Upgrade - 230: The General Drift of Sentiment

Episode Date: January 28, 2019

It's time once again for Jason's annual poll of more than four dozen Apple watchers and commentators, who have shared their judgments of how the company fared in 2018. We break down the categories on the rise (look at you, Apple Watch!) and the ones that are on the decline (iPhone, Apple Watch). Also, we discuss Apple's possible new game app subscription service -- and how it strongly suggests a forthcoming Apple services bundle.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 230 today's show is brought to you by pingdom care of and lunar display my name is mike hurley i'm joined by jason snell hi jason snell happy happy upgrade day mike i didn't say that it's Monday because, you know, who knows when people are listening to this. Upgrade Day could be any day. It could be, like, weeks away. It could be years away. Do you know people still listen to, like, really, really old episodes of this show? I take my hat off to people that do that.

Like, if you enjoy this show enough that you want to go back and listen to old episodes, I have great respect for you. But it must be wild to listen to us talk about old news stories yeah i don't even want to know i don't want to go back there no we must move forward just full of things that we were wrong about i guess what i'm saying is nobody wants to hear about that i guess so our hashtag snow talk question comes from brian this week brian wants to know jason what is your desert island album mike you can answer this question do i even need to you know it's kind of funny do this yes but you know what i forgot like when i saw this i forgot that like it didn't put two and two together that obviously me and you have had a

41 minute discussion about your favorite album it didn't jump into my head honestly i didn't even think about it until you put the link in the notes interesting yeah i used to do a series part of my inquisitive podcast um this was back in 2015 where i brought on a bunch of really interesting people in our kind of wider podcasting community and asked them what is your favorite album um and jason picked crowded house the self-titled out self-titled album by crowded house um so yeah so that's a really good album i like this pick because it's a album that i have full memories of so that's the one that's still the one you'd pick it's like not even just your favorite album but the one album you'd be happy to listen to forever i mean i i'm just i think that's gonna be the easiest answer i could give i didn't do

the calculation of like could i cheat and pick like some sort of greatest hits compilation box set album that's like eight discs or something and all that and i just decided i'm not gonna i'm not gonna go down that path the best of music compilation box set that's right that's right all the music on an ipod that i then bring with me but that's not the question here really is like what like, what's the desert island? And I'm going to say Crowded House from 1986. Thank you to Brian for the Snell Talk question. If you would like to send in a question of any kind

for us to open a future episode of Upgrade, just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk, and it may be included for future selection. So thank you so much to brian for the suggestion we have some follow-up foldable phones it was the week of foldable phones last week we picked it as something that we were interested in and turns out the rest of the internet was as well it was just brilliant it was nice and timely um this was mostly spurred on uh by the fact that uh what it was like the day after, so Wednesday,

Xiaomi, the Chinese phone manufacturer, they showed off a prototype of what they think a foldable phone should look like, and it's completely different, which I love. I love that it's completely different. You know, like the FlexPai Royale

was just a phone that folded in half like a book. But Xiaomi's phone, it's like a a rectangle and you fold the two sides around to make it like a smaller rectangle i like this idea because my thinking was you could fold only half of it right and then you could have like a like basically have three different aspect ratios um xiaomi gave no information about it just that this is their idea um and i thought again it looked interesting i don't know how usable it is but it looked interesting

um and then lauren good uh kind of posted an article about this we've just the best headline that sums up this whole trend have phones become boring well they're about to get weird and that's i think kind of the cool thing about this like and you you meant you pulled this out like in your link post on six colors there's going to be a lot of this stuff that is rubbish that's going to happen in these phones oh yeah including like what samsung's about to do they're about to put a hole in the front of the phone where they just put the camera who knows if that's going to be good or not but the point is like this year or maybe next year, there's going to be some stuff that is good,

but we're going to go through a lot of weird to get there. But that's fun and exciting because phones have kind of maybe gotten a little bit boring. Yeah, we're going to enter that period where, and I think this is going to be less true of Apple

because Apple is more careful about this. This is what we talked about last week, my piece for Tom's guide about foldable phones and how Apple tends to sit on the sidelines a little bit until it feels like it's really got a good idea because it doesn't feel that pressure to be first out the gate with something that's not very good, but is new.

But a lot of other people are going to buy phones that have super weird features in them. And we're going to go through this cycle for the next year or two, or maybe more, who knows, where everybody's trying out all these different things. And the phone makers themselves are going to find out based on the reception of them, whether people actually use these features, actually like these features. If they hate these features, they make the phones worse. So you'll end up with even more of the kind of point and laugh products than we usually get. You know, every now and then there's a weird product and everybody just kind of goes, that's ridiculous.

We're going to get a lot of those. And that's what Lauren Good's really saying here is there's going to be experimentation. Experimentation is good. It is going there will there will always be some company that is willing to make a product based on a feature that is half baked and impractical because they feel like it will get them attention. And it will, although not necessarily the good kind of attention. And that's just I mean, the tech industry has been doing that. And I think products in general, but tech in particular, for a very long time. There have been all sorts of outlandish phones and, before that, computers. And you look back on some of them, and you're like, what were they thinking?

And the answer was they didn't know what they were thinking. They just were trying stuff to see. And sometimes you try stuff, and it works. And that's why they try it, in part. So, yeah, it will be very entertaining to watch so the thing is like i know that i completely agree with you right like a bunch of companies will just jump on this like royale uh royale and royal with cheese yep but the point like but that well why the technology needs these companies because it pushes the technology forward if someone's forcing some company to like

some display manufacturer to make these displays for them it's at least beginning the process of going down that road to where it could be a good product right so like i think that that everybody needs it as well because you never know what's going to take off and it might be some weirdo design that like catches the eye of someone else, and then they make a better version of it. So I like it because it's interesting, and I applaud these companies for taking these swings, even though most of the time they end up in misses. But I think 2019, we will remember this as the year of the first flexible phones. Yeah, I draw a line between there are the companies that are really trying to do something unique and uh and they fail because the tech's not ready yet and they were they were too soon

they were really enthusiastic but they just couldn't get it together yeah and then there are the companies that are just shamelessly shoveling garbage yeah of course because they're trying to jump on a bandwagon right and i respect i respect the first group although i feel bad for them and and i i guess i think you're right in the sense that this is part of the evolution of technology is that you get this first generation of tech that somebody some manufacturer comes up with and they sell it but they know it's not very good and everybody knows it's not very good but at least it's new and they'll give it a try and eventually like everybody learns and it gets refined um i think i might argue that if you didn't have if you only had kind of like the major prestige manufacturers in the game

instead of these smaller companies that um the pace would probably be a little slower because they might be a little more reluctant to put out something that is nonsense just to see what happens. And the truth is, if Apple were the only one, what would happen is that nothing would happen for three years. And then they would be like, ah, now we've got it. And we wouldn't know whether they've got it or not, because I do think Apple does learn from the mistakes of others. And that's one of the reasons Apple waits around. So yeah, I think in the end, it's an entertaining time. And it's, you know, mostly necessary. Some of it is unnecessary. And those are the ones that are probably the easiest to point and laugh at.

But no, I think it's fun. We're entering a period where if you're a smartphone buyer, the right thing to do may just be to do nothing and sit on the sidelines while this goes on. Because that's quite frankly why they're doing it, is they're trying to get you off the sidelines to buy new phones by giving you shiny you know new features that you didn't know you wanted and you may not actually need um and uh that's where we are with smartphones now i think um jason i wanted to tell you too i have a new favorite ipad stand I've been holding this one for a bit.

I didn't want to talk about it until I was completely convinced, but I think I may have found the perfect iPad stand. Okay, so I've been spending most of my time with the Viazon stand. I did buy that other stand, the Tabitha that you recommended,

which can get slightly taller, but I don't like it as much because it's more kind of weird and fiddly to put it in the stand. So here's, before we get to this, so I saw your Amazon link in our shared show document and I went and looked at it and it looks interesting, this stand. But the question I have is always the question I'm going to have, which is, does it make the iPad go appreciably higher? Because the one problem I have with the Viazon stand is, as much as I like it and I use it all the time, it's not, you know, it could be higher. It's not the most ergonomically appropriate

height on my table. Yes, 18 inches from the table. It is wild. I can sit at a table now in perfectly straight and the iPad is at my eye height with this thing. It's called the Clear Look stand. I found it on Amazon. There'll be a link in our show notes. It's Clear Look with a K.

Of course it is. Even at 18 inches, the stand is surprisingly stable. I can tap on the screen and look, there is a little wobble, of course, physics, but it's not anything which makes me concerned that it's going to fall over um putting it in like it's got these like it's got an

interesting mechanism right it's it's kind of like the uh the the viazon mechanism of like clamping on the sides but it has these two little string things that you pull on the back of the clamps so it like it comes out really easily like you can just pull it apart very easily um also because it's it's much kind of thicker and sturdier uh i can actually put my ipad with the smart keyboard attached to it and folded around in this stand so i don't need to take it out of the case that i use the only thing i have to do which is slightly frustrating it's the only frustration i have to take the apple pencil off the side because otherwise it won't clamp in but because the base of it is metal it just kind of magnetically attaches so like it doesn't roll it like it's just there um this i think is the for me is the perfect stand it's very adjustable uh you can

turn it left and right like move it up and down uh you know you can kind of like like just get it in the right way for you i'm very very very very happy with the stand all right and you and you didn't just rush into it you're actually using this for a couple of months oh wow okay all right all right mike well i i while you were talking i bought one so this is the one i think this is the one because it has all of the stuff that makes the vias on good right like it's nice and adjustable it's easy to get in and out but it goes super high that's good yeah that's good because that's the problem i i have and you mentioned it which is um ergonomically right you ideally you want your uh keyboard at a good height for your uh you know 90

degree angle for your elbows and all of that. And then you want the screen to be level with your eyes. And that's almost always going to be a long way off the countertop. And when I'm standing at the bar in my kitchen or sitting, the iPad is definitely down. I'm definitely looking down, which is not ideal for that situation. So, all right, I'll check it out and I'll report back and see if I agree or disagree. And now I'll have three iPads.

I can make like a little group picture or something or surround myself with iPads and just keep turning around and there's an iPad everywhere I look, something like that. So we got a slightly different take on Upstream this week because we had some late-breaking news before the show about a separate non-video media streaming service

that Apple was apparently working on. There was a report from Cheddar. Cheddar is a kind of BuzzFeed-style business reporting journalism outfit journalism outfit uh that there i actually really like cheddar as a as it like it speaks in languages and terms that i understand but it's reporting on like big business stuff analyst stuff stock market stuff things like that um they reported that apple is apparently planning a gaming subscription service. They are citing five sources, which are obviously the game developers that Apple has been talking to.

This is a quote from the article on Cheddar. The service would function like Netflix for games, allowing users who pay a subscription fee to access a bundled list of titles. Apple began privately discussing a subscription service of game developers in the second half of 2018, said the people, all of whom requested anonymity to discuss unannounced plans.

I don't know what I think about this one. I don't like Apple in gaming in general because they just they're not good at it. And also there is like, well, what happens here? Right. Because this is obviously not going to be all games. So then it's going to be some games. What games get in? How does the revenue get shared? Who is deemed good enough to be in this? I don't like the sound of this on paper.

So there's an argument to be made that this is Apple trying to reformulate what games on iOS look like. Because right now what games on iOS looks like is free to play. Yeah. With in-app purchases of coins and bundles and clothes and features and things like that. And some people love it. I mean, it works. People love it i mean it works people love it but it is also not a really great

experience because then you get kind of nickel and dimed um and i can see apple trying to find another approach i'm not sure i am convinced so i appreciate that but I'm not sure I'm convinced that this will actually be an approach that solves anything. It's interesting that it's games and not apps. So the idea here, and they built that new app store with the games tab separate from apps tab, which is kind of interesting. So Apple really does think of this as a different market from general purpose apps. The devil is in the details. from general purpose apps. The devil is in the details. It is very much like when we talked about if you do any kind of subscription thing, it's all about the catalog. It's what's in the catalog. So there's a Mac app subscription service, but it's all in the catalog.

Do you use those apps? And I've heard mixed things about how that works for developers because people have to use your apps and your compensation is going to be, you're going to have more users potentially, but you have lower compensation. So there's lots of questions here, but I can see why Apple is trying to do this potentially, which is, can they give game developers a different way to drop their games on iOS that is not free to play? And I'd imagine this goes hand in hand with a la carte sales. That's the other thing that struck me about this is that there are sort of two ways that this can flow. This can be games that if you're not a subscriber, you have to pay $20 for, or it's games that are free to play elsewhere,

but here you just get unlimited everything. My issue is, I like the proposal that you are pitching, but I don't believe that in the long run, it means in-app purchase will go away even from the games that are in the service. I think that Apple would struggle to convince a lot of the larger publishers who currently have a free-to-play model to drop all in-app purchases because this is a thing in the wider gaming world like even games that you pay for that you straight up pay 50 for try and get you to drop money like extra money sure so that's that's part of the question is do they do do they have a realistic view of that where they've created guidelines that say you know you can do dlc packs at a certain level but what we don't want is you having coins in order

to enable individual plays and like how do you which is a mess right how do you, which is a mess, right? How do you even begin that? It's, so I look forward over the next week to hearing next day or two, to hearing from game developers who are reacting to this with skepticism and or enthusiasm. It's, I think it's interesting that Apple is trying, apparently trying this because it suggests that they're dissatisfied with the current way

that you interact with games on the App Store, which I think is not surprising. But the big picture for me is, like, this is another subscription service. It's, yeah, it's from Apple. Like, yet another one. How many subscription services can one company offer? And here would be another one. many subscription services can one company offer and here will be another one i think it's it's one i think it's one subscription service it's not five uh-huh

no this this is the kind of report that makes me much more certain that what apple wants to do is create a subscription service that offers a whole bunch of stuff mixed together, including magazines and games and who knows what else. iCloud, storage, maybe music, maybe video. I don't think... So they're clearly making five or six different offerings. I don't think they will sell five or six separate things. There may be a couple of bundles.

There may be a couple of bundles there may be one bundle um you know like you could you can get music and video on their own or you can get all of it which includes magazines and includes games because at least to begin with the magazines and game stuff is not going to be that large i don't think they're going to have a huge offering for either of these because they have to convince larger players in both of those industries to trust them. And I, you know, it's like, OK, here's all the money you make right now. We want you to gamble that away. Right. By coming to us. This is exactly what we were talking about with the issue that Apple was potentially having with the magazine stuff a few weeks ago, right? Like trying to convince the New York Times to give up the $5 a month that they can get from someone and get a fraction of

$5 a month instead for the hope that they'll make it up in volume. I don't know if Apple, even at their size and scale and with the amount of weight they can throw around, can convince a lot of these companies to do this. So they need to prove it um i just am not sure if i am completely comfortable with a netflix model for apps and games from apple um i don't know if it's the right thing to do it reminded me of a couple of things that like this was the thing that james thompson was talking about a few years ago so i'm going to put in the show notes an article and an episode of clockwise episode 64 episode 64, where James broke this down because this was like a real thought that he was kind of rolling around at the time. James is the developer of Peacock about the idea of having a Apple subscription service that is for all apps.

And then like, you know, like a set app where you pay a fee and then based upon your usage you get an amount of money right the developer gets an amount of money dependent on how much the app has been used and this is a good quote from from the article that james wrote on iMore that i liked he says as somebody who makes a living from selling his own intellectual property in the form of apps these sort of wild fever dreams keep me up at night. I live in fear of the streaming model being applied to software and only making a few pennies every time my apps are launched. That's a real, and I think it's a risk that I understand somebody in James's position having. Like, if you make a even popular utility application, which isn't used for hours and hours every day,

what are you going to do? It reminds me of YouTube watch time statistics, where if you make three-minute videos once a week, you are not favored by the algorithm or by the money-making mechanisms. So it pushed all YouTube videos to like 11 minutes long because if you wanted to be successful on youtube that's the way that you had to be and so so this kind of stuff makes me a little bit skittish for app development because our app are going to create some kind of class system where only what they consider to be the very best

gets to go in these subscription services? So it actually makes it financially viable for the companies that they put in it because you can't have thousands of developers in these because then nobody makes any money. I'm really in a lot of different minds about something like this. Yeah, it's complicated and messy.

And I'm sure everybody who's involved with this at Apple, assuming that this story is true, has walked through all of this and they're trying to figure out the right balance. But it's really tricky. And there are lots of questions from lots of different angles here, which is why my initial reaction is,

I appreciate that they're trying this because they seem dissatisfied in the current state of affairs, as well as seeing an opportunity here for a service, which... Well, see, my argument would be if they're doing this, if one of the reasons they're doing this

is because they're unhappy with the problem they created, then they need to find a better way to fix it rather than just deeming other people the the the the joy of maybe getting given some money every month yeah i mean they they created it in large part because of the model they chose which was very much the itunes single model for how the app store works but unfortunately that is how the app store works and they didn't create it assuming it

would go this way they very much wanted it to be um you know pricier apps and games and stuff but that's just not how the world has has gone so you know this is them trying to solve that problem in a way but but seen through the the lens of a company that really wants to add services revenue too. So yeah, right? It's super fun when you look back and you see like the two or three decisions that they made that seemed so good at the time that resulted in the situation we're in now, right?

Where it's like, there were no free apps. And it's like, oh, we'll add free apps. And then we'll, but we'll add in-app purchase for them. But we'll add in-app purchase as well, but only in paid apps. And it's like, oh, we'll put in-app purchase in free apps as well. This was the kind of things that they decided to do that then got us to the situation that we're maybe in now. But anyway, before we move on from this, Yemi Rambo at 9to5Mac also discovered in iOS 12.2, in the beta of 12.2, a landing page in the news app that references Apple News magazines for Apple News.

There are mentions of the term bundle subscription in this splash screen. And the image on the landing page shows some publications like Vogue and Bon Appetit, who are large. And there's also a magazine called Shape. Now, here's the thing. They're not, okay, they're cool magazines, like great publications. I think ESPN is in there too. It's definitely not the New York Times and Time

and maybe some of the magazines you'd really want to put front. But to be honest, they may have not done deals with any of those magazines. They could just be placeholder images because this is not a public thing um gma just found this um i think it's interesting too that people are really jumping on this idea that it's apple news magazines and in in one place but in another place that's referred to as apple news yeah so i'm not entirely convinced that apple news magazines is really the name of it. It may just be your Apple News subscription. Magazines in Apple News.

It's just in Apple News. And the magazines are there. Yeah. But it is another subscription that we've been talking about for a while that they seem to be moving forward with. And it just keeps going where we're seeing these subscriptions in the works in lots of different places,

which makes us come back to that question. What are these? What is the subscription? Is this the Apple one master subscription? Because nobody, and this is the thing is there will absolutely undeniably be subscription bundles because there's no way I like 99%. I'm going to say here confidence that I have that Apple is going to say, oh, would you like to subscribe to our services? You can subscribe to Apple Music. You can subscribe to Apple Video. You can subscribe to iCloud. You can subscribe to Apple News Magazines.

You can subscribe to Apple's gaming, whatever it is. You get like how much confusion is there if they have like 10 different subscription products? Fundamentally as well, there is a financial incentive to Apple to bundle this because they're paying a credit card processing fee for every single one of these transactions. So they don't want you to subscribe to six different bundles if they have them, like six different services. They want you to subscribe to it once because they'll probably make more money that way. Yeah.

So some combination of this. They might offer, as you said, they might offer some of these separately. Yeah, I think the high value ones, music and video, they will offer them on their own. Yeah. But everything else that we've been talking about, even including iCloud, these are like add-ons.

These are niceties. They got to add a brand name and say, this is what you get. And you get iCloud storage, and you get... And it's one of those things where as somebody paying for a 2TB iCloud account, I'm kind of anticipating that

some of these services, I'm just going to get them. Like, that I'm already paying them a monthly fee for all of that storage. I have this suspicion, and maybe they'll change the price, but I have this suspicion that they're just going to say, you know, those are the iCloud account things are going to be turned into a larger bundle of stuff that includes your backup and your photos. Because those are services, too, if you think about it. Like, backup, even though we all say iCloud storage, it's like backup and photos are really two

different services that they bundled together. Really, they could have separated them. They chose not to. And then you throw in some more and you've got multiple use cases already going on here. And that to me feels like a more likely scenario that they're not going to offer, again, whole different sets of subscription bundles uh for different things and you which four bundles do you want to buy that's also too confusing so yeah it'll be interesting to see how they do it it feels like this year is going to be fascinating year tomorrow as we record this tuesday january 29th is apple results for that holiday quarter where they where they uh miss forecast uh well the disaster quarter which will still probably be their second largest quarter ever.

It doesn't matter. It's a disaster quarter. Yeah, apparently. It is. Because we all know now, we know this having spoken about this so many times, the pure amount of money is not important. Yeah. It's all about expectations. Yeah.

To the game that is being played, the money is not important. It's growth. This will be the quarter that they missed and the future. Yeah, to the game that is being played, the money is not important. It's growth. This will be the quarter that they missed. Expectations. They're going to show a year-over-year decline in revenue. They're presumably going to show a year-over-year decline in iPhone. That will be dramatic. They'll have more detail that we haven't heard yet

that is probably going to make people, depending on what they're looking at, even more concerned about aspects of their business. And also, for for a lot of us it will make our brains leak out of our ears when they right when they start talking about headwinds and all that kind of stuff right but it's going to be a lot of yes and this is the quarter where they're going to stop reporting unit sales so we won't get any unit sales so there's going to be more residual grousing about that. So it's going to be really interesting. So what I'm saying is, check back in episode 231 of the upgrade program

where we will discuss the fallout of that because this is all interrelated and it's kind of fascinating and we'll see what happens next. But we'll find out a lot more tomorrow. My bold prediction here, Jason, is we're not going to get any specific details, but I think that we're going to come away from the call

with a somewhat clearer idea of what the Apple services story is going forward. I think you're right. I think they're going to, in order to get the scrutiny off of them about this, rather than their kind of typical, oh, we got a great pipeline right it was like great whatever fill that pipeline um i i think that yeah you're right that there

that was my thought too there needs to be a positive set of headlines they're gonna do a harder sell on services where they're like we've got in 2019 you'll see us enter new media areas and you know even if they're vague about it because it's Apple, I think they're going to push harder, even harder on services because services has been their whole thing to counteract slowing iPhone sales. It's been that way, obviously, for like four years now they've been talking about it. And of course, they're going to put their foot on the gas when it comes to services. They will also probably spend a lot of time on their global

geographic breakouts in order to say, we're doing great in these countries and these regions to take some of the load off of China. But I think you're right that they're going to really, really push services even more with some details in order to kind of get everybody excited and to calm down about what Apple's doing next. This episode is brought to you by Luna Display, the makers of the hardware solution that turns your iPad into a wireless display for your Mac. Have you ever looked at your iPad screen and thought to yourself, you're a beautiful display little iPad, wouldn't it be amazing if I could use you for even more when I sit down on my Macintosh. Well, you can.

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you can also use usb as well if you're somewhere without wi-fi if you don't have a strong connection so you'll be able to use your ipad as a second display for your mac where you can put so like you're working on something in full screen on your mac maybe you're working on some art but you still want to maybe see some reference materials your ipad is right there for you to use. It's really wonderful. I absolutely adore my Luna display that I use with my Mac mini. I use it every single day. I use it for lots of little things. You know, there's just some stuff that you cannot do in a web browser and iOS. Just, you just can't do it, but I can do it with my Luna Display because I just go into my, I open the Luna Display app and I have a Mac there for me to use. So like, for example, stuff with YouTube,

like, so if I want to put, if I want to create a playlist, right, for a YouTube channel, you can't do this stuff on iOS. Even in an app, you can't do it in the web browser, you can't do it anywhere because it just doesn't work. But I can do it with my Luna display. So I love Luna display. It works so seamlessly. I often forget that I'm not using a Mac or that I'm not using something native

and I just find myself using the Luna display for like 30 minutes when I'm only meant to be there for 20 seconds because I kind of just get lost in it because it all works so seamlessly. Listeners of Upgrade can get a 10% exclusive discount on Luna Display. Just go to lunadisplay.com, promo code UPGRADE at checkout.

That is lunadisplay.com, promo code UPGRADE at checkout. Our thanks to Luna Display for their support of this show and RelayFM. So I actually did this this morning. I was moving some things around from my apple notes to google docs right and on ios you lose all your formatting but you don't when you're on the mac so i just went in and i moved something from my notes document like a

bullet list from my notes document into google docs 25 minutes later i was still working on the upgrade notes in my with my Luna Display app instead because I kind of just forgotten what I was doing. So I'm just sitting there just doing it on the Mac instead via my iPad. It was beautiful. So Jason, it is that time of year again where you have assembled a meeting of the minds

to create the 2018 Apple Report Card, the Scorecard. Jason, what is this project that you embark upon? So this was suggested by a designer, Koi Vin, four years ago when I started Six Colors. And he emailed me and he said, I have had this idea where you, where somebody asks a bunch of people to rate Apple on a bunch of different categories, and then you do it every year. And basically I'm not going to do it, but you could do it. And I thought, okay, that's a good idea. Let's do that. And it's kind of a lot of work because you got to compile a list and you got to ask people, and then you got to check and see that nobody actually responded.

And then you got to email them again, and then you got to do it again and remind people because it's happening over the holidays at the end of the year. And everybody I'm asking is very busy doing their own stuff. And then in the end, you get back not only their votes, which is how the report card is compiled, but there's a little field for people to put in their thoughts. And some people put in lots and lots and lots of thoughts. So I ended up with 30,000 words of thoughts from people. And I end up pulling out little quotes here and there, and I leave the rest of it because it's just too much. It's great color, and I'm glad that they presented it to me. But I don't want to publish a 30,000, you know, separate 30,000 word thing. You know, I might post a more extended verbatim replies later, depending on how people feel about that.

But for now, it's basically the idea is how do people who spend a lot of time thinking about and observing Apple, what are their perceptions about Apple in a given year, in 2018 in this case? And also that gives me the opportunity to compare that now to previous years and see sort of how people are feeling. So it's not scientific or anything like that. It is, you know, what I don't want, I keep expecting that somebody is going to complain about it and say, you know, this is dumb. This is just what the commentators think. It's like, yes, that's the entire point is what do the commentators

think? What do the people who spend a lot of time thinking about Apple and its business, what are they feeling about Apple from year to year? So it's a kind of a group, a summary report card about the general drift of sentiment about Apple from this year, 55 people who write and talk and in some cases work with Apple. It's a pretty good group. There's a list at the end. So that's the idea is we're trying to get a sense of the sentiment of how was Apple's year? And how did that change from the year before? And maybe are there any trends over time? And that's really the goal of it. It's not a definitive anything. Also, I don't vote in the survey. It really is just meant to reflect the 55 people I asked to participate. So we're going to go through the categories. We're going to talk

about the scores, how they've changed, and then me and you can discuss them. And we have some quotes as well that we've pulled out of the article so we can add more color um as you would say indeed now um to this so we'll go in order of the of the article itself so we'll start start with the mac the mac gone overall b minus grade which is up from a c last year which kind of makes sense i think casey list kind of summed this up quite beautifully with the word roller coaster, as it's been for 2018 with the Mac. And I mean, you know, really this all kind of came to head in October, I think. By that time, we'd assumed

we were going to see everything we're going to see this year, right? Whatever came out in the October event, that was the end of it. And there was a lot tied up in the hopes and dreams for it, right? Like, what is the cheap laptop? Will there be a Mac mac mini will we maybe get a surprise about the mac pro and are they going to do anything else about the laptops we got all those answers so i think part of the roller coaster is there were 10 there's 10 months of speculation about the mac and waiting and basically all of our answers came in october um and this is you know there was a lot

of praise in the article for the mac mini but cause of it being a little too late for the macbook air and it kind of whilst being a good computer is too expensive um and and i think expensive is a theme throughout the entire uh scorecard the report card i mean everybody knows this um and there's also lineup confusion from christina warren she says i honestly don't know why the 13 inch macbook pro with touch bar is even being sold yeah yeah she says and later she says i just don't get it like this doesn't make sense yeah yeah and christina also said i didn't put all of it in because she wrote a lot she was it was great. She said the other challenge is that there are competitors on the PC side at the low end.

And she works for Microsoft in developer relations, but I do trust her judgment. She points out that there are a lot of premium-feeling laptops on the PC side that are way cheaper than what Apple is selling. Now, obviously, Apple is never going to be cheap, but she's just pointing out it's kind of, they're in a very weird place given the widening gulf between what Apple charges and what its competitors charge. Microsoft is also making really interesting premium hardware. Yeah, that is priced similar to what Apple prices it at. That's the thing.

It's the Asus's of the world that are not charging $1,000 for something, but instead charging $600. So Gabe Weatherhead says, the Mac quality is slowly turning back towards something Apple can be proud of. Do you agree with that statement? Yeah, I mean, I think one of the things

we focus so much on the MacBook and how their choices in the MacBook line in 2016 are still kind of reverberating. When you say MacBook, do you mean all laptops? I mean all the MacBooks. Yeah, all the laptops. I think it's fair to say that if you took them out of the equation, which some people said is like, let's leave that aside for a second. And the rest of the Mac stuff is pretty great. And even within the MacBook line, there are people who are very focused.

There's definitely a split between people who are like, it seems like this third generation keyboard has solved a lot of the major problems. And now it's, yes, there are ones that fail, but it's much less common. And then there are other people who are saying, oh, no, it's still a disaster. And that's just a matter of perspective, a matter of who's got what information. I don't know. But some people feel like, at the very least, the MacBook line is turning around, even if they haven't solved all the problems yet, and that the MacBook Air is a good example of Apple starting to do some iteration to make it to solve.

Because, I mean, all of us, I think, perceive that MacBook Air as being a product that exists because they didn't get it right in 2016, that they thought the MacBook Air was going away and it didn't because of all the issues that they had. And so that maybe that's a positive sign, too. So there's definitely some feeling, some sentiment that Apple is addressing this issue, but slowly addressing their hardware quality slowly. And there's more hardware talk later in the survey. I think that among all the categories for people that respond to the survey and also listeners for this show, this is the category that the most is to play for in 2019 the mac yeah i will say the mac you

know the mac went up half a point it it did it did go up from a c to a b minus and that was and that was down to the mac mini and the macbook air i mean the mac mini i think especially right everybody loves the mac mini no no you know it the the macbook MacBook Air still has some questions about it. It still suffers from the keyboard. If you don't like the keyboard, well, you're out of luck because it's the same keyboard that's on the MacBook Pros, probably, or similar enough, and it's highly priced. But my thinking is, with the statement that I made there,

is this is the year for the Pro stuff. So, we're going to see the Mac Pro, or we should. Could be, probably should be, iMac Pro updates. And are they going to do anything with the MacBook Pro? Yep.

And those three products probably matter the most to this group of individuals that you're speaking to. Because even if they don't buy these products, they understand the importance of them, right? That, like, if you really kill it on the pro side, everyone's going to benefit over the next few years because the technology will trickle down. And so I'm really keen to see what Apple addresses in June, because that's the time when if we're going to see anything, we'll probably see all of this at WWDC, even if it's not for sale, right? Like this is when they will talk about it because this is the market that they're selling those products to.

Maybe, maybe. I mean, I'm not entirely convinced of what is influencing the opinions of this group in terms of the Mac. But definitely there were positive things in the Mac this year, and it showed in the survey with the second largest improvement of any category. So we move on to the iPhone, which I think naturally is down from an A grade to B plus this year. I don't think it ever would have been possible for Apple to kind of maintain the performance year over year because i will tell you that if you look in the history of the survey um the the tiktok approach to iphone models is in the survey too if you have a major year with a major change the score is a lot higher than in the off year where there aren't as many changes now you could say with the XR,

there actually, this was not quite the same kind of thing, but it's certainly you lose, you're going to go down year over year to use financial terms just because of that, that the X was so exciting. But there's a lot else going on around the iPhone that people are concerned about. I would make a guess that without the XR, this grade would have been lower. Yes, I think absolutely it would have been. There was definitely a lot of praise for the XR in the survey and a lot of complaint about the pricing. So, you know, as well as the pricing,

I think probably the main thing that people were feeling from looking through the report is just that it was a bit of a boring year in most instances. I like that Shahid Kamal Ahmad, who's a host on Remastered here at RelayFM, looking through the report, is just that it was a bit of a boring year in most instances. I like that Shahid Kamal Ahmad, who's the host on Remastered here at RelayFM, says we probably hit peak iPhone. And he might be right.

The iPhone X, that's probably going to be it for a while. It's like, wow, that was an incredible year. It's like, okay, feel that because we're probably in for this design and this style for quite a few years, right? Which is how we saw with the iPhone 6. I expect that our iPhones are going to look and act very much like the X, probably for the next three years at least. Because there's only so much that Apple is willing to or can do, right? Right. Federico Vatici thinks that Apple is losing their advantage in mobile photography. there's only so much that apple was willing to or can't do right right uh federico vatici

thinks that apple is losing their advantage in mobile photography and quickly what do you think about that well this is the this is the question about um about the camera and my macworld piece last week was about that too and i actually i actually referenced federico i said some people i know say that the iphone doesn't have the punch that the pixel 3 does federico has soured on on smart hdr we've been talking about this a lot on connected recently on connected people can listen to it there it's definitely the case and and then there are other people who who think uh that smart hdr has a lot of advantages in certain circumstances and then in others, not so much. But I think it's undeniable when you look at what Google did with Night Sight, which is something that is entirely software.

I mean, yes, there's camera hardware there, but they rolled it all the way back to the original Pixel. So it's the Pixel 3, 2, and original Pixel all got Night Sight. And the idea there is that that is really smart software that notices you're trying to take a picture in the dark and says, would you like to use Night Sight? At which point it does multiple exposures, extended exposures, does some machine learning processes. It does it all together and makes a picture that looks like it was shot, if not in the day, in a much better lit location than was actually shot. And the Apple photos are just kind of noisy and dark. And that's an example of Google pushing software features to improve photography. And that's the kind of feature that I would expect from Apple, right? I would expect Apple to say,

it's too dark here. Let me help you either by asking or by just doing. And Google did it and Apple didn't. And it does show you a sign that although Apple, this is a recurring theme of this survey and of all of 2018, which is this feeling like Apple continues to push its hardware in lots of amazing ways successfully. And then on the software side,

there's just something missing. I really wonder how much, this might be a maps problem, right? Like I think of this as like a maps situation, where Google just got a head start. And that head start is gonna keep them with an advantage for a while. And I wonder about what Apple can do. I mean, they don't have to be Google, right? They don't have to beat them. But I think they have to get closer. And I just wonder how much closer they can get. So my gut feeling, and this is based on nothing, and I'm sure there's somebody working at photography at Apple who would deeply disagree

with this, but my gut feeling as an outsider is that right now, Google is much more focused on crowd-pleasing photography features. And Apple still is carrying around some cultural baggage about the fact that professional photographers use iPhones. Historically, their audience is people who are designers and photographers and other people in professional creative spaces. And as a result, Apple continues to be focused on color gamut and on having the most accurate photo instead of the most pleasing photo. Right. That these photos aren't real, right? And that they weren't real. And the problem with that is most of the iPhone audience is not somebody who cares about accuracy. They care about pretty photos i get this is just a theory of

mine but that's my theory is that night sight doesn't exist on iphones not because google got some kind of a head start in terms of this technology because apple's been doing software massaging of photos for a long time they don't talk about it they don't put it in your face as much as google does they just have it be magic like smart HDR is. But there's something missing where they're like, no, we don't want to do that. We don't want to get in their way. We don't want to take a photo that doesn't look real. And so we're just going to let it go. And that's smart. The night shot thing is the one where I look and I go, I think you missed it. I think if you're Apple, you missed the application there, which is if somebody's in a bar with their friend and they want to take a shot, they want it to show up and look good, even if it's not well lit, even if it's not accurate, they want it to look good. And Google nailed that. And Apple, I am convinced, could have done it and chose not to. Maybe they didn't think of it, or maybe they actually chose not to. But I think that this is like an entire

podcast episode in a nutshell. But I do wonder if that is behind some of Apple's decisions here, where Google doesn't care, they're just making crowd-placing decisions. And Apple cares, which is getting in its way, which again, if you're somebody who cares about what Apple cares about, is great. I just question in a broad consumer product like the iPhone whether that might be the wrong approach to take. So I think the discussion around price was probably most keenly felt in the iPhone category. So Aline Sims says Apple needs to re-evaluate its market strategy. Their current pricing is cost prohibitive for many people. Merlin man says i feel like the iphone's price umbrella is developing some copious holes yep yeah i mean that's definitely one of the big stories of last fall is that people are

increasingly uncomfortable with apple's pricing especially on the iphone and could we don't know could have been part of the issue that led to them not getting where they wanted to be with the iPhone sales. Yeah, we don't know. So we move on to the iPad. A minus, no change. I think this one is very simple. Amazing hardware, nothing on software. I don't remember what I graded it as when I gave you my scores,

but I remember you specifically picked that out when you were surprised at how I graded it. But it was because of this. I just think that this is the best ipad hardware that's ever been made but the software just that did nothing and it needs to do something so carolina milanesi says the biggest issue apple has is perception of whether or not the ipad pro is as good as a computer mostly that perception is driven by software rather than hardware which is they they did some interesting hardware stuff they put usbc on it but all the discussion was around the fact that

you couldn't access an external hard drive yeah whether people actually need to do that or not is not the point but it showed holes in the ipad yeah unsurprising um one of the things that i've noticed is um these surveys are a measure of the vibe, the overall vibe. And while there are individual outliers, what we're really doing here is saying this was the overall was, I think what I said, and I've seen it in a couple other places as well, the hardware is willing, but the software is weak. That's basically it. This is spectacular hardware and everybody's waiting for the other shoe to drop.

And like in a year where you would expect maybe the iPad with the iPad Pro, and I will point out, and I think some people maybe forgot about this, that sixth generation iPad that's cheap, which is a great deal. And a few people mentioned it and I'm very glad that they did

because it is- It feels like a long time ago that product was released. I had several people say the best deal in Apple's entire portfolio, Stephen Hackett is quoted in the story, but a couple of people said that. If you put that together, you think this is a really banner year for the iPad, and yet its score uh its average actually went down about a tenth but it's basically the same score as it was a year ago why is that with great new iPad Pro hardware and the new iPad the answer is the software because the Apple chose to take the year off in terms of the iPad and it hit them because the software the iPad software story in 2018 um was not good enough for the hardware we can't round this category out without

the quote from federico uh federico vatici says apple needs to devote plenty of attention to advancing the ipad platform in 2019 and you've got to hope i mean it feels like a foregone conclusion right the ios 13 has a huge ipad focus purely because of this hardware like you you would be a extremely disjointed company if you create a hardware of this caliber without beefing up the software right like at that point you feel like a pc manufacturer right where it's like the hardware and software don't interact it's just we make amazing hardware and hope that microsoft will do something to windows to make it more like yeah like more desirable to people because it this is so good but the nothing nothing literally nothing changed that was specific like there are still bugs in like

the files app that were in ios 11 yep right and And so you would, I have my expectations are set very high for the iPad with this coming WWDC. But I do also feel confident that we will see something. Like, I feel confident about that. Just because I, you know, it's like everybody in this, again, I'm sure you would agree, right? Like, I feel like I have observed enough about apple over time to see the seeds being planted right that like you

would not make the next this current ipad so good if you were not going to do more with it especially with photoshop coming no it is uh as we speculated at the time, possibly one of the great examples of seeing the effect of Apple's longer lead time for hardware while. And early last year, there were reports that Apple had decided to take its foot off the gas in terms of iOS and Mac OS in order to focus on stability and getting the old iPhones to work better and all of that stuff. And I think it's very hard not to read that as they knew this hardware was coming, they were going to do software to take advantage of it. And they decided that they couldn't do that because they needed to get their house in order. They needed to increase stability, make the old phones work better. And so they chose to focus on that and let the iPad kind of twist in the wind for six months.

And that's where we are right now. So hopefully they will pivot to an iPad year in 2019. But that seems to be the story here. And in what otherwise I think would have been a banner year for the iPad, it's why everybody kind of is, you know, it didn't go down. But it was like people felt really mixed. Like it should be great. But, and there's this big question mark hanging over the whole thing so yeah we'll see 2019 we have yet to get to the uh best performing product category

and we're going to do that just after we take a break and thank care of for their support of upgrade care of is a monthly subscription vitamin service that delivers completely personalized vitamin and supplement packets right to your door. Me and Tiff have fun with this because it's a vitamin, right? Vitamin is what you're probably used to hearing, but I call them vitamins. You may have wondered at some point whether you're getting all the vitamins that you need

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too because you just grab the packs that you need and take them on the go. If you have dietary needs, if you're vegan or vegetarian, they can totally cater to that as well. It's a new year, new year, new goals. And if you have some health related goals for 2019, Care Off will help make sure it sticks by helping you build a routine that's made just for you. You can take advantage of a special New Year's offer for 50% off your first month of personalized care of vitamins. Go to takecareof.com and enter the code AHOY50 at checkout. That's TAKECAREOFF, T-A-K-E-C-A-R-E-O-F.com, promo code AHOY50 for 50% of your first month of vitamins. Our thanks to Care Off for their support of this show and RelayFM. Vitamin.

Vitamin. Vitamin. Vitamins. Vitamin. Vitamin. Vitamin. Vitamin. Vitamin.

Vitamins. I feel like that's one of the words I can't let go. Vitamin. I feel like that's one of the words i can't let go vitamin i feel like that's your vitamin in your beta vitamins in your betas i don't say see beta i let that go i say beta because i prefer the way that sounds but to my ears vitamin just doesn't sound right you say herb or herb herb okay anyway as we learn from the upgradies people love the apple watch series 4 and the apple watch scored an a grade for this year up from an a minus it wasn't the biggest jump of any category, but it is the highest scoring category, right? There is no other straight A grade across the board. Yes. Highest scoring category, and I'll

point out that it was the highest scoring overall. It was the highest scoring, obviously, in the five main Apple product categories. When I started doing this survey in 2015, it was by far the lowest scoring in all of those categories. And it has progressively improved every single year. So people have come around on the Apple Watch. There's some great quotes for this one, which I think perfectly sum it up. So Christina Warren says, honestly, after a very shaky start, the Apple Watch has become one of the most consistent and exciting products in Apple's lineup. It's best in class and keeps getting better.

Federico Vatici called it the highlight of the year. And Charles Arthur says that adding the ECG function to the Apple Watch Series 4 is very clever. Only good stories come out of it. Which I can 100% agree with, right? Like, there's nothing bad comes out of having that, and you end up with more of these stories, which Apple loves for good reason of,

the Apple Watch saved my life, right? Like, you cannot have better marketing for your product than stories of it literally saving the lives of its users, right? It writes itself. It's perfect. Of course, this isn't everything right so fracia spears pointed out something like i think reminded me of a a complaint when the apple watch came out with with what is it version five of watch os i think it's watch os five right yes watch os five yes because one of them got one of the apple watches got two versions didn't it of watch os um yes yes the original

they turned it over very fast yes because i realized how people actually want to use the product was not the way that apple first anticipated so frazier says the new watch faces have a number of confusing and inconsistent elements and could use a bit of fresh thinking and then we have two quotes from developers so from Marco Arment watchOS's limitations on third-party apps and our inability to develop third-party watch faces still hold us back from taking full advantage of the excellent hardware and from James Thompson

it's time to unlock UIKit apps for third-party developers so we can finally take advantage of it all for ourselves I mean I like this because it's like users are very happy with the product but developers remain frustrated because they know they can do more to make it even better than it currently is which i think only spells good for the apple watch right like people love it already but there is still untapped potential yeah exactly right and and i i choose to be encouraged by the fact that the developers in the panel basically said um we want to use this more well because i think that wasn't the story

a couple of years ago it was like it was nice but they weren't like hungry for it but now i think developers won they tried yeah they tried and it was no good and they're like forget it and now it seems like um they are interested in unlocking that power now that they've seen what the new watch is capable of which is exciting and i'm glad that fraser spears uh mentioned that the watch faces which i wrote a thing about and we've talked about which is that inconsistency of watch faces is also something that people brought up that the uh john gruber mentioned it i don't think i quoted him but like the new faces only work on the new watches and the old faces only work like design wise work that you can put them on the the old faces on the new watches but they don't really make sense and there's a need for a

real rethink of how it does uh faces which i'm hopeful will be a 2019 thing what watch face are you using right now um it is one of the, I go back and forth between the two new faces. The infograph ones? Yeah, the two infographs. I go back and forth between them and I'm not happy with either of them. I would really much rather have a more capable version

of modular, which was my favorite. But modular, I grew up with Gruber. Modular on the big watch face, what they did to it, it doesn't work. So I'm mostly on the analog watch face what they did to it like it doesn't it doesn't work so i'm mostly on the analog hand infograph face and i have the other infograph face right next to it so i can swipe to it if i want more data and i'm sort of doing a two-face lifestyle now that's weird that's like a batman villain and we move on to the forgotten product, the Apple TV. It is D+, down from a C.

This is not a surprise because this is a product in limbo. It's right with the iPad. I mean, the hardware isn't amazing, but the hardware exists for software that doesn't exist yet. It is waiting for the streaming service. It is waiting. You know, like Frasier Spears says it's stagnant. Jim Darryl says there's a lot missing.

Christina Warren says the price is ridiculously ridiculously high and it is compared to competitors because the apple tv in 2019 in 2018 all it does is what what the fire tv does what chromecast does the future of tv apps no it's not that was wrong and Apple tried and to make a box which could have capability to play games on it and stuff, they needed more power and nobody uses it by and large that was a miss, that was a swing

and a miss from Apple so I think not only this year will we see obviously the streaming software as the other shoe to drop with this whole product line we may well see a better focused cheaper device um we'll see or maybe apple just completely goes down the route of trying to get their services everywhere as opposed to releasing something cheap themselves um but i think it would be remiss of them to try and at

least give it a go to create just something that plugs directly in the back of the TV that you can sell for $35, $40, something like that. Poor Apple TV. Is that good? So we're out of the hardware, and let's talk about Apple's favorite category, at least, which is services. Services are a C+, down from a b minus and this is a as you mentioned in the article it's a mixed bag which seems mostly kind of just like informed from people's personal experiences but that's a bad thing right yeah there it's all over the place i will say when this survey started people's view of apple and cloud services was um i think much it was much more negative

um but even then there was the sense sense that Apple was getting it together. And I think if you look back five, six, seven years, and how everybody thought about Apple services and how they think of them today, Apple services are way, way better. They have come a long way in the last few years. They're far more reliable. I am struck by the fact that there are definitely people on the panel

who will never forgive Apple for what they were like seven years ago in cloud services and will never trust Apple. And that's, I think it's interesting to look at the long memories of people who've used Apple's cloud services. Like I had somebody say, I will never trust Apple's photo syncing service. And I've been using Apple's photo syncing service

since they launched the photos app. And I think it's great, but that person had a bad experience and will never come back or it will take them a very long time. And I think that's part of Apple's challenge with a lot of their services stuff is they're still trying to live down the past. This is down a little bit from last year, this score, but it's higher than the two previous years. So I think there is this sense that people are not super trusting of Apple in terms of services, begrudgingly acknowledging that they've gotten

better, but that there are lots of issues still. And there are a lot of different services too. So I think a lot of people lumped Siri in here to say that Siri, like they liked all the other services, but Siri was a disappointment. The people, you know, there's, it's a mixed bag for sure. But I think it's interesting that apple is clearly making progress and yet not necessarily winning everybody over anything that touches the internet right that's the services and i just think that they're not there's a lot of places that they are not doing a great job in that for right like yeah i in fact if i had to say there's an overarching uh comment it would be that apple's trying to do a lot and it's unclear what level of focus in general but especially in services what level of focus they

have on the individual products like you know is for a company that is saying services are the future i think there's an overall feeling that maybe it feels like a lot of apple services are not a focus and do not improve. Whereas Google is iterating their services, for one example, all the time is the perception. And that Apple will let their services get dusty for a while. And I think that's... But at the same time, you get something like... So Stephen Hackett says things are better than ever, but iCloud sync should be bulletproof.

Dr. Drang said the two terabyte iCloud plan is a better value than Dropbox. I'm nervous about switching over, but I think 2019 is the year. And I know people who have dropped Dropbox for iCloud drive, which is amazing. And I'm not one of those people, but I to you. But I get it. But I get it because it is a lot better. And the photo service I use, and it is great. And I have had nothing but good experiences with it. And I think they do a very good job with it. So it's, again, mixed bag. It's all over the place.

And of course, right, this is the thing. You think about how big this is overall, how how many issue areas this touches apple music right jessica dennis thinks it's like solidly okay music service which it is right it's kind of all it needs to be but then carolina milanesi says and she brings up a great point right you think about apple and the services apple music and echo devices that happened in in 2018 and it shows a change in apple that as she says playing by different rules going forward home kit got a c minus with no change and this one is not a surprise to me and this one is very mixed in the responses uh i think there's no change because nothing really happened well it's the highest score home kit has ever gotten by so little that the grade didn't really change right

um it is but it is the highest average score that it's gotten. And this is one of those cases where I was surprised at how negative the comments are. Because one, my experience, I would have rated it way higher than the panel did. The panel's medium grade for it was two. It makes me wonder if the panel is split in two groups. Groups that use it and groups who don't bother using it and think it's bad because HomeKit's gotten a lot better. I think one of the big differences is are you in the United States of America? Well, that could be.

The amount of products available to you are very different. So like Federico says, like me, Apple needs to convince me to stay on their platform in 2019 because Google and Amazon are becoming more and more compelling by the day and it's like I know I look at the the products that are available to me and there aren't many like I can see that Apple is doing stuff to make like software certification better but a lot of the big companies that you have products from we don't have and I'm kind of as we spoke about like remember a few weeks ago we're talking about like plugs plugs that i and i would love to have a plug that i could use on home kit and on the echo and my options were for companies names that i've never heard of before right sure i can't get belkin products with that have home kit support you know like a lot of the

cameras i can't i can't use so and and again it's like what can you put in your home if you live in a house maybe you feel a bit differently if you live in an apartment right it's like i can't put security cameras or i can't put uh the like the locks that you have because i don't have the ability to do that so you know it's like there is a lot of personal experience that comes from this maybe that's the split is there's the split between people who have who are in a circumstance where it all has started to work and i am in that where like it's all started to work now and i'm like oh home kit isn't is a thing now where it was previously not a thing and then if you're in a place whether it was a geographic location or in terms of your uh housing situation where it's still not a thing

then it's still not a thing and you get i i just i was struck by this uh and i think what says it all about home kit is it's the highest score it's ever received still not a very good score so like progress yet a lack of enthusiasm and as uh yeah as carolina milanese said, puzzling, right? Like nothing has been happening for a while. Is this not a priority for Apple and what's going on? And again, that comes up in a bunch of areas where we view Apple as this. And I think maybe there's some truth to this. We view Apple as this enormous and enormously successful company.

enormous and enormously successful company. And sometimes when you look at what they're doing, you start to wonder if what they really are is an enormously successful hardware design system with a struggling but okay software organization. And then a whole bunch of poorly funded, poorly staffed, not focused on ancillary businesses where Apple's DNA says we have to own this and do our own thing, but they refuse to actually prioritize that stuff. And HomeKit's a great example, right? Where it's like Apple did HomeKit because Apple didn't want to cede this market to amazon and google but it does feel like apple also didn't do home kit right and is still trying to live it down and it's unclear that they've actually turned it around they started wrong with their like chip

certification the way that they were doing it right oh yeah but then they changed it right ios 12 changed it and and that's why there are more products but like it's going to take more time still yep um hardware reliability b plus down from a minus and oh boy this is where the macbook keyboards this is the effect this is where it was this is where yeah people were talking about it um david sparks says i realized recently that i no longer take mac hardware reliability for granted which i like right like i like that phrase and then of course let's let's run through the atp boys so marco says the continued problems with the macbook and macbook pro keyboards despite the reductions from 2018's keyboard membrane tarnish their reputation in a

big way john siracuse says the butterfly keyboard really has to go and casey says i'm not calling for anyone's head to roll but i do think there's a legitimate problem here that needs to be addressed this is a sore point i think it's telling so 2016 is really when the the new macbook pros came out right um the macbook was out earlier i think it's telling that if you look at my uh my results over time apple's perceived hardware reliability among the panel has dropped every year yep so this was a 4.4 average in 2015 it's now a a 3.8. Not horrible. It's still a B+, but I do think there's something in the fact that over the last four years, as the new MacBooks rolled out, especially, that the perception of the reliability of Apple's hardware has dropped from basically a

straight A to a B+, from a 4.4 to a 3.8. It is, to me, meaningful. This is the category they should always score highest on. This is what they should be and have been good at. Apple make great hardware. The median score among my panelists, my 55 panelists, was a four. And I think that that may be telling too, that even people who feel like, and I had several of them in the survey, like they bank on Apple hardware, they don't have any problems with it.

Even among that group, there's this effect that's very much what Davidid spark said which is even if i'm feeling good there's something wrong because of especially the uh uh the the keyboard but it's it's more than that um uh peter cohen my former colleague at macworld back in the day uh did a nice list which was iphone 7s returned in large quantities thanks to manufacturing problems that rendered them unable to work on cellular networks macbook keyboards continue to fail despite three redesigns and apple stores were choked with people rushing in to get those batteries replaced like these are all signs uh that are partly a function of apple's products popularity but it's also a function of the fact that apple just didn't engineer those products to be reliable enough. So it's definitely, you know, this is about as much as much about perception as reality. That's the deal with a

survey. But I can tell you that among people who carefully watch Apple, their opinion of Apple's hardware has declined in terms of reliability has declined every single year since I started the survey in 2015. Then on the flip side, software quality went from a C- to a B-. And it should have. iOS 12, especially, and to a degree, Mojave, MacOS Mojave, had a focus on stability. And this showed. Charles Arthur says,

iOS 12 was a great improvement for stability and speed. Mojave has been a quiet update. I haven't noticed anything from it, but good software is when you don't notice it. And Federico Vatici says, iOS 12 is the best version of iOS I've tested in years. The work Apple put into optimizing performance on older hardware truly shows.

Yeah, this is, for all of our comments about the iPad, this is the other side of that, which is they did, and people, individual, I had individual people with individual gripes about iOS or Mojave, but on the big picture, I think everybody in the panel pretty much agreed that last year was shaky. Again, not saying that everything's perfect, but I think what you see, because the score was a 3.4, it went down last year to a 2.7 average and back up to a 3.4. I think what you're seeing there is 2017 was really shaky. The feeling was those updates, iOS 11 especially, were shaky and people were like, well, what is Apple doing? There were a lot of bugs. There were a lot of weird things

going on. And when Apple decided we're going to slow it down and we're going to focus on stability and getting old phones to run better and all of that, the panel at least felt like they came through. And that although there's some frustration about where they're going and how fast they're going to get there, there was generally an acknowledgement that it did pay off in focusing on that stuff. that it did pay off in focusing on that stuff. Yeah, and Stephen Hackett points out that he has some concern for the future of macOS, right? That the apps, the marzipan apps are not good mac apps. And that maybe that is a thought, right? That you can think about that. What do you think about that? Yeah, that's true.

Software quality does include those new marzipan apps What do you think about that? and that what they ship in 2019 will be much better. It's also possible that, no, that's what they intend to ship. I don't believe that, but it is an open question. So I get the concern for the future, especially since, to be honest, we're leaving the year of stability and entering a year of potentially huge change. And so does software quality suffer in a year of change? I would argue that it almost certainly does, right? Because it seems to me that the way that you keep the quality up is by slowing way down and focusing on tightening all the screws.

And 2019 doesn't seem like a screw tightening year, right? It seems like a add a whole bunch of new stuff and they're going to be bugs and it's going to be weird. And it's natural to view that with trepidation, I think. All right. There are a couple of more categories that we'll round out real quickly, but we'll do that after we thank our final sponsor for this episode.

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it's pingdom.com slash relayfm for a free trial upgrade as the code at checkout to huge 30% of your first invoice. It's pingdom.com slash RelayFM for a free trial. Upgrade as the code at checkout to get 30% off your first invoice. Our thanks to Pingdom for their support of this show and RelayFM. So the last two categories were developer relations and societal and environmental impact. So developer relations was a B minus down from a B. And I think if I would like kind of sum it up that review times got faster but scam apps exist and apple doesn't seem to really be doing anything about it yeah and this is a category where um the fact is in 2015 when i started this survey

much more important maybe much more developer relations were a were a real concern. And that average score in 2015 was 2.2. It was by far the lowest score that anybody, the lowest average that we've ever gotten in anything on the survey. The developer relations were at a very low point. That's also when Phil Schiller took over and started making major changes. And that score came up and has, uh, you know, is now at a B minus. It went down slightly from last year, but basically it's a, it's a pretty good score. And that's the truth of it is I think developers are relatively happy. There are, there are issues. Definitely there's complaint about, um, about scams and frauds. And John Gruber mentioned

that for sure. Um, uh um uh lex friedman mentioned like panic coming back to the mac app store was a big one um there's a lot of positive stuff it's not a perfect thing it's always a work in progress there everybody's got kind of pet issues that they wish that apple would do better but i think what i take away from the developer relation category is that today if i were building the survey and not trying to repeat it every year, I wouldn't ask this question because I just don't think it's a burning question like it was in 2015. And that is meaningful to me that I think when Phil Schiller took over developer relation stuff, took over the app store, they made appreciable changes fairly

quickly that seemed to have solved a lot, not all, a lot of the pain that went into it. So I think that's the most interesting thing about it is just that it's not as relevant as it was four years ago. Yeah, I think that was the big change, right? It was Phil taking over from Eddie and then things started to move from there and little things started to get added. And over time, it has made things better for everyone right yep and the last one is societal slash environmental impact where apple got a b grade down from a b plus and if i was going to sum this up it would be that kind of apple talks a good game in a lot of areas does a lot of great stuff but it seemed like there was a consistent

concern with apple failing to stand up against the u.s government in a lot of key areas and that leadership diversity whilst they're still doing some efforts to change stuff is still moving very very slowly yeah the definitely there's a sense that people appreciate um that tim cook speaks out about lots of issues that the company is focused on user privacy and security and all of that, but also pointing out that, but then they also play ball in China where they're going to let China into the data centers and look at the user data and that there are places where they talk a good game and then they sit down with the current administration and they're definitely panelists saying they're

going to regret that historically by playing ball with them. Again, debatable. Everybody's got an opinion about it. This is another one of those categories that I think is still relevant, but the meaning of the environmental and social impact category in the survey has changed almost every single year, which I find fascinating. It's what people focus on. And it's actually something that Dr. Drang mentioned, which is find fascinating. It's what people focus on. And it's actually something that Dr. Drang mentioned, which is in the early 2000s, Apple, Greenpeace, especially, like called out Apple for its environmental practices. And what's funny is that they

decided to fix that and make a commitment to it. And that slide that they put up after every product with its green checklist and all that, that is all because Apple really did over the last 15 years completely change its processes to focus on making less of a negative environmental impact and being a positive impact whenever they could. And that is a place where they changed. And I think you still see that where in 2015, quite honestly, the survey was in there because there was a lot of stories in the news about Apple's factories in China and suicides at the factories and the feeling that the people in the factories were not being treated well and that Apple was benefiting from the terrible work conditions there. But over time, it has also evolved to mean other things. It has been about Apple's political

connections in the US. It's about Apple standing up to the FBI. It was about Apple's diversity on stage or diversity in its management team. Or I quote in the story, Aline and Jean from App Camp for Girls talking about their entrepreneur camp for women developers. There's a lot of stuff that people can kind of heap into this category, which is why I think it's interesting. I'm not sure it's consistent from year to year, but I think maybe it's lack of consistency is good in that it shows like, what are people thinking in terms of these intangible things about Apple? Because Apple is a company that takes stands and says it believes in things and its executives go out and make pronouncements. And I think it's worth, so I think that they're calling, by doing that, And I think it's worth, so I think that they're calling, by doing that, they're opening themselves up to analysis about where they succeed and where they fail.

That a faceless corporation might not have, there might not be anything relevant to analyze about it, but Apple is in this game. And so it is relevant for them. It's a good year for interesting stuff in the scorecard i'm pleased that you put this together because it's so nice to have a record going back yeah i that is one thing that i i really value in it is that it's not just taking the temperature of the you know the pundits and the apple watchers at any given time but it's also seeing how their um their views evolve over time with the direct quotes, you can get the sense of the,

you know, the real like feelings that everybody's got in detail. And then with the numbers, you can just get an overall kind of sense of the trends and the sentiment. And, um, again, I don't think it proves anything per se, but I think it's interesting to see, to get a snapshot of this. And the first year I did it, interesting to see, to get a snapshot of this. And the first year I did it, I actually did an open version of the survey for people who, you know, saw the link on Six Colors where they could fill it out before it was published. And I stopped doing that. And the reason I stopped doing that is the scores were different, but the relationship between the scores were identical. So, you know, it might've been not a 3.4, but a 2.4

and not a 3.9, but a 2.9 because all the scores were a little bit lower from the general public, but their relationship to the pundit survey was the same. And I think, honestly, that comes out of the fact that on average as a whole, and this should not be surprising, the people who consume all the content

from the people who think and talk about Apple have their opinions, to a certain extent, shaped by those people. So again, not proving anything. Reality may be completely different. But in the end, I think it's still worth polling the Apple observers. And I said earlier that I asked 55 people to be on the panel. That's not actually true. I asked about 100 people, maybe a little bit more. Many of them don't do it. So these are the 55 people, and there's a list at the end. These are the 55 people who said yes. And so they're the ones in the survey. I gave them the option to not be quoted. Plus, people could just not give me feedback. Yeah, I didn't give any quotes. I never give quotes. Yeah, which is fine. Thanks to everybody who didn't have any quotes i never give quotes yeah which is fine i i thank

thanks to everybody who didn't give any quotes because going through the quotes is really hard work but thanks to the people who did because they provided good uh good color let's say for uh for the the bear survey results jason before we finish today i have a follow-up item for you before we do a couple of ask upgrade questions it's unorthodox but i'll allow it it's because during the episode today uh apple published a behind the scenes video on how they made their ipad pro ads and you can now see that yes it was luma fusion that was used to edit and filmic and filmic pro used to shoot it so for all of the people that were doubting that apple made their videos on the ipad pro well they did you can see it now um and i think that's really great i'm really pleased that they decided to show this um obviously it was always part of the plan

because they were filming it yes but i'm really pleased to see that yes luma fusion is being used because that was what me and you said well they they're obviously using it because that's how you could do this yeah so yep there you go so there you go haters it's your video right you'll ask for it and there it is they did do it um the ipad pro is very capable and very powerful and i'm very pleased that apple decided to not only make this campaign but make this specific video because it proves a point. To ask upgrade questions before, so just two lasers, please, Jason,

before, thank you, before we finish off today's episode. First one comes from Matthew. Do you think Apple would create a web version for their video service similar to Netflix or Amazon Prime? Currently, you need to have an app or maybe in the future, a device that supports it.

Do you think they'll make a web-focused version of their streaming service? I'm going to say yes. Okay. It's a coin flip for me. I see how much my daughter watches Netflix in a browser and stuff. And I feel like she could... Well, I mean, on the Mac, there is no Netflix app.

You have to use a browser. And Apple could put this in iTunes. I just feel like that technology exists. And why would you not? Because then anybody who's paying you money can watch it anywhere. And I think that's probably what apple wants is to just uh i i say yes because of the same reason that it's on tvs and stuff is that it just gives them another outlet for people to give them money and watch their stuff and the one of the other things is that uh a lot of the ways that these smart tv

stuff works it's all web-based right so they're already building a essentially a web player yeah like or at least they are creating what would need to be the underpinnings for a web-based system on the tvs so i mean i don't know how much harder it would be for them to build a front end but they may have had to go a lot of the way there themselves. And also that really just, it stops them, and it's probably why Netflix do it too, it stops them from having to have to support everything. Because, well, if it has a web browser, you could just watch it. The apps are better, but you can just get there via the web. And here we go, Jason. This question comes from John.

Now that we're in iPhone rumor season, what will the next iPhone be called? iPhone 11? iPhone 11 with Roman numerals? iPhone Pro? What's it going to be? I mean, I think it will be 11. I do think it will be 11 i do think it will be 11 11 with the numbers i think it's gonna i think they will go back to numbers because it's gonna get i think there will be an iphone 11 there will be an iphone 11 max and there will be an iphone 11r and we're in complete agreement if there's a new our phone it might also just be the 10r will remain um and they won't

update that every year that would not surprise me at all. Yeah, I am in agreement with you on that one, I think. At least for now. If you would like to ask a question for us to finish out the show, you can send it to us with the hashtag AskUpgrade. We got a lot. We had a lot we didn't get to today because the scorecard is a big topic to get through,

and we don't want to have you sit here for four hours while we get through everything we had to get through today. If you want to find our show notes for this episode, you can go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 230. Jason is online. He is at sixcolors.com, where you can find the scorecard in all of its glory. There is a lot of charts, and there is a lot of information that we didn't cover in today's episode, so I do implore you to go and check it out. There's a lot of really great quotes from a lot of really intelligent and smart people. There's some cool stuff to say, so you can go and check that out at sixcolors.com. Jason is at jsnell on Twitter.

I am at imike, I-M-Y-K-E. This show is a part of RelayFM. You can find Upgrade and many, many other shows. In fact, some would say pretty much all of the great shows over at Relay.FM slash shows. And you can pick up a new show there. And we'll be back

next time. Thanks again to our sponsors, the fine folk over at Pingdom, Kerov, and Lunar Display. Until next week, Jason Snell, say goodbye. Mike, I give you an A. Aw, thank you, Jason.