Upgrade - 159: Retcon Incident

Episode Date: September 18, 2017

Our wallets much lighter than last week, we discuss what new Apple products we’ve ordered and what we’re still waiting for. We also spend a lot more time dissecting the iPhone X and Face ID, and leave room for plenty of follow-up and #askupgrade

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 159 today's show is brought to you by squarespace balance and encapsula my name is mike hurley i am joined by mr jason snell mr jason snell we are back to a sense of normality in the upgrade world now. Yes, back to our usual schedule after a summer that, while fun, was also kind of off our normal

schedule and plan for this podcast. But hey, Jason, nobody cares about schedules. It's time for Hashtag Snell Talk, and our question this week comes from D lindbergh and uh d lindbergh asked if you went back in time jason to 1997 how would you attempt to explain to somebody that apple would be the richest company in the world in 20 years well that that would be it would be a herculean task i think it would be but i think i this is

this is an interesting hypothetical i think i would say you know steve jobs just came back he's working his magic he's changing apple's product line and the products that you see over the next few years are not the product that pushes apple to to its greatest heights ever but they are the run-up to that and so just keep watching right keep watching as apple becomes more invested in consumer technology and more invested in things that are not what you think of now as a as a computer but are a little bit outside because by by going broader i would also say remember you know how you guys here in the 90s always complain about how apple is bad at advertising and marketing and if people could just understand why your Apple products were good, they would, they would become Apple users, but nobody ever

does that. So just watch because depending on the time of year, it's like that think different ad you just saw. That's the first think different ad that came out in like August of 97. So let's say it's September, like exactly 30 years ago or 20 years ago. That's the start of a long run of good ads. And Apple's also going to get into retail where they're going to bring their stuff to stores all over the country and the world where people will get to walk in and see them and do what you've always described, which is if Apple properly markets themselves and people can actually see Apple stuff and try it out, they will like it and they will embrace it.

That was a theory I know back in your time in the 90s. And turns out it's right. It's true. And Apple's going to do that. Plus, they're going to go into new product areas so um i i as a as a time traveler i can't advise you on investment decisions but come on you see what to do i bet this would be a also here's who won the super bowl i don't know just throw that in there and there's here's that new sound you've been looking for your kids are really gonna love it i bet you could explain this

in those terms to somebody following apple and you could make them believe you right by using the things and like steve jobs has come back and he's gonna fix it and the advertising is gonna get better i don't think that it would be really be possible to explain this to people outside right like people that understood enough about technology but like didn't obsessively care about Apple. I feel like you'd really, really struggle to explain it to them. Like people that understand Apple, you could explain it to.

Well, people who, for somebody who totally doesn't understand Apple and doesn't know anything about it in 1997, what I would say is, you know, Apple, that company that makes a weird computer that nobody buys? They're not going to give up on that, but they're going to make a new product

using their technology brilliance you know how like everybody loved the mac when it came out and people were like oh the mac but nobody uses it but everybody loved it and talked about it they're going to do that again in the next decade twice uh in different categories that aren't computers and you won't need to use it with a mac you can use it with a pc and people are are going to love it. And that's what's going to happen. And I think people would say, oh, okay, sure. That makes sense. If I tried to convince them that the Mac was going to be the most popular computer, they wouldn't believe me, which is good because I would be a future, I'd be a time traveler who was lying to them. That's terrible. But I think that would be the way I would explain it is Apple's going to try again. Apple's going to do something like the Mac that's revolutionary, but this time it's going to work.

And they're going to do it twice, with the iPod and the iPhone. And that would be how I'd explain it to somebody who doesn't have a closer level of detail on what Apple is like in 1997. If you would like to ask a question for the beginning of Upgrade, all you need to do is send a tweet with the hashtag SnellTalk and they go into a document for me to pick from. Be like D. Lindbergh and send in an awesome question and then maybe you can help start off a future episode of Upgrade. We spoke about the fact that Upgradian, who is in the chat room right now, Kyle's the Gray, was in the Apple Watch video, which is now, I believe, on Apple's YouTube channel. So I'm going to find a link for that and put it in the show notes so you can go and watch it.

I don't think they published it when we were talking last week. Turns out that Kyle's was not the only Upgradian who was in that exact same video. Stuart Brinegan was the self-proclaimed standing up in the office guy. See if you remember there was somebody standing up and reading their letter aloud. Yeah, it's a good laugh too where it's the time to stand and he stands up in the middle of the office and all of that. And that's Upgradian Stuart from Scotland.land yeah stewart wrote in and said i was on

it too so there were of the maybe 10 people featured in that um in that video two of them were upgradians but at least i mean who knows there could be more there could be more right but it's just amazing right and you know mike i think i might have said this last week but i'll just say it again my initial reaction to this is obviously the screeners didn't ask the right questions how are they how are upgradians allowed in the uh in the video jason they may have been looking for them it's possible well they are the most discerning and uh high quality audience around so the brightest and most attractive of all of the

podcast listeners are up gradients there's no doubt we know that it's it is a complete fact and none of you i'm sure will disagree with that. I wanted to give some follow-up on Apple Watch Cores. Last week, I professed how unbelievable I thought it was that our watches are about to have dual cores with the Series 3. Turns out that the Series 1 and Series 2 watches that were released last year both had dual-core processors in them. The original Apple Watch, which has been dubbed the Series Zero in a retcon incident, had a single core processor in it.

Some further follow-up that we've had from many people about the word Qi for the Qi wireless charging standard. I want to just... Jonas was one of these people that wrote in to say that Qi, in the context that it is being referred to here with the wireless charging standard, refers to the idea of air, breathing, or energy flow. We said on the last episode, because somebody told us in the chat room, that Qi was the Chinese word for seven, told us in the chat room that chi was the chinese word for seven which it is also true that that is the word but apparently um it is pronounced slightly differently and i believe that there's

context that that would be required for a lot of words for what i can gather mandarin seems like a tricky language it might be it might be hard might be kind of outside of my realm there i've got a dumb joke that only nerds who are comic book superhero nerds and tech nerds will get. You want to hear it? Yep. How does Iron Fist charge his Iron Fist? Oh, that's pretty good. Yeah, okay.

Yeah, I get it. Chee. I like that. That's really good. You should tweet that. That is a tweetable joke. Oh, no. That is a tweetable joke.

Yeah. Come on. That's your wheelhouse. The people following you on Twitter. It's a tech nerd dad joke is what that is. Butable joke oh yeah come on that's your wheelhouse the people following you on twitter it's a tech nerd dad joke is what that is but uh there it is gee he just i imagine he just sort of lays his hand down on a power pad and lets it get that's how it works charged up that's how it works so it turns out that's why i mean that makes it a when when someone told me it was the chinese welfare 7 i didn't understand why they called it that but now i get why they

called it that i understand why it's called Qi now, because energy flowing in the air. And let's just be honest, until this Apple event, I literally thought it was called Qi. Oh yeah, 100%. I thought it was called Qi. So now we know better. Thank you, everybody.

Why wouldn't you think that? Alright, next week, Mike at the Movies Terminator 2. That will be the end of next week mike at the movies terminator 2 that will be the end of next week's episode so if you want to be able to listen along um between now and the time that you listen to next week's episode of upgrade episode 160 make sure that you have watched terminator 2 or decide that you don't care about terminator 2 spoilers which is probably okay considering the movie is like 20 years old 1990 casey list pointed out that this is actually a 90s movie but as a early 90s movie that's a sequel

to an 80s movie i am cleaning it i want to i want to institute a uh a sub rule of the mic at the mic at the movie selection so the the kind of unofficial official rule is that jason for the time being gets 80s movies and casey gets 90s movies even though we do this way more i mean i don't know how as well yeah like because we do we watch firefly together on analog so casey has already instituted his own amendment he's on like a little rule addendum here. But this new rule addendum that I will institute for the movies portion is that if a movie franchise begins in one decade, I believe that the same show should continue further viewings of the franchise no matter when those movies came out. It's fair game. I think that's good. no matter when those movies came out it's it's fair game i think that's good and uh yeah terminator two is uh a it's a classic in a lot of ways it is it is a uh blockbuster that helped define what

blockbusters uh summer blockbusters were it was it advanced the game in a lot of ways i believe that this movie is going to help me understand why as a child I had a Arnold Schwarzenegger Terminator toy because Terminator 1 would not answer that question. I'm expecting Terminator 2 will answer that question.

Alright, so next week we'll be back. Alright, so we obviously spent all of the time last week talking about new products so i thought we could maybe go over what we pre-ordered if anything at all jason what did you pre-order um on friday i pre-ordered you know it's always tricky with me because sometimes i i i get things to review and sometimes i have to buy them to review them and sometimes i buy them to use them and review them but you know i have different motivations because again it's it's also my

my living to do this so like i bought a uh i bought a 10.5 ipad pro because i got a review unit of the 12.9 but not the 10.5 And I wanted to review both of them. So sometimes my buying decisions are weird and not directly correlating to what my personal preferences would be. But anyway, the 4k Apple TV, because I, you know, I want one. Yep. If I get a review, that's nice, but I want one. I have a 4k TV. I want one.

I'm getting that. And I got a, I got a cellular Apple watch because I want a 4k TV. I want one. I'm getting that. And I got a, I got a cellular Apple watch because I want a cellular Apple watch. And so I got space gray. So that means the aluminum. I thought about the stainless. I always think about the stainless, but as nice as that black stainless looks like, because I don't want the silver, but I think like the silver one very clearly says this is a pretty stainless steel watch and the black one while nicer than the space gray one it's a lot nicer i think and to my taste anyway and a lot more expensive so i figure like i'm just going

to keep it going i've always had the space gray apple watch in aluminum and i'm still going to get that the one difference this time is i have so many bands now, including so many black sport bands, that I went with the Nike Plus and got the anthracite black Nike sport band. And you get all those special faces. I get the special faces and I get that band and I still got all my other watch bands. So I feel like why not do that? So I pre-ordered the 4K Apple tv because we use our apple tv every single day um and i want to be able to watch all the 4k hdr movies on my 4k hdr television and i really really really cannot wait seriously just cannot cannot wait to stare with my mouth agape at the screensavers i'm so

excited about this you cannot even even believe. This is something that my entire household is excited about because we both love looking at those screensavers, me and Idina. So we're very excited about that. And I got a Space Gray 42 millimeter cellular Apple Watch with the Olive Sport Loop. So I want the Sport Loop because it looks like a kind of a best of all worlds um last week i thought it was magnets but it seems to be some kind of velcro material but it seems like it's a good velcro um rather than like regular velcro like it's not just your standard velcros it's it's nice apparently uh isn't the color that i would want the olive one i actually want the black one

because the black one has like these little flecks of color in it, which look interesting. But I don't think that was an option. They're very restrictive with the color options that come as kind of like, buy the watch, get the band. However, I love my Pride band so much that I can't imagine really wanting to swap unless these new bands are really amazing.

If the new bands are really great, then I'll get maybe the black one at a later date. But I'm starting off with the olive one, which is a nice kind of, it says olive, but it looks great to me. So it looks great. I did want to make a note on pre-orders. Of course, I mean, this maybe isn't so weird for you, Jason, but it is incredibly weird for me to have an iphone pre-order schedule go by and i mostly just ignored that fact isn't it strange isn't that a strange feeling very weird um very weird that it's kind of like oh you can pre-order an iphone but i'm just not gonna bother like it was a very strange feeling it made me realize how far away october 27th

pre-ordering november 3rd is that is a long way away like yeah that that's yeah i'm very sad about this uh it also i was kind of keeping my eye on uh the-ordering status, and it seemed that it took basically all day for the 8 and 8 Plus to get pushed back to about a one- to two-week dispatch in the UK. And that seemed to be pretty similar across most territories from what I could see people talking about. So I guess there's two things from this. One, they didn't sell out immediately. from what i could see people talking about so i guess there's two things from this one um it

didn't they didn't sell out immediately uh but in two that they least still did i think it yeah i think that's it i think they don't need there was no way there was going to be completely uncontrollable demand for this phone because first off when looking at what the specs are i would think that apple knows pretty well how to assemble these and make a lot of them because it's very much like the existing iPhone 7 and 6S and 6 that they make, right? And they've probably been making them for a while and building up a supply

because they know they're going to sell, but nobody really expected that it would be necessarily record-breaking because there's another new iPhone model, right? So there's going to be reduced demand. I think it is encouraging that there appears to be demand for the iPhone 8. And I heard a bunch of people say, ah, I'm not going to get the 10. iPhone 8 works for me. And a lot of reasons, the price. I heard people skeptical of any first gen of anything. And the iPhone 10 is definitely a first generation in a bunch of different areas.

um and the iphone 10 is definitely a first generation of a in a bunch of different areas um some skepticism because no nobody has seen in the wild um how face id works so i think some people have professed skepticism about that and uh the sensor housing notch thing right like some people are like people don't like it and that and that's or at least you know and maybe they'll get used to it and maybe it'll turn out that that that it's awesome. But if your initial reaction is like all of these things, like the price and the notch and it's new stuff and it's all that, you know, I've heard from a lot of people are like, yeah,

the iPhone eight is fine. And you know what? Apple's okay with that, right? Like Apple wants there to be a spread, especially since everybody's assuming that iPhone 10 demand is going to way outstrip iPhone 10 supply. So Apple, the Apple's gamble is that they don't want to kill iPhone 8 sales with the existence of the 10.

And it looks like that hasn't happened. I mean, it's hard to divine it just from availability because they are metering their own availability. They may be making fewer of them in order to meet a reduced demand. But yeah, it is a funny feeling oh uh in the chat room joe steel asked us to explain our storage options on the apple tv 4k and the my simple answer is i of course i bought the cheaper one with less storage because storage on apple tv is stupid and it's really only used for apps and why would i spend money on something that is dumb so i thought about making a joke and saying i went for the 64 but if you hate the apple tv you may say why did

you spend money on an apple tv then if it because it is because it is dumb but i i like the apple tv and also i want to know about it i don't love it but i like it and i'm looking forward to the 4k stuff on my 4k TV. Another weird little aside about 4k while we're there, which is that iOS 11, which is coming out tomorrow, as we record this, the 19th, one of the things it does on the new iPad pros is it supports HDR video. And that's live now if you're on the GM, and I had to quit my TV app and then relaunch it to get it and i haven't had time to do like a side-by-side comparison or anything like that but it does offer they're not 4k they're 1080 but they're they're 1080 hdr versions of movies which is really interesting and suggest they said

when those came out that the screens were great they were ready for hdr content and here is the other shoe dropping there i'm happy they're doing this yeah i think that's good um yeah it's cool i wanted to share two little just very quick tidbits of information that i found out since last week that i thought were interesting to mention on the show one which i find to be really disappointing is that the apple watch lte model only works in your country of purchase it will not roam on lte right which is really disappointing for me just because of how much time i spend in the u.s and something that i know is likely to happen is i'm well i'm hoping that the the lte apple watch will help me develop some

new habits in regards to when and where I need my phone with me. And I know that I will develop some habits, then I will be on a trip, and I will just leave my hotel, leave my phone in the room, and then, you know, it's gone. And it doesn't work. And then I'm going to be really sad.

But hey-ho, this is the first edition, but it is a shame. I do consider it a shame uh the other is that ipad pros uh on the 256 and 512 gigabyte models they've all been increased by 50 across the board lte or not yeah this sounds like uh as everybody's been speculating, this is about storage costs going up. Yep. That the storage used in the Flash storage of Apple devices is severely constrained because everybody wants that storage for all of their devices.

And it's expensive. So, so all of our dreams of like SSDs coming down in price, it's not happening right now because demand again, here's that supply and demand thing. Kids take your economics class when you're in school. I keep telling my daughter that it's like economics. It's kind of important. You should pay attention. This is a case where there's so much demand because everybody wants to put this stuff in all the devices they make.

And the, I'm sure there are there are ramping up factories everywhere but right now the prices are going up and not down and apple is uh gonna maintain its margins apparently so it's passing those prices on to consumers which is unusual all right let's take our first break and uh we should talk about the iphone X some more. See how I stumbled there? I got looking in the document, Jason, and I struggled with whether to say X or X.

But I went with X. iPhone X. There are more lasers if it's iPhone X, but it's not. There are no lasers. Oh. All right. Today's show is brought to you by Balance. Balance are the team behind Balance for Mac. This is an app that will help you monitor all of your bank balances and card transactions. It's available right now. You can go and get it and you can go check that out. But the folk over at Balance have just launched something called Balance Open. Now, this is a free open source Mac app for checking Coinbase.

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i have been working with the crew at balance i have been more attuned to like these these cryptocurrency type things you know it's the beta meinhof phenomenon i think it's called that when you know about something you see it everywhere i am starting to see things like ethereum especially mentioned in so many different places. Like this seems to be just like a thing which is really picking up steam now more than ever. Cryptocurrencies are here to stay. So get on your way. Go to bowel.money.com and you can check it all out. Our thanks to Balance for their support of this show and RelayFM. So let's talk about the iPhone X. I did it again. I look at it.

I should just start writing the word 10 down instead. Because every time I see X, I just want to say X. Just get your Apple pencil out and open a new note and just write X equals 10, X equals 10, X equals 10. So over and over and over again. So over and over and over again. Jason, I wanted to focus on three different features of, or at least aspects of the iPhone. And we're going to talk about Face ID separately in a moment. But I wanted to focus on a couple of different things with you to see what you think,

because they're just things that have been playing on my mind, especially over the last few weeks. Overall, I don't know if we really spoke about this too much last time because it was pretty fresh. But especially as time has gone on and we're like a week removed now, how do you feel about the notch from a design perspective? You know, I'm torn. Having held it in my hand, right? And you are in the unique you know we should just just let's get it out there again sure we should say this i mean because it's important

it is important to underscore this point i think wherever we can that you are in the unique um position yes i'm i'm one of a few hundred people who actually has held an iphone 10 in their hand yeah so i am especially interested in in your opinion because of that sorry to interrupt you so um the when you hold in your hand right like the thing that comes out is that it is it is the screen is pushed as far to the edge as is possible and then there's that notch in the top and And I think Apple is struggling with this too. Like they obviously had an internal debate about whether they wanted to make that screen, the portion of the screen to the size of the notch accessible or not to developers.

Because they could have said that the notch area is reserved for status bar and that's it and get out of that space. But what they want actually is for people to and this is a phrase that they have used embrace the notch for developers to embrace the notch or they don't say the notch right but that's that's the message embrace the notch embrace the the curvature of the screen because it's not just the notch it's the the edges are curved edges of the screen are curved they're not um right angles yeah that is important to mention because i think that a lot of people are focusing on the notch because it's the thing that is like right in your face but the edges of the display are curved and that's never been the case before am i right uh yeah that's right um so the

it's not playing by the rules that ios has played before. And, you know, there are reasons, right? It is following the curves of the device, which is, and then the curve is reflected again, the notch is also curved. And it's meant to be like, it's trying to get the curved edges thing across to you. And so what Apple wants developers to do is to have their stuff go, you know, spread out to the sides. You don't want to put text right up against that edge. But they want to have, like, the background colors flow out to the edges and things like that. Although there's some really weird examples of things like Safari in landscape having white bars on the sides, which is, like, really bad. I think everybody's going to be figuring this out as they go,

like what's the right way to do it. So the notch, you know, it has to be there. I think it's an interesting choice that Apple has decided not to block it out and just make it a status area. Because if they'd made it a status area with a black background, it would make it more or less invisible, right? It would be like, there'd be an area with no writing on it, but it would still be like the black background would be consistent and you could you could fake it but they decided not to do that

and instead kind of lean into the fact that it's it's there i think from apple's perspective it is we've put screen in places where a screen normally wouldn't go um is sort of the argument like we could have stopped the screen at the bottom of the sensor area, but we decided not to. We just kept it going all the way to the edge of the phone. We'll see how it works in practice. I think the screen is beautiful. I think it's a little bit weird, but necessary. I will just, as an aside, and I don't want to, you know, podcasts are nice because you can't actually hear them, but the counter arguments do get generated when you say things on podcasts. I've seen a bunch of people say, well, if you defend the notch and you thought that the flat tire on the Moto 360 smartphone was dumb, you are being inconsistent.

And I get that argument, but I don't think I agree with it because the Moto 360 smartphone was a round phone. And the whole idea was it's a round watch. Whole idea was it's a round watch, like regular watches with a round screen on it. And then the screen wasn't round. Yeah, they called it the 360. Yeah, I mean, yeah, the screen wasn't round. The iPhone X, yes, it does have a weird thing.

It is weird. It is in the way of it being a completely edge-to-edge screen. I don't think it's as fundamental to the product as the Moto 360 was, where it was like, this is really exciting that they've managed to do a round screen. And then you find out, well, no, they didn't. It's got a flat part at the bottom with nothing below it, which I understand why they had to do it that way. But it really fought against the entire kind of premise of the product on this. It's less, it's less of an issue. But I know you can see, I know you've seen it on Twitter, too,

like developers are struggling with it, because there's questions of sort of like, where do we put things and they don't have a lot of time, at least they have more time than if it was shipping on Friday, but they don't have a lot of time to deal with this. And I know that it's like, you know, I saw some tweets by James Thompson about like, he put iPhone 10 support in to PCALC when he released it this week. And, you know, I, and there was a Twitter thread of like, this is a weird decision. He's like, yeah, I'm still rethinking things, but you got to start somewhere. And I wanted to be compatible. So there's a lot of questions of like, do you curve other edges of UI elements? Do you extend UI elements up to the top, but there's a notch in the way? There's like lots of questions for

designers and developers of apps about how you work around the notch or embrace the notch and what do you do with it? You know, I think there's questions about lots of apps that have like Overcast as a card metaphor and the card can't go all the way up to the top because it can't because there's a notch in the way it's like what happens there is so I don't know I think in the end it's probably not going to be a big deal I think it used as a status area I think on the sides it's probably fine but it is i feel for all the app developers who have to kind of ponder what this means to have the curved edges and the notch on the screen and um i think there's going to be a period of experimentation here where everybody is trying to figure out like

what feels good to use on an iphone 10 and, right now it's all mock-ups in the simulator too, because most people don't have one of these in their hands. So I think that's exciting. Um, but it's, uh, you know, it's definitely, I'm sure Apple would rather it be invisible, but they can't do that. To go through some of your points backwards. Um, to go through some of your points backwards um the moto 360 thing i understand when people say that but i always liked the way that watch looked i mean i have a history of saying that i've enjoyed the look of that device i like the rounded oh yeah part and the flat tire aspect of it never bothered me like my feeling at the time was well that stuff has to go somewhere if that's all they could do it's all they could do i think your overall look of it is good i mean my my push

back on it would be that i was disappointed in it because i was excited about the idea that they were doing a truly round watch which was is very hard to do and that they got hit by yeah i mean they couldn't they couldn't pull it off and they shipped it anyway and yeah it looked great but it was it's just really it's really unfortunate because like that was the meaning of that that was the ideal platonic ideal of the moto 360 was it's a round screen and it wasn't quite and that's too bad yeah in hindsight the name of the product should have been different um the i i will also say that I think over the last couple of years, maybe, um, at least the last year, uh, I, I have said in many places that I think that Samsung were making the best looking smartphones on the market.

I think that the S7 and the S8 and the notes, they've all been incredible. Like as soon as they started doing the edge to edge stuffto-edge stuff, I've loved all of that. The screens going over the edges, and then with the S8 going kind of as far to the top as they could put it, I've always thought they were incredible. I will say, for me right now, for me right now, the iPhone

10 is the best-looking smartphone that I will be able to buy. I think this phone is beautiful. I love it. I like the distinctiveness of the weird screen shape. I know it's going to be hard for people to develop for it, but every screenshot that I've seen of an application that has been optimized, I think it's just stunning.

And this includes James's with Peacock. I'll put a link in the show notes to a screenshot of Carrot Weather running on the iPhone. The Carrot Weather one looks great. And they're using, what Carrot Weather is doing, right, is they're using the extra space above. They're embracing the notch

as a status location where the time and carrier and all that information is and but they're running their uh their background up to the corners and so it looks really nice because you see the notch but you see the background colors flow up around it and cover the status area which i i suspect is going to be the most common way app developers approach this and i think the way that's the way it should be done because it's like it makes everything part of the application but it's not putting use of things that you need up

there but it's making the whole screen it's like makes it a kind of seamless experience everything is the application that you're in at this point of time right and i i think it's i think it's beautiful i i know that a lot of people don't like the the notch they think it's a kind of a compromise and it is a compromise but i think with everything apple has had in their hand here they made a great compromise there's a couple of things you know i've been saying i said this before the phone launch and i'll say it again. If that would have just been a screen that was black, I would have felt cheated as a customer. Because why have you got a screen that is just black, right? You either don't have the screen or use the screen.

And I know that there are useful things in there, like status bar stuff, I get that, but that's not enough of a use case for me. Just having these two little parts of a screen that are colored in black, I feel like I'm not being given the opportunity to use all of the screen that I've paid for. And I also prefer that Apple has done something

where they're building UI and forcing developers to customize or really twisting people's arms to customize and play around with it and do things with that screen rather than it just being a black bar and everything starting lower down. I think that overall,

this is going to work out to be great. And I think that Apple is telling people to embrace the notch because if they didn't, every single developer would just make that black at the top. People wouldn't even try. I mean, of course there'd be some, but I would really believe that most designers and developers would take a stand on it or say that it's too tricky to make it work and would just say like, oh, we're just going to color this in black. And I feel like that would be a waste, at least by Apple putting this in the human interface guidelines.

They're going to be forcing people to experiment and see what they can do. And as always, with any big change like this, the stuff that we get on launch day and for the first month, it's not going to be amazing. There will be quick things done without anybody using the devices what you could mock up in simulator. It will be in a few months time

from the launch of the phone where we'll see people, if there's anything interesting to be done with this, we'll start to see it. And I really honestly believe that there are interesting to be done with this, will start to see it. And I really honestly believe that there are going to be some kind of new paradigms, new mechanisms, new user interface things that people are going to start to do

that will then be adopted more widely. There will be some enterprising individuals who have a really good idea for how to use that space really effectively, and then we'll start to see more people do stuff with it. And so, yeah, I'm excited about it. I am. I'm very excited about it. Like, let's say, for example, right, like an application like TweetBot. What if they changed the color of the UI up on the top if I had a notification that I hadn't read yet? You know, like, there could be little things that people start to do with the fact that you've got this screen, which would mostly be color that you

could use of it, that could end up being really cool. But I think that Apple have to ask people to really, really think about it, to force them into doing it, to force them, to push them is maybe a better word than forcing, Like to push people towards trying to experiment because otherwise people I think will gloss over it. But yeah, I think that the iPhone X, I think it's beautiful and I just cannot, cannot wait to get one. $999.

What do you think about the price of the iPhone X? It's, people are stumbling over it but the fact is you've been apple's been inching up the price the iphone plus pushed up the price this is the phones have always been expensive they're getting more expensive it's true but there's also a much broader spread of phones available and this is at the high end of apple's product line. If you look at the price points that they're offering now, there are lots of them. And this is, I think I was listening to the ATP conversation last week and Marco said something that I think is right, which is, you know, Apple's probably never going to stop offering a phone at $9.99 now.

But what this gives them is the ability to spread the product line even further and offer products that are more expensive to make that maintain the margins that they want at the high end. And so, you know, I just think this is where the market's going, is that Apple is always going to be a company that is seeking the higher end of the market. And the fact is, they have not hit any demand walls by doing this, that Apple raises the price and they still sell as many as they can make. So they raise the price again and sell as many as they can make. The argument would be that while I think maybe making an Apple

Watch edition in gold was a bridge too far, that pushing this stuff up is... Look, I mean, I would much rather that this iPhone X be available for $699, right? I would totally prefer it at $699 than $999. But knowing what we know about what's in it, and looking at the spread of Apple's product line, I get why it's $999. And it's the same reason that the Apple TV is not $99. It's the same reason the Apple Watch doesn't start at $149 or $199. It's because it's Apple. They know they can charge more and sell them and you don't have to like it and you don't have to buy it i think that's a lot of uh a lot of arguments about apple products this is the like just how when people get angry when the macbook comes out and it doesn't have ports

and people get angry about it uh the implication is well i'm mad because i don't want it it's like apple is a kind of company that makes people angry when you can't buy or don't want to buy or are not willing to buy a certain product because you want to want them all. Even if you don't buy them all, you want to want them all. And I get that at this price, you might want to just walk away and say, forget it. There was an unsurprising kind of huffy post on the, I want to say The Verge, although it might've been in Gadget or Gizmodo. I can't remember. And it was basically, I'm not buying an iPhone 10. It's like, well, congratulations, sir. Good for you. It was Paul Miller at the Verge.

Paul Miller at the Verge. That's right. It's like, well, yeah, bravo. Everybody write in and tell us what you're buying and what you're not buying, because that's a personal decision. I had to roll my eyes at that post because sure, that's his personal decision. He won't buy it. And a lot of people won't buy it and they'll buy it. And instead they'll buy the iPhone eight. So Apple is okay with that. And a lot of people will buy the iPhone 10. So, you know, I don't, I don't, I don't know. It's phone economics for a lot of people. It's the most important device that they own. You, most people don't buy a new one every year. And I would say a lot of people I know who do buy them every year, it's totally would love for it to be cheaper because I would always love for it to be cheaper. But, um, Apple knows that they will sell as many as they can make at $999. And so this is going to probably continue as long as it's successful.

I'd rather, one last thing. I would rather this phone exist at $999 than for Apple to look at the cost of making an OLED phone with all those sensors and everything in 2017 and go, no, it doesn't pencil out and not make the phone, which they could have done and may have done in the past with some features, right? Where they're like, let's wait a year. Everything will be cheaper in a year. And I would rather this phone exist and be expensive than not exist for sure the iphone 8 that i would buy would be the 256 gigabyte iphone 8 plus which would cost me 949 dollars the iphone 10 that i will buy is 200 more at the point where I'm already spending $1,000, like $950,

I would spend the extra $200. Because I feel like you get to a certain point, and it's like, well, you know, what does $200 mean? When you're already at $1,000, what is another $200? And I understand why that is a difficult thing for a lot of people. But I think at a certain point, the numbers, the relative numbers start to matter a

little less. And, you know, bear in mind, you know, there are many different reasons why I have the money that I do to spend on these products, you know, like, there are various things that I do in my life and save in my life to make sure I can buy these phones every year because it's important for me. For many reasons, because I care and also for what I do for a living. But there are many people that buy an iPhone every year. And I think if you buy an iPhone every single year, maybe a couple of extra hundred dollars isn't that much of an impact to you. I don't know. I mean, your mileage may vary on that one.

But I think, you know, $999, a lot of people, most people aren't paying that amount of money in one big go. You know, there are contracts, there are upgrade programs, right? These are a thing that exist. Yeah, it's just you're paying, you're going to pay another, whatever, $10 a month over the course of that contract than you than you did before and yeah but i i think the bottom line is i think a lot of the reaction is people would rather not spend as much money which i totally get because it is an incredibly large amount of money for something that you're only going to keep

for a year maybe who knows yeah maybe but not if not if it's two years or three years, necessarily. And so I get that. And also I know that people feel oftentimes frustrated when Apple makes something that they want, but for whatever reason they can't have. Or Apple makes something that they're not going to get when they're somebody whose identity is tied up in being somebody who's got the latest and greatest Apple stuff.

And I get it and i would say that at some point some price point this becomes a problem for apple but i don't think this is it i mean because again first off the price isn't entirely real because um people tend to buy other things too so the starting price tends to not be the actual price you spend at Apple. And second, phones have already been creeping up there, right? If you get a plus with more storage, you're headed up toward a thousand already. And then do you get a case? Do you get AppleCare? So this is the world we live in is products like this exist.

And if your phone is fine, you don't have to buy it. And keep that in mind. And that's the only way. If Apple will change their... If you're really angry and think Apple needs to change the way they approach pricing, the way it works is if the market shows that Apple has failed to push the price higher. that Apple has failed to push the price higher. Like, not deferring your upgrades,

not buying a new iPhone, gravitating toward the older models that are cheaper and pushing down the average selling price of the iPhone. If lots of people do that, Apple will change its behavior because Apple is trying to find the right mixture. This is two-thirds of Apple's budget, is the iPhone. They're not going to jeopardize the iPhone's revenue engine in order to have a high-end product. The high-end product is meant to complement the rest of the product line.

And if they reach a point where it's acting to the detriment of iPhone sales, they will change their behavior. So, you know, I don't think that's going to happen at $9.99 starting for the iPhone X, though. I don't think it's going to happen. No, I don't.

Well, but the thing is, Apple need to try. And as a business, I understand why they're trying. You need to know. Look, no one wants to leave money on the table, right? This is their job as a company. If they're able to make $200 more per person,

they are going to try that. They're going to find a way to do that. Well, that's exactly it. This is what they're here to do. Back to the Apple TV. I want the apple tv to be the base model apple tv b99 because i want to see apple in there at least trying to fight at a lower price point with the chromecast and and roku's and fire tvs of the world and apple has obviously decided they're okay with the apple tv being way more expensive than those because the

people who are going to buy the Apple TV are going to want it for Apple specific reasons. And they're absolutely going to be willing to shell out another hundred dollars in order to get it. And that makes more money for Apple. And maybe that's the reason the Apple TV exists is for Apple, like below a certain point, Apple doesn't want to bother with the Apple TV. The reason that it exists is perhaps to keep throwing more money in their direction. I mean, Apple, that is, I think one symbol of Tim Cook's Apple is optimizing ruthlessly, in some cases, optimizing price points to generate revenue. And it's the reason why Apple is one of the most profitable and successful companies in the world.

Apple is one of the most profitable and successful companies in the world. But all of us, you know, this week, I think many, many upgrade listeners and you and I have thrown money, our own hard-earned money into the Apple vacuum cleaner that sucks our money out of our pockets. And so, yeah, that's where that huge profit comes from, everyone. It's us, right? And they know it. And they know they're doing their best to get our money and to make products that we want to buy. And where it breaks down is if it's a product we don't want to buy or it doesn't have value at the price. But $999 is not going to be it. Somewhere between $999 and a solid gold Apple Watch, there's a breakdown.

But I'm not quite sure where that is. Finally, I wanted to talk about the home button and losing it as a thing. I think the main concern I have with the iPhone X

is the muscle memory thing. You know, the idea of pressing a circle on the bottom of my device to wake it up, to go to home, all of these things, that has been the last 10 years for me, has been doing that and pressing that button and going back home or, you know, double tapping that button and going into back home or you know double tapping that button and going into multitasking and i hope that the fact that the gestures being basically the same as the ones on my ipad will help it settle in but i think that there's going to be some some real time that it's going to take to break the muscle memory that we have uh for for going home you know um i again i'm gonna i'm gonna play

i've got it for another month i'm gonna play my trump card of having used the iphone 10 for a little while for 30 minutes or whatever um less than that probably 15 minutes while people are over my shoulder looking staring daggers at me because i'm using it they want to use it yeah um the i think it's not going to be much of an adaptation period i really don't i i think you hold it in your hand the way it worked for me i hold it in my hand i move my thumb down to where i'm just again non-thinking i'm moving my thumb down to the button to tap the button hey guess where my thumb is it's down at the bottom of the screen what do i do i put my thing i moving my thumb down to the button to tap the button. Hey, guess where my thumb is? It's down at the bottom of the screen. What do I do?

I put my thumb down and instead of pressing, I flick. That's it. Like the gesture is, first off, pressing the button is a gesture, right? It's gesture UI. It's more obvious because there's a button there with a circle for you to press, but it's still gestural UI. Especially when the buttons stop moving so it's already gestural ui and this gesture is so close to that gesture that i think it will take very little time and i'm i'm just gonna come out and say it um i think it's i think it's past time and i think it's time for the home

button to go and i am happy for the home button to go i have all this summer i've been thinking about this as we've been doing you know as the rumors have been out there about a buttonless iphone and all that i think i think it's been 10 years we've been using this this ui as comforting as a hardware button is to go back to home the fact is that's a simple gesture it's going to be visible everywhere with a little line thing that they're going to do um there are still other hardware buttons on the device but for that one i'm okay with it like i feel like apple is driving ios to a new lexicon of gestures i think people will be able to get the basic gesture of flipping up from the bottom to go home. And the more complex gestures like flipping up and holding to switch apps, not everybody's going to get that. But that's okay, because not everybody needs to get that, because flipping up to go home will get you back to your list of apps, and then you can find the next app you want to launch. So I'm, I'm kind of a believer in it. I'm okay with it going everywhere on every iOS device over time. And I do actually think that's going to happen. I think

that the home buttons days are numbered now, because it takes up a lot of space on the bezel of every device, because it's not just where the button is, you have to make room for that button. And that means unless you want to do a notch around the button, don't do that. It's a bad idea. Just get rid of it. That's a that's a button that can be gone. You can do a notch around the button, don't do that. It's a bad idea. Just get rid of it. That's a button that can be gone. You can't get rid of the sensors. You can get rid of the button. So yeah, I think it works.

I think it's fine. And I think that it's the start of a new chapter for Apple in terms of their gestures. And I get that it's not obvious in the way that a physical button is obvious and that there's some user experience issues there. But I think in the grand scheme of things, we're at a very different place in terms of who uses touchscreen devices than we were 10 years ago. And I think Apple can get away with it. And I think it's better. In the end, I think it's better because just like getting rid of the hardware keyboard on the original iPhone because that space could be better used as something that was touchscreen and could be anything underneath

instead of just a keyboard. This is the same story, which is there's still a home gesture at the bottom of the screen, but now all of that space that was just nothing except a button is now a gestural area that's programmable, and I think it's better. So as you were saying in your Macworld column this week, it's like the design ideal, right?

Like this is, you know, the button was there because it was what we needed. It was what was thought was required. But as time has gone on, the ideal design for the iPhone is just a screen. So you need to let go of the chin. And if you let go of the chin, you need to let go of the chin. And if you let go of the chin, you have to let go of the home button too. Yeah, that it was Johnny. I've said it in the video, right? He said, um, the screen, just a screen has been what we've been working on for more for 10 years, 10 years, the iPhone had just come out. Right. So the clear implication there

is from the beginning, the design ideals of the iPhone were as much screen as possible on the front, the screen, everything else. They said this back in 2007, everything else about the device should fall away and you should be interacting with the screen. That was always the idea. And everything since then has been, how do we get closer to that ideal? And I feel like, and this is why I wrote about it on a macro last week. I feel like this is the closest they've gotten. Obviously the final ideal is that all of that other space,

including the whole notch and all the sensors, there's some way where they can make it that those are not visible and that it's just all screen but they can't get there yet but i feel like this is this is apple reaching the edges like this has been all along it's been a battle at apple to make an iphone where the where the screen reaches the edges of the face of the of the of the device and that this is the phone that does that so in some ways it's the it's a it's an important milestone. Just like how I feel that the Apple Watch always was headed toward having cellular connectivity and that it kind of met its milestone of its design ideal with the Series 3.

Because it's finally got that last piece that it's not that these products aren't going to evolve and grow and change but like a fundamental thing that was obvious that it needed to go there it's it reached it um you know minus the notch in the case of the iphone 10 but it reached the edges everywhere else which is i think that was the goal all along and and uh so it's fit it fits it fits but at the time they felt that they needed that tactile button. We're not giving you a whole keyboard, but we're going to put a button down there. And in emergencies, you can press it to go home. And I don't think Apple doesn't think that's needed anymore. And I think they're right.

I think they're right. I'm excited about this phone for some of these reasons. Like whilst I'm on, you you know i'm a little bit um apprehensive of the change i'm wondering how that's going to feel my ultimate feeling is excitement because this is going to be the most new feeling iphone in a very very very long time for all of these reasons right not just because it looks different not just because the screen is different but because there are brand new ways to interact with it ways that are completely different to any other ios device um it is very intriguing 2017 i i'm gonna say as a you know i don't know one of a

small group of unofficial ios historians i guess right we're watching this for a long time paying close attention. I feel like, you know, obviously the design milestone where they threw out the skeuomorphism is a milestone of iOS. Yeah, iOS 7. But this year, I think it's going to go down

as a almost like volume two, like of iOS conception, where Apple's rolling out a bunch of things that are redefining fundamental parts of iOS. And a lot of them are manifest in the iPhone 10. And the rest of them are manifest in the iOS 11 interface on the iPad. And I think that they go hand in hand. I think they were all designed together. I think they're all in lockstep. I think they are all about Apple driving some certain gestures forward and having things be more consistent and different than they were before across iOS devices. And so big year, 2017, between the iPhone 10 and iOS 11 for Apple redefining what it means to use iOS.

And I think it's good. And I think it's going to kick off more changes that are going to stem from these changes and are going to advance the ball in the future. But it's a big steps forward because, right, I mean, the iPhone, I mean, the iPad running iOS 11 is also a very different feel,

just like the iPhone 10 is going to be a very different feel from previous iPhones. And so both sides of the iOS equation are getting these, you know, rethinks this year. It's exciting. I turned on my old 12.9-inch iPad Pro to wipe it, to restore it, because I'm selling it to a friend.

And I was like, what is this? Just seeing the iOS 10 home screen with the big dock and everything. It was like, wow, okay. I've really gotten used to this over the last three months. It's like, what is this wasteland here that I have? It was a strange feeling. We could talk about iOS 11 next week, though, in more detail, of course. Yeah.

Because it comes out tomorrow. It comes out on the 19th. So we're going to talk about it in more detail next week. Because we still have more iPhone stuff to talk about, this week's episode is brought to you by our friends over at Encapsular. They have website security tools and a content delivery network that will make absolutely any website faster, safer, and more reliable. Over 100,000 organizations trust Encapsular every day because of these ideals, because they make

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Craig Federighi has been on a bit of damage control, I believe. I feel, over the last week. Namely, giving an interview to Matt Panzarino at TechCrunch and appearing on episode 200, congratulations John Gruber, of the talk show.

If you can call it an episode, I mean, it was only 30 minutes long. Is that an episode of the talk show, really? A call it an episode, I mean, it was only 30 minutes long. Yeah. Is that an episode of the talk show, really? A fifth? Is that a fifth or something? Yeah. Of a regular talk show?

It's a fractional episode of the talk show. It was a segment. It was a segment of the talk show broken down into its own episode. I am not surprised about this, though. I had a family gathering over the weekend. It was my mom's birthday. And me and my uncle, my uncle works in the telecoms industry.

So we really have a great time talking about this type of stuff. So we're talking about the iPhone 10. And my 80-year-old grandmother turns to us and says, that was the one that didn't work on stage, right? So she knows. Because they showed up in the news. So everyone knows that Face ID in its very

first iteration, in its very first demo, I should say, failed. So they have been spending some time over the last week, at least Craig Federighi has appearing at least in the places where the most ferocious

users are. So they go into the talk show go into TechCrunch. Answering emails. Answering, yeah, answering emails from developers which MacRumors had, which I'll put a link to that in the show notes too. It's not a good look, right? This isn't what apple want to happen no i mean obviously it was a mistake it wasn't

actually a failure they explained that it wasn't a failure but uh because apparently what happened was there was a setup tech and they did lift you know they raised to um raised to wake and then they were looking at the phone and it was trying to do face id on them and after a certain number of scans just as with touch id it fails and goes back to inputting the password yep and they didn't realize that that happened or could happen and uh nobody else checked before the event to make sure that the phone was ready to go for Face ID. And so, you know, it wasn't a failure of Face ID. It was a failure of setup preparation. Yeah, it was locked, needing a password.

And then it worked, right? On the other line. But it's tough, right? What a time for a demo fail. And there it was. There was a demo fail. And Craig didn't understand it, didn't understand what he was was doing. Cause obviously he's got his mind on doing his presentation. He didn't realize that what he was looking at was the ad password, uh,

enter password screen, which he could have done and then, and then locked it and then done the demo too. But he didn't realize that either. So now they have to recast it. And it's just, it's tough because this is your big moment and it had a false start. and it's just it's tough because this is your big moment and it had a false start if you ever wanted proof to the conspiracy theory that all of these demos are staged well this is it right because what they should have done in hindsight you know like if they believe it works and know it works to assure to assure that it's going to work change the code in this build on this phone so it would definitely authenticate him well i guess i guess so i guess you know i mean that would be the way to do it hard-coded for federighi face exactly just uh and unlock every single iphone

but no i but you know in a way i'm happy that they don't that this did happen because it can it shows that they don't do that right which is always a question in my mind of like, you know, I know this stuff works, but like, it's not ready yet. Like, do they do anything to kind of to massage things? But anyway, I'm keen to understand how this works in Mike Hurley's life. Like what was happening to the phone? What was it doing? Right right so they're saying that like you know the reason this happened is that the phones were being handled and it was trying to scan faces it was waking up i mean that's that's that's the key thing is if you tap if you can tap to wake or lift to wake it was waking up and then trying to do a scan and failing yep and in normal use they must

feel um apple's also another thing to talk about the damage control another thing they've done is they've kind of uh rustled up uh other people apple employees who've been using the iphone 10 and those those people have been talking to people they know and saying oh i've been using this for months and it's fine don't worry about it just to just to get that just i've seen several people say oh i've talked to the people i know at apple who've been using this and they say that it's fine and it works great right so that's also happening here whether whether organically send the birdies out let them fly whether organically or whether somebody's like yeah you should mention that to your friends in the press that it works

fine um but uh yeah it's it's the problem here is we don't know because we haven't used it and even the press at the event i was lording it it over you earlier, but I can't on this. Face ID is one per, nobody was training their faces at the event, right? So I have to take it on the word of the Apple employee who I saw use Face ID. And that's at a kiosk in a crowded demo center. It's not day-to-day use. So nobody has any personal experience with this. We have to take Apple at its word. And guess what? People are always going to be skeptical of new

stuff, even from Apple, especially from Apple. Who knows? But they're always going to be skeptical. Now, I look at it and think, everybody was skeptical about Touch ID, and how did that work out? It worked out fine. Doesn't mean this will work out fine but it does mean the skepticism is not fundamentally uh because this is is likely to fail yeah it's because it's new and we haven't experienced anything like it and so we don't understand and until we see it and how it's implemented and how it works for ourselves we're going to be skeptical of it and that's i, I think, totally fair. Now, the problem with the failure, or the, you know, demo failure, if not technology failure, is that it plays into that fear. So I, you know, and the Apple's not going to be able to solve this until they get reviewers writing about

how the how the face ID works, and then people actually use them. And it's going to be telling the value of having people write about and talk about technology is we can talk about our personal experiences and tell the story of like, well, I used it in my everyday life. And this is what I found. And this is how it worked. And have it be credible, perhaps in a way that an Apple, you know, somebody paid by Apple, an Apple employee is not going to be as credible about it. But a lot of people are just going to need to see it for themselves or hear it from a trusted source. And that's just where we are with it. And there will be, we talked about this a couple weeks ago, there are going to be issues. There are going to be things where people are like, oh, did you know that it didn't do this? Or, oh, I found a funny, they always said that my sister and I looked alike and turns out that

she can unlock my phone. Oh, isn't that funny?'re gonna get those stories they're gonna be weird quirks things we learn uh about fail failures and successes and false positives and all of that is gonna happen but we don't know yet and and so we've got a vacuum and you know what happens when there's information about apple and nobody actually knows the facts is that the noise fills the gap yeah i i want i've really i, I'm really intrigued to see how it plays out. I think that measured skepticism is a healthy practice, right? Like, don't just believe it's going to work because Apple made it, but don't believe it's not going to work because Apple made it. You know, I feel like there is a measurement

that everybody should follow with this right like i'm confident that they wouldn't have made this decision if it didn't work as good as touch id or close to um but i don't necessarily think that just because they apple have added this that it's better than anything else like i don't i'm gonna wait to see on that one personally there were some clarifications that came out in these two places and some additional information that we didn't have before um and so i kind of wanted to run through a couple of these things uh wearing sunglasses will work fine in most instances because the ir camera the ir scanner can see through uh sunglass lenses there are some instances where like there are some kinds of coatings that can block IR. Um,

and obviously they wouldn't work because of the attention detection, right? So it's not just, um, scanning your face. The, the iPhone 10 has to see that you're looking at it, but you can turn off attention detection if you want to.

So it's just scanning your face. So Apple has this as an accessibility option for people. Right. Um, blind people is obviously one of them. Um them who may not be able to look at the screen shelly brisbane who writes a lot about accessibility was on download last week and we talked about this and yeah that that is a it's not surprising given apple's attention to accessibility that they would be accessibility features in in face id and this is one of them where if you're incapable of being scanned as having your attention being given to Face ID, you can turn that off. And similarly, if you are incapable of moving your head or neck for multiple face scans, you can actually have it only do a single

scan. So there is definitely accessibility built into this apple has tried to make this as accessible a feature as possible so if you uh have a your favorite pair of sunglasses and you're unwilling to change them because they're your favorites and you're going to be spending a day at the beach you can just turn off the attention detection for the day so it it still scans your face, but it doesn't need to see your eyes, which is a good feature to have, of course. Also, as well, this is good. I'm happy for this change.

I think we've spoken about this. I've heard it in many places by now that iOS 11 includes this mode where you can hit the lock button five times, the sleep-wake button five times, can hit the lock button five times, the sleep-wake button five times, and it enters a kind of a mode which serves many purposes. One is emergency mode, right, to bring up the emergency calling. So you can dial an emergency number and you can have it automatically call an emergency service if you want, which is very similar to what exists on the Apple Watch right now. But it does a couple of other things, and one of them is to turn off biometrics,

so it turns off Touch ID. So then to be able to enter a phone, you have to put the passcode in. And this can be really good for if you're in a situation where you don't trust an enforcement official. Maybe you're going through customs, maybe, you know, and you just don't want to be in a situation where somebody can compel you to unlock your phone

without having legal representation nearby. Well, on the iPhone 8 and iPhone X, you don't need to hit the button five times. You just grip the phone, pressing both buttons down for a period of time, and it will enter this mode. And I think that's a way better way of doing this than hitting the button five times because i could do that through my jeans right like i could do that and then you

just squeeze it you just squeeze the buttons and it's you know you can feel them especially how big the new buttons seem to be on the on 10 especially um and you get a haptic feedback to confirm that it's entered into the mode i think this is really great i hadn't seen this mentioned anywhere else, except for in these two places in this article with Matt Panzarino and on the talk show episode 200. It's really good.

I like that this feature is going to exist, and I like that they've made it easier on these new devices. Yep. And then just a couple of other things i wanted to just pull out real quick from the tech crunch article which is much much longer and went into more depth um apple took well federici took great steps to reiterate the lengths that apple took to in to ensure

privacy on the devices um confirmed that there was no light shone in your face i don't think that apple's marketing is helping them here um i initially thought that there is no light shone in your face i don't think that apple's marketing is helping them here um i initially thought that there was some kind of light shone in your face like that your face was illuminated by the phone in some way to scan because all of their marketing shows that and i know what they're just trying to show you how it works but i think a lot of people are confused by this yeah i i'm sure that they debated this and i had the same thought you did and knowing how it works i'm watching them describe it and thinking oh man people are gonna think that you actually are illuminated by these by these uh

sensors and things like that when it's actually all happening in infrared and i know they tried but i felt like as i was watching and i thought you should have set this up better they didn't do a good job of defining it initially you should have set it up as all of this happens in infrared so you're you never see anything and then even like on the slides where they show the person's face illuminated like

show it not illuminated and say this is what it looks like to you but in infrared it looks like this and we use that information. And just like lean into it because a lot of people ended up reading it as, well, I look at my iPhone and a beam of light shines all over my face

and little dots dance around. And then my phone up. It seems like a little showy to unlock a phone that way. But okay, I guess. And then here we go. And then a couple of other little details um apple will be releasing a face id security white paper um and federighi also did some further clarification on at what angle you need for the for the phone to be able to see your face

which i knew was a thing that everybody was spending a lot of time thinking about, rightly so, before the phone was released. Like, what angle does the phone need to be at? How much of your face does it need to see to authenticate? Like, do you need to perform a selfie action every time you want to unlock your phone? So, I'll read a quote. It's quite similar to the ranges that you'd be at if you put your phone in front-facing camera mode, as if you were taking a selfie picture. Once your space from your eyes to your mouth come into view, so you'll be able to see that, you will be at the matching range. So it can work at fairly extreme angles. If it's down low because your phone is in your lap, it can unlock it as long as it can see those features. Basically, if you're using your phone across a natural series of angles, it can unlock it. I really like the way that this was described. You know, like if you can, if you can take a picture that has your eyes and your mouth in whatever angle that may be,

the phone should be able to unlock. So I think that that's going to work. Like basically my thinking was like, if I'm looking down at my phone right without like really leaning into it will it unlock and yeah it turns out it will so i thought that that was really good and i appreciated that um i appreciated that clarification well if you think about like can you see the screen of your iphone or can you know can you see the screen of your iphone if you can see that you're most of the way there it would then need to be that the space, somehow the space between your eyes and your mouth is blocked by something. So, which I like the idea of the natural series of angles.

Again, we're going to find people. Everybody's going to try this and say, Oh, well it worked here and it didn't work there and all of that. But I, I have seen a lot among the fear, uncertainty and doubt spreading around a face ID.

One of the ones I, I have seen is I don't want to pick up my phone and look at it to unlock it. It's like, uncertainty, and doubt spreading around Face ID. One of the ones I have seen is, I don't want to pick up my phone and look at it to unlock it. It's like, well, shouldn't really have to do that. And in fact, the way it should work is you should be able to pick up your phone and it's unlocked, or you should be able to, if it's in the right angle, just flick it open on the table and it's unlocked because it can see you now there are going to be cases where that's not the case but um but that's the that's the ideal here is pick it up flick and it's and it's unlocked um and in fact somebody uh i read somebody said

i would really love to have it where if i unlock it it just automatically goes to the home screen i don't know if apple's gonna add that as an option but it's not not bad like like if i if i look at my phone it unlocks and takes like takes yes sir take you to the home screen right away sir and one time you glare at it but um yeah that's how it's supposed to work so we'll see how it works in practice could be an accessibility option right there is the one in the current phones right where it will just go straight home once such id is authenticated like that's the thing so if well if that's a thing then uh presumably that will still be an option and you could flip that on and then when you look at the phone it will just take you to the home screen without a flick which is fine great yeah i don't i don't know what the, I mean, I know that was a thing. I don't know if it still is a thing.

I believe so. I believe so that, you know, you remember when they changed it from the raise to wake? Yeah. Rest finger to open, open iPhone with touch ID without having to press the home button. So you would,

so it's possible. Yeah. So there, there, there are ways around it, but we'll see. I mean, we'll,

we'll see. I'm not sure. You wanted to mention a product that we didn't get any time to talk about last week, surprisingly. Yeah, it's another Apple accessory and it's kind of boring. And yet I think it's really interesting. So for $100, for $99,

because again, it's not just a $999 phone, it's everything that you buy for it. But this is the first time Apple has done this on the iPhone. it is an iphone folio case that means that it's got a cover and it's actually got a slot for you to put like money or credit cards or whatever but the thing that's different is you flip it open and your iphone wakes up and you flip it closed and your iPhone goes to sleep, which has been the case on the iPad forever, but has never been supported on the iPhone before. And the iPhone X apparently supports it. The iPhone X has a magnet in it.

Yeah. This was found in the GM leak that came before the keynote. Yep. Yep. So this is the this is the result is presumably all the third-party case makers will be able to do this too but apple has a folio case and i think it's good it's not for everybody i think it's not for most people but i definitely know people who really like having their iphone with a cover on the case and of course right now

you flip it open. And then you've got to wake it up. Because it doesn't have that iPad experience. And this one does. And this is a product from Apple. Because Apple builds what Apple wants to build for itself. And it's good. I'm happy to see it.

Even though I'm not in the market for it. Yeah I think this is a weird product. I know. Oh totally weird product. I mean there's just a couple of things that i find funny about it one of them is that it has space for cards in it which is hilarious considering the fact that apple pay exists as a thing um and that this would cause problems in places where you use contactless cards like you'd have to open the the wallet every time you couldn't just press your wallet against it because it would be trying to read either the apple pay sensor

or the card or both so you'd have to open it up every time um but yeah if this is a type of thing that you want you probably already know that which means you most likely already own one of these and sure if apple makes one great but it does cost a hundred dollars so you know that's on you but yeah it is this is a i do find it a strange product to debut now like it just seems like if you haven't done this already why are you doing it now but they are um and if you want it it's available for you. Yep. All right.

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So all of the information is just saved into Google Drive for us, what people are filling out. It's fantastic. Very, very, very, very filling out. It's fantastic. Very, very, very, very simple to do. Very awesome. There's no other way that I could have done this personally. Between me and Adina, we don't have any website coding experience. We would have been completely lost trying to set this thing up and set it together. It would have been a nightmare. Squarespace plans start at just $12 a month. You can start a trial with

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you'll never guess what is back. After a summer break, it was rested was rested it's tanned rested and ready mike it's ready to come back it's hashtag ask upgrade all right i have like a billion questions so we're going to do as many as we can do within the time that we have left so maybe maybe we can lightning round these let's say is this sure okay let Sure. Okay, let's see. Is this? What's the segment like, Mike? Is this like Ask ATP? No, this is a trademark.

Oh, I see. Oh, okay. Hashtag Ask Upgrade. Jay asked, which would you prefer? Apple Watch with LTE or an always on watch face? So we have Apple Watches of LTE available now. But if given the choice, would we choose to have an always-on watch face over LTE? I think Apple Watch with LTE is, like I said earlier,

a fundamental change in the usefulness of the Apple Watch, and so I would always prefer it. I would really like it if I could select a face or let it do a low-power face that was always on and fade it up. I feel like they must be getting close to that, that maybe next year's watchOS update will do something like that. Because, yeah, I would like to be able to glance at my watch,

and sometimes it doesn't wake up and still see the time. And you can't do that now. So I would like that. But the LTE, that is a core. That's why I'm buying a new Apple Watch. It's like, that's going to be awesome. I agree with you completely. You know, both of these features

would have a significant impact on battery life. And I believe Apple is deciding to tackle them one at a time based on what they think is the most important. And I'm surprised if you would ask, if you would ask me when the Apple Watch was announced, whether in 2017 with watchOS 4 they would have figured out how to do enough battery savings to do an always on watch face i would have said of course and they haven't and so that's disappointing but

if you would ask me if they'd have a an lte version by 2017 i would have said maybe right and they do so that's good. Justin wants to know, do you think that the inductive charging capabilities on the new iPhones will allow Apple or third parties to make new battery cases that are smaller in profile? So I would love somebody who has knowledge of the Android accessory market to tell us if these cases exist for Android.

Because if they do, then the answer is yes for android because if they do then the answer is yes and if they don't the answer is i guess there's a reason why that doesn't work because you would think one of the nice things about inductive charging would be you can make a battery case that doesn't have to be plugged into the device right It just goes on the back and the power flows into the device. But I don't, I did a quick search and I couldn't find any. That doesn't mean there aren't any. So I'd be curious for people who will come from the Android world where there's been wireless charging for quite a while about whether this is a thing or not, because I like that idea, right? That's a, the idea that you like that idea right that that's a that's a um

the idea that you could have a case that is not extending below your phone and and plugging up the lightning port that it's just a hump on the back with battery and it just magically charges your phone and doesn't and gets out of the way of your ports that's awesome like when you're traveling you could have longer life without uh if you're listening on a on a set of headphones using the lightning adapter and you can't charge your device right but you could via the inductive battery pack but i i my guess from what my cursory googling has shown is that maybe there are issues with uh with this that the kind of power that needs to be provided to an inductive charger is not efficient enough or strong enough to be something that can come from a battery pack but i don't know i'd love to hear that my guess is that the technology required is too physically

large too big too big that could be and that's why there haven't been any yet and or still too early to wouldn't be great a little bit too worried about cases exploding in pockets yeah but i would love it i mean i would really love it if there was an inductive uh inductive charging thing i'm still a little bit surprised that apple didn't do something like the smart connector um that is completely low profile and not a port but that you could put a case on and it would feed battery into it um although not fast right the smart connector is inductive and it's very slow but uh if you leave the case on all the time, then it just sort of will keep refilling the battery. But I don't know. I'd love to hear.

Tony asked, does anyone know what's going on with AirPlay 2? It was conspicuously absent from the iPhone event. Saving for the HomePod event? So here's one thing I just want to say, Tony. Thank you for the question. I don't think it was conspicuously absent. I think it was kind of mostly not worth bringing up in an event that was already super packed,

mostly because there isn't too much to say right now as there aren't products that will support it. There are many speaker manufacturers have signed on and Apple has provided a list of these somewhere, like lots and lots and lots of speaker manufacturers, all of the big names. To make devices that will include Airplay 2 after ios 11 launches i expect there will be some pr releases about it some point over the next few weeks there might be like a like a newsroom

article about hey look at these airplay 2 devices and if there is a home pod event maybe they would talk about it then maybe but i'm not convinced there even will be a HomePod event. But I just don't think that it's too important right now. Yeah, this was not an iOS 11 event, right? This was an event for the hardware. iOS 11 already got a lot of time in June at WWDC. It is shipping, which is great.

Shipping tomorrow. So this week we may even see all the press releases about now supports AirPlay 2, blah, blah, blah. Because you can't really sell AirPlay 2 speakers when it's not officially supported by any Apple devices. But as of iOS 11, it will be. And I would imagine that there will be announcements and launches and press releases, and then it'll all start kind of happening. But I'm not surprised. And I'm with you.

I think it's unlikely we'll see another Apple event this year. Doesn't mean it can't happen. But like the HomePod already got announced. Everybody knows what it is. It just needs to ship, and it's not going to... I don't think they're going to do an announcement, like an event saying, hey, it shipped. They don't need to do that. So I'm still in the camp of no more events this year.

We'll see. Rajiv wants to get our opinions now, our early predictions on future iPad models. Do we think that Touch ID will be on future iPad models? Could Face ID come to the iPad and along with it, a super slim bezel version? Feels like an eventuality to me. Because you could then charge even more for the ipad pro which

i'm sure tim would love to be able to do i think um my gut feeling is that they can get the they they will start getting rid of the home button like i said earlier i don't know whether that'll happen next year or not but it could the advantage of getting rid of the home button is they can either make the screen bigger they can make the device smaller and uh creep toward the advantage of getting rid of the home button is they can either make the screen bigger they can make the device smaller and uh creep toward the edges of the display even further um face id is going to be the killer right because if you get rid of the home button now you need to do face id you have to it has to there's plenty i mean this is the same argument as as face id on the mac right which is there's more space to put this stuff. You don't need a notch, right?

Because these devices are so much larger than the iPhone that you can just leave some space for the sensors. So I do think it's inevitable that Face ID will exist on the iPad. But whether it's a 2018 thing or a 2019 thing, I don't know. I think that would be great. OLED on the iPad is the other answer. And I think it's just going to be really hard to make an OLED screen that big. And that's going to be a really expensive device. And the iPad Pro is already pretty expensive.

It's going to get even more expensive if they do that. I think they want to do that, right? I think if you look at the iPhone X, it's like this is stuff Apple wants in all their products, but it's going to take a while to get there. So I'd say it's less likely in 2018. I think if I was a betting man about this, I would say less than 50% for Face ID and stuff in the iPad in 2018. Also, we'll see, maybe the iPad is going its own way in a lot of different ways. But I think Apple would be happy to get the home button off the iPad

and that would mean putting Face ID in. If I was going to put a bet on it, I would say that the next iPad Pro will go this way, but that may not be in 2018. Maybe two years is the the ipad pro refresh right

now could be and it may just be one of them that has it it could be that would be that would be your ipad 10 basically i mean they're not going to call it that because i think they've got a they're in a happy place now with the ipad but um it would be in the ipad pro right and it might be in it might be in one it might be in both who Pro, right? And it might be in one, it might be in both, who knows? But yeah, I think that's right. But 20, you may be right. I'm skeptical about 2018. If there was an iPad Pro in the fall of 2018, it's possible, but we'll see.

I think it's, my gut feeling is it's less likely, but it's not impossible. Edie wants to know, do you think touch id will reappear once technically possible nope no under except for one condition that at scale face id fails terribly that's the only way we see touch id come back i suppose if face id doesn't work then sure they're gonna have to go back to touch id but i think apple's confident that Face ID will work and that'll be the end for Touch ID. I agree. Reid wants to know, what do non-optimized apps look like on the iPhone X? Are they cut off at the corners and the unibrow?

The wonderful James Thompson, I asked him this question because I knew he'd been spending quite a bit of time in the simulator. Because as we spoke about earlier, he's done some work with his fantastic app, Peacock, which by the way, you need to try the new about screen slash AR mode of Peacock. Oh my God. You just have to. I'm going to put a link in the show notes to a write up that you did at Six Colors, Jason. James is wonderful it's it's an about screen ar mode and a game and it's also a game where you drive a truck around or you

could just drop bananas onto the peacock icon like it's just sublime and amazing and wonderful and fantastic and you have to just have to do it james wants to support every piece of hardware that exists so which is why there's peacock for the apple tv which is yes he knows it's absurd but he doesn't care and he likes to support every feature so like drag and drop is supported in the new version of p calc and that because the code is shared it's now drag and drop on the mac too which is kind of funny um so ios driving mac features there and uh then but's like you're a developer of a calculator and there's all this great 3D and AR stuff

in the operating system. What are you to do? And the answer is, yeah, he put an AR mode in. And you can throw dice and globes and bananas into an AR space and watch them bounce around and change the lighting. Probably like you throughout the whole summer. And it just got more and more absurd as the time went on when he was like when he added the little car

and i was like what are you doing yeah i think what he said was i think i may have accidentally made a game yeah and you can you can a uh bluetooth enabled gamepad to the device and drive the little car around if you want to because the gamepad code is all in there from when he supported the apple tv pcalc is an amazing application um we're spending time on this now because you should buy it if you haven't but see the thing is about james is i know that like he's not just wasting his time he implemented the drag and drop code incredibly quickly and that was basically the only thing in ios 11 that his app could take use of functionally so then he decided to play around with this other stuff and then made

something fun with it right like what all it was at first was he'd spent so much time to making these um amazing additional icons that you can that you can get now that he wanted to just render one in sprite kit in the about screen and then he did that quicker than he expected and then it just was just a trail of things that he thought i'll try this and just kept doing them faster than he thought so he built an entire game inside of the app which is in itself kind of genius because now we're spending so much time talking about an update to a calculator. Anyway, in the show notes is some

screenshots that James put together for me of what a non-optimized app looks like. And it's basically an iPhone app in the middle of the screen. There is a big black bar at the bottom and a big black bar at the top. That's what it does. For as much as the simulator can show you anyway. So that's what they look like so i hope that lots of apps support them quickly because

i would prefer not fantastic ui to just black bars right like just give me the first round of them just make all the apps full screen as much as you can do and then work it out later all right couple more questions travis wants to know what other apple products could incorporate chi charging maybe the next apple tv remote or the magic mouse so i agree with both of those they would they would work quite nicely um but an apple pencil enabled like an apple pencil wireless chi charging would be fantastic i would love that that would be really great the apple pencil is the first one that came to mind for me beyond the airpods and the apple watch and the iphone is i mean i the ipad presumably will gain wireless charging because

why not they've got the room i think that'll happen and but the pencil right we're charging it is so ungainly now that I think that that's a natural too. And the mouse, the charging is really bad too because you've got to flip it over. So I think those are two examples. I assume somebody makes a Qi mouse pad, right? Yeah, I was thinking about that. And the conclusion that I came to is it's kind of at that point,

you may as well just have a usb mouse but like sure if you want to have your mouse pad plugged into the wall or your computer and then your wireless mouse on top of it then go for it i'm sure that yeah or you know you could just get one of those ikea things and because ikea okay so ikea have a vast selection of products already available with Qi charging built into them. But you can also just straight up buy a wireless charging unit that you can bury into a desk. They just sell just the little units or pads that you can just screw a hole into like a large hole into a desk and just drop one in so that's where you can buy some of that stuff by the way if you are interested in playing around but they make a selection of products already and the last um question comes from kian and kian wants to know what are our thoughts on the current state of the

iphone se uh do we think that apple will keep it around with 6S parts, revise it in the spring, or kill it off? What do you think, Jason? If I had to predict, I would say the iPhone SE will get an update next spring and it will be with

iPhone 8 bits. That's my guess. Do you think it will look the same? Well, that's the question. I think the easiest thing to do, maybe it's iPhone 7 bits and not 8 bits, but like relatively recent iPhone, because then they're going to want to keep it around

for a couple of years. I think they may keep it the same. It wouldn't, you know, shock me if they tried to do a new design, but the easiest thing to do is just to keep that design. And the fact is the new iPhone looks more like the SE than the last iPhones did. So in terms of metal band.

And so, yeah, I think it's most likely to look the same and I would not be surprised if there was an update in the spring just to bring it up to modern standards and keep it alive. Because I think they've found that it's a successful part of the product mix down at the low end, and that there's an audience for people who want the small phone. And so why not? If you would like to send in your questions for the end of the show, where we talk about the... We try and clarify things for you and answer your questions about technology as much as we can.

Just send in a tweet with the hashtag AskUpgrade. Just tweet that into the ether or you can send it to us. It doesn't matter either way. We get them all. And also, if you want to send in a question for me to ask Jason at the start of the show, hashtag SnellTalk for that. I want to once again thank our three sponsors for this week. That is Squarespace, Balance, and Incapsular. If you'd like to find Jason's work online, I'm going to give you a few places to go.

Go to SixColors.com for Jason's work and writing, along with his help from the wonderful Dan Moran. Poor Dan. I know it's not how he's said, but I like saying it that way. I know that his name is Dan Moran, but I feel like Dan Moran is like his Hollywood name that I like to give him because he's a big-time published author now. So it's his stage name, Dan Moran. Buy Dan's book, yeah?

Yep, you should go do that. The Caledonian Gambit is the name of Dan Moran. Everybody should go buy Dan's book. Yep, you should go do that. The Caledonian Gambit is the name of Dan's book. If you are looking to find it, you can do that. That is the Googleable information you will require. You can also go to the incomparable.com for Jason's

podcasts. And of course, Jason hosts a vast selection of shows at Relay.fm as well. You can go to find Download, and you can go to find download and you can go find free agents and lift off. Is that all of them? Did I get them all? I think I got them all. Download free agents lift off on relay.

That's yeah an upgrade. Don't forget upgrade. I think people already know that. I hope so. Probably. Jason is at Jason L on Twitter J S N E double L. I am at I Mike I M Y K probably. Jason is at jsnl on Twitter, J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. I've been working on a pretty big project

that if you follow me on Twitter, you'll be finding out about later on this week. You can find our show notes this week over at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 159. We'll be back next week to talk about iOS 11. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Until next time, say goodbye, Jason Snell. slash 159. We'll be back next week to talk about iOS 11. Thanks so much for listening, everybody. Until next time, say goodbye, Jason Snell.

Goodbye, everybody.