Upgrade - 160: A Helipad on Your Table

Episode Date: September 25, 2017

Jason and Myke discuss the new iPhone 8 and 8 Plus and the Apple Watch Series 3 with cellular, plus there’s a little bit about macOS High Sierra. And then Myke at the Movies is back with “Terminator 2: Judgment Day.”

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 160 today's show is brought to you by pdf pen from smile blue apron encapsula and mac walden my name is mike hurley i'm joined by jason snell howdy jason snell howdy mike hurley we're in a very busy time right now. I feel like there's so much stuff going on. We've got an action-packed show today. We already have things for next week. It's a busy, busy time. It is. There is so

much going on. We could dive into the details of how we have to schedule these episodes. Nobody cares about that, Jason! Because it's time for hashtag snail talk and today's question comes from david and david says by now we know jason's favorite food favorite beer and favorite star trek what is his favorite board game uh childhood edition is probably sorry or as they say in canada sorry. And Adult, probably Carcassonne,

if that counts as a board game. It's sort of you have to build a board, but I like that one. It has a board, right? Every time we do family game night, I want to play Carcassonne and that's not allowed because we have to play other games too.

But yeah. If you would like to submit a question to open the show, can be as obviously we have gone over many times basically about anything just send a tweet out into the world with the hashtag snell talk it goes into a document i will pick them up and maybe your question will be asked on a future episode thanks to david for that question this week so should we do some follow-up? Last week's show, we spoke about battery cases a bunch. Yes.

We were wondering why, if induction charging exists and all you have to do is just touch the phone to something, why were there no induction cases that we could find? We couldn't find any for the iPhone. Apple isn't selling one, even though they stopped selling the battery case that they had. Where are all the induction cases? So a few people sent this in, and a guy called Mike was the first person to send it in.

Thank you, Mike. To a Samsung page, Samsung make a wireless charging battery pack for the Galaxy S7, and it just looks like a thick phone case. So this is it, right? This is the thing that we were looking for. You just drop it in and you're ready to go. For somehow, some reason that makes me raise an eyebrow, this is currently $20, $70 off on samsung.com. Maybe people aren't buying it. I don't know. But I think that is an interesting, I guess

because it's the S7, right? Everybody wants the S8 now. I guess that's what it is. Right? Because it's an old phone. Right. So that would make sense. It sounds like there are physics. This may be an example of something that was created because somebody thought this was a good idea, but that

there are physics issues. My understanding is that the transfer is inefficient. You need to have an inverter in order for this to work. And as a result, like you would waste, it would be bulky and you would waste a lot of the battery's power in the transfer. And so it's inefficient. And the fact that this is not a common thing

suggests that there are lots of really good reasons. Now, Apple doing inductive charging suggests that perhaps we will see another few companies try to get on this bandwagon, even if the products are bad. So that's something to watch for, right? Like if there's an inductive charging case that comes out for the iPhone 8 or 10 and we look at it and it's like this sounds too good to be true it may it may well be and that may be why there aren't so many of them um it's too bad because it's a fun idea but yeah i have some late breaking news as well uh mophie they have a product that they're that's on their site right now but is not ready to be released it's currently unavailable for the sam S8, which is a wireless charging case.

And this one looks fantastic. I expect it is really tricky though, as you say. So I'm interested to see how this goes. This is like a brand new thing that they have. So I'm intrigued to see how this ends up working out. So they have like a whole thing called charge force. It's like this thing that they're building. Um, but it looks like it's not as simple as you would expect. Like there's this big pack that you have to put onto it. It all looks a little bit, uh,

complicated to be honest, but it seems like something that is starting to become more and more of a thing, but it doesn't seem like it is as easy as just putting a case on the phone. Like there are some issues with it. So I'll include a link to that in the show notes. But the Mophie one doesn't look as efficient as the Samsung one does. But for whatever reason, it doesn't look like Samsung have made one for the S8. So maybe it was just a tricky product to make, as you say. Yeah.

I was in an Apple store like a week or two ago, and I heard something really strange, and I don't know about it. So we're going to talk about the iPhone later on today. But I heard one of the Apple store employees say that for the wireless charging to work, you have to have a specific case for it. Like the old cases won't work. that for the wireless charging to work, you have to have a specific case for it. Like the old cases won't work, is what they said. Like the new cases for the iPhone 8,

they've been designed so that the power can pass through easily, but that the iPhone 7 cases won't work. I don't know if that's the case, but I heard a store employee say that. Hmm. That's the case, you say. so i don't know i don't know i don't want to spread force false facts here but that was just something that i heard and i wondered is this one of those things that apple apple store employees say um like but they don't actually know like i wasn't sure but i overheard a conversation the phone wasn't out at this point well it certainly could be an issue? Could be an issue that there are either certain materials used in cases that prevent the transfer

or you need to put certain materials in a case in order to facilitate the transfer. And even then, it may be that the case reduces the effectiveness or speed or something of the charge. I don't know anything about that, but it's possible. It's something we're all going to have to learn, I suppose. So at the end of the show today, we're going to be doing Mike at the Movies Terminator 2. That's going to be the end of the show. But we had something that we wanted to include as follow-out right now because you put something together for the Blade Runner fans.

Yeah, there is a – on the Mike at the Movies feed on The Incomparable, theincomparable.com slash Mike, on the Mike of the Movies feed on The Incomparable, theincomparable.com slash Mike. You can get a new episode that is the Blade Runner Director's Cut. It is basically our conversation with John Syracuse, and it's preceded by two minutes of new footage, exclusive new footage, that is essentially Mike and I,

when we were done with the show and stopped recording, he stopped recording, I kept recording. And we talked about Blade Runner for like two minutes. And I said, oh, you should put that in the show. And he said, no, I already stopped recording. But that's in there. And I think that fulfills the dream of Blade Runner as a thing that keeps getting revisited with new material. So we did it ourselves. that's in that that's in that feed and if you ever want to go back and listen to a mike at the movies we do them time delayed a little bit but they all live there just the mike at the movies parts of the various analog and upgrade episodes where mike talks about movies and occasionally tv shows yep and there is the occasional standalone mike at the movies episode that goes into that feed which we don't publish anywhere else. So if you look through there, you'll see some additions that I've done in the past. I have two more booked for this year. So there are going to be at least two more this year of episodes that are only in that list.

So, for example, My Cousin Vinny is in there, which I spoke about with Tiff and Marco Arment. So that was kind of last year sometime. So yeah, there are little things that pop in every now and then. And I have two of these with two special guests coming before the end of the year. So you can go subscribe to that, theincomparable.com slash Mike.

If you enjoy that segment, there's more of it. Yeah, a little more. And I had one piece of follow-out. Somebody emailed me, and they were very nice to do so, and it's a listener, about this fellowship program that I think we actually even maybe have mentioned on the show, which is the idea of getting people who are savvy about technology to go to Washington, D.C. on a fellowship for a year and try to get members of Congress up to speed on technology and so that we can have better technology legislation and we can have representatives

who understand the issues of technology. So it's the Congressional Innovation Fellowship. And this is the last week for applications for next year's fellowships. So I think it's pretty cool. We mentioned it because security expert Chris Segoian, who is a former Apple script guy, Sal Segoian's nephew, actually, was one of the – he was at the EFF – or no, he was at the ACLU. And then he went to this fellowship. So you might be, Upgrade Listener, you might be somebody who could apply. There's a stipend for

the year, and you spend a year in Washington, D.C. educating the people in power in the United States about technical issues because they need the help. And the whole idea here is to get them up to speed because differences of opinion politically is one thing, but illiteracy essentially of technical issues or simplifying to the point where our representatives are making decisions that they shouldn't because they don't understand the issues involved. That is a problem. We need to get them educated. And that's one of the things that this program does. So applications are open through the 28th and we'll put a link in the show notes

for people to check it out. So on today's show, we're going to talk about the iPhone 8 and the Apple Watch Series 3, of which we both have watches and you have an iPhone as well, so we're going to talk about those and give our thoughts on those products. But as we record today, Mac OS High Sierra is being released.

Is there anything... I mean, I didn't even really have this in my topic list at all, Jason, because from what I can gather, there kind of isn't really much there. Yeah, that's about it. It is like Snow Leopard in the sense that it's Snow Leopard, if you want to cast your mind back to 2009, followed Leopard and Apple basically said, well, we're making a lot of improvements under the hood, but there's not a lot for users.

And that is High Sierra. High Sierra, a lot of the stuff that they're doing is it's like Metal 2, the new version of Swift, and VR support. But that's like the highest end currently shipping iMacs and the new iMac Pro, and the Mac Pro will benefit from that when it arrives, whenever that is. And, you know, new version of Swift is great for compatibility reasons, but it's not something you see. New file system is not something you generally see, although it can actually have some, it's a transition, it can have some impacts. There's questions about how well documented it is for third parties who are dealing with it. And you don't have a choice. If you're running flash storage only internally on your Mac,

it'll get updated to the new file system. There's improvements to photos. A lot of it is just compatibility improvements. They make changes on iOS and they want to bring those across. But there are very few direct user-facing features in High Sierra to the point where I feel like the smartest thing for most people to do is probably to wait and see and make sure that everything kind of shakes out and there aren't security issues and there aren't disk utility issues. And, you know, eventually we live in a world where eventually you're going to have to update because there'll be a critical security issue that doesn't get shipped to Sierra, but gets shipped to High Sierra. to Sierra but gets shipped to High Sierra. And if you're upgrading a relatively recent phone to iOS 11, you're going to need to,

and you sync with Photos and iCloud Photo Library, you're going to need to turn off the new file formats, the HEVC and HEAF, if you want to see those files on your Mac because Apple has chosen to not make Sierra compatible with those formats. That's High Sierra. Yeah, I haven't turned on HEAF yet or HEVC

because I don't plan on upgrading my Mac for a little bit. So I've left those off on my current iPhone 7 Plus. Yeah, so it's one of the, you know, I guess I would say it is the least compelling update to the Mac OS in those eight years probably um it's not a must update you will need to go eventually for compatibility reasons but there's nobody pushing you to do it today and so waiting and seeing might given all the under the hood stuff that's changing and that there's not a lot of direct user benefit on the top that may be the best thing to do is just wait for a while. And so I'd say this is one of the least compelling

updates in the near term for users. I think it'll pay off. A lot of this stuff is going to pay off over time to the platform and to features that will come in the future. But as I once said to a developer who released a paid upgrade to their product that had almost no new features because they spent the last year and a half building all of these incredibly necessary things under the hood to keep the product running and for the future of the product. What I said was, how do I recommend that people pay for nothing? And I know it's not really nothing there's stuff happening underneath but if you're a user um the changes apple's making now for next year like that's a very inside baseball apple thing of apple changing this stuff for the user there's no direct benefit so why so just don't go unless you do see a direct

benefit for something like wanting the heath and hevc stuff to work on iCloud photo library directly but but there are very limited use cases I think people who are really heavy users of photos photos is the app that changes the most in High Sierra because it's a very young app and it has a lot of changes. I'm unclear. I need to check. There are a bunch of Safari changes, but Safari 11, which

is the new version, Apple always makes the latest version of Safari available for the two previous OS releases. So you can install Safari 11 on Sierra and on... It's currently available for Sierra. Like, you can get it right now.. So you can install Safari 11 on Sierra and on... It's currently available for Sierra. Like you can get it right now. Yeah, you can get it on Sierra and also El Capitan.

Even if you're two versions back, you can get it. And I think it's got like the video autoplay blocking and all that stuff in it. So you don't, if the new Safari is what you want, you can just download it. You don't need to update to High Sierra to get that. So again, yeah. So that's my short version of High Sierra. Maybe we'll talk about it later some other week, but I don't know. Maybe not because there's not a whole lot there.

Honestly, it's about the future and that's great. And it's about compatibility and that's fine, but it doesn't make it one of those things where the day it comes out, everybody's going to get some great thing at their fingertips immediately because that's not what this update is. Okay, Jason, let me take our first break of this week's episode. And then we'll move on talking about new hardware. Today's show is brought to you by Mack Weldon. They make the most comfortable underwear, socks, shirts, undershirts, hoodies and sweatpants that you're ever going to wear. Mack Weldon is better than what you're wearing right now. Unless of course you're wearing Mack Weldon. I'm wearing what you're wearing right now, unless, of course, you're wearing Mack Wilden.

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are review these are review units from apple so you took another trip to the to the spaceship i did i took another trip to the i got my briefing in the uh in the uh the apple store oh oh interesting i guess they have like what is being called the boardroom type thing, like a room in the Apple Store. No. This was literally... I'm told that there are briefing rooms at the Steve Jobs Theater, although it's unclear what other briefing areas they will have.

But for this, since the Apple Store isn't open, I was literally just in the Apple Store. They gave me an Apple Watch briefing at the Apple Watch table since the Apple Store isn't open, I was literally just in the Apple Store. They gave me an Apple Watch briefing at the Apple Watch table in the Apple Store. And then they gave me an iPhone briefing at the iPhone table at the Apple Store. Yeah, I know, right? Yeah, I guess it makes sense because I'm thinking obviously the store isn't open. So it's actually probably a really good environment because they probably had all the stuff there, right, ready for it to be good to go.

So it's actually a pretty cool environment to have a briefing is in and amongst the store and the products. The town hall, town center, town hall. Was it town center or town hall? I forgot. Whatever one it is, that's where you were to get your briefing, to get your products. I'm not sure it was either of those things, but it was, yeah. It was just their briefing center is where it used to be.

They have a briefing center. So what devices exactly do you have? What colors are they? These are white fronts, and it's a silver and a gold. You have the gold. Okay. Again, as always,

it's really difficult to ask you these types of questions, but do you have any opinion on the gold color? No. No. Okay. I mean, I can tell you the problem is that the gold and rose gold kind of gradation involves light amounts of red hue that I can't see. That you can't see. That's such a so so what i would say is what i've been told and it seems right is that there is a well you know i can i can see some differences but it's not it's a level it seems so subtle to me

and i know it isn't subtle to other people but um what i would say is the new gold is neither the old gold or the old rose gold but somewhere in between somewhere in between because the thing that interests me about that from all the pictures that i've seen and all the videos i've seen and stuff like that is the back of it like the back of it is this interesting like muted color like it's not white it's not silver and it's not necessarily the same color as the band that goes around the outside like it looks different and i think it looks kind of attractive i think i really like the way that that looks with the the glass and the slight color that they've got on the on the back of it so i think that's really cool but uh but yeah i i i'll have to go to a store and look at it myself

because i understand that you can't provide me with the description that i require right now it is fair to say that that the back is not white. Like there is a color cast to it. It is a much warmer back than the silver white back, right? The silver white back is more bluey and there's definitely more of a, it's more of a, I mean, it's not blue, but it's like, it feels like a white white or a blue white. And the other one feels like a really warm white, or you could say it's sort of like taupe or tan or something. There's definitely, it's picking up, you know, it's meant to complement the gold around the frame of it.

So it's not one white for all. It is a different kind. Do you have any accessories? I do. a different kind do you have any accessories uh i do i have the i i have a charger and i have some cases when you say a charger do you mean a wireless charger yes i i do cool we'll talk about that in a minute then um going back to the look and feel of the device how does it feel to have a glass back back on the iphone how does that feel it doesn't feel that different to me but that's because i used the iphone 7 with the jet black uh covering and the jet black the jet black coating is basically the same the the jet black coating is um it's got the same feel to me as the glass back i feel like that was a preview of at

least tactilely what the eight feels like so if if you heard people talk about, oh, you know, there's going to be, I can take my case off. Because that was the case for me is I used a case on the 6 and the 6S. And I stopped with a 7 because I got the jet black finish. The glass is unlikely to get micro abrasions like the jet black. Although I never, the micro abrasions on the jet black did not bother me one bit. Um, but it's less likely to happen on the glass back, but yeah, it's, um, it's that feel, it feels very much like that, uh, that phones feel. Um, it was, so it was very familiar to me. I guess if you're coming from a more, you know, a traditional anodized iPhone 6 or 7, you're going to notice that. And it's hard to describe it, but it is.

It's like the equivalent of if you put your finger on a piece of glass and you pull and you can feel that the glass is kind of pulling back at your fingertip and it makes it impedes your movement. That's what it feels like. It's and it's the same. Apparently, it's the same glass it's the same oleophobic coating on both sides like they're you know it is a two-sided glass thing but in practice it feels very much like the the jet black it's it's definitely more tacky i mean not like sticky but like it is easier to grip it because it's it's exerting some force on your on your on your skin. Okay.

Okay, that's good to hear. I mean, that's kind of what I was hoping because, I mean, I've been very much in the case club for a while. Like, I've had cases on my phone since, I mean, mostly always have, but especially since the 6 design because it was pretty slippery. But I would ideally not, you know, I think I would actually prefer to not have a case on my phone. And I'm hoping that for the X, the glass back and all that's going to feel really good because as well, that phone looks so good. I kind of don't want to put a

case on it like it's so yeah, maybe maybe the glass will be enough. I'm willing to try it out. But I do know and I have seen many reports that to replace the backs on these is actually pretty expensive because all of the induction stuff is built into the glass on the back. So if you do break it, it's actually pretty expensive to get that replaced, more expensive than it has been to even get screens replaced in the past past so that's something to bear in mind i think so having had these phones for a few days now jason what do you think about the design uh i mean it's it's it's an iphone i hate to be so blasé about it but it's an an iPhone. It is, they call it 8, but, you know, 6, 7, 8. It is all of a kind.

I think it's, the backs obviously are different because they've got the glass back, which also enables the wireless charging. I think the anodized aluminum around the edges is really nice. I think they look great. As somebody who used that Jet Black iPhone before, it's like, yeah, this is good. This is the kind of look and feel that I like. I would choose the black again because that's my personal preference. And I know that people are sad who are fans of the rose gold, although the gold may satisfy them. But it is recognizably you know it is recognizably a um a an iphone in the design style that we've had for a few years now it doesn't it you could tell at a glance if somebody's using an aid if they don't have a case on it right because that back is so different it's distinctive yeah it is a it is still a flat

surface like the old flat surface and the shape of it and all is the same. What about the display? Have you noticed anything in there? I mean, it has True Tone in it now. How does this iPhone's display compare? Looks good. Looks really good. I was looking at both models. I haven't done any like head to head.

It's very much like my thoughts about the 7 and then switching over to the 8 and using it. But it looks good. The True Tone is really nice to have. I would argue the way that I use my phone, I'm less likely to be using my phone when I'm inside at home, which is when the lighting is pretty different and I haven't been like out to a restaurant or something. So I feel like True Tone on the iPad first was the right thing to do because I think the iPad is in that context of shifting light, indoor light especially. And it's also probably more of a long-form reading device, which True Tone really lends itself to. There are a lot of reasons that you would put that technology in an iPad first, I think.

Yeah, no, I think they made the right call there, but it's nice. It's nice to see it because it is a, it is a nice feature. Um, for most people, the, um, the, the idea that your white point, you know, it, it, the end result is that a lot of light indoors is warmer than, uh, than, than white points on devices are. And that makes the device seem really harsh and blue and um glary and you don't really think about it's just like how the screen is until it is uh compensating for it which is what it does and then it looks a lot nicer although i'll point out i mean it's if you've got the white ring around it you know that that uh ideally those those work in tandem right because the light is also bouncing off of the white of the frame on the front of the camera or on the front of the device

and so you know what you want is white to be white and not have it be like well this looks this this is yellow and this is blue and why are they mismatched so that's that's the goal and it's it's a it's a good goal to have i i i it. It's not one of these earth-shattering features. I would not get a new device just for True Tone, but it's nice. And it's a very Apple feature in that way, which is just sort of like, yeah, if you're in a room with warm lighting, shouldn't the iPhone's lighting be warm too? And it should. It's true.

That's the right call most of the time. And you can turn it off if you don't like it. So these phones feature the A11 Bionic chip. In some of the reviews and stuff that came out in the last week or so it's been interesting to see that like apple have admitted to the fact that they're giving them these names purely for marketing purposes now like the fusion and the bionic because just a and a number doesn't sound good so they're giving them names like how you have like snapdragon or whatever um which i'm fine with like it doesn't make a difference but like having a name to it is more evocative from branding perspective now this phone is monstrously fast like these by a11 bionic

chips they are monsters right like it's it's unbelievable you know there are reports of them being faster uh is it single core or multi-core than the current shipping 13-inch macbook pro of geekbench scores like just really really powerful stuff you've got a you've got a phone that's as powerful as a as a good uh not not cheap good laptop and that is that's where we are i think the always the question is what do you do with it and the answer right now seems to be things like games and ar and all of those things right and and that's good and it gives room for developers to throw more uh more processing power at things obviously that uh the bionic chip is also powering specific phone features on the 8 and the 10 that are doing things like the machine learning and face recognition and things like that on the 10. So there's other parts of it. six cores that are accessible simultaneously if need be, instead of the two switchable cores on the Fusion in the last generation,

that if it needs to crank things up and bring all the power possible to bear, it can do it. And it can function like a powerful laptop at that point. I think there's an argument about whether people are actually using that power. I'm sure Apple is, and I'm sure game makers will do it. And the Apple Design GPU is part of this too. But I feel like we may have reached the point with smartphones where for general purpose performance, it kind of doesn't matter.

Like they're fast. They're going to be fast for a long time. They're fast enough for most things. And it's the specific purpose. And you see this in Apple making their, you know, specific things that are built into the CPU for specific features that that's more of what it's about now is signal processing for video and stills. And it's machine learning stuff it's like and the gpu and things for ar and all of the like purpose-built stuff rather than having it just be general purpose performance because it's great on general purpose performance like how i'm not sure i mean again

never say never over time in on an infinite time scale, right. You always want a faster device, but, um, it seems like Apple is already shifting to having lots of things that are, you know, purpose-built things in the Silicon that let them do very specific things a lot faster and enabling those features that they need because they can afford to do that because the base general processing, uh, power that's available is so strong that, you know, they don't, you know, they don't need 100% speed boost next time, right? They don't, they really don't. They probably need

speed boost in specific areas instead. I don't know. It's just, it just struck me as funny that, yeah, it's fast as a MacBook Pro, but what does that get you? Very rarely is an iPhone being used to do things that a MacBook Pro is doing when it's stressing itself out. Like very rarely is it encoding video or things like that. It is doing some super stressful things for AR, for example, and that's sort of what, you know, it's been built for built for yeah i've noticed playing with some ar apps on my current iphone that it gets hot and it really affects the battery and there are points where like it's struggling to to do things and i'm assuming that all of this stuff is better on the newer hardware which is more purpose built for these types of things has better chips in them you

know like i'm imagining that it is a, whilst the experience is great on the current models, it's even better on the next ones. And I guess part of that is also in the cameras as well, right? Because there are things in the cameras which are being used to take advantage of this stuff. I wondered if you've noticed anything about the cameras and if you've had any, you know, if you've been able to play around with any portrait mode stuff um what your opinions are of these features a little a little bit still early um the portrait mode stuff is is interesting i mean it benefits from it benefits from the right lighting i mean that's the irony of it is it benefits from the right lining because there is only so much that the algorithm can do, especially for the spotlight, right?

You need that for it to be at its best. It needs to be well lit in a certain way and then it can do its magic. But it's fun to play with. The, I think the radial UI for the different portrait modes is really weird, especially since the regular camera interface has the swipe to move between modes. So you swipe to move between still and video and

portrait, and then you tap on the little cube and now you're doing this kind of like, it's like moving radially instead. It's like, I'm not sure what the, it just seems weird to me i'm not i'm not maybe i just need to get used to the interface but it seems a little bit strange but the the the portrait mode stuff is interesting again i think when reality hits what apple's doing uh in its promos you'll find that you want a good shot and then the good shot of a good subject then that stuff can really enhance it but you need to you still need to do that you can't just like pull out your phone and take a picture you know in a moment in bad lighting and have it become magically beautiful it's not it's not that it still needs to be composed and you still need decent lighting

i haven't tested low light performance yet. I shot some video in 4K, 60 frames per second. That was amazing. I watched it on my 4K TV. It looked great. The video quality is great. You know, it's a good camera. Apple's always pushing forward with cameras.

And this is another step forward. I mean, I hate to say it, but so many of the stories of new iPhones is Apple pushed everything forward another step forward. I mean, I hate to say it, but so many of the stories of new iPhones is Apple pushed everything forward another step. And if you're only one step behind, is it a must buy? Probably not. But if you're two steps or three steps behind,

then you get all of the steps last year and all the steps this year combined. And that's better. My wife is on a six and she's going to get an eight. And that's going to be great, right? Because she's going to get all the success and seven and eight improvements all rolled into one. And that's a, that's a massive upgrade. That's amazing. And that's, I think those are more common than people going from the seven to the eight where everything is, you know, the increments,

it's just, you know, everything's better, but rarely is it one of those moments of like, oh my God, I can't believe how much better this is. Because it's more just Apple just keeps pushing the ball forward relentlessly every year. Matt Panzarino at TechCrunch had a really good review of the phone where he focused on it being a camera primarily. And I put this in the show notes because there's one feature that I'm really, really impressed with and looking forward to, which is the performance of the flash. So there is a new type of flash technology.

Yeah, it's slow sync flash, which I always have loved on point-and-shoots before. And the idea there is it's a great feature. In certain circumstances, it really makes your photos better yeah and apple hadn't done it hasn't done it before and the idea there is you flash the flash but you leave the shutter open longer outside of the flash and it basically lets you increase the dynamic range of your shot because Because if you just open the shutter, when the flash is illuminating, you're going to get that bright foreground, that person in the foreground who's been flashed. And because that's a, it's a small shutter time, you're going to get them and they're

going to be clear, but the background, because the background is dark and the shutter was not open very long and the flash didn't illuminate the background very well, they drop out. And you get, you've, everybody's seen these photos where it's a flash photo and it's like somebody's in space or, right? You can't see very much behind them, but they're in relief. The slow shutter keeps the shutter open. So the flash goes, but it also is collecting light for longer behind, you know, around that person. The darker stuff is more visible. And it can make for great, like, if you're taking a picture of somebody at sunset and the sun's going down, it's pretty dark behind them, but the sunset is there and it's spectacular. If you take a flash photo of them standing in front of the sunset,

you get them and no sunset, right? But with the slow shutter, you get them and the sunset because you get the light collected off of them from the flash, but then the shutter stays open and collects more light from the scene behind them. And sometimes it looks a little weird, depends on the timing. And I think Apple's probably doing a lot of very clever algorithms to try to make this work better but um i've taken some amazing slow shutter shots with my point and shoot over the years in those you know vacation situations and things like that where you've got

a beautiful background but you've got to light the foreground so um yeah panzerina's article is great because it's basically a review of the iphone as a camera first, which I think is smart. Because the truth of it is one of the most important functions any smartphone has is as a camera. I also noted from reading stuff around that the iPhone 8 line, and I guess the X will be the same, by default HDR is on and always on. And it doesn't save the other image in your camera anymore and you can make these changes if you want to um but yeah you and also you can switch this all on in ios 11 on your current devices but apple believes that they've done a good enough job with hdr now that it will produce a better picture basically every time yeah apple is confident that their hdr mode is going to get you the best picture so they don't even bother to save the other version and this has to do you know the way the hdr mode works is it's it's bracketing two

shots it's taking a shot that's capturing the dark stuff and it's taking a shot that's capturing the bright stuff and then it is using algorithms to merge them together into a single photo that has a wider range that's what dynamic range is between the bright and the dark and they've been doing this for a long time and it you know it started out and it worked sometimes and then it worked better and it's worked better over time and of course the the more data they can collect faster the less um risk you have of the HDR shot being weird because in the gap between shot one and shot two, people moved and stuff. The faster you make that, the easier it is for this all to get put back together again. And they're obviously, yeah, they're confident enough about this now and they want to save space and not have you taking two of everything. They think the HDR

picture is good enough that by default, it just saves an hdr picture and that's all you get have you had any time to test out wireless charging in any detail like what are your opinions of wilds charging um you know i it's funny because it's going to be for people who've been using wireless charging on android it's going to be like opinions from five years ago or something like that. And I'm sure that there'll be a new brand, a new, you know, new set of,

of chargers that are made for specifically for Apple, because the stuff that's out there now is obviously like, Hey, we've got a cheat charger. Let's print, let's, let's use it. I think that's what the two that are out there now,

maybe there'll be a new things designed more to fit in with like the look and feel of Apple's stuff. I don't know. Everybody's going to take advantage of the fact that Apple's doing this now. So there'll be new accessories. Which is great. It's great for everyone. Which is fine. I'd say it's nice.

You've got to – I think there are specific use cases where you think i'd much rather lay this thing down on the circle than to plug in the cable that's right next to it um you know the circle still needs still has a wire and that wire still needs to be plugged in somewhere and it doesn't come with like a usb plug it comes with a power plug so if you've got a usb outlet like i do that's not going to work you need to plug it into an outlet and then you've got a cable. So like my area that has cables coming from the USB plugs in my wall to where you can plug them in for the phone. Now there's also a cable running across there from a power plug to this little pad, which needs to stay visible so that I can put my phone onto it. So it's not a miracle. It is still just, you know, it's an,

it's a different wire in a different place, but you don't have to plug in the wire. You still also have to plug your phone. You have to land your phone properly on the circle. There's a little light goes on, on the, on the charger saying that it's charging as well as some interface change on the screen when it says it's charging. It's really easy to not lay it down properly and not charge it. I did that more than once. I think it's easy for somebody else to jostle things and have it like come off of the charger and then it's not charging. So, you know, I think wireless charging is not a miracle. Oh my God, everybody's going to love gonna love it everybody's gonna have this everywhere i think it's very much like how is how do you use your devices where do you charge them when do you charge them and where are your plugs and all of that to make it you know uh worth the you know

because what we're really saying is i don't want to have to plug in a cable. I'm not sure that landing an iPhone on a little helipad on your table and confirming that it's actually charging is less cognitively challenging than plugging in a lightning cable. And the lightning cable is more efficient and more foolproof. It still could be unplugged on the other end. It's possible. It's happened. And so I don't know. I guess it's a nice option, but I think that you should not, people out there who haven't tried it, don't assume that you're absolutely going to want to do it. And it's going to be the best thing ever because I think for some

people it will fit their lives. And for other people, it'll be like, why do I have this? Now, instead of having a little white cable, now I've got a plastic puck sitting somewhere. And again, will it be better if it's like a little mat in your car or it's, you know, something that looks doesn't look like a a plastic, a shiny plastic disc, but it's it's more subtle and all that. Sure. There are lots of different scenarios. There are lots of different ways that this could work better. But but, you know, my initial response is it's cool and all, but I'm not sure i would choose it over just i think plugging in my phone is fine honestly having used it for a few days it's like it's novel to land it on the little puck but i i you know it's it seems more foolproof and not any harder to just plug in a lightning cable at that point when phil schiller introduced the air power thing on stage,

he specifically called out travel as a thing. Like when you go traveling, you don't want all the cables. I could see myself wanting to have the air power thing for travel, right? So I just have this one thing that I put on the nightstand wherever I go and it charges everything. I don't know if I really want this at home because I have some really nice docks that I use. I use the Studio Neat docks and I charges everything. I don't know if I really want this at home because I have some really nice docks that I use. I use the Studio Neat docks and I like them.

I like them because they stand everything up and they keep it all in place. And I don't know if the wireless charging for those reasons is going to be that helpful to me because then I'm still going to need two things, right? Because I can't wirelessly charge my Apple Watch. So I'm going to need something for that for now. So yeah, I feel like it's good that it's there as an option now, but I'm also pleased that

they didn't take away the lightning connector. Yeah, yeah. I don't think you can. I've heard a couple podcasts speculate about like, well, you know, is it only a matter of time before the lightning connector goes? Like, I don't think so. I think you've got to have one way into these devices. I think that the Apple Watch shows that everything gets way more dangerous when you lose all connection to the outside world

because it's much more easy to brick something and not get it back. It's the reason there's no public beta for watchOS, right? Because there's no way to just plug it in somewhere and reset it. If it dies dies it's dead and you've got to take it into the apple store basically at that point so i i'm skeptical about that it's a it's a nice feature and over time yeah if there are chi related things everywhere like the car is a good example where if there's a place if i could you know there's a place where i can lay my phone naturally in the car that I would anyway. And it just, everything magically happens.

I guess that's great. If, if the, if a hotel room has something like this, I think that would be great. Yeah. You know, all those things,

you know, it's good for that stuff. I think, honestly, I think wireless charging is more convenient outside of the home. and, and so, yeah,

because the, the good part about it is you don't need to give everybody a different cable right like that's the idea is everybody uses the same standard and that is a better situation than the one that we currently have where you need to have cables or bring your own cable the idea of anyone be able to put their phone you know whether you have a samsung or an lg or an iphone and you put it down in one place and it starts to charge, like that's great. That's great for everybody, but in the home, maybe not so much. So I'm assuming that you're going to be using the regular size eight until the 10 comes out. Would I be right in assuming that? Yeah, I think so. I, so I had the same thought about, I've got a little bit of

time here. Maybe I, maybe I spend more time with the plus model. Um, the camera is great. The second I, you know, I, I took it to the, uh, the football game on Saturday and took some pictures with it. It looks great. The camera is so nice. The having the telephoto lens is, is fantastic. Um, but I think for me, bottom line, I use my phone one-handed most of the time, and I can't use that plus one-handed. I just can't. It's just too big. And so the plus size is not ever going to work for me. It's just, it's never going to work for me because of the way that I use, the benefit that I would gain. Because I thought about it also because of the Apple Watch, right? Like if you've got a cellular Apple Watch, you don't need to take your phone everywhere. You don't need to take your phone running. You don't need to do any of those

things. So you could have a huge phone because in times when you need ultra portability, you just don't bring your phone and you just bring your Apple Watch. I thought about that. But then in the end, it came back down to, it's not comfortable in my hand. I can't reach things on the screen. It makes me have to use the other hand in order to do stuff because, and I don't like that. That's not how I use my phone.

My iPhone is largely something I hold in my left hand and do interface stuff with my thumb most of the time. And then occasionally, I'll change hand positions to type something or all that but it's a lot of it is just scanning things in in one hand and um and i can't hold the the plus comfortably and it hurts me because the screen is beautiful and that um camera is beautiful but the good news is apple is also going to make a phone that's sized more like the iPhone 8 and has both cameras.

So that, how about that? So that is, that's what I'm hearing, but not yet. You're leading this quite nicely towards the end of the discussion here, which is the poor fate of the iPhone 8. This is, I think, a much bigger jump phone to phone than the 7 was to the 7s maybe even the success to the 7 in some instances like the amount of features the change in design the change in materials it's a really good update like i think it is giving the customer more especially than the uh the 7 did um and the 7S. Sorry, the 7 did. We didn't have a 7S. Did we?

No, we didn't have a 7S. No, we did not have a 7S. Oh my gosh. The 8 is the 7S. Yeah, something like that. So I'll rephrase that. From the 6S to the 7, I think that the 7 to the 8 is a much, much better upgrade. But it is getting completely overshadowed

by the fact that the X is coming. And I feel sorry for the iPhone 8 because I wished that this was the phone that I got for my previous generation. Because I remain that, like, my 7's fine, but I don't really feel like I got that much out of it. You know, i lost things

you know i lost the headphone jack and i lost the the 100 reliable home button uh with no reason really for why that came out don't at me there's no reason uh and i think that the eight is great like there is a lot of really interesting things in this phone but the 10 is just around the corner and it's like this huge x that is like shadowing over the eight is how i imagine it right and it's just there's nothing that can happen every review talks about the 10 yeah but a lot of people for a lot of people the 10 is not the phone for them right there there are this is my point right like it this is a great phone but it just keeps getting overshadowed and it's a shame because i mean i've seen so many of my friends buy the 8 and they're super happy with it which i'm really pleased about because this is

a this is a great phone that exists for people that don't want or can't afford or have no interest in the other one yeah i um i feel like the people who buy a new iphone every year um they're what we're going to do is we're going to see a split in the market of people who buy the latest and absolutely greatest from apple and people who just want an ip update. And the fact is, if before when the 7 came out, like there were people upgrading from the 6s who want the latest and greatest, and there are people upgrading from the 6 and the 5s and the 5, who just want a new iPhone, and this is the latest iPhone, so they'll get it. And some of them might even have chosen the 6s at that point from the 5s and save a little bit of money, right? That was always there.

What the existence of the 10 does is create this extra option. And my suspicion is that everybody who is on the every year phone, I want the latest and greatest, I'm a huge fan of Apple, all of these things, they're going to be lining up for that 10. But if you're coming from, like my wife, if you're coming from the 6 or the 6S, and you look at the 8, like the 8 is great. It's a great update. And the 10 is new and expensive and unlike anything they've seen before. And some of those people will probably be like, yeah, no, let's do it. I'm all in. But I think this leads to why the 8 is less exciting, is the 8 is less exciting because it's slotting into a price category.

It is the next generation of the last four years of phones, and it slots in at its point in the price hierarchy with a couple of phones below it and now one above it. And that means that it is reliable and a strong update and will sell a lot to people who are upgrading from phones made two, three, four years ago and will be profitable for Apple. But what it's not going to have is the excitement of the brand new and the specialness of it being at the top of the line

and i think that's okay but it's also just a fact like it's just a fact that it's it's not um it never got well i got it got half an hour in the keynote where it was the king of the castle and we all knew that the 10 was coming anyway right so it's just um it's just a solid product that iterates on the previous generations and that will sell a lot of them and make a lot of money for apple at that price point but it's not the best iphone right and it's never going to be i do think that there is i mean i agree with you mostly i do think that there is a little bit of a split which if of the people that want the latest and greatest that just don't want the 10

for whatever reason you know and in a way that it hasn't been before you know i feel like the latest and greatest crowd has always just bought the latest and greatest but now there is a a split between like latest and preferred right which is maybe different to how it has been before. But I do agree that I think that the majority of people that have wanted to get the new phone every year will wait for the 10. But there is like a group which is significant enough, which is like, for whatever reason, design, price,

whatever it is that are staying away from the X for now. But yeah, that 8-line is very attractive. It's a very good-looking phone from... I think it looks nice. I think the design is nice. I think it's just

a nice advancement of that. And also, the technology in it looks good too. So you definitely are not losing if you get one of those things, I think. Today's show is brought to you by Blue Apron, the number one recipe delivery service with the freshest ingredients.

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But there's been a lot of mixed reviews for this device, which has been really interesting. And it all seems to come down to the connectivity. There's been lots of positive reviews and some negative reviews as well, in a way that's interesting for Apple products. I don't think you really see negativity as such, like as in this doesn't work. But there's been a bunch of those, as such, like as in this doesn't work, but there's been a bunch of those to the point that Apple have released some statements saying that there are some issues with the LTE Apple Watch, which has kind of actually been an issue with the Apple Watch in general since it came around, but they've never really been surfaced on scale since the LTE watch. Effectively, what's happening is the Apple Watch is trying to connect to open Wi-Fi networks

that you need to enter passwords for. So you go to Starbucks and you connect to Starbucks and it pops up on your phone or your tablet or your Mac or whatever. Hey, put this password in or press this button and you can connect. Well, obviously the Apple Watch

with no browser, no interface for that, cannot connect to these. So the device believes it's connected to Wi-Fi because it connects to a network, but it has no internet connection. And the reason this is coming up more is because to save battery, the Series 3 Apple Watch will connect to Wi-Fi

as much as it can when the phone's not around well the point of this device is the phone shouldn't be around yeah and this is uh you know the existing apple watch would do that the previous ones uh if if you're on a previously joined wi-fi network it would you're at the supermarket or something and and it's not cellular but it sees a wi-fi network it recognizes it would try to get on it right because then it can get data and it's not cellular but it sees a wi-fi network it recognizes it would try to get on it right because then it can get data and it can update your stuff and that's great but obviously something happened in watch os 4 that caused this to happen in networks that it hadn't successfully connected to before with captive portals that it can't possibly log into. And then it would just

sit there on the dead Wi-Fi. And that meant your phone. I mean, I've had that happen with other devices too, right? I had that happen with a Nintendo Switch at a hotel where it was a captive portal and the Switch's web UI, which it does have, but sometimes on some corporate Wi-Fi networks or hotel Wi-fi networks it won't slide up the login panel no matter what you do and you just can't get on that wi-fi network it's just impossible and and it's a little bit like that here where it just you know there's nothing that the the watch can do at that point and it's not smart enough to say either don't connect there or um i need to not be i can't get an internet connection on the

wi-fi so i'm going to bail back to cellular and apple said they're going to do a software update but that's on apple um it's i i experienced some issues with with the apple watch 2 i have the apple watch series 3 with cellular and it definitely feels like there are software. It feels to me like in certain circumstances, and once everything is set up and running, that it works pretty well. The problem is what people found about the Wi-Fi, where they said the cellular didn't work. It's not really accurate. What was happening is that it was connecting to Wi-Fi networks.

It shouldn't be. When I'm not near any of those, I haven't seen that feature at all, but when I'm not near Wi-Fi or something, cellular works great. I had an issue where I set up the watch. The next day, I went out on a bike ride with just the watch listening to music and it worked pretty well.

And then it rebooted like Apple logo on the screen. Yeah, so this is a thing that you're going to notice more ding ding on in my ear pods in my air pods as like oh i've lost the connection and the watch is gone and the music stopped and then i got it going again and it did it again so i have noticed with my series two that every now and then i'll catch the apple logo the watch seems to reboot quite frequently but you maybe don't notice it i had a workout going and when when the phone came back after the reboot or who knows if it's a full reboot or if it's losing the ui and whatever it's doing whatever is happening but it's showing the apple logo and in fact it was showing the

dim apple logo then then the brightness comes up and then it comes back but the workout timing continued like oh yeah no you've been working out this whole time i've totally been paying attention to you i'm not sure that it actually had but it kept it going so i might have missed it and except that my music stopped and the and the the uh airpods de-paired with or disconnected from the device and so that was something i also had a case where uh bluetooth just disconnected my uh my airpods spontaneously so that was not good and then the weird thing is then i came home and i noticed also that my bike uh the bike computer you know on the workout wasn't measuring distance or speed which doesn't make any sense right and i get home and keep in mind this is 24 hours after I set this thing up.

And I get a flurry of permission requests where it's like, I would like to track your location. The activity app would like to track your location. The weather app would like to track your location. Oh, I also noticed that the weather app thought that I was in Salt Lake City, which is super weird, where I was a month ago. So it feels to me like the watch got stuck

in after being set up, and it's a new watch, so it came with watchOS 4. After it got set up and restored my data and all of it's a new watch so it came with watch os4 after it got set up and restored my data and all of that it got stuck in a weird place where it should have been asking for for permissions for location and stuff like that but it didn't it got stuck and i wonder if that might have actually had something to do with the reboots is that it was in a weird state where it was restored but it wasn't restored all the way um i can theorize it about all i like the fact is i went out for a workout with listening to music and it it failed me three times twice by rebooting

since that since that got unstuck and it asked me all the locations uh permissions all the data all the uh everything's been fine all the data's been right the locations, permissions, everything's been fine. All the data's been right. The locations have been right. The activity data measures distance, and I haven't had a reboot, which is why I'm saying, like, I wonder if this is one of those issues

where they really tested the watch in use, but didn't test it quite as much in setting up from zero and migrating from a backup. Okay. So maybe it gets better over time. Right. So that's just a theory because I haven't seen those behaviors since then. But let me tell you, if I had had to write a review after workout number one with a new Apple watch, it would not have been good because it was like useless. It was rebooting and

completely unstable. And, and yet since then it's been fine. So that's my gut feeling is that they've got bugs and they've got stuff that they didn't adequately test. And the reason they thought that it was fine is probably because the stuff that they were looking for was while it was all set up and going and not maybe the onboarding process. But so I don't know. I've got more to report. I've got more, you know, more times I need to take it out on untethered. I've done that a few times.

I love being able to do that, but you got to rely on it in those cases and you can't have it. If this thing is sold as we preloaded your music, you can listen to your Apple music on your AirPods and record your workout. So go do that and you'll still be in touch. And I called Stephen Hackett at one point during that too, and that worked. Great. If I try that and it fails multiple times, that's not so great.

So I need to try it some more. But the initial, I think it was in some kind of messed up state. And that's on Apple. I think this is just, it's not doing, there are bugs happening in the setup. That seems to be the case. Yeah. That's a definite, right? There are going to be bugs with this product.

It's a new thing. It's a weirdly difficult thing, I'm sure, to try and make this thing work. But in regards to the Wi-Fi issue, the connectivity issue that some reviewers were seeing, Apple released a statement and they were like, we know this is a problem and we're going to try and fix it in a software update later. It seems like a lot of these problems came to light once it was starting to be reviewed because there were maybe people in high traffic areas like in New York City where a lot of these publications are or like in downtown San Francisco where there are a lot of open Wi-Fi networks that need these captive networks they call where you have to do something and it decides to see these problems.

So now Apple needs to try and fix this and I don't know how they're going to do it and it's going to be interesting to see how they do it. I think they already had this behavior and then it isn't working in watchOS 4 because the whole idea is that if you can't if the watch hasn't connected before to that network and it appears open but it can't get data out, then it needs to just be like, nope, I can't do that and move on.

And it isn't. So they should be able to fix this. And like I said, I think they have code that already addresses this that's in watchOS 3 and something happened and it's not working right in watchOS 4. So I'm hopeful that this will be a pretty easy fix, but yeah, whoops, ouch. That said, there's a lot I like about it. You've got one too, right? Yeah, I do. I got mine on Saturday.'s a lot there's a lot i like about it now that it's up and running but it was a rocky setup process so i will say that i was actually impressed with the general setup flow right like i know that you have problems like initially totally but the

actual setup of the product itself was one of the nicest that I've used in a while. So let's, one of our episodes that got a lot of acclaim a couple of years ago was when we talked about the upgrade experience, right? And we really kind of ripped into Apple about how setting up an Apple TV was hard. Setting up a new iPhone is hard. Getting a new iPhone should be one of the happier days of your year, right? It's like, yay, new stuff to play with. This is awesome. Hooray. And instead you get frustrated because it's like taking forever and it's confused about what apps it can download and apps download stall out. And, and you have to enter in your password a million times and approve a bunch of different screens. And we really rightfully, I think gave Apple a lot of stick about that. They are way better at it now than they used to be. If you had an iPhone running iOS 11 and you updated to a new iPhone this time,

so you updated your old iPhone to 11 and then you bought a new iPhone, you get to use their new transfer technology, which is very much like the Apple Watch setup, where you take a picture of the screen of one from the other, you put in your passcode, a whole bunch of your data comes over automatically, and it dramatically reduces the amount of time you spend fiddling with settings on your new phone. There's still some, you know, stuff you got to re-input and authorize and all of that, but it's so much better than it was before. The Apple Watch onboarding, similarly, you know, they did a very good job. There was not a lot of fiddling I had to do, not a lot of messing around with details because it restored from a backup that was my other Apple Watch. And I had issues later where it seemed to get in a weird state, but the actual walkthrough was fine.

And the Apple TV 4K, because I got one of those this weekend too, again, same deal. They have the bring a phone near it. And they had that, I think, last year too. And it copies off a bunch of the settings so I don't have to deal with it anymore. So in all of these cases, Apple has done a lot better on the onboarding than they had two or three years ago. And they deserve our um our our appreciation for that like they have made a lot of strides there because that was an area that needed a lot of help and they've done a pretty good job especially on the iphone but um the

apple watch is a good example too so fair fair i think for us to mention that yeah like i really liked that all i did was I had my Apple Watch. I took it out of the box. I turned it on, and because my phone was close by, it was like, do you want to set this up? I was like, yeah, I do. Like, thanks. And the backup had already been completed from the previous watch,

so it was already there. Something that I was blown away by. I'm setting up Apple Pay. Um, and I asked for them to text me a code, my bank to text me a code. The text comes through the code that was in the text was automatically pre-filled when the text came in. So there's something going on with machine learning. I'm sure that read the text message and put the code in for me. I was like, Oh my God, this is amazing. That, that, that yeah it does that sometimes when it knows that it's sending it's receiving its own um verification code it just knows oh that's mine

and it takes it and then i really liked that they've added this i assume this is an os watch os4 thing when the watch is setting up because it takes some time right like it's got that spinning thing like it is filling up There was this new kind of like Apple Watch Basics guides thing, which teaches you about what they call to press firmly on the screen. So it's not called 3D touch or force touch. I can just press firmly for more options.

It tells you about the digital crown and a side button. It just explains what they do. So you can actually do something while the watch is doing whatever it's doing. I assume it's like restoring from the cloud is what it's doing. For the Lte stuff i was really surprised about this i get six months of unlimited data for free with ee and then it's five pounds a month for 10 gigabytes of data on my watch after

that but i'm on no contract with them it's a 30-day rolling contract so i can cancel it whenever i want but six months for free it's pretty nice i don't contract so i can cancel it whenever i want but six months for free it's pretty nice i don't know if this is the same for everybody i think it is but like i was really really pleased about that um actually it is the same i looked it up yeah it is the same for everyone better deal than in the u.s where it's much better ten dollars a month although it's part of my pool so it's part of part of my data pool it doesn't have any specific data limitations although apple is trying very hard to reduce how much data it uses i think more for power consumption reasons than anything where it is aggressively like looking at your if you if you use apple music

it is aggressively looking at your apple music like things that you play a lot playlists you play a lot the algorithmically generated playlists that Apple Music does based on your preferences. And it is automatically syncing those overnight when your watch is charging because it wants to preload as much data as it can so that you don't have to use data. Not for the data caps so much

because that cellular radio obviously drains the battery dramatically. So they're trying to be very aggressive about having it not use very much data. And you can't really use a lot of that storage for much anyway. So why not fill it up with music and purge it if something's needed? Exactly. I tried, like you, I sent text messages. I made some calls. In my home, I have one bar of coverage like

but this is normal like I don't get great cell reception in my house but it was able to do it all I went outside and it was fine the speakers much louder like everything was fine with that like I don't I haven't done like extensive testing in central London and I will do that and I will try and I'll report back if it's a problem but what i've had so far was great i just threw my iphone into uh airplane mode i confirmed that it wasn't connected to wi-fi but you know because you can scroll up and i could see it had the little dots indicators for the cell stuff and it was working great um i did test a bunch of third-party apps stuff like fantastic cow jew, Air Mail, none of these apps could get any data over LTE. They were all asking, where's the phone, right?

So I thought, I wondered what was going on here and if there was something that could be done. So I spoke to our good friend, Underscore David Smith, because I know he has a lot of knowledge of working on watch development. And I asked him, what is the situation here? So he kind of said to me that, like, the way that the watch apps have been done before, and the past as we know, is they've always needed the phone to piggyback on for any kind of information. So they just look

for that. So all of the watch apps that we have, they're looking for the phone, because that's how they're developed. But it doesn't need to be this way. So it is possible to have watch apps talk to data in the cloud talk to servers but this isn't something that anybody's done previously because it wasn't required the phone always had to be there so well this i mean well okay so this is a quote from underscore he said to make a watch app work well on its own it has to be treated like a peer of the phone app and sync directly to the server rather than just leeching on the phone's data so it is possible to do stuff to talk to a server like so something like fantastic cow could pull from a server but it takes a lot of work and this will take work from developers that they haven't needed to do before and i'm keen to see if this is something

that people are going to put effort into so watch os3 let the watch independently connect to wi-fi networks without the phone around and developers were told at the time like you can use this feature i think the the right way to say it would be to say that was such a rare use case that there there was no reason to completely rebuild a watch app to operate independently for the circumstance where you happen to be on an open Wi-Fi network with only your watch and your phone not around, right? Whereas now with the cellular, the use case is dramatically expanded, which is why – so it's not as if developers couldn't have done this last year. It's more that they had no good reason to. Yeah, I wasn't trying to say that. I may not have phrased it very well.

But it's more just the case of like, it is possible to talk to the cloud, but apps don't do it because there hasn't been a requirement. But it won't take work. Because initially, the only way these apps worked is by talking to their buddy on the iPhone, right? And now, you know, now things have advanced to the point where, but you can see, I mean, to people out there, what Mike said really makes sense if you think about it this way, that you have to re-envision your watch app to be more independent and behave as like an app instead of just behaving as a client that sucks data out of the iPhone app that goes with it. And that's a big, that's like a big shift in, if you're fantastic, that was a good example. Like there's a big difference between asking your buddy app, give me calendar data and saying, I need to connect to Google Calendar and pull down the data directly from Google Calendar. I'm not saying that that's necessarily what Fantastic

L is doing, but it's a big paradigm shift. And the watchOS 3 stuff with Wi-Fi, I think was clearly a suggestion by Apple that this is where the watch platform was going. But again, how many people were doing that versus now where people are going to have these cellular watches and are being encouraged to leave their iphones behind makes a big difference yeah in my experience none of the third-party apps that i use could work without the without the phone being attached to it yeah so i think it's going to be interesting to see what happens here because there is more of a use case than ever for developers to do this but are they going to?

Is this time investment going to be worth it for their watch apps? I think it's going to be a case of waiting and seeing. I think the Siri is good. Siri works good. It speaks back. The voice sounds good. I don't think I'm going to use Siri

any more than I used it before for my watch, which is basically, I'm probably not going to do it, but it's there if I need it. And it's better. General performance feels much nicer. It feels way snappier. Some animations, so like, you know, every now and then

I get a notification and I'll dismiss the animation on it. Like, I'll dismiss it. The animation on that dismiss is much smoother and I'm noticing that when I'm seeing it. What do you think of the red dot on the crown not a fan okay you have this you have the space gray like me i'm assuming i'm assuming yeah because that's what we've both had before i have it too um i don't love it i don't hate it but like i would prefer it if it wasn't that way but i'm not kind of tripping over

myself to get a sticker to put on it right like i Like I'm, I'm, I'm fine with it because I actually don't see it most of the time. Um, the crowns click feels different to me though. I I'm noticing that the, the clickiness of the crown feels different. Um, but yeah, I,

I think I'm with you in that. Like, I don't love the red, but I'm, I don't know if like, you know, if how you feel like, would you want to cover it up?

But like, it doesn't bother me that much. I bought some stickers. You did. Okay. Interesting. I want to know how you feel. Would you want to cover it up? But it doesn't bother me that much. I bought some stickers. You did? Okay, interesting. I want to know what they're like. If you find any that you like, let us know in a future episode

so we can include links in the show notes if you're happy with them. This watch has more heart rate sensing stuff. And I know this is something that you were frustrated about. We've spoken about it over the last couple of weeks. Do you have any tales of heart rate monitoring uh only that i went to the the football game on saturday and there was a particularly exciting part where we were standing

we were shouting and standing and cheering and i got a i got my first heart rate alert that said you seem to have an elevated heart rate while not doing a workout. And I was like, well, yeah, I'm at a football game shouting and it's really exciting. And it was like, all right, fair enough. Like, yes, I'm not surprised my heart rate is elevated here. There's a reason for it.

It's fine. But it was a funny moment to have that be my moment of elevated heart rate and accurate, totally accurate. Yeah, I don't do anything. so i haven't got one yet you haven't haven't well just wait for it i'm happy with this device in general um i like it for all of the things that i liked about the series too right like it's faster it's uh more capable the battery life feels exactly the same to me because i never had any problems with battery life anyway. And I'm more,

I'm keen to see how over time, if and how attitudes of mine will change towards my phone on my watch and how they work in conjunction and apart. Like I think that this is a long-term thing to see if this is something that I pay attention to. I'm keen to see how that is over time. But I think this is something that's going to take time to realize. And one of those things for me is that I hope that third-party apps will integrate to work better with the fact that they can connect on their own independently now. And I hope that that's something that we start to see more of over time, because that would really make it good for me because there's a few apps that I use a lot on my Apple Watch

and I would want to be able to keep using them when I'm outside of the home. And I hope that a lot of that stuff gets addressed. Like, for example, Overcast. I want Overcast. And Marco wrote a blog post last night, which I'll just include in the show notes, which just talks about all of the things that he would need to be able to build a good Overcast client. And it feels like more than is going to come before watch os5

uh if within the next couple of years it seems like a lot of stuff uh so i hope that these things can be addressed because i think that this is a great device with a lot of promise but it it's a version one and it feels like that and that's fine but I want to see more as time goes on. Well, I think most importantly, it's very clear that the hardware pace has now outstripped the software pace. Which is good though. I mean, yeah, because I agree with you completely

and I think that's good, but I want to see the software catch up now. I mean, I'm happy to see that the hardware is pushing forward at a good clip, but I want to see the software support going in tandem now. Yeah, well, I mean, and it does speak, the hardware, as nice as this is, like if the promise of cellular is not fulfilled

because the apps can't do what they need to do, and Marco's got one particular use case he's looking for, but boy, when you hear him talk about what, or him and David on when you hear him talk about what or him and david on under the radar talk about what they can't do and all the hoops they have to go through and how little they're able to access in watch os um it it starts to feel like with all the promise of the Apple Watch cellular, unless you're Apple and you've built it into watchOS, basically it's not delivered. And they can do more, like we said, to make the apps access data better. access data better, but listening to developers, it sounds like this is on Apple, that watchOS is just not good enough for these apps to do what they need to do to take advantage of the hardware.

And that means, you know, that lessens the impact of the hardware. That makes it less likely that it's worth it for you to get an Apple Watch with cellular right now because outside of the stuff that's on the device, the third-party app stuff is not that great a situation right now. And like the podcast is a perfect example. Marco's trying desperately to find a way to play podcasts on watchOS on cellular and can't really do it. And Apple, despite having the podcast app on iOS, has shown no desire to do it either. So if you listen to podcasts while you run, the cellular watch won't help you. And so you won't buy one.

And so that's on Apple. Like Apple needs to fix up its developer story on watchOS. And it's a shame that the reality is that probably we're going to have to wait a year for that to happen. It'll be a whole year until watchOS 5 comes out that maybe addresses some of this. Maybe. That's too bad. All right, it's time for Ask Upgrade.

Hashtag Ask Upgrade. And today, Ask Upgrade is brought to you by our friends over at Smile. And today, I want to talk to you about the PDF Pen family of products. PDF Pen equips you with everything you need for more powerful PDF editing. And with the PDF Pen family of products. PDF Pen equips you with everything you need for more powerful PDF editing. And with the PDF Pen family, you can get everything you need for more PDF mastery with PDF Pen for all of your devices.

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Get everything you need for more powerful PDF editing by going to smilesoftware.com slash upgrade. Thank you so much to Smile for their continued support of this show with the great PDF Pen product suite, the PDF Pen family. Thank you so much to Smile for their support. Okay, it is time for hashtag AskUpgrade. So you can send in your questions as always with the hashtag AskUpgrade

and we'll get to them at the end of the show and these tend to be our technical questions. And today we're starting off with Lenart and Lenart asks, is it a matter of time until Apple builds a Qi charger into the iMac display or into the stand? You know, the little foot that's on the iMac or the external displays that could maybe allow us to charge our magic mouse,

a keyboard or phone. That'd be a nice place to put one. Brighten the little foot there. What do you think? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, it would be nice whether they would do it or not. I think it would be a nice thing to have i'm sure it would be nice whether apple would build because keep in mind then that that piece of metal now needs to be a piece of hardware like electronic hardware and they have to connect it when the foot is attached you know they have to have power and it would be thick right yeah and then they're putting it in everyone, expecting that people will use it. I think it's not likely, personally. Rajiv asked,

in iOS 11, how can you tell if an app is universal on the App Store? So the universal badge has a little plus sign, which shows it's universal. I think that's gone now, but there are ways. It's actually better than ever before in the new App Store. So on any device, on any iOS device, there is a label underneath the screenshots that says what platforms.

So it will say, like, offers iPhone, Apple Watch, offers iMessage, App Store, Sticker Pack, or whatever. It has all of them there, whatever the device, whatever this application can be supported on, it has it all listed. And then you can also tap on that and see screenshots for each version of the application on all of the platforms.

So that's all there within those new screens, which is really great. I love those new App Store listing pages. I think they look really good, really good. Having all of the reviews, like I like the fact that the reviews are a number now. That makes more sense to my brain. I like that you can see everything else that a developer

has. It's all laid out so much cleaner. I really like the new App Store a lot. And the pages for each application and each developer are nice additions. Benjamin wants to know, Jason, how to pronounce correctly the new file formats for images and

videos on ios and mac os uh well it is clearly hyph and havoc and you should always say them that way hyph and havoc he f and havoc he f hef. Hef or Heif. And Hefk or Heveek. Heveek. No, it's Heef. Heef, Appalancis, Heef. That's what they say, Heef. So, I guess, sure. And H-E-V-C.

Read the letters. Great. I go back to my English classes, right? Heef. Heefcliff. Mm-hmm. So, yeah, that's me. I guess it and hevc like a like a heath bar okay i don't know what they are but uh you don't know what a heath he nope like okay how about like if you're out in the countryside on the heath yeah like heathcliff it's no more anyway heath uh is it heath heath right with an f heath heath

heath with an h e v c okay so i'm pleased i asked this question because now chris has a question about those can uh can chris wants to know jason can you please explain compatibility related to heath and hevc photos when sharing or backing up to a mac or pc boy can i i wrote a whole article in macworld about it that i'll link in the show notes um basically um the device should detect what your compatibility is and HEIF and HEVC and will transcode on the fly. So if you're running Sierra and you try to import photos

shot on an iPhone 8 with HEVC and HEIF photos and videos, when you download them, they will come out cross as Jpegs and h.264s and it will do the conversion for you and it's doing there's a setting to turn that off and give you your originals regardless but what it's going to try to do is be compatible so apple wants this to be invisible if you're on a system that it knows because it knows what it's connecting to, this works for AirDrop too and other sharing.

If it knows for certain you can see a HEIF file, it'll send you the HEIF file. If it doesn't know for certain, it won't. It'll send you a JPEG. With Photos app then, if I turn on HEIF on my iPhone, what does my Mac get on sierra like what does it get uh it gets a uh a preview image that's a jpeg that i forget what they call that um apple has a word for it

it's the derivative preview okay it's not editable there'll be a little symbol when you go in to to view it that a little alert symbol that says not editable and you can't edit it however here's a here's a cute thing that the apple has done if um every mac on your um attached to your apple id is not yet on high sierra hi it will just sync a uh a compatible version instead oh my god that's so confusing though well no but it's confusing in the details but in life it should actually work okay and the idea here is if you don't have high sierra yet it's not going to sync high sierra only files to icloud photo library because it knows you can't do anything with them but if you do have a mac running high sierra one is all that's required then it will okay so it's trying to do its best to never send you something you can't edit somewhere.

But yeah, if you've got a Mac, like I've got my Mac that stores all my photos on it and it's running Sierra. And then I've got my iMac and it's running High Sierra. And on the High Sierra Mac, I can take those HEIF files and I can edit them. On the Mac that stores them, that's running Sierra, it sees them. It will show me that preview, but mark it as being uneditable. It actually is, since it's set to download all the files, it has downloaded that he file in the background and put it in its library, but it can't do anything with it because it's an incompatible format. So it's trying to do all the right things. This is one of those cases where I think if you don't pay attention to it,

this is one of those cases where i think if you don't pay attention to it it's all fine but if you're one of those people and our listeners are these people and we are these people who are like but wait what about this what about that what about this what about that then it's like all right let me explain what about all those things but i think if you're not paying attention and you're just like to do to do take a picture there it is i think you won't notice it i think it i think it'll just all kind of work, right? Cause that, I think Apple's done a very good job of trying to anticipate all of these things. Um, if you're obsessed with never wanting the transcoded versions, then yeah, you're, you're going to want to either set the setting that always trans transfers the originals, which is in the settings on iOS. And you're going to want

to update a Mac somewhere. If you use photos, you're going to want to update a Mac somewhere to high Sierra, just so that you can see those files. Because Apple has chosen, it's their choice, not to do something to update Sierra to support those file formats. I'd imagine other apps will. I'd imagine that like Acorn or Photoshop or something like that will eventually support those file formats and those might actually work on Sierra. But Apple has said, no, that's a High Sierra thing. You got to update in order to see it. If you double click otherwise in the finder or do a quick look, it's just like not there. It doesn't work. Dylan asked, I don't have a 4k TV. I have no plans to get one. I currently

have a third gen Apple TV. Is there any reason not to just go get the fourth gen Apple TV? So the fourth gen is not the 4k, i'm thinking correctly in that one fourth gen is the previous apple tv the one you can still buy that's cheaper um i recommend getting that one if you have no plans to get a 4k tv the 4k apple tv is useless to you it'll be faster but i wouldn't yeah i wouldn't unless you're unless you plan to get one right if you plan to get one in the next couple of years and you need a new apple tv now then sure get it and i you know and then you'll have it and it'll work with your new tv when you buy it but there's if you have no plans to get a 4k tv then you don't need the 4k apple tv

okay so that is hashtag ask upgrade for this week I said, you can send in your questions to us with the hashtag AskUpgrade, and they go into another lovely sheet. I have many sheets. They have many hashtags that pull in lots of information, and then we can answer your questions on a future episode of the show. At this point, we are going to fire off the spoiler horn right now, I think. I'm just going to do it now for fun. Because after this break, we're going to...

Yeah, we have a break first. Well, I want to fire it now. I have some real-time follow-up from Joe Steele who wants to... It's a real-time correction for you. They didn't lower the price of the old Apple TV. It still costs what it costs. They just added a new 4K Apple TV that's more expensive. There you go. Thanks, Apple. Good to know.

So, we're going to talk about Encapsular now, but then we have Terminator 2 with Mike at the movies, so the spoiler horn will lead me in. And I want to take a moment to thank our friends over at Encapsular for supporting this week's episode.

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and can process 30 billion attacks per second. This is why Encapsular's network has successfully defended some of the largest website attacks on record. If you're attacked, Encapsular's powerful CDN ensures that your content is delivered to your customers fast. You don't want people bailing on your site when they come to it. And with Encapsular, they wouldn't have to because no one

would even know that something bad was happening. And you can see any attacks as they're happening on the fly and adjust your security policies along with them. It's all in their wonderful dashboard that they have. As a listener of this show, you can get one whole month of service for free. Just go to encapsular.com slash upgrade.

That's I-N-C-A-P-S-U-L-A dot com slash upgrade. You'll find out more about Encapsular's service here and claim your free month as well. Thank you so much to Encapsular for their support of this show and RelayFM. All right, I need to get my other notebook now, Jason, because we're going to talk about Terminator 2. Judgment Day.

Okay, do you wanna I had some real difficulties today Jason yeah couldn't find the movie oh it's readily available on the US iTunes store is it? oh yeah like have you checked within the last couple of days

because I literally like bought it last week so frustrated it's not on itunes here every other terminator movie is i think i know why though because it's just been in cinemas they did a 3d uh re-release of terminator 2 at the end of august um and i think that is why it has been it was unable i was unable to find it to buy or stream anywhere on the internet today there are there are three different versions of it available on the us itunes store right now absolutely nothing in the uk every other

terminator movie is there except terminator 2 so i did some googling and unfortunately i had to come across some website that was just streaming it. There was nothing I could do because I had today to watch the movie and I usually don't have a problem because we pick movies that are like 20 or 30 years old so it tends to not be an issue. But it was an issue today so I had to

do that. Casey Liss ended up coming through with a Plex version for me but i was already halfway through the movie at that point this is a long movie this is a longer movie than i was expecting it's a like two hours and 40 minutes i was not expecting that but there's a i mean there's a special edition that adds some scenes which is maybe the one that you got who knows but i saw a movie that was like two hours and something it was two hours and change one movie two two and a half hours yeah it's that's too long the regular

edition is shorter okay well i saw the this one all right for whatever um i will say that i really like this movie um it is as big of an action blockbuster movie as you can get like it is peddled to the pedal to the metal all the time uh constantly for this movie like yes they're just huge car traces and explosions like in the first 15 minutes yeah it has a huge opening and then it stops for a little while to get you the character and like there's a whole section that is like characters and, and all of that. And then there's the huge action piece at the end. Like it's interestingly structured in that way where it really is just like

huge action, 25 minutes of characters or half an hour of characters. And then back to huge action for the rest of the movie. I will wonder though, I wonder if, you know, we've done these for quite a while now we've watched many movies uh together but not together

can you guess the thing the main thing that i didn't like about this movie huh uh the the cgi terminator no actually i thought the cgi was really good um in oh it is it is a groundbreaking in its way like really really held up um and i was really pleased with that the kid okay edward furlong's performance as john connor i really didn't like it i i thought it was a not good performance i know that like child acting can always be difficult, especially when they have a role, which is as important to a movie as John Connor's role. Like he is in basically every single scene,

all of the important moments, like he is there. I didn't like him. Like I just thought that he was an annoying kid. Yeah. When I'm thinking I'm supposed to relate to him. But I also just didn't like the performance um i just didn't it took me out of a few scenes uh there were multiple instances where i'm like this kid's really annoying like a scene which i was expected supposed to be like

you know fantastic the hasta la vista baby moment right when he teaches him that and it's like oh my god this kid is so annoying like everything he's saying the way he's saying it like that i didn't like that i didn't like his performance but overall like i did i did think that this was a great movie like this was what i was hoping it to be like this big action movie um they're just they're funny like i really love the way in a stupid like in a really stupid way that they they set up why arnie's now the hero like it's so dumb i reprogram me like i'm like come on what more what more do you need i mean what i know i think the moment when james cameron thought and presumably it was him or somebody told him either way like here's what we do in terminator 2 we send back a terminator the

terminator program to to save john connor from a worse terminator who's now trying to come and kill him and like such a good idea because that's that's what makes this movie work is that now schwarzenegger still the ruthless killing machine but uh but now he's got to take orders from friendly john connor yep and and uh and that that leads to some great moments like he tells he's got to take orders from John Connor. And that leads to some great moments. Like he tells, John Connor realizes that, the kid realizes he can give him orders, right? Which is fun. And he does terrible things with that momentarily

and causes those two guys who were trying to save him to be horribly maimed. That's a tough one. But then it does lead to some amazing moments where he's like no you can't kill people and then he he shoots he shoots people in the legs instead and he's like what are you doing and he's just they'll live it's just like oh my god no because he's still the terminator right i want to say i love i love love the fact that the movie is this way and that like this like the terminator is now a good guy but like i really kind of just like laughed when they the way that they just do of it like

reprogram me he reprogrammed me it really made i was just like okay i mean that is the easiest way to get there but it was it just i just i thought it was very funny and like i wrote down in my notes lol merchandise was what i wrote down down. The beginning of the movie is trying very hard to make you wonder, like, is Schwarzenegger there to kill? Who's good? Who's bad? Like, I really like that setup. And I imagine if you don't know anything about this movie, like, especially when it came out, like, that was a really tense moment.

Like, oh, my gosh, already? Like, he's already going to kill john connor i kind of i like the setup of that like the whole thing of them meeting in the hallway um and then all of that was really good and i liked it yeah yeah and there's the um the action set piece in the mental institution is pretty amazing i mean the the the one there's the early one where he meets john where they're they're at the mall and then they're going through like the la river and all of that that's pretty that's pretty good and fun with the motorcycles and the big rig and all that but the from for my money the one that is the most

amazing is the uh at the mental institution because it's the like multiple characters are doing multiple things uh she's escaping they're coming to to the institution. The bad Terminator is coming there. They're, you know, she's got to make her escape. But then as soon as she's going there, she sees him. But then the bad Terminator is also there. And then they have to run. And that goes on for a very long time. And it's just all exciting and action-packed.

And just, it's very well done. Incredibly well done. Yeah, i really like the opening to this i mean of course then it goes into like this crazy um action sequence right the um what are they at storm drains or something what what are they that's the la that's the la river believe it or not that's what they call the la river but there's not much it's just concrete and all that but that's that's where they're chasing he gets out of the out of the mall basically where he's at the arcade have you seen this boy says uh robert patrick the the movie that made robert patrick famous as the uh evil terminator and he does a good job he's basically like your stock policeman evil policeman basically he keeps the police uniform

for the whole movie right like he can wear anything he wants but like just keeps the police i mean i know that it makes sense in a lot of scenarios to wear it but like when they're in like the warehouse at the end right and it's just like they're all fighting he's like he's still wearing the policeman's uniform which is like okay why not and the uniform's part of him right that's one of the things that i think is really smart and consistent about this movie is that he can't make machines so like he has to he he duplicates the security guard at the at the metal institution but he um has to take his gun and then he tries to go through the bars and the gun doesn't come through with him and he has to

like pull it through the bars instead it's like it's very consistent about the rules of like what the all the liquid metal terminator can do and can't do which i think is good because you want to have right but that's it yeah effectively yeah he can't and he can't fire from a distance if he wants to attack you from a distance he has to like get a gun or something because he can't do that and that's again if you're going to have fantasy characters like this giving them some rules to follow is always really um always really useful and like it's like the the liquid metal that he's made of is not regenerating like if he loses some of it he's lost some of it and he would be smaller like he can't grow it well right

so he has to go when they when they shoot part of him off it like bubbles back to his shoe he has to collect it to get it back yeah which sets up that scene later in the movie which is maybe my favorite like special effects scene when he's frozen in the liquid nitrogen and he's like walking forward and it's the pieces have been breaking off it's like i love that that was so great and then he's just getting out we got him yeah and they shoot him into and he breaks into pieces and it's like ah we win and it's like nope he is falling this movie like it does does suffer from that in the same way that the original terminator does in the same way that a lot of superhero movies do where it's like how many

times can you kill the bad guy right like we can kill him like six times but like every time it just gets stronger yeah like that stuff gets a bit frustrating to me after a while right it's like when they're in that like the 45 minutes that they spend in like the final scene where it's a bit frustrating to me after a while right it's like when they're in that like the 45 minutes that they spend in like the final scene where it's just like they keep finding new ways to kill both of them right like yeah terminate and get smashed to literal pieces but oh he has a power reserve right and it's just like how many times will these characters die like to the end i honestly thought that the end of the movie was going to be like Shredder and Teenage Ninja Turtles type deal when he like his hand comes out of that vat at the end is what I was expecting

right like he was never dead at all and that's how they set up the third one like that was kind of what I was expecting to happen it's like that that stuff it does grind on me a little bit but I did like the the final action sequence more um in Termator 2 than in the original terminator like yeah it was there was just more stuff going on and terminator versus terminator is intrinsically more interesting than terminator versus human yeah well it amps it up a little bit although they go back and forth right then he he starts to go for the people because he's incapacitated the terminator but then the terminator you know schwarzenegger comes back um because he'll always he'll be back um and yeah that there's a lot of interesting stuff in there i do i do laugh at the ludicrousness of it of the setting where it's like first off convenient liquid nitrogen truck right

of course it's a liquid nitrogen truck and then where are they they're in the steel mill where all the steel workers have run away but they've left all of the equipment still going and moving and stuff um so that they can have a molten place in order to drop it although that one at least i kind of believe the terminator was going toward that he felt like that was that was his ultimate out was i need to go someplace where i can melt down this guy and i so i'm willing to accept that but it's still like you know so often the the climactic fight scene in a movie is set in the steam factory where it's just like atmospheric and lots of equipment um and it doesn't really make sense that that's where they are but um but still yeah it's it's it's good um i i like this

movie a lot i hadn't seen it in a while um, and this really was a definitive summer blockbuster of whatever 1991, I think. Um, it is, it is a definitive, like this was huge and nobody had seen the first movie, right? Everybody saw this first.

It was first movie was very obscure and this was a gigantic, everybody saw the Terminator or Terminator two in 1991. And the CGI is really good of the metal Terminator. They leaned into the fact that they couldn't really do textures in CGI very well. So he doesn't have textures. He's like a silver blob. It's like perfect. It's exactly what they were capable of doing.

So they have him be a murderous silver blob. And he's scary, right? He doesn't really talk other than to to get questions and information and he seems indestructible like you can fire bullets and and shotguns at him and he just kind of reforms and so you the whole movie he just brings menace if he finds you how do you even get away from him and that that i think that that's really powerful too um and i really like the time travel part of this too. I'm wondering since you look back to the future so much, I really like how they go,

they find the guy who invented Skynet who doesn't realize that he's doing it. And they go to his house basically. And Sarah Connor terrorizes him and then the Terminator and John have to stop her. But I like that whole part of the story that they find the creator and did you notice the bootstrap paradox it's one of the best things in this movie too is the terminator skynet is created because of the piece of hardware that the original terminator

left behind which was sent from skynet so it's a completely circular uh story which i just i mean i love it it doesn't make any sense i love it yeah i i like it but it is silly right like those sort of time travel things are frustrating but they they can be really well like i think it's well done here but just like that that conceit is frustrating that like something didn't exist but it exists because it existed but nobody made it it's's like, I don't... It's very... I know. It sends you through a loop, right?

Because how was he there in the first movie? That's right. It's very confusing, but it's good. There was a little bit of exposition about all of that, which just gets a bit difficult at points. Yeah. Because it's like sometimes in trying to explain it, you actually make it more confusing

yeah i like that i like dyson um uh that is a good character that the guy joe morton who plays dyson he's really likable he doesn't do what a lot of scientists do in movies like this which is when you reveal that he is in the future his thing that he's creating is going to um is going to be just just going to destroy the world they tend to be like mad scientists who are evil themselves and they're just they know that their thing is evil because they're evil and they're they will fight you and in this movie first off he's portrayed as human the whole way he's obsessed he's got a wife he's got kids he needs to take them to the to the water park. It's quite horrifying when Sarah goes there. I want to talk about that more in a second.

But when she goes there and shoots him and is trying to kill him and the kids are trying to protect him, it's like a very human portrayal of him. And when they sit him down and there's that scene with a voiceover where they say, we told him what was going to happen. He's very upset. And then his response is, let's destroy my life's work. We can't let this happen. And I love that. Like he's in. And in the end, he sacrifices himself to ensure that the after he's shot many times, he's probably going to die anyway.

But he makes sure that his entire life's work is blown up so that this Armageddon doesn't come to pass. And I don't know. I felt like that's pretty rare for that kind of scientist character usually they're portrayed as being um bad in some way fundamentally bad and he's a decent guy who didn't know what he was doing when he was making this stuff or didn't think about it yeah um i wanted to to before we get to that part i want to talk about sarah for a moment yes because they do something with her that I really like, and I thought they were going to screw up,

which is the way she deals with and relates to Arnold Schwarzenegger, to the Terminator. So first off, when she first sees him, she just loses her mind, right? Which is the right way to do it, because the last time she had seen this person this person was trying to kill her and has sent her into a mental like into a psychiatric hospital like she is there because of everything that happened because naturally nobody will believe her right because the government has covered it up and no one is

you know and these two agencies are not related in any way right like they just think that she has lost her mind and is saying all this stuff and etc etc but then like the the risk is like oh okay so they have she's been saved by the terminator she's now gonna love the terminator but no she tries to kill him right she tries to destroy the computer chip yeah which is a cut scene that's not in the special edition um oh but okay but or it's in the special edition it's not in the original um where she she's going to smash the computer chip and all of that um i like that scene because it it furthers her character and also something that i really noticed this time that i guess i've noticed in the past but i really noticed this time is this movie does something really interesting with Sarah.

She is really broken. She is unsurprisingly right, but she's really broken. She spent her time with the survivalists. She got institutionalized. She's been away from her son. She's had her whole life uprooted. If you think back to that waitress in the beginning of the first movie, she is now a lean, mean fighting machine right and

she's obsessed with armageddon she has visions she has dreams of the end of the world and she's got to try to protect protect it her son and and save the world and she's been institutionalized like she's messed up and what i really like is i don't love edward furlong's performance but i like him later in the movie when he's put in opposition to sarah and i like what they do with a character especially where he's the grown-up like he's showing that he's a leader and in that scene which is cut from the original movie but is restored in the special edition he basically says you say i'm going to be this great leader in the future and you won't listen to me now we need him and and he's

been spending time with the terminator and knows that he is a valuable ally and she's just blinded with her rage about the last movie basically and all of everything that's transpired since then and he's the grown-up she's just an agent of destruction at that point because her life has been so messed up by what's happened and he's the one who is going to it's very clear in that moment he's the one who's growing up and becoming a leader and um and is going to save the world and needs to be saved and i really like that i really like that sarah sarah doesn't get broken out and become the the superhero who can save her son with the help of the terminator she's an action hero here too but she's the action part and the

the kind of more grown-up decision-making part is her son is john which is you got to see a flash of that right if he's just a dumb kid then why is he going to grow up to be a leader and i think in those scenes with his mom um when they go and they stop her from killing Dyson, you're seeing him being the grownup because she's just so bent on violence and revenge and protection and all of that, that she's not thinking as clearly as he is. So I like that scene where she's going to smash the CPU of the Terminator.

And I really like that John talks her out of it. And in the original version, he just says, because they're her out of it and it fits in the original version he just says because they're supposed to like turn on his learning in the original version he says oh yeah but um yes i can learn and the special edition is like no i can't they turn they turn the learning off and they have to take the chip out and turn the learning on and then he starts to learn the yeah i like that baby i like that a lot like i like that scene i'm pleased it was there because if i wouldn't have seen that scene i would have been frustrated by like she just is totally okay with him right like i feel like it needed that like for like just a furthering of the idea that she doesn't trust him

because she shouldn't because that's it's like is the same person isn't the same person right time uh wibbly wobbly timey wimey but like she doesn't see it any other way right she's she all she knows is like she had to watch that face be crushed in a in a hydraulic press it seemed like he wouldn't die and now he's back right just from that illogical standpoint it's like oh no he's back how does he back i thought i destroyed him yeah and like now he's got skin on him again right like she should be she should hate him um and so she never really seems to reconcile it which is which i like like even like even at the end until the end she doesn't super protest it though right like well yeah well i i so i i view that she comes to respect him as like her you know she has been

refined she's a terminator yeah right for a cause she has she has her life has narrowed down to she's an expert with weapons she can get all these high explosives like that is what she is and that's what he is and they're both protecting john and she knows that that's what he's doing so i feel like at the end it's almost like this professional respect that she has for him as as a protector and as a an agent of violence on on the force of good but yeah she has no fondness for him because it's the face of the monster right that but there's that moment of like as he's going you need to lower me down into the molten lava and and john doesn't want him to go right but she knows what needs to be done and he knows

what needs to be done he knows he can count on her to do it and that's that mutual respect that i i think it really works it's a nice it's a nice trio they they are it actually reminds me it's not quite like the trio in star trek but it reminds me of that a little bit where you've got the because because like john with the terminators a little bit like kirk and spock in the sense that it's sort of a, uh, a, you know, logical doesn't understand your human emotions kind of guy. And then the, the, the, the very human is like, come on, you can laugh. And then I also like the, the, you know, his relationship, John's relationship with Sarah and then Sarah's relationship with the Terminator and Terminator's relationship with

John. It's like a, it's a nice triangle of, uh, of character interaction. I think it makes the, the characters much more interesting how they bounce off each other yeah i think i enjoyed this more than terminator um oh it's a way better movie than terminator on so many different levels this is this is a this was a really fun movie and i liked a lot of the stuff that they did with it i think they pushed it into interesting directions um and and overall i think they they crafted something that's really good like it's just like a really good action movie of a great story and some really good like personal relationship stuff so one of the things i wanted to ask you about is how did you feel

about the ending because the ending here is it's a shot of like a um uh a road It's actually a reused shot from earlier in the movie. And there's a voiceover and she basically says, nobody knows what the future will hold. It's echoing a voiceover that happens earlier. And it sort of leaves it all like, have they changed the future? What, you know,

what have they done? And it's just totally open-ended. Like who knows? We'll have to write our own future. The end. Did you like that? Did you like that kind of open-ended ending? It feels like it's the only thing that the characters could have known. They have literally no idea if they've made any change at all.

There's no way they can know. And so I think that it is the right way to end the movie if you're going to end it from the character's perspective I always thought it was weird that it's the shot of the road and the voiceover and what I found out later is that there was an original ending which is like

40 years in the future and Sarah's an old lady and John is a senator and she's watching kids playing in a playground and there is no Armageddon and everything's fine old lady and John is a senator and she's watching kids playing in a playground and there is no Armageddon and everything's fine and they did it. Nah, I would have hated that. And James Cameron decided no,

I want to leave this open-ended. It fits with the themes that you need to make your own future and that the future isn't written. And also it would create yet more bootstrap paradoxes because now there's no nobody to send the terminators back uh which is also funny but um i'm i i agree i think this is the right ending my problem with it is knowing now what i know it explains why they reuse a scene of

road yeah because it's like as the last shot and it's like i wish because it obviously it happened so late in the process like all the effects were made that like the whole thing was done and scored and everything apparently and then cameron was like no i don't like that ending we're going to change it and he couldn't shoot something new like the like the first movie ends with her like going out she's going to be driving to mexico or whatever and there and and there's the you know there's a storm coming and all of that and that like that's a really good ending and this one that's the one one thing that sticks with me that i wish was better is i wish the end i i like the voiceover but i wish it wasn't just i mean like literally it's the same shot from about 20 minutes before where except they don't pan up they cut it before

it pans because they were trying to come up with something and i'm not even sure that the the shot before they may have inserted a voiceover there just to make it parallel the voiceover at the end i don't know so there's some weird stuff in it but i still thematically i like it i like i like it better that the road stretches on and who knows what will happen next perhaps there will be more sequels there will um but uh this is the this is the end of the uh james cameron with the original you know with the two original leads doing this i will say news broke last week that they're going to make a terminator movie that linda hamilton is going to be in and that is her first appearance since this movie as sarah

connor which is kind of interesting. So I wonder if they will tread on ground sort of like the cut scene from this where they're in the future and things are maybe good, but there's still some force that's trying to attack them from the future or something. Who knows if it'll even come off. But you don't need to watch Terminator 3. I actually kind of but this is the but but you don't need to watch terminator 3 i actually kind of like terminator 3 but you don't need to watch it like this is james cameron's take on it with these two actors and that's the end basically as far as as far as you should probably be concerned in terms of essential terminator because i like

the open-endedness of it because in my mind at least in theory when they killed when the um the the the scientist guy what was his name dyson dyson dyson that's it like the vacuum cleaner company um when he blew everything up like in theory the terminator should have disappeared like it was in my mind it's like why is he still here shouldn't that shouldn't this close the loop right like but yeah and it's already a bootstrap paradox right but it's like it's so confusing but it's like so that's why i like the open-endedness of it because like well that's why the terminator stuck around because you know like even though they've done all of this stuff it doesn't change the fact that they're still going to be there in the future because it always felt

like a stretch for me to be like just this one guy was the only person who had any idea about this technology right right and that they hadn't they hadn't taken notes about it that are available as well i will without without just i'll tell you the premise of terminator 3 which is guess what now john connor's a an adult and he's got a girlfriend and um i forget whether sarah is dead or she's just off screen but linda hamilton's not in it but basically another super-powered terminator is sent back and they send another arnold schwarzenegger model back to to protect him again and they just do it again and the idea is no it didn't work there are still things you know they are still finding ways to exist and they push i think the premise in that

movie because it's 1997 is when judgment day is supposed to happen so basically they say they pushed it back but it still happens and And it's like, you get the idea that John Connor just can't escape this. You can delay it, you can't escape it. And I won't reveal more about Terminator 3, but I kind of like it. There are parts of it, it's not great, but it's not bad.

And then they made other Terminator after that that I haven't seen and I don't know anything about. So that's it. That's Terminator. That's Mike at the Movies. We're done for this week. If you want to find our show notes go to relay.fm upgrade160 Thanks again to our lovely sponsors

Mack Weldon, Encapsular, Blue Apron and Smile. Thank you for listening. If you want to find Jason's work online go to sixcolors.com He is at jsnell on Twitter J-S-N-E-L-L I am at imike and we'll be back next week. Go to sixcolors.com. He is at jsnell on Twitter, J-S-N-E-L-L. I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E.

And we'll be back next week. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. We'll be back. Hasta la vista, Jason. Adios. That's my Stephen Hackett impression. That was good.