risk that you would take. This was a gamble that they took, and now they're hurting from it. And honestly, I hope that they're able to recover from it because Samsung are doing really interesting stuff and Apple needs good competition. Oh, I'm sure they're going to be able to recover, but it's going to hurt them. Yeah. I mean, like recover quickly, right? They will obviously recover, but like, you know, the fact that the next phone that they release... They miss a cycle right yeah exactly and the next phone there might

be some skepticism and i mean there'll be residual problems for them i mean there's no doubt but i'm sure they'll come back you're right it's a gamble i think that's a good way to put it is the question is the level of arrogance going on here like did they really believe that they could just push it and it would be fine or did they i doubt they actually thought well let's do this really fast and hopefully we'll come up with a phone the chances are pretty good that our phone won't explode that's probably not what they thought no that thought never entered their mind right they were just like we know we can do this stuff let's just do it quicker so i maybe this comes from me following apple for years but i look at this story and the one thing that i keep that tickles the back of my head is i feel like one of the problems with samsung is that

they are i mean they always talked about being a fast follower right this is part of their their their culture and i see it here it's like samsung seems to define itself by its competition and in terms of the smartphone market by Apple. And we saw that early on where they just aped Apple stuff. And now you're absolutely right. They have pushed some stuff ahead. The entire Note line, which was a joke at the beginning, but proved to be find a market that people wanted those large phones. And everybody thought that that was, everybody else was following Apple and they went beyond. They did phones of all sorts of

different sizes. They learned a lot and they found that the phablet category was a real thing and that people wanted those big phones. So full credit to them that this is not all that they do. But sometimes I think maybe Samsung's culture is a little bit too focused on Apple and you could argue, look, Apple's number one. Of course you want to take on number one and you want to strategize about how you can beat Apple. On another level, I think, you know what? There's a lot of smartphones being sold. Samsung is the leading Android smartphone vendor.

It's basically Samsung and Apple. And Samsung is taking, you know, Apple's got the market of people who want Apple and Samsung's got the biggest chunk of the market of people who want apple and samsung's got the the biggest chunk of the market of people who don't want apple stuff they want android stuff and i don't know at what point do you say we should our stuff should stand on its own and we can beat apple like it's not like apple um i think that was what they were saying though right they believed that they could so they wanted to get it out before them to show how that apple's phone is going to be kind of boring and that this is an opportunity for us to really punch apple in the face by

rushing out a product a month a month before they make their announcement we don't know that apple doesn't do this stuff right like there is a perception of them as the perfect corporate company but i think that the new phone shows some interesting decisions of them as a business sure that makes decisions of course they're a business that makes decisions but i guess part of it is apple still you know just comes out with an iphone in the fall yeah but maybe the plus was a little bit early right because they didn't have all the features for it and so what what i guess what i'm saying is is maybe a little bit of never let them see you sweat and a little bit of if you're – one of the business parables is that Coke's slogan for its company was, for internally, was, you know, our company goal is continue to be the number one soft drink company in the world. And Pepsi's was beat Coke.

And you could argue that, that, that if you're number two, focusing on beating number one should be what your company is all about. But you could also make the argument that focusing on being on beating your competition and being number one is not necessarily the same as focusing on making a good product and doing what you're best at and letting the market come around to the fact that you are producing a better product and that's that's all i'm saying here is i get a little bit of a tickle when i look at this

story the bloomberg story of like come on samsung you're doing really well you've got innovative stuff you've come a long way in the last few years why make a bet like this is it did you really need to be out a month before the iphone i mean maybe maybe so but i just kind of don't think it's worth it's worth that i think they're i could see like lg doing it or something right where they're like oh man we got to do this or huawei or something like we got we got to get noticed we got to get out there but this is samsung did they really need to do this and it bit him and it's too bad but um it is a fascinating story and i just i just had that

moment of i'm sure apple is very competitive on the inside but on the outside they're like we're just grinding we're never gonna let them see a sweat we're just gonna put out a product here's our product and yeah they don't let it show anymore they had they had a time where they would like throw jabs at people but luckily that's kind of stopped now which i like yeah you know like they didn't mention samsung on stage right samsung mentioned apple on stage where nothing had happened right saying about the headphone jack but apple just like keeps it to themselves like and how perfect it is right to say your phone's catch on fire but they just kept their mouth closed which

i think is the right way to go yeah because it could be them next time i mean and google will stop doing a lot of that as well there was a time where every google i o keynote was just how many apple jokes can we string together but that's all stopped now so i don't think it's the better way to be let's be classy you know let's just be classy um let's talk about the upgrade program which is not this uh it's the iphone upgrade program yeah i you yeah i saw this in the notes the upgrade program welcome everyone welcome to the upgrade program on BBC Radio 4. There has been some follow-up and some interesting occurrences with the iPhone upgrade program. So after last week's episode, it seems like Apple started to get their stuff together.

You know, we were talking about people trying to go who were part of the upgrade program, couldn't get their phones, which was like a what is going on? You know, as we were saying, in the back of your mind, you expect you kind of have a phone guaranteed but they was like well no you have to wait like everybody else or maybe even longer now many people wrote in to say that after a week they're getting some emails from apple blah blah blah like saying to call them many people i heard from spent over two hours on the phone with apple support but it seemed like every interaction on the phone with Apple support, but it seemed like every interaction ended up being positive.

So the two hours on the phone, I don't think you can blame Apple for this. This was like a day or two after they announced a new iPhone. Like this is what happens. Like after the iPhones went on sale, like this is just people calling up to try and find out if there's stock

to try and find out X, to try and find out Y. Like that's what's going to happen. There's no like amount of staffing that they could put on to fix this problem like this is just how it's going to be right you could never get people adequately trained enough to deal with two weeks of high call support volume and then go away now see what they apple have learned now for next year is okay how do we avoid letting people be on the phone for two hours you know way because they seem to have for many people at least solve the issue avoid letting people be on the phone for two hours? Indeed. Because they seem to have, for many people at least,

solved the issue by speaking to people on the phone, finding some stock for them, telling them, we're going to set you a reservation for this local store, maybe not the one you thought about. We're going to have a phone for you waiting there. And there has also been some reports that Apple then started holding back some phones for these people. So now, like a lot of people who said that

their phones were going to be shipping in october they're now shipping now because they sorted everyone on the upgrade program out so it seems like apple jumped on this because they were surprised by it is how it seems but it looks like that they have got it kind of sorted out but i would i would expect next year there's going to be a lot more communication and a much better flow for these customers. Yeah. Like one of the people that wrote in to us was Upgrading and Casey, not Mr. Liss.

And Casey said that he was on the phone for two hours. I saw some friends who were doing it, and they were on the phone for two hours. And talking about two hours, actually, I went to the Apple store to pick up my phone. And the lady said to me, you're not doing the Upgrade program, are you? And I was like, really worried about it. I was it i was like no no i'm just buying outright and she's like oh good because it's been down all morning and it was 8 30 at this point so her previous customer like the store opened at 8 her previous customer got completely broke and then i was seeing people that i know and talking to people from the uk saying who has spent like three hours in the store

trying to get their phones on the upgrade program the system just completely died oh which reminds me of the first iphone so when i tried to buy the first iphone in the uk they were doing card transactions only no cash to stop scalping and i was third in line my brother had left school at three o'clock he went to stand in line for me i left work at five i went and met him i stood in line i was in the store for an hour and a half because this is a car phone warehouse it was like a chain of uh right like phone stores it's a phone store and they were the only ones selling it at that point i don't know why we didn't have them in the apple stores but it was only a car phone warehouse and uh all this network complete network across

the country went down so they were like you're just gonna have to get cash so everybody was going out to the cash machines and just giving them like 600 pounds in cash and taking the phones and they're like you're gonna have to activate it at home it was amazing they were just like there's nothing we can do we have this line of like 100 people and we can't even serve customer number one it was it was insane nobody expected it this had never happened before right that people were lining up for a phone so their systems couldn't deal with all of these transactions because they went on sale at 602 in the in the evening which ended up being like a thing that stuck for a few years because the network 02 were the exclusive

carrier of the iphone uh so they put them all on sale at two minutes past the hour also apple realized that perhaps not having all the iphones in the world start activating at exactly the same moment was probably a good idea yeah so instead it was it became a rolling like local time in the morning you could get your phone instead of it being but that first one yeah well we'll talk about that jason yeah yeah it's true well so i wanted to say so it's the first year of the upgrade program being having the upgrades happen and i think you're exactly right that that as we talked about last week a little bit this is the opportunity for apple to say okay how do we minimize people on the phone how do we get people's orders in early

you know we know these people are going to want a new phone. We should ask them what model they want. As soon as we announce the new iPhone, we should say, hey, the new iPhone's coming. If you want to upgrade, go to this page, choose your model. We'll tell you when you're going to get it, having all that. And I'm sure they're going to do that. It's just a matter of that this will be a learning process from them. And I also wanted to mention, talk about that podcast effect of saying things and then seeing what happens and getting the feedback. It did seem to start changing right after we talked about it. Like Monday morning, it seems like Apple kind of had a strategy shift with the upgrade people to make it right with them a little bit more. on Sunday we got feedback from people as they were getting as they were hearing from their upgrade people including Casey but a bunch of other people too and that was kind of cool to see because they were all saying the same thing which is Apple is working on making this better

than I thought it was last week right which is which is a good sign again it's sort of damage control and trying to fix what was broken. But this all leads into hopefully a much streamlined upgrade program next year. We'll hope so. All right. After this break, upgrade iPhone review time. So excited. This week's episode is brought to you by Text Expander from Smile. Text Expander puts the power, the amazing power of text shortcuts in the palm of your

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Go to smilesoftware.com slash upgrade for more information. Thank you so much to Smile for their support of this show. All right, Mr. Snell. So. Yes, sir. You have put together a great iPhone review, which people should go and read.

I did say to you privately, and I'll say it here again, this is my favorite that I read. Aww. I thought it was really good. What can I say? Captured by that Snell charm. You get me every time. Yes, of course Snell charm. You get me every time. Yes, of course. Famous.

You get me every time. So there's a lot here. Now, if you will so permit me, I would like to run through my kind of thoughts and feelings about the iPhone. Denied. No, I'm not going to permit you. Well, I'm going to do it anyway. Okay, fine.

And then you can kind of chip in with your thoughts as well because people i'm sure everyone that's listened to this show has either already read your iphone review or pause the show to go and read it right now i'm sure right so this is my place this is where i talk about my feelings about the iphone and i have many i am interested in your feelings about the iphone so i want to preface this i don't usually do. So I want to preface this. I don't usually do this, but I want to preface this review. This is an opening statement you're making. I have an opening statement. Oh boy. Here we go. I love my seven plus. I think the iPhone seven plus is a great phone and I'm very happy that I made the upgrade. Um, I recommend it to many people that listen to the show. Like if you are a technology focused person like we are,

I recommend it because you're going to get a lot out of this device. But there are some interesting decisions and things that have happened to this phone that I think need to be in some parts praised and some parts criticized in equal measure. Even some one decisions need to be praised and criticized so i want to do all of that i want to talk about all of that i also have uh documented the entire setup process so i can go through that again like we did last time is that okay yeah uh yeah what do you think about my opening statement i i think i think that you're saying nice things about it because you were about to say all the things that you found that are wrong with it.

But that's fine. I'm also going to talk about all the things that I like. Okay. But I have a lot of things that I think are really strange. And I don't want people to think that I'm just ragging on the phone until I get to the end. You know?

So I want to just talk about everything that I've found about it. So first off, I have the gold phone. But they had some demo units of the seven um in both of the black models uh in the store they didn't have any pluses because that was the thing there were no pluses available for to buy anywhere interesting they didn't even in the in the store have the black uh demo units for the plus just Just the 7s, just the regular size. Seems like either it's a combination

of the Plus being more popular and maybe them not making enough. I don't know. But there seems to have... They're severely supply constrained here. So, yeah. I saw both of them. Now, this is 8.30 in the morning. The store had been open for 30 minutes. They were both covered in

fingerprints. Like, just covered. i i didn't like it uh i prefer the matte black out of the two of them um i will call it matte black forever by the way because you can't call something black and jet black like you have to give the black one another name right called soft matte cook soft matte black i preferred that the two of them because to me i know everybody loved the jet black the jet black just looks like the 3gs it just looks like shiny plastic and i don't like that look it does it there is no doubt it reminded me of the 3g and the 3gs that that except that that is that big plastic curved back and this is this you know super shiny but flat back but material like the way the materials look it just looks like there's this like covering of plastic over the top of it it's

very strange looking but i can also i also can see why people love it because it really does look just like it's made out of one thing it looks like when it's off it's just a stone this is the the what i what i wrote in my review is this is I believe, the Johnny Ive dream that he's been working towards since the original iPhone, which is curved edges, slab, one material all the way around, as if it's just a single unbroken surface. Because there are antenna lines, but you can basically not see them. There are antenna lines, but you can basically not see them. And when the screen is off, the glass in the front and the material in the back looks essentially the same. So you know what I want?

I want a white ceramic all the way around, you know? But it won't be because the screen will still be black. That's why this is – I heard John Syracuse talking about this on ATP. I don't like white front iOS devices because the screen's black. And when the screen does come on, you're now competing with the white of the material of the frame with the white on the screen. And I don't think that's a great comparison either. So I always have preferred black framed iOS devices. I like the Jet Black a lot. I like the matte black too.

If they made the matte black only, I would be beside myself about that design because I think it looks great. But I think the Jet Black is great too. I actually kind of like, prefer the Jet Black in terms of fingerprints because although it's got fingerprints, I also feel like I can just sort of wipe it off.

And it's got the oleophobic coating on the back there and, and they, they wipe off pretty well. Whereas when I try to wipe off the back of the, of the, the, the matte black, which I also have that, those are my two review units or were both different blacks. The, um, that one, it just smudges. So I actually think it looks worse, um, with fingerprints on it than the than the the jet black does um and i i anyway i think it's sort of like the the ultimate johnny ive design he's been going for this since the beginning i said in my review that it sort of makes the uh original iphone look like clown pants because if you look at it's like there's sort of like the black bottom of the back and the silver top of the black of the back, and it's got the glass front, and then it's got the like shiny chrome frame around it. It's like all these different materials.

It's like, how many can we fit in here? Well, and you know that that was just, you know, that chrome frame, there's no way that Johnny Ive was really happy about that because it doesn't match anything else, but it's like, yeah, well, that's what we got to do, so we're going to do it. And this is his thing. So it's not for everybody, but it does feel that way. And I would also say people were talking about grippiness and

I was trying to imagine like, how could the jet black model be grippier? It doesn't make any sense, but because it's not that, um, it's this polished, uh, covering instead of the, uh, the sort of traditional, uh, rougher anodized aluminum. And what you get is that effect if you've got a slightly damp finger, and our fingers generally are a little bit damp. That's how people are. And you run it on a pane of glass, you know how it sort of sticks a little bit? Or if you pull it hard, you can actually make the glass like squeak.

It's that effect that's happening. It's so smooth on the back that it actually sort of like grabs onto your fingertip and the moisture in your fingertip as you move. And so it is absolutely grippier. I have been using this since I got it without a case, which I never did for my 6 and my 6S. And that's been a lot of fun because it's a way better product out of the case and I feel much more confident about holding on to it than I do with the normal anodized backs of the other phones. Yeah, I always keep my phone in a case. So, you know, the special black back.

So it could be any color, really. Exactly. So for me, I like the gold and the rose gold because I like the accent colors. So, like, I have it in a nice blue case and I get the gold and the rose gold because I like the accent colors. So I have it in a nice blue case, and I get the gold Touch ID ring. I see a bit of gold at the bottom, a bit of gold at the back and the side. I like that more. It's got a little bit more of the flair that I'm looking for, just not too much. It's not ostentatious.

It's just a little bit, and you can match it with the case, and I like that. So that's why I go for the colors these days. I really wished that they would maybe give me a black one. I'd to try you know black and gold see what that looks like or black or just all of one color give me blue red pink even just you know let's mix it up but anyway um it is very they are very good looking i can see that and i appreciate that they're just not i just don't think they're my preference which is fine that's why they make a bunch of them um whilst we're on kind of hardware something that immediately got me the sim tray is super hard to open now because it has a seal on it genius right of course it does everything needs to be sealed up because of the

water yeah i felt like the um i had a a paper clip that i usually use to pop the sim tray out because i so let's talk about this for one second because I keep hearing this from my friends. Every iPhone I have ever received has a SIM tool in it. Yeah, that doesn't happen in the US when you buy a locked phone. Right, see, because ours are basically all unlocked to a point. So there's always

a SIM. Every time I've ever bought an iPhone, now this may have changed recently, but when I bought them even from carriers, the box always had the little SIM removal tool in it weird yeah weird yeah so i and i have some around but you know you can never find one when you need one but anyway my point is that the the paper clip i used didn't fit so i had to find something else because it was i think i feel i think the hole is a little bit smaller too on top of everything else and it was harder to pop it out for sure i feel like i should gray market these things i have so many of them right jason yes mike you

remember love from last year we it's it's perhaps our you know i would say maybe our most notable episode that we've ever done i thought we really nailed it and we really kind of, and people reacted well to it. And it was our discussion of this act of buying a new iPhone and getting it going, which should be a joy. You just spent a lot of money on a fancy new iPhone. The next steps, what happens next and how does it go? And we said last year that it felt like Apple needed to tighten up its game on this a lot. That it was not a fun experience to get your iPhone set up. It was more like something to be endured. Yeah.

I think it was like two episodes in total, but the one where we actually kind of really went into it was episode 56 called The Migration Experience, which is a great name for that episode, where we just spoke about how hard it is and how hard it's become to set up an iPhone for many different reasons. And it's because over time,

Apple are adding more and more and more to this stuff. And Apple's kind of way of not syncing a lot of these things with iCloud because of security, whilst they're great for our security, does add a lot to this process. So what I did this time was I wrote down every step that i had to take to get my phone set up so the first thing that i did was backed up my old phone on

itunes with an encrypted backup because this is what saves the passwords now i've seen some people talking about this i don't know if this is confirmed. That iCloud backups are now encrypted, so they will save passwords. But I do this stuff over iTunes because I don't have the best internet connection, so I want to try and make sure I get everything possible quickly. So I backed it all up, turned on the new phone. I had to enter my Wi-Fi information. I had to then set up Touch touch id which you can only do the one thing for so you then have to go and set up later the rest of your fingers which is fine

then i set up a passcode then i restored from backup so that takes however long that takes let's say 30 minutes uh then i had to set up apple pay again so i had to enter in some of the information from my card get a text message i had to enter in a code yeah then i had to i was thinking to myself it popped into my head what do i do with my apple watch and i couldn't quite remember so i decided to go for it and just unpaired my apple watch from my old phone which takes quite a while to do because the whole time i'm thinking like do i back this up like i can't see an option to back this up right and the unpairing backs it up i believe which is not said anywhere like you know i know what they're trying to do i know what they're trying to do they're trying to make it a seamless experience but just

one line that says unpair and back up like that's all it has to say. Because you don't know what you're doing. You're like entering an abyss. I am surprised that the Apple Watch backup transfer thing has not gotten better this year. I guess they were really working on watchOS 3 and that was the priority and probably should be because that's the experience that you have every day but i'm a little surprised that it still is a big pain to move your apple watch when you buy a new iphone but there it is so that's what you do you unpair it it backs it it up i think that the process is totally fine like what happens like you unpair backs up and then you set it up with the new one restore it from a backup right which is going to iCloud. But it doesn't tell you. And I don't think that it is like a thing that you just assume is going

to work, right? Because that's not how any other devices work. Because it's so intrinsically tied to the phone. You know, it's just the whole thing is frustrating. So I did it, I unpaired my Apple Watch, it was going in the background. Then you have to set up the home button. Now you choose your customization for how forcefully it hits you back when you click it. Then my phone is ready. It unlocks and I'm waiting for apps to download. This drives me crazy. This drives me crazy. Why am I backing up the phone and then downloading applications again? Why can I not just do a complete backup to itunes and then put it all back again like why can't i do that i don't know why a backup means then download all of your apps from the store again like the data is kept but the apps are downloaded and like in a world with

super fast internet connections this isn't a problem but this isn't the life for everyone and also like there are problems i'll get into in a minute which make this a terrible solution for iphone launch day i don't know why they do this right it's funny too because i think there's some inconsistency here which is when i uh attached my iphone to my uh my mac and and tried to back it up on itunes what it told me and i had an iCloud backup but i thought i would try it this way too and it gave me the there are some there's some content on your device that isn't in your itunes library i i need to sync that back before i do the backup and i thought don't i don't want to sync my phone with my itunes i just want you to make a backup yeah and and i i gave up if i'm remembering

correctly the the ability to back up apps and then re-download apps to itunes changed last year didn't it this was part of the big problem it's like they always download from the store now right the argument is that if you're um if they're doing that space saving thing where it's actually dynamically giving you a different binary based on what your phone is. Then if you're, if you're upgrading from an iPhone five to an iPhone seven, you're going to get a different version of that app. They can't just pull down the binary from the five and push it to the seven. Um, so they're, they're embracing the cloud for that reason and fair enough. But as, will get to um the challenge then is you've got a lot of devices trying to download items from the app store immediately upon getting the new phone

so they better they better well download and um that is where i got stuck that that was that was the problem is that i had some confusion and i think i ended up like logging out of the app store in settings and then logging back in. And that seemed to kind of, and then at some point I restarted and it seemed to get it to life. But I had a long period of time where all of my apps were basically paused or waiting to download and didn't download. Yeah, after a little while, I started getting a bunch of app install errors.

Like this app couldn't be installed, retry and you'd retry it and it would fail again and fail again. So that was while, I started getting a bunch of app install errors, like this app couldn't be installed. Retry, and you'd retry it, and it would fail again and fail again. So that was the thing I was dealing with. That was popping up randomly. Some apps were installing, some weren't. Then I tried to set up my Apple Watch again in the Apple Watch app, and it got stuck on the terms and conditions screen for like five minutes. It was just spinning, spinning, spinning.

I had no idea what was happening. I quit the app, did it again, and then it just starts pairing. It's like, hey, watch and still i'm like am i have i done this wrong i have no idea if i've done this wrong um and then it ended up like after a while the apple watch set up and everything was there i had to like set up some stuff again like it seemed like the watch os 3 plus application stuff like a bunch of complications got knocked off like until the apps were updated but like that was like whatever but the whole process with the apple watch was frustrating because at no point during this like one hour process i had any idea if i'd done it

right until it opened up and they'd done it right again i i still don't have apple pay on my watch because an error occurred while setting up apple pay is what I get every time I try to add the card that's on my phone. And I can't even take action. It's just an error occurred, and that's been occurring since I put it on there. I have no idea why. So after dealing with my Apple Watch and all the install errors, I set up all my other fingers for Touch ID.

And then... I like that we live in a world where you have to set up fingers. That's interesting. Just go through and do all of that again yeah and then at a certain point all applications stopped installing um so this is i i started doing this pretty early in the day right so i'm back at home doing this at like 9 30 in the morning so by this point like when i started so by this point i'm getting close to 11 a.m this is when I assume lots of people start getting their phones around Europe and stuff like that. So this is just when the

App Store just starts to fail. And then, after a while, a bunch of apps didn't install and their icons disappeared. So this happened last year as well. So I then had to do like an inventory of my old phone to my new phone and work out which apps hadn't installed.

Then I had to download all my Apple Music again. Yeah. So this was my setup process. It ends with me looking at both of my phones and choosing which applications the phone

has decided not to download and then downloading my Apple Music. So I will say overall this was still very complicated and annoying but nowhere near as bad as last year and i think there's a couple of reasons for this yeah i was going to say i you i ended up ultimately restoring from icloud and the encrypted icloud backup so the number of passwords i had to re-enter was so much less than back when they weren't encrypting the iCloud backups and i have to i have to applaud them for that i was so frustrated by the attempt to iTunes backup because it wanted to pull content off of my phone and put it on my in in iTunes just like i don't do i don't play that game i don't want to i don't want to have apps ios apps on my mac i'm not

interested in having them present there just Just do a little backup file, you know, encrypted backup file with all my stuff in it. And that failed. But the iCloud backup, yeah, was so much speedier because all of that data transferred. But it's, you know, the issue is the App Store on this day cannot handle these people coming to it. It's the same as the two-hour wait thing, right? Yeah, and this is one of those cases where Apple just needs this. If this is unavoidable,

which it may be because of the way they set up the app downloading system, if it's unavoidable, then they need to really work on handling demand because it's not a surprise that there's a huge amount of iPhone demand. And I know that it's very difficult to scale for the one or two days

where you need vastly more than you need the rest of the year. But this is the biggest product at your company and the biggest product in some ways in the world. You gotta make the onboarding experience good for everybody. uh product at your company and the biggest product in some ways in the world uh you gotta you gotta make the onboarding experience good for everybody and that means meeting that means meeting this demand so it feels like this was the number one problem with this is apple services were really shaky that day i mean i apple music stopped working at one point on my mac and and a bunch

of people saw this where it was like i haven haven't been able, there's a really annoying dialogue that comes up in iTunes, which is very unfriendly and un-Mac-like, which is something like, I haven't been able to connect to Apple Music for the last 20 seconds or something like that. Okay. Okay. Alert, alert. You're stealing music. You're stealing music. You might be. We don't know. I don't know where i am i'm confused so this is the thing is clearly lots of things bad that were bad were happening to apple server infrastructure on iphone day this is not a surprise though right so that's the challenge for apple is how how do we uh either increase our server capacity so this doesn't happen or change the way we handle the upgrade experience to get some of the load off of our servers and that might be something like having your backup contain apps

and only restore them you know restore the ones that are compatible via app thinning and the ones that aren't you mark them as you need to redownload this or i don't know right i mean but are there things that that they can change in the backup process or the upgrade process that that lighten the load on the servers? That's one strategy. And another strategy in addition to that probably is how do we make the server server stay up? How are we hitting the servers? How do we keep them up? Do we need to increase capacity temporarily, but clearly they need to do some more work here because they just can't it's it's a on day one it's a bad experience and i know yeah okay day three it's not so bad

necessarily but here's the thing like we were talking about last week with the upgrade customers and and actually there was a people had to do a uh who went to the 10-0 update on their old devices on day one this also happened after last week's show in the first hour ended up with a phone that needed to be attached to a computer in order to complete the update because there was something wrong we haven't even mentioned that little part of it but it's the same thing which is yeah you fixed it after the first hour but who was the who's downloading at hour one your biggest fans your your most excited customers and this is the same about iphone day one which is iphone day one is the people who are the most excited customers and this is the same about iphone day one which is iphone day one is the people who are the most excited and you need to have that be a good

experience and it just is you know the server stuff just isn't isn't uh isn't there yet nope and it's a shame it's a real shame yeah yeah because i mean i as a fairly sophisticated iphone user i ended up in that same position which is is, it's like a mystery. It's like, what do I do when I have screens full of apps that are sitting there at waiting for hours? What do I do? How do I approach this? out of the app store i locked back into the app store which is you know settings uh you know app store tap on your apple id sign out sign back in i did all of that stuff and eventually it it just sort of went and but even then it took time and something stalled out and came back later and it's just not great because you know your phone is the apps are very important to a phone and they weren't uh they were stalled it was it was uh too bad it's really weird that you had these issues as well because this was just random

day for you right you were a couple of days before but there was still issues so that's true that's true i i did experience a lot of these issues not on the friday but on the wednesday yeah but like i gotta say overall it was better and i don't know why maybe that there weren't as many problems maybe i was used to it maybe my expectations were different for how it was going to be this time around but it was better than last year but it's still not great i really believe the encrypted backup thing does eliminate a whole slice of complaints that we had the last yeah but i did that last year though with itunes all right so like the thing is like the data is all there like even on the applications i had to re-download from the store after they failed,

the data was still there. It's just sitting in the iPhone somewhere until you re-download the application again. It's the whole app. Is it app slicing, they call it? You were mentioning earlier. I think that's what it is. App thinning? One of those things.

Isn't it app thinning? Yeah, thinning, slicing. And slicing? It might be both. Chopping it up, dicing. Yeah, that's it. It thinning one of those things yeah thinning slicing and slicing it might be chopping it up dicing yeah that's it it's app app dicing app thinning and resource slicing see we're both right app dicing uh like i i gave apple some slack earlier about the two hour wait times right and saying like what are you going to do because that's a people problem yeah this is a technology problem this is just having more robust technology and

this just costs money and apple has all of it so have some extra servers that come online i know that's such like a layman's way of saying it but that's that's the way i look at it right it's like you can fix this by throwing more money at this and quite quite frankly, you have all the money. So make it better. So I've got some thoughts about the UI of this too that I'm kind of confused about, which is, and I'm sure, this is my standard disclaimer for Apple stuff, but it's like, I'm sure these conversations

happen inside Apple, but let's just bring it out and talk about it here because inside Apple, conversations stay inside Apple. Is the restore process, is the UI for the restore process right i mean it's better it felt like less screens than last time i gotta say but it's still like a nightmare of stuff there's a lot of there's a lot of questions you have to ask uh and and and you know how how how vibratey do you want the home button to be and things like that that

that are in there but um so the app so then you get to the home screen it's restoring and it's got to restore all those apps is that the right way to do that would they be would you be better off having uh having a restore screen that is a progress bar so your phone is basically unusable or a or or a different way to display those apps do those apps not appear? Is there instead like a proxy app that says restoring your apps and then as the apps are restored, they pop into view? Would that be less frustrating

than seeing a hundred apps grayed out saying, you know, waiting? I don't know. I wonder if this is not instead of making them download faster, but but in addition is there a way to make it feel less frustrating to but then wouldn't you just think that all your apps were disappeared like you think they all got deleted that's the that's the argument right but you could also i mean you could just lock people out and say please wait while i restore your apps but then you can't

use anything including the stock apple apps which you want to do so this new phone for a thousand dollars and you know it's difficult i don't know this is the thing like i don't purport to have all of the answers because i really don't if i had all of the answers then i probably wouldn't be recording this show with you right now jason i would be solving the problems but like i know my experience as a user and i know it can be better and it goes back to like you know trade offs for security a lot of this stuff is re-entering stuff because they won't sync it and i love that they keep my data secure but it's also frustrating like i don't know what the trade i don't know what the right trade-off is there and frankly i'll let them make that decision but i know that there's like five or six screens in that process

that could just be synced between devices. You could do it locally over Wi-Fi. Like there is a way to do this. But hey-ho. I have so much more to say about this phone, Jason. But I'm done with the setup process now. The phone has been set up. Okay, good, good.

So let's take a break. At last. Okay. This episode is brought to you by AppCare and their new service, AppDoctor. Now, I'm sure that you've all seen the news by now that Apple is going to start removing apps that are no longer being maintained.

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everybody's got at least one or two apps on their phone that are also going to get hit by this because they do this one little thing that we love, but they're old and they haven't been taken care of in a while. Maybe they were made by one guy or one girl in their basement and it's done because it didn't make them any money, but you still use it and love it. There's going to be a ton of apps taken out of the store like this. This is what App Doctor is here to help with. If you have an app, if you've made an app, you're a developer of an application, which you would like to make sure does not get into any of this trouble with the new rules,

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If this is something they cannot bring to life under the new criteria, you will not be charged. So, if you have an app that you want to stay in the store, or work for a company that needs their app fixed you need to check out App Doctor listeners of this show will get 20% off with the coupon code UPGRADE9 that's upgrade and the number 9 to find out more go to appcare.io slash upgrade thank you so much to AppCare for their support of this show

what an interesting service so they're going to help they're going to help out all these developers I hope and keep some of these applications in the store I can see a lot of companies that could find some use out of something like this yeah, people are going to be shocked when their app is kicked out

of the store if this is the type of stuff that you do, like you do contract work this is a great business to set up so go check out App Doctor by AppCare because I think it's uh i think it's kind of very very smart home button now little home button you were not the thing that i was expecting to be so contentious i was expecting headphone jack but i got used to that super quick jason because i use earpods for the majority of my time and i have those i got a little adapter and i'm good that's all fine that's all

taken care of home button i was not expecting to be the way that it is so the first click of the home button that is no bueno i can't imagine anybody who clicks that button for the first time, and I'll say click and button in the biggest air quotes, finds that to be nice. It is a horrifying experience. So remember when I came back from the event and I said that the home button thing didn't work for me, that it felt like it was not quite the right location and it didn't feel good at all.

And that's what you said. That's the no bueno experience right there which is like what is going on here but um but uh one of the things that i discovered is that that was a setting that that home button had been set to a setting that was not the not the strongest setting um so it was a combination of it being kind of a weak vibration and uh and just the initial experience of like whoa this is not what i'm used to with an iphone button that i've been using for the last nine years no i agree with you that setting number three is the correct one it is the most forceful

it is the one that makes it feel like you're actually doing something this is just weird so it takes way more pressure to click the home button the settings of 1, 2 and 3 are not the settings I wanted I wanted those to be pressure settings but they're not, they're just feedback settings right, so how 1, 2 and 3 is just how hard

the Taptic motor goes off you know, I thought it might be like Touch ID where you could have soft and hard presses not Touch ID, 3D Touch. The same on the trackpads, right? You could say how hard it is you want it to be to press. It's not here. So there are some weird things about this.

I feel like when I hit the button, the whole bottom of the phone is being clicked in, is how it feels. Like it's a hinged screen, right? So you hit it, and then the whole bottom of the phone compresses would you agree with that kind of feeling like when you hit that button it feels like everything's moving i don't that's not how it feels to me how it feels to me is like when i press it it's almost like i'm pushing through and i'm feeling because i hold i hold it i've got i'm you know my fingers are uh in behind the phone and my thumb is on the front of the phone and that's how I click it. And it feels to me like I'm pushing through and I'm, and the vibration

is carrying through to the back of my hand. Like the whole, the whole thing is going. So it does, it doesn't feel like the whole phone is, is bending. That's not how I would describe it. And I don't, I don't have any problem with the pressure of it. It seems perfectly reasonable to me. So that, you know, I just think different people react to it differently. So like, and every now and then it's funny, like I was finding them the first day or two, it's kind of worn off now, but I would hit the button, feel the vibration and thought I did something wrong. Like I thought the phone was telling me I made a mistake.

Like it was just getting used to it, right? Yeah. that's i don't feel that anymore like i actually now i've gotten used to it and i take some pleasure in the exaggerated click that it produces like the the feeling is more visceral it's like a you're in the phone like i like it but this is not a better button like it's not a better button and it never will be a better button. And I can't work out the reason why they've done this. If there is a reason, Apple hasn't said that reason. I am sure there are a long list of reasons why they changed the Home button. Some we could see now,

and some maybe will come clear in the future, if all the rumors of the Un unicorn 10 are to be believed. But as of right now, the reason on stage was now it's customizable. So no, nobody needed that. It's like, man, I really wished that this button clicked at different forces. Like this. This is my criticism is like we all talk about this. We're talking about this with a headphone.

Right. We want the story. What is the story of the removal of the headphone jack, right? We got a story. Whether you're happy with that story or not is whatever. But we got a story, right? We're moving to wired. We want to get rid of this old technology.

We have courage. Oh, God. But with the home button, nothing. it's like it's customizable like there's no reason for it because this is look the reason is that it's um it's not moving it's one less place for a watt for water incursion to happen um it's it's it's gonna be one less moving part that is broken that needs to be fixed. There's lots of, they have reasons, right? You're right, they didn't go into them. I'm sure there are a laundry list of reasons, but none of them are like,

here's why you as a customer is going to get a better experience out of this. It's funny that you feel this way i have no problem with it having set it to three i just have i am i have embraced the new home button it's it works just fine i have no problem with it it doesn't bother me at all so i i i i kind of enjoy it actually i'm kind of burying the lead on this a little bit. The reason I have an issue with this is because there are times where the home button doesn't work. I press a button that does nothing. So I noticed this thing

that if the iPhone 7 home button is covered with any kind of material, something is obstructing it, maybe if you're using your fingernail, you're not pressing the phone correctly, there is no click. And there was this whole big thing that happened over the weekend with capacitive gloves will solve your problem, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

My point was never anything about gloves. It was just no sensor connection, no click is what I came to the conclusion of. The Touch ID sensor is now what registers the click being made. You have to make a connection with the Touch ID sensor. So I'm having many times where I'm hitting it and maybe not hitting it properly, and there's no button. Or the reason, when I notice this,

it's something I do all the time. I am laying down on the bed with my phone in my hand, and I'm kind of resting my phone against my chest or my stomach, and I go to press the button, and I'm pressing material material like my t-shirt right like it's just obscuring the button a little bit doesn't work like this is and and as well when you make that connection and nothing happens it feels to me viscerally uncomfortable like you're just jamming your finger or your fingernail into a piece of unmoving glass which is really weird

because you're always doing that. But when it gives you the tap tick, it feels like a button. But when nothing's happening, you just feel like you're just mashing against this piece of glass. So this is my whole thing, right? I feel like the experience that I feel is not as good anymore, because this button is a button that can fail on me. And this was always my problem with the trackpads, right? There are times when it doesn't work on the laptops. My Magic trackpad, never have a problem with it. But every time I use one of the new 15-inch MacBook Pros, I hate the trackpad, because it seems to not work as well for me as the Magic trackpad does. I don't know why. Maybe it's just like whenever I do this, I'm just using Stevens

and I think he uses a different setting to me. But anyway, like I don't like that when it's not set up the way that I like. But I have this button now, which which doesn't work. And it is in times that I want it to. And I find it very frustrating as somebody who's used a phone for nine years, like I'm so used to just like hitting that button and it goes. Like, as I said, like I'm getting used to it like you. When it works, I'm, do you know what? I'm fine with it, right?

Like it is a different experience and I'm fine with it. But it is a button that doesn't have a 100% success rate, which is really weird. Well, I mean, it breaks the spell of the this is no no it's a button it's really a button because it's not and and you you press it in certain circumstances and it doesn't react and you feel like i i just had this the other day with my magic trackpad where it lost connection with my mac yeah and i clicked i clicked on it and nothing moved and it was like right like what that that so that breaks the

illusion and that's that's problematic it's it's it's it's yes that's a thing but i will say it also means stuff like it doesn't accidentally go get pressed in your pocket but nothing happens i've heard people say this when has that ever happened to anyone and then what happens like old siri might go off i've Yeah, I've had that happen. I've had it be pressed in my pocket when I didn't intend for it to be. Absolutely. Your pockets must be pointy. I don't know what's happening with your pockets.

Indeed. Yeah. It's a tough world out there. People are always poking your pockets. I just can't. I mean, I'm sure it might happen, but I just don't see that as like a hooray. And I've never and i've never experienced what you're describing with the seven which is pressing it and and having a thumbnail

not register yeah i mean look this is this is like different ways of operating the button right but like what i'm saying is a categorical fact right that something can obstruct the button the button yeah and i think i actually this came up people were talking about gloves and things like that in the winter time which i don't understand because i love how like i just want to say like just for the weirdest and by the way like if there's steven's going through this whole thing right we're hissing we're going to talk about that on connected as well it's been a weird weekend for us it was just so interesting to see this happen where like i just said something obstructs it the button doesn't work and within an hour everyone was posting articles about got capacitive gloves yeah i never even said that like i i don't care about gloves i'm just

saying it doesn't always work whatever that's all i want to say on that but it is for people who use gloves that was a question and there are some people whose iphone strategy involves being able to push the home button yep for some people it worked and some people it didn't was what i was seeing like exactly right so some capacitive gloves work with it and others didn't it sounds like there's like you've got to hit it a certain way because it is it's trying to get that connection otherwise it won't it won't trigger so it's something that you know if you are somebody who relies on gloves and uses an iphone you've got a set of gloves you should check it out on your seven before there's a really cold day and your fingers freeze or you can't use your phone but it's probably not that big a deal but you might need to buy new gloves which is like you might

i didn't expect i'd need to buy new gloves when i bought my iphone you know it's just the thing like i just find it to be a weird thing yeah i don't know it it it doesn't bother me for me i just accepted it and it works fine and it doesn't bother me at all yeah so for the most most people like it's not going to be a problem but for the people that notice it like me it's a lesser experience right and and you know we talk about all this time all the time on the show the magic of apple right it's why we do this show because we love the things that they make and as people who really obsess over the criminology of this stuff as we do as all of you listeners do as well it's why you'll listen to this show we always talk about the story

of the product right and just as of today the story of this button has not been told and it makes no sense it's weird that they talked about it being customizable as if and i i kept thinking like whoa what does that mean are there certain clicks I can do now? And that, nope. I thought I was going to get like gestures and stuff, you know? Nope. No, nothing. It's just like, oh, how hard does it vibrate? All right.

Sure, Phil. Like, if that's what you need, man, we'll go for that. But let's talk about that Taptic Motor, the thing that is powering it. Because this, I love. Yeah, it's great. This Taptic Motor is pure Apple whimsy. Like, this is what they do so well, right? This is the complete opposite of the button.

And it feels restrained to me. And I'm sure there are people out there who are going to go, ugh, I don't want it to move, my phone to move at all when I do anything on the screen. It's like, okay, well, you should turn off that feature then. And then it won't do that. But I found like- It's a delight. Using Android phones that have,

oftentimes there are these Android interfaces where everything you do vibrates the phone a little bit. And it's like, what is happening every tap? Yeah, it vibrates on the keystrokes and that's too much. You can turn it off, but like Apple didn't do that. It is fairly restrained, but I find it whimsical and delightful do that it is fairly restrained but i find it whimsical and delightful and and yet a little bit restrained like if you reorder you know reordering

a podcast list in overcast and this is not something that that marco arment actually wrote it's just he's using a standard controller when you slide those items around in the list there's a little tick tick tick that you feel as the animation of them sliding around happens and spinning the spinning the date picker spinning the the the timer in the clock app pull to refresh uh when you pull down the notification shade like they all bump on you and something i love rearranging uh iMessage applications as you drag them over each other like tick tick tick i wish that the real apps on the home screen did this as well it's so nice it's like you can feel yourself dragging them over like

this is the genius like this taptic stuff whatever they did is amazing right like it how it tricks you because it's the same with the home button like it tricks me like nothing changes but i feel like something's happening it's it really is brilliant at my uh when i was at apple i saw this app that was um it's a music app and it's like a piano yeah and you run you run your finger over from left to right over the piano on like the seven plus and you can feel your finger going over the keys it's crazy here's the thing right about that do you remember before all this came about it's been going on for years, about Apple were apparently creating a screen that would give feedback.

Do you remember that was the rumor? So it would give you feedback when you touched it in certain areas? Yeah, right. I think this was it. People were just tricked by it. That's the idea. It's definitely like that.

And I mean, there was a Taptic Engine on the 6S for 3D Touch, but they were very clear to me that the Taptic API stuff doesn't work on the 6S for 3D Touch, but they were very clear to me that this is a much... The Taptic API stuff doesn't work on the 6S because they felt like that was... Yeah, they said this is a much more refined and focused Taptic Engine.

They can do a lot more tricks with it. And some of these taps are so light, and they're so fast. Oh, it's just amazing. But I think it's really good. I'm interested to see what third-party developers do with it, but I like that Apple has done this sort of sprinkling across everything. And it's subtle but delightful,

and that is the best when you have features that work like that. I'm with you. I really liked how they integrated haptics into the UI with the Taptic Engine so that it felt like, you know, all that animation they've been putting in over the years with all the different classes that they've got, where it's sort of like you just as a developer, say, make a list here and then reorder it. But it actually, everything slides around. There's so much animation in the UI. And a lot of this Taptic Engine stuff that they're doing seems to be tied

to the animation. So it really does give you that illusion like, well, of course, as this is moving, I can feel it moving. And that, instead of it being just a completely abstract thing, it's something that's happening as part of your gesture or as part of the UI that's leading to the movement. And that makes sense. I also played a game for a minute that uses this,

and that was pretty amazing too. Like you fire a missile. Do you know what this game was called? I don't remember now. I should look it up. But it was like, if you fire a missile do you know what this game was called i don't remember now i should look it up but it was like if you fire a missile and you can feel it go and when it when it explodes you can feel the rumble of the explosion i mean it's not quite at like i'd say it's not at the level of vibration of like a rumble pack in a in a console controller but uh but it's also more detailed than that that's kind of a right the console controllers are sort of like right it's this yeah it's just a blind vibration right this

is this is this is a much more kind of refined uh effect but not as uh not as powerful as something in a console controller but pretty cool so there will be some cool uses of this by third-party apps too and bad there will be bad ones too there'll be terrible ones that will all say what the hell did you just do but that'll that happens i've listened to and read a bunch of people saying stuff about the camera on the plus you know like on atp they were talking about it marco changed his decision. Yep. Because something, something, something, optical stabilization images mesh together, something, something. Stuff I don't understand, basically. Uh-huh.

But I love the camera. My God. My God, this camera is incredible. It's incredible. Like, just the standard pictures that I can take on this thing are insane right the depth of field that i can get already is insane before the portrait stuff is even available the zoom whoa like taking pictures of people i know look everybody who's ever had a camera before like he's just laughing at me you know i'm not a camera guy like whatever the the telephoto lens

i love i absolutely love it like i've been just been taking pictures like i took a picture of my cereal just for whatever like okay you know because it was just what was in front of me when i figured i wanted to take a picture um the way that this that, the quality of the zoom is incredible. And just the detail that it picks up. Like, I absolutely adore this camera. Like, it is amazing. Yeah, it's pretty great. One of the things that I discovered is I took some pictures of some sunflowers that are in my kitchen. Yep.

And I took that with this as well as the 6S, the 7, 7 Plus and the 6S. The fact that it's capturing wide color gamut, the P3 color gamut, and then the displays can show the P3 color gamut. On a non-P3 display, you can tell that the color is better. It's a better camera.

And on the P3 display, it is shocking how much better it is. So when you're taking pictures and looking at them on the device, you're benefiting double. You're benefiting from the quality of the camera and the capture and then the display of it. But it's pretty impressive.

Yeah, they continue to make... This is a thing, you know. Camera is one of the most important features of a smartphone. And Apple has tried very hard to make that iPhone camera better every single year. And they did it again. It is better again. Plus, on the 7 Plus, you've got the 2X version. And then, you know, they're doing a little secret sauce behind the scenes to take advantage of the two cameras when they can.

Yeah. Which they didn't talk about on stage at all. Secret sauce is making me laugh right now. Secret sauce. This is one of those things that Apple has the ability to do to us. They have a whole kitchen that's cooking up secret sauce all the time. Apple mentions a phrase like horses and mountains and secret sauce on stage and they mentioned it in regard to the earpods and now i'm hearing a secret sauce everywhere secret sauce

it's it's a thing you gotta have sauce and if you have this before though keep it a secret oh no that's a thing secret sauce is absolutely i think no i know what it is it's mcdonald's right but like we weren't talking about anyway but what it's just funny to me. They mention a phrase and it becomes part of the Lexicon for a while. Like, secure enclave. We all know what they are now. Jim took a picture of his pineapple pizza in a similar vein to me. Another example in a low light condition

of the great camera. Look, I know that people that love cameras, they're never going to be completely happy with the way that these things work, right? Because they're not real cameras. They're trying to put real cameras inside of a phone, which is difficult to do. But for someone who doesn't really know

and just likes the way that their pictures look when they're taken really well, I'm very happy. I'm just like over the moon with this camera. It's just incredible you know all the stuff that it's doing with the two lenses and all the stuff i can get out of the zoom with them like i am so thrilled with this they look incredible to me um and i it's one of my favorite features of the phone obviously but i wasn't expecting it so much to love it as much as i do um i'm so happy with it it's very good and well let's let's um i wanted to just follow up they didn't mention it on stage but it is true every time you take a picture in the standard like in

the camera app and it's it's uh firing both sensors off yeah i don't know why they didn't mention this gathering both pictures and when it does its processing if it does why they didn't mention this. Gathering both pictures. And when it does its processing, if it does, and they won't talk about the details of it, really, but it is doing some things, knowing that it's got another camera to try. The way I read it was, if it's got areas of the photo that look questionable, that if it's got data from the other camera that looks better it will try to mix in the other other one it's super secret sauce stuff mike it's secret sauce stuff but uh so they won't talk about it but the jpeg you get out of the iphone 7 plus may include data that's been merged together from both sensors in order to get the best picture possible. Obviously, if you shoot with another app that's using RAW, you're picking the sensor and you get the RAW sensor data. But the JPEG that's gone through all of Apple's processing,

that's one of the things that Apple will do with processing on the 7 Plus is potentially look at the other camera data and see if it can integrate that in some way, which is also pretty wacky. My layman's way of thinking of this is it's like some kind of super hdr mode right because my understanding of hdr is it like takes the brights the best brights and the best stars or whatever and puts them together to make the best image and it kind of feels like that you could do that i'm unclear on if they're actually doing that but wouldn't that make sense that if you're on the wide angle and you take a

shot with the wide angle or or vice versa that the you would actually set the settings on the other camera to be uh different yeah uh different shutter something different about it to to sort of get that to happen because the way hdr works now is it takes two pictures in rapid succession and then merges them together um i don't know they they said noise reduction is one of the big things that they're they're trying to do with that um i guess you could take detail from one lens color from you know i don't know how it's done i don't it kind of makes sense in my brain but they they they do some of that but they don't talk about what they're doing so that's just we just kind of have to take them at their word there the speakers are so loud um and they're really clear

uh it's not as good as the iPad Pro, of course, right? Because the iPad Pro has two times more speakers. Yeah. It doesn't sound two times louder to me, but it's a lot louder. I'm very happy. They're way clearer. And it's funny, when you have it at full volume, your iPhone basically shakes, right? You hold it, and you can feel the sound.

Yeah, and they're not just putting Taptic Engine in there just to fake it. Who knows? I think it's much louder. It's still tinny. I mean, I would not love listening to music or watching a movie just on the speakers, but you can. It's nowhere near as good as the iPad, right? The iPad speakers are just legitimately good. Yeah.

They're very good. But this is like what I wanted. It's way better. And the stereo effect really is surprising in that it doesn't feel like they've tuned that speaker so that it's in stereo and you don't feel like you have one speaker aimed at you and one speaker aimed away from you they feel balanced when you listen to it it plays stereo for audio um for i mean for music as well as for movies so if you play a music track it will actually use the the um one speaker for left

and one speaker for right even if you're in uh in a portrait you're holding it upright it will still uh stereo separate i'm really worried that one day i'm going to hit the loudspeaker button when i'm on the phone call and burst my eardrum i think they'll try very hard not to do that but i my hope would be that they use they use the sensor to not do that. If you hit loudspeaker and put it up to your ear, it won't go off because they can use the screen detection sensor. That's what I hope they're doing. I would think so. If Apple, if you're not doing that and you've heard that, I recommend that.

That might save somebody's eardrums because these things are loud. I would be surprised if they didn't have it in there so that if you have the proximity sensor and they know that there's a person near that speaker that it doesn't it's volume limited thinking about there's an easy way to test this and i'll do it i just put my finger over it yeah we'll see uh this phone is so fast in everything it does it is incredible everything loads faster there's less lag across the whole system i I noticed it almost immediately, just how powerful this thing feels. It's insane.

Yep. It's twice as fast as the 6. I mean, you can really feel it, even from the 6S, right? Like, I feel it. Like, I just... You should do it every time, but this thing is noticeably faster.

I have no idea how they continue to make these things faster and faster all the time. It's such a small little box. The other big thing that i love love is the screen my gosh the wide color gamut stuff yeah what it does to these screens like everything looks better to me like it was how i felt about the ipad pro right like that just looking at my home screen was a treat and that's how i feel here it's a shame to not have the True Tone, but quite honestly, it's so close to me. Like I can look at the two devices

and I can see what True Tone is doing to them. But the quality of the screen and the wide color gamut is so good. I almost don't care that much because it is so fantastic. And when you pair with Night Shift on the iPhone, like it is just a completely pleasurable experience this the screen on these things absolutely fantastic i agree it's a it's a very impressive screen i think

my only my only thoughts go back to when we were talking about samsung is it does feel like that's that's a challenge for apple is can you get can you get it to feel a little more edge to edge there's not a lot of frame left around it, but there's still frame left around it. And on the regular 7, you know, I'm not a big believer in the idea. I've heard people who are fans of Android devices say, oh, but Apple's so far behind in resolution. You've got these Super HD displays on Android devices. It's like, you know, above a certain DPI, it really doesn't matter. And in fact, it's a bad

idea to have a higher resolution display because no one can see it, but you still have to draw all the pixels, which means you have to have the GPU to drive it. That all said, the iPhone 7 not being able to show like 1080, true 1080, it could the smaller iPhone could probably

have a higher resolution screen than it has. So I hope they go down that path. I don't think it's something that most regular people are going to care about. It's a beautiful screen. It is a retina screen. So you probably couldn't detect a whole lot of difference anyway. I just, you know, I think it's worth mentioning that, that it's like the plus is a true 1080 screen, but the seven is not, it's not, it's not quite there yet so um maybe in the next version but that's that i think this kind of leads us to our conclusions it's sort of like what is this iphone how is it different than the past and what does this mean for the future so i think this is the weirdest iphone ever made because there are strange choices with

peculiar outcomes. We didn't even talk about the headphone jack because I just feel like it's a non-story at this point. We've said everything. Maybe this is why they have the TikTok approach where there's like the 5 and the 5S, the 4 and the 4S, the 6 and the 6S. Maybe that's why they only do two because when you do a third one, it gets weird.

You don't want to go to the third one because this is what happens the strange things weird at the third iteration you're completely right like you don't want to yeah you know and this is this is it is weird there are a lot of challenge things they're doing here that are like we're going to change things we're going to do all this stuff i mean yeah of course the phone is or the the camera's better and the processors are faster. It's like all those things happen every time and they're to be commended. We shouldn't take that for granted, but they're to be commended for that. But then you've got, we also added a camera, got rid of the home button, got rid of the

headphone jack. We're like, okay. It looks the same. It is weird. And for me, and I like it. I think it's actually, I think it's it is weird and for me um and i like it i i think it's actually i'm i i think it's i think it's great i think they pushed it forward in a bunch of areas that are really nice i think that the the color gamut stuff the camera improvements it's really impressive great to look at uh so much faster all those things are great uh better the better uh speakers are fantastic um i do wonder what this says about the iphone product line like

we won't know for a year what this phone's place in the world is and i feel like we've got a couple of options one is it's a weird phone and we're gonna look back and be like and then they did that third one that the seven which was basically like the six and the success and that was strange they made a lot of weird decisions there and but then they wiped it all away and they did a new phone um i i think more likely is we're going to look back and say that this was a transitional device where they were trying out a bunch of stuff before implementing it and a whole lot of other weird stuff with whatever next year's phone is but we won't know i mean there were rumors that suggest that that is the case but we won't really know until next year but but that that

you know i i think one way or another it is a very different phone in a lot of ways than than any previous iphone i think that's interesting that they that they've done that nine years in you know this is the thing like i love this phone as i love all new iphones because it gives me a bunch of stuff that's really great, but it's also given me some things that are not so great, which is weird. I can't think of an iPhone that's done this before. It's made some decisions that are completely perplexing.

Removing the headphone jack is perplexing. I'm sure that I would feel probably the same way as I do about the Home button if I didn't know about the headphone jack like six months ago. And I think that's a decision made by Apple. Imagine if they would have taken it off, how you would have reacted.

Remember how you were reacting when the rumors were first coming out? And I think it was very smart by them to remove it because that's way more of a hot button issue than the Home button is, right? But i mean technically the uh oh i want to mention and this is probably something gonna be solved in software i don't know but people have discovered by the way that the lightning port goes to sleep yeah so if you if you if you plug in your headphones and you listen to a podcast and like 20 minutes later you want to click to pause your phone, I believe it doesn't work. So there's been a little bit of contention.

What I have seen proven on video is play a show, pause it, five minutes later you cannot unpause. Oh, so it's when it's not playing audio. When nothing's happening. I see. Interesting. I've seen video proof of this. I'm going's when it's not playing audio. When nothing's happening. I see. Interesting. I've seen video proof of this. I'm going to put it in the show notes. That when you want to resume, you have to basically plug and replug to get it to work. So that's one of those things that maybe that's just an unintended side effect of all of this that, like I said, I hope can be fixed with the software

update. But this is the thing about having a weird phone like this, right? Is that I think there are going to be weird edge cases in all of these things that are going to come out as stories. And some of it, Apple's going to say, oh, that's just how it is now. And other things, Apple's going to say, oh, that'll be addressed in a software update that's coming soon. And that one strikes me as being, you may need to trade off on the battery life that like if you've got a lightning device plugged in and audio isn't playing that yeah you you still need to listen for it to give you a command to play the audio again you got to do that and and hopefully also something with software with the headphone thing i've just not bumped into anything yet i will do sure but you will and and we'll see those stories i mean i could i could write those

stories now i can predict those stories there'll be somebody who's somewhere and it's like my wedding was ruined because i didn't have this adapter and so we couldn't play that song right that story will be gonna happen you know it's gonna happen you know my car trip was ruined because i couldn't uh you know I couldn't connect my iPhone. Those stories will get written by angry people. There are always – I mean, I was sharing in the relay Slack. There are always people who really have a bad experience with something, and then they go on Twitter or whatever or Facebook, and they vent, and then somebody picks it up because if you write anything about anything about an apple product somebody will write a a story for their blog about the fact that you had that issue like you found out with your observation about having a t-shirt in front of the home

button that that became a story on people's websites because you had an observation on twitter so that will happen at some point down the road that's true and some of them apple will be like yeah that's you know whatever and other times there may be some things where they're like oh actually yeah that's a good point we're gonna fix that in an update which one are you gonna buy because i know you were on the fence about the plus and some of the stuff you were saying in your review really made it seem like you were maybe leaning that way more than you ever have before because of some of the advances oh no but i i mean i thought i gave it away when i very specifically said it's almost enough to make me switch and join the plus club because of the camera i just wanted to see if i had some

luck in it i read it i know what it meant but i just see if i could see the keyword is almost but not not quite though you know the plus i've got it here i actually am going to switch i've been using the seven i'm going to use the seven plus as my primary um for a little bit because that's part of the experience of it it's it's really nice and big it's also really big and yeah yeah so that's my that's that's my thing is do i really want for the more flexible camera and all of that the fact is i run with my phone in my pocket, and this thing's enormous. So am I leaving my phone behind if I do that? And then I can't listen to podcasts because I don't have – unless I get out the old iPod Shuffle or something like that.

The way I use my phone, I don't think there's enough benefit in switching to the Plus because I'm going to have to tote that thing around everywhere I go and it's big it's really large you get used to it you get used to it it's funny to me to hear so many people get so close just fall at the last hurdle next year

I'm going to get you all I think it's always worth considering I don't know Mike next year the smaller phone may be so amazing that we don't even need that big phone anymore. That's a topic for another time. I'll give you this to button this up, which is I did, as part of this, run a bunch of benchmark tests, a bunch of speed tests with Geekbench using a bunch of different iPhones, including the SE and the 5. And holding that SE in my hand, I felt like i was holding a remote control like a clicker or something it's so small good or bad is that so small that uh that ship has sailed there's no way i'm gonna use a phone that size forget it i i know the nostalgia when it came out and people like gruber saying oh but i like it it's i like that size i don't like that size it's too small i think it's crazy pants to go back to a phone that's small

it's like it's like child's toy phone i i was a big advocate in that phone existing because i think it's an important part of the market and and not everybody wants a big phone just like not everybody wants the gigantic phone that you use um but for me i can't, I can't see going back to that phone ever. It's just so tiny. All right. So I feel like I've made my point now. Like that's why I wanted to say up top, right? I do really, really love this phone.

I'm happy I made the decision. I've already sold my 6S Plus. It's gone. I love this phone, but it's a weird phone. And I'm getting used to it, but it's weird. And things are going to continue to be weird because I haven't even bumped into any headphone stuff yet. It's going to be weird.

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Tactic vibration. Tactic vibration. Probably six to a seven. And TJ wanted to know what our favorite 3d touch shortcuts were and if we take live photos so my favorite 3d touch shortcuts i love the peeking at emails links and messages just so i don't have to open stuff and switch apps or like i get a message i just want to see what it says in full without sending off a read receipt or i get an email and i don't want to open it so it marks as red i just want to peek at what it says in full without sending off a read receipt, or I get an email and I don't want to open it so it marks as read. I just want to peek at what it says. I love all of that stuff. And there was notifications now and you can kind of expand the notifications. All that stuff is great.

I'm really happy with all of that. I also really do love live photos. It's one of my favorite things that Apple has added to iOS in recent years, because it just makes my photos more delightful. Like the photos sit still, I swipe through them and they move a little bit, which is nice. And then I press and hold on them and I see something that wasn't captured in the image that I caught.

And it's a whole different way of taking photos. And a lot of the time, the real joy of the photo now is actually in looking at the moments before and after it. I really, really love live photos and it seemed like such a trivial thing when they introduced it, but it's one of my very, very favorite things about iOS today.

Yeah, my favorite 3D Touch shortcut is actually the... I'm really liking in iOS 10 the flashlight that you can 3D Touch on the control center and then choose the brightness of the flashlight. I think that's amazing and hilarious. Medium light. Low light. Oh, look at that.

Yeah, right. So you control center 3D touch. I'm about blinding everyone. Yeah, control center 3D touch is something that I really wanted for iOS 10, and they delivered, and I'm very happy about it. And I take live photos, too, all the time. I don't often by mistake because I leave it on but i do enjoy them uh in certain circumstances and it's really fun to go back to a photo that you took and like and discover it's a live photo and get to see the world around the photo that you like which is

really sort of how apple pitched it last year was you know what if your photos could come to life it's not like okay everybody i'm going to take a live photo now so start acting it's more like it's a photo and then you can see what happened around the moment of the photo, and that's pretty cool. I'm all surprised. Just someone blinking and making the face before they make the photo. I love all of that. Yeah, I really love it. I've got a picture of my dog running around, and in the live photo, the dog comes into the frame and looks at the camera,

and then that was when the picture got taken, and she runs out it's like uh that's it's pretty cool stuff and we have a great uh selfie live photo of you and me where um the flash fired the the true tone flash on the front of the camera fired uh and you're blinded by it and that's the best live photo ever because it is the best live premise and yeah we need to i'm gonna find that and i'm gonna put it in the show notes all right somehow this could take a long time do you have it to hand or am I going to have to keep scrolling through your Twitter timeline? I think it's in my favorites alright, well

we'll find that, we'll put the GIF version in the show notes and I'm going to leave that to ask of you, Snell we can do this next up on Arbosk Up have richard richard wanted to uh get an input from you jason um isn't it a major oversight that sierra isn't aware of tethering will attempt to sync desktop and documents no matter how large they are what connection you're on uh it's a major oversight that the mac is not aware of tethering um this has been a thing for a while now it's probably why there are no cellular capable macs

is because i think there are some fundamental problems i'm surprised though that they didn't three or four years ago put together a new set of apis for the mac that indicate whether something is on a cellular connection or not but i mean your argument would always be that until apple makes macs with cellular stuff then then they're not going to bother. But this is a problem when you tether because it thinks it's on Wi-Fi and it can eat as much as it wants. But, of course, you know that it's on cellular. I think this became a problem when the OS became aware of tethering as a thing. So when they added the continuity features.

You've got the little uh little uh link in the chain thing so it knows but there's no api that's the thing ios was built fundamentally for the idea that you're going to do a lot of things on wi-fi and less things on cellular from day one that was the iphone os model and so every app every part of the system has these two different classes of data and and sometimes settings about what the behavior is but every app has that and the mac has never had that and it would be a big thing to do that they could do it they could have done it they could have seen this coming years ago and apple seems like they just don't care about worrying about the mac using data when it's on a cellular

connection so all i have to do is say use trip mode um that's why it exists i think it's on a cellular connection. So all I have to do is say, use TripMode. That's why it exists. I think it's tripmode.ch is the website, I believe. But TripMode is a utility that looks at the connection that you're making, and you can do it by interface and by Wi-Fi base station, I believe. So you can basically say, when I'm connected to this device, turn on and block all data from these processes and it's not perfect but it does allow you to use metered

connections and um block certain background stuff like icloud from using that connection it's not perfect but that's the workaround right now. But yes, Apple has been missing the boat on macOS for years in terms of laying the foundation for being able to differentiate between, you know, okay for unlimited bandwidth and please watch your step and don't download stuff on this connection. Yeah, it's kind of surprising that they've added this new feature

and it doesn't do it right like as you sound like i completely agree like old features maybe it wasn't ever thought it was never thought of the os didn't know the difference between tethering or not but now it feels like it could and it's when an application like trip mode exists it shows it's possible to understand it's only only with tethering with ios devices though i mean that's the thing is that there are also um you know little wi-fi uh hot spots and there are non-apple devices but like tethering on ios devices will be a good start at least sure but it's just not there nope jack asked the age old question i feel like every episode of upgrade gets this question. In light of the A10 in the iPhone 7, shall I wait for an upgrade

to the 12.9-inch iPad Pro or purchase now? So I'll give you the same answer that I give as always. If you can wait, and you can wait for an undetermined amount of time, if you can wait for a year even before needing to buy an iPad Pro, you should wait, because the A10 in that thing

is going to be bonkers. It's going to be bonkers. So if you can wait because the A10 in that thing is going to be bonkers. It's going to be bonkers. So if you can wait because we expect within the next six months there will be an update, then yeah, you should wait because those things are darn expensive. So if you can wait, wait. If you can't,

it's brilliant right now. So there you go. Nate wanted to get started with some HomeKit stuff. Jason, where should he begin? Oh, I'm the wrong person to ask. I bought a couple of Hue lights. I don't have any HomeKit stuff. I actually bought a couple of Hue lights

just so that I could write about the Home app, which I haven't done yet. I haven't even put in the lights. How many Apple writers does it take to screw in a light bulb? The answer is they're waiting for their Amazon delivery of their Hue hub hub so they can do that uh so i don't i don't have an answer here all right so i have an i have a basic answer go to apple.com and take a look at what's home kit enabled because they've got some stuff there but my next tip will be what i'm thinking about right

now i am trying to find devices that are HomeKit enabled and have some kind of other service attached to them because in when is it going to be? A week and a bit? Just over a week or so away

I'm going to be receiving an Echo because they're available in the UK now and I want to be able to have devices that the Echo can talk to and HomeKit can talk to. Because I don't want something that's locked into one system. So I don't want things that just

the Echo can talk to and I don't want things that just HomeKit can work with. So stuff like the Hue lights work and I think some of the Wything stuff works. So I'm trying to find things that I can use for both because I don't want to get locked into one of them because we have no idea which one of them is going to win right now. Google Home might be the winner.

So I want to try and find devices as much as possible that will work with all of my stuff because when we move into the new place, I'm going to be doing a lot of this. So before the end of this year, you're going to be hearing from me a lot more about home automation. So Nate, if you can hold off, wait until I start looking into this stuff. Otherwise, if you want to buy right now, look on Apple's website. Last up today, Tony asked about

Apple Pencil skins and pen loops for the Apple Pencil and asked me if I had any I could recommend and if I found them useful. So I will include a link in the show notes to a little post that I put on my Tumblr site where I linked to some things, some little hacks that I have for my Apple Pencil, including a clip, a pen loop that I use, and the skins that I use. I recommend all of those things. I think the skins add grip and a little bit more fun to the just white piece of plastic that you get. I think the pen loops are almost essential. I think you have to have something

that attaches your pencil to the iPad. So right now, my 9.7, I have the pencil in the pen loop of the Logitech case thing to create. And on my 12.9, where I'm used to using the smart keyboard, I have a pen loop. I think you have to keep them together.

Because otherwise it's going to get lost or it's not going to be there when you need it. So I really recommend the stuff. and things that are in that blog post are tried and tested by me and i love them and when i bought my second apple pencil for my second ipad because multi-pad lifestyle i did the exact same thing with them although i bought a different skin one of them has the pencil skin that you see one of them has a crayola crayon skin that i found from a from a different website so check them out the skins are great uh the d brand skin is really good and the other skins i found are really good as well you'll find links in the show notes to my post where i explain all of that

that's it jason i have enjoyed this one i was really looking forward to it i hope our listeners have too i could tell you're having a good time this is your time to let it all out let let all your feelings about your brand new apple product out yep it's good it's good stuff so and next week it's going to be mac os time because as we record this week as we record this mac os comes out tomorrow mac os sierra so next week it's going to be all Mac all the time, I think. So get ready for that one. I'm not upgrading. Silence. We'll talk about that. We'll talk about why next week. If you want to find our show notes, go to

relay.fm slash upgrade slash 107. If you want to find Jason online, he's over at theamazingsixcolors.com and theincomparable incomparable.com theincomparable.com, the incomparable.com,

I should say. If you want to find him on Twitter, he is at jsnell. I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. Thanks again to our sponsors for this week's episode, the great folk over at AppCare, FreshBooks,

and Smile. Thank you for listening, as always. If you like the show, share it with a friend. Why not? What is the worst that can happen if you do that? They might say they you like the show, share it with a friend. Why not? What is the worst that can happen if you do that? They might say they don't like it, and that's okay.

They probably won't judge you too harshly. We'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Mrs. Snow. Goodbye, everybody.