Upgrade - 161: I Look at My Phone and the Money Leaves

Episode Date: October 2, 2017

Myke and Jason have taken delivery of the Apple TV 4K and have some initial thoughts, Apple gives us a deeper dive into how Face ID works, and Amazon introduces many Echos and gets in a fight with YouTube. Plus, this entire description now fits in a tweet... if you’re special.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 161 today's show is brought to you by squarespace away and timing my name is mike hurley i am joined by the wonderful mr jason snell ciao jason snell hello wonderful mike hurley how are you i'm very well how are you pretty good pretty good you know it's uh it's getting toward fall and that brings my my thoughts to things like uh thanksgiving and turkeys and dinners and other things that'll have to be made well this is good yeah because whilst nobody cares about that well maybe some people do but so i don't want to cast aspersions upon people's feelings of thanksgiving so you really set me up

for it usually you team me up for a really good one but today i couldn't be so excited because i didn't want to say that nobody cared about a big american holiday but we have hashtag snell talk and today's snell talk question comes from gary and gary's question is kind of related gary wants to know what is the best gravy flavor jason why did you pick this question mike i just i i wondered what the best gravy flavor would be you know gravy flavor gravyvy flavor. Gravy flavor. Gravy flavor. It's fun to say. The answer, you want to know my answer? Like my legitimate answer when I saw this? I squinted at the screen and I went, gravy.

Perfect. Well, I mean, there's onion gravy. Gravy is the best gravy flavor. There's sausage gravy. I suppose. So what is gravy to you? What's gravy to you, Jason? I don't want to turn this into robot or not now.

I don't know. Gravy is kind of a thick brown kind of liquid that is put on mashed potatoes or biscuits or other things. It's hearty and it's made from flour and maybe some sort of meat juices of some kind, but not necessarily. But I don't know. I mean, yeah, my mom used to make a ham gravy that was sort of sweeter. There were turkey gravies and all of that.

I don't know. I think, Gary, the answer is that I don't have an opinion about gravy flavor, gravy flavor, gravy flavor. It's just gravy. I like sausage gravy and onion gravy they're my favorite gravies uh i don't know if i've had onion gravy isn't that just gravy with onions in well it's a gravy that you make using on it this is you know we're not a cooking show uh but there's there's many flavors thank goodness for that there's many gravy flavors uh sorry gary for the uh sorry if you want to send in a hashtag snell talk question and maybe get a better answer uh than

what poor gary did just send us a tweet with the hashtag snell talk and it will go into a big list that i can pick from sometimes i pick questions that jason doesn't want to answer. Sorry, Gary. Today's follow-up section begins with just a note about a watch app. Shazam. You're familiar with Shazam? This is the application. Yeah. I'm pretty sure everybody knows by now. It identifies music.

You can have your phone or whatever device you have Shazam on listen, and it will listen to the song and identify the song for you, right? It's really cool. Siri can do this too, but Shazam, I have found in my tests to be better at picking this stuff out. They have redesigned their Apple Watch app. So now it no longer needs the phone. What it would do before would be like trigger a background process on the phone, which would help identify the song. It doesn't need that anymore because the Shazam app is fully independent. So now you can open the watch app, you ask it to listen,

you can even put your arm down and it will give you a haptic when the song has been identified because previously as well, like with a lot of watch apps, for it to be running, you had to have the screen on, but now you don't necessarily need to do that

and the Shazam app has done this. The reason I bring in all this up is because the Shazam app has done this. The reason I bring all this up is because the Shazam app, now that it's fully independent, works over LTE. So, we were talking about this last week, about applications that can be updated, what can they do? Well, Shazam has done that.

So now, you can use the Shazam app whether you have a connection or not. And this is just an example, I guess, of a big application moving to support all of the stuff that has been available in watchOS for a while, but nobody's really taken advantage of because there wasn't much of a reason to. But now the LTE

watch is here and it doesn't need to be attached to the phone. You can get these benefits. So I thought that was really cool. This is an example of a good watch app supporting the LTE stuff. Yeah, it's important important we had a couple people write in about um about how the their concern is like they rely on a feature that is basically like a synced notification uh you know a linked notification from the from the phone yeah

and and this is definitely one of these areas where the apple watch is needing to evolve because what you need with a cellular apple watch is independence you need the apps on it to um to work independently although i did have a thought which is apple could use icloud to distribute notifications across all devices in fact because you do get your notifications on other devices so some of your notifications from your iphone could also go to your apple watch even when they're not together because that is the case when your phone and your ipad are not together they can get the same notifications yeah i feel like i'd be in a weird middle state with that though like i would maybe want to do something and can't you know etc etc yeah exactly, et cetera. Yeah, exactly right.

But it's just, it shows you the adolescence of this. It goes back to what we said last week, which is Apple Watch hardware has outpaced the software and now the software has to catch up. And that's not just the third-party apps because as we know from hearing from some app developers and listening to Marco Arment talk about his issues with Overcast,

that there are places where WatchOS just doesn't really provide a lot of power that they're accustomed to from iPhone development. And so this is a case where Apple's hardware people have really pushed the hardware with the Apple Watch, which is great, but the software is now needing to catch up. And, you know, hopefully, I think we'll see more apps take advantage of this as much as they possibly can this year but it also sounds like that there's going to need to be some advancements in watch os to really enable the app developers to take it even further and that unfortunately will probably be next year yeah um i was uh i was

i went swimming a couple of days ago and you know it was nice to have my watch on to track my swimming i love that one of my favorite features that came with the previous watch that it can do swimming tracking. But it was nice because I was in the pool and my phone was locked away and I was still getting iMessage stuff. And if I take a break from swimming for a few minutes, I could respond to some messages by speaking into my watch.

It was pretty good. I liked it a lot. And I hope that more and more and more stuff happens with this. So, yeah. I'm seeing in the chat room people saying that the siri integration you know when you say hey siri what is this they're apparently using shazam servers that's great uh yes you know i don't know if the watch can do it i don't know how well the watch does it and etc etc etc i've never gotten that feature to work reliably there you go so what are what are you going to do? Through Siri.

I've heard this as well. I mean, I don't try a bunch myself, but I've heard people say that the Siri integration isn't as good. Even though it's using Shazam's information somewhere, it maybe isn't as optimized. We have a really quick bit of follow-up. We were talking about cases and Qi charging, and there was, I think, an Ask Upgrade about old cases and

charging and things like that. And we heard from a few people, it sounds like we heard from a few people who actually work in Apple stores, who said, as far as they know, the old cases work just fine. We had somebody who has an old case and put it on their iPhone 8 and was able to charge just fine through the case. So I think, you know, we don't want to say it absolutely will in all circumstances that all of your iPhone 7 or 6 cases will work if you lay it on a Qi charger. But I think it was worth mentioning because we had somebody who reported that they were told that they wouldn't work, and that seems to not necessarily be true. Last week, I mentioned during the Mike at the Movies segment that there was some standalone

Mike at the Movies planned for the rest of this year, and yesterday we released one of those. Me and John Siracusa watched both Kill Bill Volume 1 and Volume 2 and discussed those. So, you can find that at the incomparable.com slash mike but of course there'll be a link in the show notes that as we said there are some standalone mike at the movies uh and this is one of them so you can go and take a listen to that if you want uh no spoilers for how i felt about the movies or why they were picked but i think it's worth listening to just to hear the rules that I had, which were fantastic. Actually really great.

Like he gave me some guidelines about how I should watch and when and why, et cetera, et cetera. And I actually really, really enjoyed our discussion about these movies. We had a, I think it came out really well. So you can go check that out.

And in case you're wondering, no, it's not longer than the two movies combined. It's like an hour long. So we didn't, we didn't hit the John Syracuse trait of longer than the movie because I wasn't going to allow that to happen

because we were not going to talk for six hours. Being instructed on how to consume particular kind of media. Welcome to my, by John Syracuse. Oh, really? Does he do this for you too? Oh, whenever we do, whenever we do like anime

or Miyazaki or like things where Professor Syracuse is assigning us the work, he will instruct us on how we need to watch those things or at least give a strong opinion. I followed the rules. I followed the Syracuse rules, and I think they enhanced the experience. Yeah, I recommend going to listen to this. It was a great discussion. And so, yeah, go check it out. I'll put a link in the show notes yeah that's great and that feed is fun for if you don't regularly listen or or you don't always have time for the the the segments that we do here and that you do with casey on analog that's a fun feed too because just collects them

all so when you're in the mood to listen to mike talking about movies and tv shows and things it's all in one place that was that's why it So, Jason, can you tell me some defining features of Twitter? Well, let's see. So you have each post is 140 characters. Wrong! As of a few days ago, Twitter doubled the character limit for tweets to 280 characters

in a bunch of regions depending on the language one of these languages that they have adapted this for is English so if you're in the United States or the United Kingdom or any other English speaking country and you have your language set to

English on Twitter, you may be part of a potential test slash rollout slash i think it's actually happening but they're calling it a test for some reason and be enabled for 280 characters available to tweet now i still have 140 characters which is weird because i don't want 280 characters, but I also don't want to be the guy who doesn't have it. Right? I'm in this kind of weird sense right now where I don't necessarily want to have 280 characters at my disposal, but I don't have it.

And I'm like, well, why don't I have it? I feel like I should have it. Everybody else is getting it. But that's kind of where I am. Yeah, it's that moment where you see a long tweet and you're like, what, that jerk has 280 characters and I don't? What about me? I assume you only have 140 characters.

Why don't I have 280 characters? What's wrong with me? Why didn't they want me? So, are you still in the 140 club? Oh, yeah. This is weird. Hashtag 140 club. Hashtag 140 club. 140, yeah. This is weird. Hashtag 140 club. Hashtag 140 club.

140 forever, baby. I'm seeing these tweets in my timeline. I use tweetbot. I assume you're seeing them the same. They're so long. Yeah. Just something looks weird, right? Like, it looks really peculiar to see these tweets.

Yeah, they're very long. They're so long. It seems wrong. I know what twitter is saying like i've read their blog post you can go and read the blog post and you know it's the idea of like people want to be able to express themselves and i'm sure they're trying to you know curb some of the tweet storming type stuff and or the screenshotting right people posting screenshots like i think twitter want that to be text they want it to be there so right you know right those those 30 tweet long threads will now be 15 tweets long instead i guess yeah i would assume though that they've i would assume that they've done some some data analysis

and have worked out that by increasing it to 280 there will curb a lot of what's required you know people instead of posting three tweets might post one now because they can get it all in if they just squeeze it into what would be 280 characters you know like you know you catch one you catch two and maybe three you know and maybe it stops people from doing that and or you know stops people from having to post these screenshots of the notes app you know i think that's a good one i mean the argument and gruber made it again this week we've had this discussion before about that twitter could just create a text attachment type right where? Where you can just like your tweet, your 140 character tweet introduces it. And then you have a text attachment that's readable and it's accessible in a way that a

screenshot isn't because, but they chose not to do that. But we've, we see this. I actually wrote a piece about it, like how everybody takes a screenshot of the notes app with text in it and post that to Twitter or Instagram or Facebook because they don't have enough text in in twitter in order to get it out there so uh this is better but i i and maybe it will cut down on using the notes app but it's still it's still in this interim place where it's not like unlimited nor is it super limited it's just a little bit less limited which is kind of kind of strange i mean i think it's okay um i think a lot of the criticism i've seen has been more meta twitter criticism which is twitter has lots of problems with harassment on their platform and with awful people and also bots that are trying to manipulate public opinion on their platform

and so when when they announce this um everybody says why are you rolling out a new feature that is not addressing the problems on your platform and their answer is well we're also addressing those and people don't believe them and they get angry and i think maybe rightfully so but if they are doing stuff for that they definitely don't make as big a song or dance about it as they did this right like if they're doing things they don't talk about them that's because this is easy i mean this is this is something that twitter just needs to want to change um the other stuff is hard uh so they of course they make a press release about this and a blog post and all of that um but yeah it has the potential to change the platform and and not necessarily for the better,

not necessarily for the worse, but I do think that some level of outrage about this was inevitable because it's change and that's just people are going to be outraged about it. In the end, I would wager that most tweets are not going to break the 140 barrier because most of them probably don't get close now, but that it will cut down on threads which i think are annoying now we could we could argue again that twitter could do a better job with addressing the need that people have by making these giant twitter threads that they could do something else because a again a 10 tweet thread does not get solved by going to 280 characters it doesn't it makes it a five tweet thread.

Maybe. But that's it. So I would say I'm definitely in the camp of, I don't want text attachments to tweets. Like I don't want it. Because then it becomes like. It's a blogging platform at that point. Because the thing is,

with threading and with threads, which I also do find frustrating sometimes it's because of the way twitter works it's like i'm reading this conversation it's like it's upside down like i yeah no i'd rather have a a feature that addresses threads right that lets somebody make 20 twitter posts that are all interlinked and that are collapsed by default to a single one and that went and and then then the API and the web interface and all that lets you open it up and see all of those. And some threads in some clients,

in some instances on some platforms, you can do that now. The problem is that if you're following somebody who's doing a tweet thread, you don't see tweet one and a click to see the whole thread. You see all the tweets and it fills your timeline like even with doing that you're still going to get you're still going to be back

into square one of making it a blogging platform right like as soon as you take away the thing from someone of like maybe i shouldn't spam a timeline right then then people try and cut it down i think maybe so i mean i think the challenge though is what are the users want obviously the users want to post this stuff and they're going to find a way to do it and if you're the platform owner you don't want to distort what your platform is but at the same time you don't want to you ideally you want to address like the motivation behind why users have behaved this way um and you know the thread thing is still out there because i don't think 280 makes much of a difference for it no i mean i will say for my own personal usage 280 will be beneficial for some things that i do i find that very frequently i'm either perfectly fine or i need two tweets right like for whatever it is i need it's either one or two that's all i ever need uh but this

happens to me a lot like if i'm announcing a new thing or like we've got a big episode or something I want to promote, it's always like 150 is the exact minimum that I can post. And it's always so frustrating. So being able to go to 280 will help me a lot in that. But I don't want to become more verbose. And I don't necessarily feel that everybody else needs to, because I'm being, you know,

I'll be frank. Most of the tweets that I've seen that are 280 characters don't need to be, but like people now have the space to do it. Like part of the reason that has made this platform great is that it's short and it's quippy, you know? And of course, yes,

it's getting broken by the fact that people are posting just like 60 tweets in a row to talk about a thing uh where basically that content just shouldn't be there but it's what people want to do right like that content should exist in the place that content should exist which is on a blog like that's where that should be but people don't want to do that and if people don't want to do that you can't stop them but i don't i don't i mean i can see the situation that twitter and is like how do you fix this for some reason they've done this i don't know if they needed to do that i don't know if this is going to help them as you say because all it does is just half it but like it still is going to occupy the exact same amount of space on

a screen but this is the the route that they've chosen to go down and it just looks weird it just looks weird and i don't know if this is gonna help the platform in any meaningful way right i can't imagine that people are going to be like well now i'll sign up like you know it's it's a strange right it's a strange thing yeah it it is weird yeah i i uh have the same thing as you which is i have accounts like i find this more relevant for something like my uh for the incomparable Twitter account where I like to list, I like to mention everybody who's in an episode and I have panels of many people. And once you do that, you've run out of space to describe what the episode's

about. It's like new with these people link, and then you're done. And then I'll have a little more time to like a little more space to explain that a little bit further. That'll be fine when that happens, when I get 280 on that account. But you know, I don't know. It does seem weird. Like I don't think it's fundamentally good or bad. And I think that it could just be fine. The problem that I have with it is very much the problem. It's some of the stuff you've mentioned and that I mentioned earlier, which is it has a little bit of a rearranging deck chairs feel about it. Like of all the things happening on the platform of Twitter, this is what you choose to do. And I know maybe that you choose to do it because it's easy. It's easy, but this seems like not where your focus should be when you've got challenges of reaching new audiences and challenges of harassment. Yep.

And potentially like counter, you know, anti-cultural attacks by bots run by governments trying to stir up unrest in other countries like there are lots of things going on that are not uh the length of a tweet but you know so that's my issue with it is i think fundamentally it's not necessarily a bad move it's just like seems like a beside the point move yeah it's like twitter if you want to implement a feature that people might like edits this you know whether you want that or not i think there is a more of a user desire for tweet editing than double the length tweets you can work i'm sure that's a very difficult thing to try and work out but that would maybe be met with a little bit more praise from your users yeah i mean they're there are issues with edits so like you'd need to show the edit trail and you need to limit when

the edits happen and yeah but that would you know work that out do a basic version of that you know whatever it would be that's gonna be met with with if you want good pr for this stuff on a wider scale that's going to be met with more hurrahs i mean yes of course find a way to make the incredibly difficult problem of the harassment stuff better right like i don't know i don't know how you do that right like i have no answers for you there are lots of people that have lots of great ideas um listen to those people right there are things you can do but you but I'm sure the reason that a lot of that stuff doesn't get done is because there are accounts that are active, but this is a whole big issue for another time, maybe.

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later today Apple have published a white paper for face ID I think this is something that they promised to do on stage I believe or at least during the introduction stuff they said that they would have a security white paper out which is out and it also came alongside a revamped privacy page that apple put together apple.com slash privacy which talks about

the way that apple feel about privacy i want to talk about some tidbits some little pieces of information about face id that could be pulled out of this white paper um one of them this is something that we'd heard about but like just an implicit confirmation from Apple that developers don't have to make any changes to their apps to use Face ID where Touch ID was used. If you use Touch ID, then it was fine, right? But then if you now you can open an application and instead of a Touch ID thing, you're showing a Face ID thing. So you show your face.

It's a standard security. It's nice because this is the idea of planning ahead and saying look we're going to have a biometric authentication system and you hook into it this way and then you as an app walk away and let the system verify and then it'll come back and say yep that is that person and so if you're one password you know and you're you're 1Password, you know, and you're unlocking your vault with a thumbprint, now guess what? It'll unlock with a face ID. And it's all the same to you because it's just biometric validation. That's very cool. So it's a great thing for developers that they don't have to do anything, right?

Like you already did the hard work. Isn't that the best? Because that suggests that everything that's underlying, when something is really built with a good foundation, Apple can change parts of the underlying system and apps just work right with the new whatever it is that's changed, new hardware of some sort, new approach to software. Like that's always the best, right? If the developers don't have to do

anything and it just works, that doesn't always happen. But this is an instance where Apple should be able to literally just swap in Face ID for Touch ID and nobody should be the wiser in terms of software development. Every time you unlock an iPhone X, Face ID takes data of the face in front of it. Now, this is either a Face ID scan, so it's accurately identified you via Face ID scan, or if you try and scan and it doesn't work, or if you unlock and then you unlock your phone with a pin, it will take that information.

Because it will believe at that point that if you have unlocked it and it looks at your face and has a particular rate that it believes it might not be you, but isn't like enough for them to unlock it, right? Like it's hitting within some certain parameters. It will take that data and update the profile it has of you. And it does that every time the phone is unlocked. And this is how Apple builds the way that your face changes over time. Right. It's clever, clever too because they're

doing it within a range where like if i have so um so my wife and i have our own like passwords for each other's phones and stuff right and because occasionally you need to unlock the other person's phone and do something they're busy or whatever um and so what you don't want to have happen is lauren unlocks my phone with phone with a password and it scans her face and goes, oh, that's who Jason is now. Jason had an operation today and now this is what he looks like. He looks very, very different. And then I come back to my phone and they're like, nope, I don't know who you are because that lady unlocked your phone. And so that's who I belong to now, right?

Like it's, I don't even remember who you are. I'm with the new person now. Goodbye. Or your face has belonged to us. It doesn't do that. Ideally, what you've got is it looks and it's looking for a high enough percentage that it thinks yeah that probably was you but not i wasn't sure enough to auto unlock and then it uses that as as a hint it learns from that and it kind of like puts that into its uh the context that it uses and they describe this as being the method

by which they can track like differences in facial hair and makeup for dramatic, I think they said differences in facial hair and makeup, and still know it's the same person. So if you change your look but are still obviously you and you unlock your phone because it doesn't recognize you with your changed look, it actually uses that as a cue to update its training because it knows you look different now and that the next time it should

actually recognize you, which is, yeah, this is a nice feature and it shows you the level of steps and the complexity here that Apple is going through in terms of trying to get a user experience that works, but also have a secure system because the way that this, the way that the data is collected is secure. You didn't mention the infrared dot mapping thing. The dot pattern is different based on the hardware. Every phone's dot pattern is different. So you can't take a dot pattern, like take an infrared camera and measure a dot pattern on somebody's face

from one iPhone and then use that to spoof another iPhone because the patterns won't match, which is really interesting. And then like the encryption, how they take the data and it's like, you know, it's signed and encrypted and then it is thrown away in certain circumstances after time or on a restart and then you have to re-enable it. Like there's a lot going on here in terms of the details of how they're securing this data.

And of course, the basic misconception that a bunch of people had when this was announced, which is, you know, it doesn't leave the phone. And in fact, it's reduced to a mathematical equation. It's not even the dots anymore. It's just a mathematical equation that is, I think it's very much like cryptography it is representing what the measurement was so that if you take a new measurement you can say that it matches but it's not the same as having the original measurement still around there's a lot going on here so like there's even um an enhancement to ar kit which includes facial recognition and mapping onto a face you know like they demoed the Snapchat stuff and how Animoji does it as well.

But third-party applications that use this part of ARKit, they don't actually get the face data. They don't get it. So even then, it's not just not Apple. Nobody gets that information, which is, again, very cool, very clever. A big question that a lot of people ask is, like, how will payment authorization work? Like, do I just look at my phone and the money leaves? Well, to authorize payments via Apple Pay, you double-click the side button first, then look at the phone. So it's a slight change.

Like, even if you hold it to a reader, you still have to do the double-click thing. So there is a slight change here. I will say that personally, I never, with Apple Pay, hold the device, then authorize. I always pre-authorize. Like I double-click the home button, hold my Touch ID, and then it's ready.

So I'm looking at doing it in the line, and then I just hold the device, right? Like I never do the waiting thing because I find that takes too long for me. It's frustrating. Plus, I know I'm going to do the Apple Pay thing, so I do that. It also seems like, now they talk about making payments in apps.

Now, I'm assuming, my read on this is this applies to both Apple Pay inside of apps and in-app purchases. This is how I read this. That to make payments in applications, you confirm intent by also doing the double-click of the side button and then the face scan.

So all payments are done with a double-click and a face scan. That's how it works. This is click of the side button and then the face scan. So all payments are done with a double click and a face scan. That's how it works. This is probably why the side button is so large on the new device. It's to make it easier for you to get to because you're going to be clicking it more, right? Like, yeah.

And anybody who's used an Apple Watch already knows that this is a gesture that Apple has been using for Apple Pay because that's how the Apple Watch payment flow goes is you double tap on the side button and then scan you know and then you know tap your so it's actually going to feel really natural for me because i would say 90 95 percent of the times that i use apple pay i use my watch i don't use my phone yeah yeah well i mean what i was going to say is to to be honest, this is really interesting, but I'm not sure how much more I'm going to really use Apple Pay on the device.

Most of the time I'm using Apple Pay on my watch. But for people who don't have an Apple Watch, this is the way that you'll pay. I care more personally about, like, how do I authorize an App Store purchase, right? Like, how does that work? And it seems like it's the same thing. It does the Face ID scanning instead of the Touch ID for, like, the confirmation.

But to confirm the intent, you do the double click, which makes sense. I mean, there are facial gestures they could do, but I don't want to do any of those. You know, like I want to do the double clicking. You know, I've heard people say like, well, if you winked at the phone, I don't want to do that. I don't want to wink at my iPhone. That's not a thing that I want to do to confirm a payment to be made or to be unlocked like i have no desire to do that kind of stuff what if you get something in your eye and you accidentally then it's a seinfeld episode right yeah like i'm just yeah i'm not i'm not willing to do that

double click is like a it is a thing it makes sense to me um it is a second level it's like two-factor right like it's my face and my thumb doing the job and they do it together isn't that a seinfeld episode where george gets something in his eye and he everybody thinks he's like a two-factor, right? Like it's my face and my thumb doing the job and they do it together. Isn't that a Seinfeld episode where George gets something in his eye and everybody thinks he's winking? Yep. Yep, but I can't remember the payoff, but yeah. Horrible, horrible misconceptions happen because of that.

Yeah. So you know, the last thing you want to do is to do that. If you're under the age of 13, your facial features may not be distinct enough for Face ID to work. Isn't that interesting? You're just... If you're not a teenager, the iPhone just thinks you're an undifferentiated blob.

You're just a blob. Just a human blob. Whatever. Human. Maybe human. Maybe even not. I don't want to speak to the way that people live their lives, but I don't think at this point a 13-year-old should have one of these phones.

Like I just, I mean, I'm sure there are going to be many, right? Like many, many 13 year olds in the world that will have an iPhone 10. And in two or three years, even more of them will have them when they're handed down. So my hope would be honestly that like Apple can make it better. I mean, I don't know if it's like just a limitation of the technology or they just haven't gotten good enough yet. Or if it's purely a 13 year old or a 12 year old or an 11 year old, their face can never be detected.

But we'll see about that. My hope would be that they would make it better if they want to roll it out, because it's not like, you know, a nine year old or your fingerprint isn't like it's not distinct enough yet. Like that's not how this works. So I would hope that that's something that can make better. But yeah, I'm sure that there are going to be many 13 year olds many 12 year olds in the world that are going to be upset when the face id doesn't work for them right like i'm sure that there are many people but like

there shouldn't be that many that it's going to be like i don't know 13 gate or something but hey the one thing that i am frustrated about is one face per device and you mentioned this like you and lauren share passwords me and adina we have our thumbs registered on each other's phones your mileage may vary with this right like personally but that works for me and her like this is just a thing we're totally cool with that um i don't have my phone locked because i don't want her to see it i have my phone locked in case i drop it on the bus and again like people's privacy like i'm not saying you're doing something

wrong because that's not how it is people are private about their stuff in their own way you know no judgment right this is a judgment free zone um but i am frustrated about that like that she's going to need to put the pin in or whatever so i'm going to tell her my pin she got to remember the pin and it's like it was way easier when we could just touch id on the devices i've got to think that at some point this will change but i wonder if this is a hardware limitation like not the camera but like what all they're storing if it's just too complex yeah for for more faces to be stored or whether it's something that they could update with software down the road because yeah it would be

nice it might be like if there were a couple of distinct faces. Like that chip can only take one, and then maybe it needs like two chips to add more. So they may never do it, right? Like it may always be now like it's one face per device. It may be the way it is, but I would hope that they're able to change that over time. I guess unless you're a twin, then you could have multiple faces per device, I guess. Is that how that works? That's the only way you get more than one face per device, I guess, is have somebody who has the exact same face as you, I guess, maybe, I don't know. But there you go. That's the Face ID white paper. Again, this is still on the long road ahead

that we have for this. We're a month away, month and a bit away, month and change from the phones being in people's hands, possibly, if you can get one. So yeah, we're on the long road to the iPhone X. I'm excited for it. I cannot wait to get one of these things. I'm pumped. I'm very excited. Talking about new

hardware, Apple TV 4K. We didn't get to it over the last week or two.'s true there's so many things to talk about and write about and you can't get to it all and unfortunately the the poor poor baby of the apple tv 4k fell at the bottom of the list uh of of the things that would deem the most important but um i wanted to just talk about a couple of things about my setup and my my experience you have one too right so i guess we can we can go we can chip in together on this you do have one absolutely i i i know in fact let me tell you my story because it's really funny i pre-ordered um the neck the day after the orders

went up i was like i don't know if i'm gonna get up at midnight and i was like yeah well i'll get a 4k apple tv and i'm probably not going to get a review unit to test anyway so i i'll get one so i placed an order and they said well you'll get that probably about October 8th. It's like, all right, well, that's dumb, but okay. And then I thought a few days later, I had this thought, which was, I wonder if they're in stock at my local Apple store. Yeah, they were in stock there. And which made me think to myself, why? I think Apple needs a better system, right? I think apple needs a better system right i think apple needs a system where they can say hey i know you are waiting two weeks to get an apple tv but if you like we could shift this to be a pickup order at your local apple store i think they don't do that because what

they want is they want to allow people who don't think about buying online to wander in to drift into an apple store and get one like they don't want to cross the streams there they have to have it you know right you can't ship but i mean i understand but you can't just ship the online orders you have to have store stock as well you have to have some store stock yeah so i i understand it and yet at the same time as a customer i was told to wait three weeks for something that I could drive five minutes to pick up, right? And I finally just, that's what I did is I went and I got one. I feel like they should tell you, right?

Like, you know, you place an order and send you an email and they're like, oh, hey, by the way. Yeah, I think, and there might be something to that because, of course, I ordered it, I think, before it was in stores. And so they're like, all right, well, it's going to be three weeks. I think before it was in stores. Yep. And so they're like, all right, well,

it's going to be three weeks. And if I had ordered it when it was in stores, it might've said, this is available for pickup at quarter. It does do that. It does do that. Like if you're buying after pre-order time, it shows you both options. Like it shows,

Hey, available pickup today, but it would be nice if they could do it retroactively. Right. So like they could say to you like, Oh, by the way, like right now there is stock in store today

we don't know what it will be like when you get there but check yeah the problem is that that ruins their store stock because then you're diverting all of your some of your pre-orders to store stock yeah that is that is frustrating but when it when it's out three weeks and it's in stock at your local store, that's pretty dumb. Anyway, so I did cancel my online order and place an order for pickup. And one hour later, I had the Apple TV 4K.

So I did get it in the end. So I found set up simple, not as simple as the Apple Watch, but simple, right? You just hold the phone near the device and it transfers over like Wi-Fi information and account information. I still had to enter my itunes password once um and i had to re-authenticate netflix and youtube and stuff like that but they're actually youtube is really simple to do

i love the way that youtube does their activation thing where it just shows an eight digit code and it says just go to youtube.com activate on any device type this code in and it's done so you don't have to sit and put in passwords i love that lots of apps lots of apps do that i i have that for um a lot of the different video apps where they want me to authenticate um either with my cable provider or with my just my login and those are my favorite ones when they work because then I do need a separate device, but I also am not laboriously entering in a passcode. So I will say to Apple's credit,

Netflix doesn't do this. Netflix wants my username and password. But when I get to that screen, a notification pops up for me to enter in text. And I was able to go to another application, I went to one password, got my got my password and the notification just remained persistent in the notification center uh-huh so

i just hit it and pasted in the password so it's like yeah you thought of this right like i'm feeling now like especially with way better apple tv that apple's gotten to a point where like they're showing that a lot more thought has gone into this product than when it was initially introduced. It is way more put together as a thing than it was initially. And there were many rumors about that, about the idea of it sat on the shelf for a while, it wasn't touched, and it was just shipped with old software, which is why Apple Music wasn't on it, etc., etc.

But now it does feel better. I have a 4K HDR TV, and I could instantly see a change in the menus crisper richer color and the thing i was most excited for totally paid off the screensavers are amazing they look so good they do they do they look really good really frustrating for me that you cannot watch 4k youtube videos this is really annoying yeah and this is this is apple's decision to not support google is pushing the vp9 codec and saying 4k is only they're not going to bother doing h265 encoding of uh of 4k videos they're only going to do vp9 and apple's like well we're not going to support vp9 and it's this it's this little passive aggressive game they're playing this

is the same reason why you can't watch 4k youtube videos in safari on a mac but you can in chrome because it supports the codec so this is uh a little adversarial thing between apple and google but it makes apple's product worse in this case apple need to give in on this one in my opinion um i liked something that daring mr daring uh john gruber said and daring fireball please it's mr fireball he says unlike the iphone and ipad apple tv doesn't have enough market share to force google John Gruber said during Fireball... Please, it's Mr. Fireball. It's Mr. Fireball to you. He says, Unlike the iPhone and iPad, Apple TV doesn't have enough market share to force Google's hand.

I think Google can stick to its VP9 guns and it will be Apple that pays the price. Completely agree. And I would say, I think Apple needs to say for the Apple TV 4K, they will support this codec. They don't need to do it anywhere else.

But this is a TV device that has 4K HDR support and one of the biggest video sources in the world probably with the most 4k content probably they don't support right like yeah i watch videos constantly from youtubers that publish in 4k yes and now and my tv can do it so So my TV has smart apps, right? And it has 4K support in the YouTube app. So if I want to get that content, I still have to go back to the TV app, which is one of the things I was hoping

from getting this device, and then eventually there being Amazon, is that I only ever had to use this now. But if I do, for whatever reason, want to watch a video in 4K, I then still have to go to the clunky smart app on my TV. Well, look, I mean, Google, I think Google is being jerky here

by not also embracing H.265 or HEVC because that is also a standard. But Google has their own thing that they're pushing, which is VP9. And it's this format war kind of thing that's happening. And it's dumb. I will admit it is burdensome to YouTube to have to encode 4K videos in both of those formats for compatibility reasons. But, you know, it's one of those things where we could argue that the right thing to do ultimately is for YouTube to offer 4K video in whatever formats people are consuming them in.

But the reality of the situation is Apple is making a 4K TV box that can't play 4K YouTube videos. And we can say, well, YouTube should just change, but it's Apple's product and Apple can control whether it's better by including that support. And they have chosen not to do it. And I think, you know, to John Gruber's point and your point, um,

Apple TV probably needs 4k YouTube videos more than YouTube needs Apple TV to play videos in 4k. Yeah. Cause you know what will Chromecast everything else. Yeah. Yeah. So it's like, you know you know and we're gonna talk about amazon stuff later but the amazon fire tv 4k that'll do it and you know what that thing costs 70 now 4k and hdr support for a hundred dollars less than apples yeah but i do really love my Apple TV. The Siri remote, right?

It should be better. They didn't really do a lot. They added that ring around the menu button. Honestly, for me, that has made it better. It's not a better remote, but it's better than it was because now I can pick it up and I know what way it is

and I know what button I'm touching because I can do it in proximity to the little ring. It's like touch typing on a keyboard, right? You look for the little notches on the keys. It feels like that to me. Not that I know how to touch type but I understand what that means. But it's like it's not a... The remote is still bad

but it is better bad than the bad it was before. It has been improved. It should be better. But if this is what they were going to do, then fine. Wasn't it? It was, I think maybe Marco Arment who said,

it's literally the least they could do. If it wasn't him, it was somebody I heard say, it's like literally the least they could do was put a white ring around the menu button. Yeah, I think the trackpad is still just a problematic interface and i i use it a lot and i still get in situations where i'm like no don't don't go there don't do that or or where they put some clever sort of like flick up to get more

things and i flick up and it's like nope that didn't work that didn't work too much not enough and you push exactly right and you push it a little too too hard now you've clicked and now it's it's gone away somewhere you accidentally clicked yeah it's still not uh it's one of those things that apple is is trying to reinvent the remote and doing uh you know it's it's a mediocre job that maybe there is a reason remotes are the way they are. Um, but you know, yeah, it's, this is the whole story with the Apple TV is like, there are parts of it that are pretty good. Um, in isolation, I actually think it's a pretty great product. Um, it's got issues, but, um, the, the, for video watching, like the, the, the apps that I use are all pretty good. Um, There are some exceptions, but I think they are not Apple's fault

so much as the provider's fault. It can do some good work. The challenge is that there are areas where Apple has made the product less, like not supporting VP9, so not supporting 4K from YouTube. And there are places, and there is the competition, right?

All of us know that there are other devices that do this for $100 less. And the challenge is like, is Apple providing an experience $100 greater than Amazon's 4K Fire TV? And, you know, well, what are they doing that the Amazon box isn't? what are they doing that the Amazon box isn't? And it's, well, AirPlay, you know, screen mirroring and access to iTunes content. And that's about it. I mean, is that enough for the difference? And, you know, part of me thinks that Apple

is not too concerned because they just don't think that it is an important enough market for it to matter, especially since 4K HDR TVs are kind of expensive. And so I think they may figure, look, if you can afford a 4K HDR TV, you can afford $170 box to get access to Apple stuff. And maybe they're right about that. But that's part of my frustration is like, it's an okay video streamer. It's just way more expensive than the competition. And it's disappointing that it isn't better.

And some of that is not Apple's fault. Well, some of that is sort of Apple's fault in the sense that Apple and the content providers have had issues and Apple doesn't want to roll over on them. But the content providers also don't want to get taken by Apple. And so you end up with breakdowns and things, single sign-on not being fully supported and stuff like that. I don't know. I don't mind using it. I enjoy it. And in fact, I like it better than the Amazon Fire TV I've got, which has its own interface issues. And I like it better than the interface on my television, which know the tv apps are not

particularly great there's they're really generic and weird um but all that said it could be better and it could and I wish it was cheaper to get into the apple tv line and that's something we talked about a couple weeks ago which is I'm surprised that the base model apple tv isn't under 100 now now that they've got this 4k model but it's like you know what are they selling are they selling the razor are they selling the blades like what are they what is the point of this product like do they want people to be buying content or do they want people to be buying the boxes i mean i would argue that surely it's the content right like they want people buying tv shows and movies and locking them into the ecosystem too, right? That's part of it.

It's not, yes, locking them into the ecosystem sells a more expensive box, but also buying the more expensive box and making it easy to buy more movies locks you further into the ecosystem. It goes both ways. And it's a weird, yeah, I wonder what the strategy is here

or if they're just kind of like groping around in the dark. And maybe some of it is this video strategy. Like what are they going to do? There's a whole other topic that we've talked about on my podcast that I do with Tim Goodman from the Hollywood Reporter TV talk machine. You can get it at theincomparable.com slash TVTM.

We talked about it a lot there and we're going to talk about it more, I think this week, which is what is Apple's strategy for how it rolls out its video service? It's got high-profile TV executives now talking to the creative people in Hollywood, and it's got a big checkbook. But what it doesn't have is a story about where their shows are going. Like, what is that service? Is it everywhere is it only on apple tv um you know is it just are they just going to keep throwing things on apple music are they going to have a clearly defined video service on top of it and the problem with signing a big name and having and and saying you know yeah we're going to throw

you a lot of money and creative control to do this thing that you want to create that big name one of the things they know is like if they go to amazon or netflix they know where their show's going to be seen and who's going to see it and with apple it's like they're not like we don't have an answer there yet so i wonder sometimes if that is part of this kind of like, what is the role of the Apple TV is like Apple hasn't decided what the role of the Apple TV is because Apple hasn't decided exactly what it's going to do with his video service. Like, is it is it available everywhere? Or is it only available on this box? And if it's only on this box, do they raise the price? Or do they keep this high price of the box in order to drive hardware sales? Or do they lower the price in order to drive subscribers to make it easy for people to get access to their stuff? I don't know. It's a hard question. There are lots of different ways they could go,

and they seem to have not committed to any of them right now. So, I don't know. All right, so Apple TV 4K, there's still some frustrations to it, which is exactly what I expected, but it's the upgrade that I guess I was looking for mostly. Yeah. And 4K, you know, 4K looks good.

I have a 4K TV that doesn't do HDR. But I will get one at some point here. But 4K can look good. Those screensavers, as funny as it is to talk about, oh, the screensavers are so great, but those screensavers are so detailed that they really do show off the 4K. They are impossibly detailed. And I find them entertaining to watch.

I like watching them. They're on in the house and I watch them. Cars going around and all of that. Yeah. Is that car going gonna go off that exit in dubai or is it gonna stay on the road we don't know you have to watch and find out that's that's right is the sun going to set behind london or not we don't know we have to wait and see if there'll be a cloud or if we'll see the sunset and uh yeah and and like the netflix um 4k stuff is great i'm

looking forward to the amazon app because they've got a lot of 4K stuff. And I currently have to watch Amazon. I currently have to watch all the 4K stuff through my TV. Now I can watch Netflix 4K on the Apple TV instead of through the dumb TV app. I'm looking forward to getting Amazon out of the TV app and just using Apple TV instead because it's a lot easier to navigate to. And now what I'm'm finding and this is

kind of funny is i'm like a 4k um like a seeker of 4k now 4k and hdr where it's like what do you got like i've got some movies that do 4k now that's fun that some of my movies got upgraded so i can watch like uh the the later Star Trek movies in 4K. And there's some other movies in 4K. It's great. But I look at like HBO Go and I think, come on, HBO, you got 4K versions of your shows, right? You should roll that out.

And CBS All Access, I had that because the new Star Trek show started last week and it's on streaming and it's on, it's on Netflix in the rest of the world, but in the U S it's on CBS all access. And it's like, it's provided in 10 80 and it's provided in stereo or like, it's not even in 5.1. It's like, get your act together, guys, give us a 5.1 audio track. And if you've got a 4k version of the show, I want to see it. I don't know if the version, Netflix around the world is 4K or if it's just 1080. But I am finding myself doing that thing of like, is this a 4K? No, it's not for all these apps.

So obviously, every video provider is being pushed to provide 4K shows and movies. So it's going to happen. And HDR. And making your videos look better is a good thing it's not the you know most people probably on a smaller hd tv cannot tell the difference between 4k and uh and 1080 hd but um hdr is more noticeable and people will get that on ipad pro now and yeah it's all it's all good but it's just i find it funny like the moment that i get the apple tv 4k attached to my TV, I start looking for 4K stuff.

And being disappointed when it's not. Exactly. Exactly. Like I'm looking for that content now more and more. Oh, I also switched it to 24 frames per second to test that out. And I am happy to report that. I think my TV does a pretty good job of the pull-down thing where it tries to do the right thing to make the film content not look juddery. But I think at 24 frames a second on the Apple TV, it did look better.

It does take my TV about a second to change between those formats, which is the reason that Apple doesn't do it on the fly. a second to change between those formats, which is the reason that Apple doesn't do it on the fly because Apple doesn't like that. It blinks out for an undetermined amount of time while your TV changes its settings. But, um, but it did look good. The problem is that the user interface looks ridiculous at 24 frames per second. It looks like you've gone to the old, like you're using an old timey Apple TV that can barely draw on the screen if you do it at 24 frames per second. So this is that idea that John, it's the John Syracuse feature, right? Which is to be able to say, look, give me output to the TV in the proper format for the video that you're presenting. So if it's not HDR, don't present it in HDR because apparently that doesn't look very good. If it's not 4K, don't present it in 4K, present it in 1080 or 720.

And if it's 24 frames a second, present it at 24 frames a second, not at 60 frames a second. And Apple has chosen to this point not to do that. You can set it to lots of these different video settings, but you can't do what my TiVo, I think actually has this setting, which is pass through, which is basically like just do the native of whatever the content is and switch on the fly. And you get a lot more of those kind of blank moments where your TV kind of blinks and then comes back in, but it's always in the preferred format for the content. And I have some hope that Apple will just make that a setting

for people who care and nobody else will use it and it'll be fine. All right, today's episode is also brought to you in part by a new sponsor and that is Timing, the automatic time tracking app for Mac. Look, time tracking, I know that many people find it boring. Hey, I have a show where we talk about time tracking quite a bit, I know that many people find it boring. Hey, I have a show where we talk about time tracking quite a bit. I know that some people find it boring.

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Like this isn't a thing that you can do manually unless you want to be spending a ton of time. And because timing collects more data than a regular time tracker, its use extends far beyond billing hours. It shows you exactly when you were using which app or website, maybe when you were slacking off, or I should say taking a break, and how productive you have been so you know how to improve your productivity going forward. But your work doesn't just happen on your Mac, right? And that's why Timing's timeline automatically makes suggestions for filling gaps in your timeline and can ask you what you did offline every time you return to the Mac. This way, you'll never forget to enter a meeting again. I installed Timing on my MacBook Pro whilst I was traveling over the summer,

and the fact that it was logging things automatically for me was amazing like i am pretty bad at doing manual tracking when especially when i'm outside of my usual environment so it's like it's perfect for me on my mac pro like when i'm doing other things i just completely forget to do any type of time tracking yep it's it's like time tracking amnesia or something where it's like you get out of context and like it's gone it's lost i'm not in my office so that means that i don't do this anymore uh so what i love about timing is that it just does it for me so all of that stuff is just entered in automatically it's fantastic you can try it out for yourself by downloading a 14-day trial today it's a completely free trial of the app by going

to timingapp.com upgrade so it's a 14-day free trial at timing app.com upgrade and you'll save 10 when you purchase as well timing stop worrying about time and focus on doing your best work instead thank you to timing for their support of this show it's funny that you um you're talking about time time tracking and stuff we've talked about this before on this show which is my concern that you go too far deep down into something like this and you're wasting more time than you're talking about time time tracking and stuff we've talked about this before on this show which is my concern that you go too far deep down into something like this and you're wasting more time than you're saving because you you become kind of obsessed with the mechanics of time tracking and i know you and gray have talked about this stuff too um and that's one of the for me that's like the best feature in timing is that it you can do that if you want you can obsess if you want but it's got enough intelligence to try and like intuit what and based on rules you can set up

and then because i've been using it for a while now and uh that's what i like about it is that i don't fuss over it i don't i don't i'm not my hobby is not time tracking, right? It's just happening. It's better. Sure is. All right. So out of nowhere, last week, Amazon had a surprise press event where they unveiled like a large selection of new Echo devices. Surprise! They embargoed the existence of the event. What?

I don't... It's just... Whatever. Tell your family you're going to seattle to see a friend the friend is jeff bezos he's your friend now he's your family you loved anyway but a couple of days before that there was some news that was interesting i just wanted to touch on real quick that google have pulled youtube off of the Echo Show. Yeah, I can't watch YouTube videos on my Echo Show anymore. And I have two statements from The Verge,

one from Amazon, one from Google slash YouTube. Amazon say, Google has chosen to no longer make YouTube available on Echo Show without explanation and without notification to customers. Google have said, We've been in negotiations with Amazon for a long time. Amazon's implementation of YouTube on the Echo show violates our terms of service, creates a broken user experience.

We hope to be able to reach an agreement and resolve these issues soon. I don't think that this is coming on to the device for a while, it sounds like. That is really frustrating. If you are somebody who bought that device, hello Jason, one thing that you're supposed to be able to do on it is watch videos watch youtube videos cooking videos while you're cooking yeah it it on one level i think a lot of these statements

from both these companies is accurate right like um although without explanation is interesting because that's that's like, so were they in negotiations? And then Amazon made some sort of response and YouTube was like, okay, we're out of here. If you're in negotiations, someone's explained to you why at some point, right? Exactly. You must be aware. Yeah. So without explanation seems a little bit weird, but I would say Amazon's implementation of YouTube on the Echo Show violates our terms of service, creating a broken user experience. We're going to have to analyze

this. And unfortunately, now I can't launch YouTube on the Echo Show and see what they're talking about because it's gone. But there's a lot of speculation about this. This is similar to some of the problems that Apple has had with video providers, including Amazon, ironically, because it has to do with who owns the data, what's the user experience that you're defining in your app. Like, Google has an idea of what its user experience is across all its apps. And I've complained about that from time to time, that sometimes a Google app on iOS doesn't behave like an iOS app should. And it's like, guys, I know you're Google and you want all your apps to look the same. But when you're making, like at one point,

there was all the Android share icons. And it's like, I don't even know what that is. Like every other share icon on iOS looks this way and you have it look a different way. It's confusing to me, right? And they've made progress there. And I like the Google unified interface in a lot of ways.'s very nice but here like what is google saying they're probably saying like we want you to respect our uh our autoplay we want you to display our overlays

like all of these things that are that that and and i want to be clear here that youtube considers part of the YouTube user experience. And I have to phrase it that way, right? Because, I mean, you do a podcast with a YouTuber. Sometimes the YouTube experience is not what the customer or the video creators want the experience to be. So it may be that what Amazon is saying is, well, we just want you to play the video you want. And then we're done. And then you can instruct us about where we go next. And YouTube's take is no, no, no, no, no, no. We always are pushing somebody to the next video and doing all these things because that's what we do. And and Amazon is put in a position where they're

potentially like Apple in saying, we don't actually think that's a good user experience for our customers. We don't want to do that. And you're now in this push and pull where it's like, but they're our customers, but they're our customers. No, they're our customers because they're YouTube users. Like, no, but they're really Echo Show users viewing a video on YouTube. And this is when the negotiations break down. I feel like that is what's going on here.

negotiations break down i i feel like that is what's going on here and it's too bad because you could argue that the echo show um is the reason it exists is for things like youtube videos in fact the thing that i am most disappointed by so far in having the echo show is that it should be way more video centric than it is it should be super easy like they need netflix on there they need you know they need everything on there and I know they want to push Amazon Prime Video I've I'm a Prime user I've got Prime Video but there's shows that aren't on Prime Video and then I find myself putting my iPad in the kitchen while I'm making dinner showing a Netflix show and I'm looking at that Amazon Echo Show screen and thinking that would be a perfect place to play this Netflix video. So with YouTube being gone, it's like pushing that product in the wrong direction. And that may also be part of this is Google saying, look, we are creating a huge amount of value for your piece of hardware by being on your product.

And you need to do what we say. So it's the giants. They're wrestling. They're angry. So they had an event, and I'm going to run through real quick these devices because there were a lot of them. There is the new Amazon Echo.

So this device replaces the current standard Echo. It's smaller, comes in a variety of finishes and colors. Amazon says it has better audio with Dolby processing. It is unclear if there are any big advancements at all with the audio hardware inside of the new amazon echo yeah great deal of skepticism about whether it's actually better audio hardware or if it just sounds sounds better yeah it's hard to tell amazon is pushing the multi-room audio with this product they give you a 50 discount if you buy three of them but that's still really expensive it's like 280 something like that uh you cheaper than sonos but so it's

like a cheap way to do multi-room audio but sonos has a really good audio hardware right so it's like who knows yeah you can attach speakers to this one though via the inclusion of a 3.5 millimeter jack in the back of the echo previously only the echo dot had that now the echo has it the the new amazon echo is kind of like a mix between the old echo and the dot because it has all the buttons on top like it has the volume up and down buttons which the original echo doesn't but the dot has and it has the 3.5 millimeter audio jack which the dot has been because amazon is based in seattle i'd like to put it this way, which is the original Echo was a Venti,

and the Dot was a Tal, and the new Echo is a Grande. It's in the middle. Sure is. It also looks a lot like the Google Home, doesn't it? It does, because it's got the cloth covering on it. Yeah. And it's that mid-size that's squat size yeah this is 99

dollars though it starts at 99 the previous echo was 149 179 something like that um so yeah it's much cheaper uh i ordered one of these for home um we're gonna replace the one in the kitchen so we ordered the one with the uh metal finish because the cloth finish probably doesn't feel right for the kitchen. I feel like it might get a bit not good over time. So we went with one of the metal finishes, and I don't like the wood finishes. So then we're going to do some house shuffling, right? I'm going to put the big Echo in here,

and then we're going to put the Dot in the bedroom, and then we've got them everywhere then. Echo Connect, $35 device. It plugs into a phone line to let US-based customers make phone calls through their Echo speakers, and the calls are tied to the owner's phone number. This is a device, I think, to try and get the Echo line of products

into the home of older people. I can't really get my head around this one so much. It's a phone phone it's a loud speaker that has the assistant built into it it's uh i don't really get this one so much jason but it's only 35 so great yeah it's a it's yeah it's a phone connection kit thing you're right this is this is for people i mean what's funny about it is like it's it's basically a landline utility yeah which which is of limited use but you're right i think some of this is i want to talk uh with um with grandma on the echo and this way like we can just

call her or something like that i i don't, because you could also use the internet to do it. It's interesting. This seems like a really weird niche product, but it gives your... Also, you could do it via IP, right? You could just do it on a virtual line, but instead it's like connecting to your actual phone line. I don't know. It's strange. What a strange product.

Yeah, so it just looks like it's you that's calling. Does it have... All right, okay okay i want to just say this now we're going into a real big amazon segment we're gonna say the name we're gonna say it all right if so if you have an echo nearby go ahead and press the button because like this is going to be too much work otherwise does this thing have alexa built in like i think it does, but, like, I can't find out, like, a definite yes or no on that. I don't think it does. I don't think it does. I think this is an accessory to connect to your internet and your phone line.

And then your Echo is the thing you talk to and listen to. So this is an accessory. With Echo Connect and a compatible Echo device, you can ask Alexa to call anyone using your phone landline at home. Okay. Exactly. Weird. This is a weird, weird product.

Because it's not for me. It is a weird product. Because I do not have a phone landline in my home. I don't have one. So it's, you know i i don't need that but i know i'm sure the chat room is pointing out it does it does work over uh voip too but i think the idea here is that you're attaching it to a uh uh so you get both right because the echo can already do these echo to echo calls and they can make some some vote or whatever, but this is so you get both.

You plug your phone jack into it, and then you can receive calls as normal, and when you make calls, it looks like the phone number. It's like a bridge between the two worlds. The Echo Plus, this is... It's weird to say this is the bigger Echo because it's the same size as the one that was on sale before. Yeah, that's the weird thing is they've redefined the old Echo style as the plus style now.

It's become a plus size. Like I would have, again, to use the Starbucks metaphor, I used to think it was a Grande, but it turns out it's a Venti. It's bigger than, it's the bigger, it's now the big Echo. Oh, yeah, no, it goes tall Grande Venti, which is mind bending. Okay, so bear with me on this one it took me a long time to understand what this product did like i'm i'm kidding i'm not kidding like 45 minutes of trying to work out exactly what this product does the echo plus looks like the current tool echo and is much and much exactly the same yeah i think it has better microphones in it but there's like a second gen microphone system whatever but it's much and much the same

it features more powerful smart home integration and it's intended to be a smart home hub and i already hear you say mike what are you talking about my current echo is a smart home hub. Well, yes and no. So the Echo Plus features what's called a ZigBee radio in it, which is a low-power wireless protocol, like it's a chip. We put this low-power wireless protocol that's used in a lot of smart home devices. Not all, but lots. I think over 100 right now that ZigBee supports. So what this means is you do not need a bridge device and you don't need to install any skills

or apps to support a variety of products for smart home. So when you plug in the Echo Plus you just say Alexa search for devices and it will connect to whatever it can find. Now this includes

Hue Lights. Now to me to get Hue lights to work with everything in my home, I have to have this little box that's plugged in to my router. You don't need that with this. And to go one step further, in the brilliant way that Amazon does this stuff, each Echo Plus comes with a Philips Hue bulb in the box. Genius. Because then you get to see the benefit of these

devices right like firsthand if you buy one of these you just screw it in and you can then control that light and you're like oh okay like and then you start to like get get your idea around it so the device i think that this device it signals something about what Amazon is trying to do here. I mean, like previously it's been like, you know, we want to have everyone and write the skills. And I don't think they're going to stop that, right? Because it's just this one device right now. But I think what it signals is that maybe they are trying to do what Apple has done and what Google has done. what Apple has done and what Google has done.

And they're like maybe trying to not necessarily build a platform, but be a more seamless experience like HomeKit is, right? Where it's just like it finds the stuff. Or like when you have these bridges, they just find the devices. It's a weakness of the Echo ecosystem where you have to deal with these skills and all of that. And regardless of the devices having a built-in hub i feel like there's two issues here there is the built-in hub stuff where it's like now you don't need to buy that 40 thing that you put on your ethernet network and plug into a wall and just leave it under a table somewhere and all it does is talk to your light

bulbs like that's kind of dumb right but they have to do it because they have to have some piece of hardware that acts as a bridge well the echo plus does that now so that's that's good that's a direction i think that a lot of these products need to lead like go in if they're if they're there's a challenge with the different standards and all that but like that would be a good thing for the home pod to do and for the apple tv to do as well is say well what if i don't even need one of those things because i can talk to it directly? So that's good. And then there's the software side, which is, are these devices smart enough on their own to talk to this stuff?

Or is there a more complicated kind of procedure that you have to go through? Because that's how I feel about my smart home stuff on the Echo now, is that the simplest stuff is pretty doable. And then you get up above a certain level and you're like, I don't even, like I've got, I should be able to, I should rephrase this. I know I can set my Echo up

so that I can tell it to do something and have it dim the lights in my living room and turn on the television and open up Netflix. And I know I can do that, but for the life of me i don't know how and that's a challenge it all needs to get better in terms of what they can control they did announce as part of all of this that coming soon is the ability for like for scene developers for scenes and also to have like multi-step things so like oh they're improving everything right and something that we should mention now is something that i have complained about and

dan moran has complained about i know on six colors a lot which is guess what for the first time um alexa skills can now um generate notifications so you have to opt in you have to opt in but that one of my complaints and again i don't want to be bugged by my lady in a canister but like if i choose an app and say hey app let me know when the baseball game is starting you can't do it like in the current conceptions like it doesn't go that direction it doesn't come from the internet into your device right and the first time they did anything like this was with the calls right where all of a sudden your echo is lighting up and saying you've got a call from steven hackett and it's like what is happening right well now with this new um this new generation of skills the skills can do that so the skills can actually ping you and say that thing that you you know that

gum you wanted is back in style or whatever they can do that for you the baseball game's about to start and that's a big step forward for them too so they are making a bunch of other announcements here it's just the skill stuff i don't know i mean you've got you've got echoes too the skill stuff is so squishy it's like it's because it's a voice device like there's no there's no real good way to access it on the device. And then you're in the Echo app or the Alexa app, and it's not very good in terms of skills. This is one of those cases where I look at the App Store and I'm like, oh, yeah, the App Store is better at this than Amazon is at getting this stuff together. Because I feel like it should be way more um discoverable and easy to enable this

stuff and instead most of the uh amazon uh echo skills that i enable are coming from the other direction where like any list sends me an email that says oh we now support the the shopping list on the echo and click here to turn that on because Because their store is a junk design. It's like just junk. It's like Amazon, fix that. Right? It looks terrible. It needs to be better.

It's so user hostile. It's a nightmare to use. I was just flicking around then while you were talking. And it's like, this is just like a horrible design. No, it reads like a lot of stuff that is early on in the smart home world where somebody slaps something together and put it up and it's like they designed it when

there were only 20 of them and they were mostly garbage done by hobbyists and a couple of different hardware partners and it was like it's good enough to ship it. But now you've got a lot of these devices out there and you've got a lot of these kind of skills and they're coming from different locations and it's like the experience needs to be a lot better than it is right now all right two last things echo spot

it's like an echo alarm clock it's a small device of a 2.5 millimeter screen it also features a speaker and a camera it's like the bedroom 2.5 inch screen it's bigger than that 2.5 millimeter screen would be very small wow 2.5 millimeter where did that come from 2.5 inch screen it's bigger than that 2.5 millimeter screen would be very small wow 2.5 millimeter where did that come from 2.5 inch screen it's a little like a little round blob that you're supposed to put on your nightstand it's a light basically a light it's what you described barely see it also features a speaker and a camera it is like a bedroom version of the Echo Show $130 shipping in December in the US it's an interesting product like I would maybe consider one of these, it's got little information

that shows on the screen for you this feels like a more sensible use of a touchscreen for me than the show I just feel like it makes more sense for me personally when they come to the UK I'll consider it I like the ambient nature of this I mean it's $ bucks. It's not cheap, but I like the ambient nature. I've mentioned on the show before that one of the things that I have repurposed my old

squeeze box music players to do is show the time and temperature and put those in a few places in my house because it's nice to have the time and temperature visible. And I've got the weather station, so the temperature is readily available. And this is one of those examples where having ambient information from the internet around is nice. Just ambient. It's just a screen. And surprisingly hard. Surprisingly hard to get that. So I look at the Echo Spot and I'm like, oh, that's really nice.

Because it's not cheap, but you could put one of those somewhere where people are looking from time or know to look, whether it's in bedroom, living room, wherever. And at a glance, you could see time and temperature or news headlines or whatever you would put on there. I would say that knowing what I know about the Echo Show, I have some skepticism about what's going to be on the screen of the Echo Spot because the home screen of the Echo Show is very limited in what it's able to be customized to be. And it needs to be better at that. It's kind of a hodgepodge right now, and it needs to be better. And the Echo Spot, with the limited screen real estate of that thing, needs to be that much better in terms of letting you choose what you need to see on it but

it's an interesting product and the last thing which is not an important thing but it's a weird thing uh echo buttons which is the first of what they're calling alexa gadgets which is a 20 set of buttons that you can use to play trivia games with and the echo will answer questions and then people can press their buttons and then answer back. It seems like a fun little game to play. I feel like this would be a great stocking stuffer when you buy your grandma her first Echo for Christmas. Right? Then the whole family can sit around the Echo

and play a trivia game. Fine. Yep. So there are so many devices here. And I guess that what Amazon is doing is trying to just fill every need which is yeah i don't know if this is good or bad it is a strategy though right like it is a strategy it is amazon realizing that the echo has has some traction and that it needs to go

all in on this. And not all of these products are going to work. I mean, I'd imagine that they've got a lot of, there's no company with an access to more rich, like consumer data analysis than Amazon, right? Just because of their sheer scale of what they sell and how many people they sell to. So they've made some guesses about,

informed guesses about use cases for this stuff. But it's also the case where they are shipping a bunch of stuff and seeing what happens. And while part of me thinks maybe fewer devices that are more focused would be better. The fact is they have they have a new what we thought of as the main Echo. They have a new one that does a whole lot more and they have a cheaper one that is now the new main Echo and it does more and has some different looks. And they've still got the small one and they've got the video one

and they've got the bedside, like small screen one. So, you know, it's really interesting. And in the end, we'll see where people want to integrate this stuff and where they don't. But it's very clear that Amazon is not going to let Apple and Google slide on in here and take over leadership in this without a fight. And this is amazon fighting and uh full credit to them i think their challenge is that they don't have parts of the ecosystem that amazon or that apple and google have that they have shopping and they have some video content but with the youtube thing we can see that they you know they are reliant on uh companies that have been more partners than than competitors and now are kind of competitors so that's one of their challenges but um but the echo was a hit right and they're going they're going in they're leaning in on the echo and uh i think that's great i think some of these products may flop and that's okay

i think if they flop they'll just walk away and try something new i i think that's true amazon is no it's not shameless about that they've had many failed products right like they don't walk away and try something new i i think that's true amazon is no it's not shameless about that they've had many failed products right like they don't i don't you know not they don't care but like they don't cower when they fail right they'll just keep going they seem very much one of the these fail fast kind of places where um that's a that's a what ed catmull said that about pixar like if you're gonna fail fail fast just get it just get it over with and move on. And so, like, the Echo Connect doesn't work.

Like, obviously, the Fire Phone failed. And they're like, all right, that's it. And it was gone. And that was it. Echo Connect, who knows if there's any market for that. Echo Spot, will people like that? The Echo, the one that they already have that's the Echo Look, is that it? Which is supposed to be your, like, fashion companion.

We haven't even mentioned that, but that's a weird product that may or may not make it. But they're trying. They didn't do anything with that one. They just did as it was. And we mentioned the Fire TV, right? They've got the new Fire TV with the new features it has and it's $70 compared to Apple's $170.

The Echo is $99 and the HomePod will be $399. Now, your mileage may vary as to what you consider to be a better product, but is it going to be four times as good? It might be twice as good. It may be three times as good. Will the HomePod be four times as good as the Echo?

I don't know that question. And we'll see what Sonos is doing in an announcement this week. And we'll see what that is. Sonos I think is doing an announcement this week and we'll see what that is because that may be in, it's possible that there's some Echo integration in a Sonos level kind of set of speakers. And if that's the case,

then that will be an interesting comparison with HomePod because HomePod is justified by its sound as being the higher price. And that'll be interesting to see how uh where sonos is in that in that space because it may be that the amazon is pricing for the mass market and then sonos is going to have amazon or you know alexa integration but it's going to be um priced for their market which is people who care much more about audio quality. And none of these Echos is going to be threatening Sonos or probably HomePod, right, in terms of audio quality. So that'll be interesting to see where that fits in. Because you're right. There's a real question

about that $300 difference in price. Like, I am sure that the HomePod will sound way better than that, than any of these Echo sound. But what if nobody hears it because nobody's going to spend, or very few people will spend $400 on that HomePod and they'll buy an Echo for $99 and play music on it and say, it's fine. Because for a lot of people, it may just be fine. And I think that's a big risk Apple takes with a HomePod at 400 bucks is what if they have built a product that people don't actually find value in, right? Because Apple can charge more because people perceive a value in their products and in the quality of their products. And that's going to be the question with HomePod

is what is that perceived value? How does Apple get that out there? Because a lot of people, I mean, Sonos has felt this too, I'm sure. A lot of people get one of these $100, $150 Amazon boxes with bad sound, quote unquote, bad sound, and love playing music on it and don't really care how it sounds. Hello. I'm one of those people. Right. And that makes it a lot harder for you to justify charging three times as much

for better sound if the sound is fine. And, uh, right. Because then for them, your differentiator doesn't matter. And that's, yeah, we'll see. Cause it really, it's like, I don't care too much much like we don't play music in the house so much that i need the best like we just have it play as a usually um you know if i really want to have great audio i'll come in here and use my multiple hundred dollars setup that i have with a audio amp and incredible headphones and that stuff like the echoes facility is to just play music loudly that's what it's to do like yeah while I'm while I'm making dinner or something yeah and so really like I don't know how great the HomePod's going to be for that like it just it's why like I'm not really interested in that product

but Amazon they're firing on all cylinders whether you yeah it might be too many cylinders but they're firing on all of them but some of those cylinders they're just going to throw away later so it's going to pop out of the engine. Today's show is also brought to you by Squarespace. Enter the offer code UPGRADE at checkout, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase. Make your next move for Squarespace. They'll let you easily create a website for your next idea.

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Should we do some ask upgrade? Yeah, let's do it. So the first one today comes from Ian, and Ian asks what 4K TVs we own and if they have HDR. So you already mentioned earlier on in the show that yours doesn't have HDR. My TV has both 4K and HDR and is a Panasonic TV. I'm going to put a link in the show notes to an Amazon page for this because TVs have the worst names. And you can,

you know, you can find it on your own. But so for example, mine is the TX-50DX700B. Although actually, I think mine is a 42 inch, which it doesn't look like is available on Amazon anymore. So it's probably a different thing. I think there is a newer model of this TV now. But so I'm just going to give you know, just for comparison's sake, that's the TV that I own. I really like it. It's not too big and it has 4K and HDR. Do you know what your TV is? Yeah, it's a Vizio. I think it's a 2015 4K model, 50 inches and 4K but not HDR.

Maybe it's the P series i'm not sure but it's it's uh like literally um the 4k yeah our tv broke a couple years ago it just died and we went to costco and i bought a tv and this is the one i bought and it's fine it's not great but it's fine and it does 4k which is kind of more of an oddity but it does do it so one of these days I'll get a bigger TV. But what's holding me back is that the reasonably priced good HDR 4k TV is a 55 inch model, which would be five inches diagonal, bigger than the one that I've got. But I feel like if I'm going to buy a new TV, I might want a bigger TV than that. I might want to go like up into the 60s and put it on the wall and have it be properly big. And those are more expensive. So

it's making me hesitate. We'll see. Adam asked a great question. How will the later release of the iPhone 10 affect upgrade program holders in 2019? Because of the payment requirements, right? So you'll be getting this phone in November. What about when September comes around? It's not been a year. So I've done some digging on this. There are a couple of things. One, you only need to make 11 payments, right? So it's 12 months, but 11 payments or, you know, kind of whatever. When you trade your phone back in, you can get credit, upgrade credit, which can knock off some of that money. But you can also end the plan at any point just by paying the remaining months. So you can upgrade early. You just have to just pay what's left for the finance portion of the phone, but you can also get trade-in credit when you take

your phone in to upgrade it to the next one. So then you can work it out that way. So it's totally possible. There are many routes around this. If you go on the upgrade program, you won't have to wait until November. You can, and then it might be easier, but you won't have to wait until november uh you can and then you know it might be easier but you don't have to you can end it early so simple to do there you go good to know nice and easy aviv asked will the watch series 2 work with chi chargers or only apples series 2 isn't gonna work with chi charging at all does does aviv mean series three but i don't know about series three doesn't work with chi charging so none of them do yeah yeah so series zero one two don't work with anything but the apple inductive charger that comes with it

um series three will work with the air power thing that apple's going to come out with so it may work in the future with other kind of extensions of chi that involve the the larger kind of thing that apple's trying to do with the air power stuff but even that won't work with a standard chi charger oh so that was interesting because i figured that all of the watches would work with the air power matt i didn't necessarily think that it was just the series three well okay i i don't know that 100 but i think that's the case i think it's just the series three that that has been changed that that's one of the things if i mean air power doesn't exist yet right so who who knows maybe but that was my my read on it was that it wasn't going to work with the with the other ones but. But they're all inductive charging, right? So they all theoretically could.

So here's what it says on Apple's website. Just lay up to three compatible devices like the latest iPhone, Apple Watch, and AirPods anywhere on the surface to charge them. So it may be that it needs the latest. And of course, that's the AirPods in the new case that you're going to have to get that works with it. We'll have to wait to see

like definite confirmation of which is which right but um it you know it just says requires iphone apple watch or airpods and then it says airpods with wireless charging capabilities to come in 2018 that's in like the small print so we're gonna have to wait and see what watches exactly will work with this but it may be safe to assume that it's Series 3 only. I think so. Rajiv asked, which platform has a more vibrant and active app store, tvOS or watchOS? Woof.

I'm going to say tvOS because watchOS, does watchOS really have an app store? WatchOS just feeds apps from your iPhone apps. It's in the watch app. I always forget it's there. Yeah, but it's not, but it's just a filter on the iOS app store. There's no, there's no like watch apps

that don't have iOS watch app, iOS apps, right? That's true. Yes, there has to be both. So I say tvOS because tvOS, you can just have an app that's an app that's a tvOS app and watchOS is all like, well, I mean, you could say it either way right you could say the watch os app store is way more vibrant and active because it just kind of piggybacks on

the vibrancy and activity of the ios app store whereas tv os is off on the side i think a better question would be tv os or mac app store which one is more vibrant and active i'm not sure i have an answer for that one either do i have to choose no can i choose none you can choose none the answer is c none uh the story so far in the chat room has given us a link to a mac rumors page which has like a breakdown as tech specs and series three apple watches have supports air power mat in the technical specs the series one doesn't i'm going to assume the series two and the series one are in the same boat on this i assume so and finally today josh asked is there a method to convert my existing massive photos library to heath i could do with the extra space do you know is there a way to do this well if there isn't there will be there will be at some point because with heath encoding

building built into modern hardware somebody you know if if the if the fat cat software people who do power photos haven't already done this they will you might be able to do an export although even there i think apple look apple doesn't want you to do this oh and the and the reason is it's lossy. You are losing your original and replacing it with a changed copy. And they're both lossy formats. So you're double lossing your original photo. You're going to lose information on your original photo by doing that.

So Apple is not, I think, going to lose information on your original photo by doing it so apple is not i think going to support this um and if you're if you're syncing with icod photo library it's even more complex right because you would have to like export them and convert them and then delete them from the photo library and then re-upload them um so i'm sure there will be a third-party tool that will look at your photos library and convert them all and delete the originals but i don't recommend it because your photo originals are important and the jpeg is the closest you can get to breeding off the sensor right it's the device when it took the picture it encoded the jG, and that's what you've got.

And if you encode it as a HEAF, you are now double encoding it, and you're going to lose information along with saving some storage space. So I don't recommend it either. But I'm sure there will be a third party that will do it, but I don't know of one right now. Okay.

So yeah, I mean mean it seems like a risky thing too like I don't know if I would want to put everything through I guess you could convert like a second batch but then like you're going to check them all I don't know like it feels like a tricky thing to do right now like I guess if you're going to do it

wait like just wait a little bit I think if you're going to do it, wait. Like, just wait a little bit, I think, would be my advice to you. Okay, if you want to get our show notes for this week, head on over to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 161. I want to take a moment to thank again our fine sponsors this week, Squarespace,

Away, and Timing. Please go check them out and support the show. If you want to find Jason's work online, you can go to sixcolors.com and theincomparable.com. And Jason is at jsnell on Twitter. We're in the hashtag 140 club. I am also in the 140 club and I am Imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. Most of all, as always, thank you for listening.

If you want to participate in the show, a couple of ways you can do that. You can send in a question for us to open the show with the hashtag Snell Talk, or you can send in questions for us to close the show with the hashtag Ask Upgrade. And I'm sure that you as an intrepid listener know the difference between the two types of questions. Everyone does a pretty good job of that, I think, on the whole. People don't tend to get those two things mixed up, which I'm very proud of our listeners, because I know there's lots of tweets

and lots of hashtags, and we're happy that you... And also, I love that people send this stuff in as well. Like, thank you for participating and sending these questions in to us. It is really, really useful, and I'm very happy that every time I open the document, there's always more stuff than I can use. So it's great. So thank you very much, as always.

And we'll be back next week. Until then, Mr. J.C. Snell, say goodbye. Goodbye, everybody. and we'll be back next week until then Mr. Jason Snell say goodbye goodbye everybody