Upgrade - 264: Beautiful Breakable Glass Objects

Episode Date: September 23, 2019

We've got the new iPhones and it's time for our first hands-on impressions. How has Apple improved the upgrade experience? Could the Apple Store pick-up experience use a little more attention? Are the battery and camera improvements worth the upgrade? How much do we miss 3D Touch? Also Jason has a new Apple Watch, and Myke is sorely tempted by the ceramic Series 5.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 264 today's show is brought to you by text expander from smile same box and zapier my name is mike hurley i am joined by jason snow. Hi, Jason Snell. Hi, Mike Hurley. How are you? I am fine and dandy, my friend. Fine and dandy, indeed. I'm currently in Chicago. I'm recording from the small studio at the Cards Against Humanity office. I would like to thank Alex Cox and Cards Against Humanity for their help in saving this episode of Upgrade because I am stranded. But nobody cares about that. Our hashtag Snell talk question comes from a different jason and

it's for you jason what is your favorite game so far on apple arcade it's tough there are a lot of games out there for apple arcade and i haven't played all of them and i haven't played all of them thoroughly but if i had to pick one right now it would probably be mini motorway because i love mini metro so much yep i have some quibbles with mini motorway i actually think some of their because the the stuff gets the buildings get dropped down randomly and i think it's a mistake that the when a big store gets dropped down that there's a hard-coded um entrance to the store because i've had it happen that it gets it gets dropped down and it's nowhere near anything and it's on and it's like inaccessible and it's

very frustrating when stuff like that happens. And so I have some complaints, but I do like that game a lot. There are a bunch of others that I've been trying. I played, I was playing Tint for a while yesterday, which is the sort of like watercolor game, which is, I will admit, a little harder for me to play because I have to focus on what the colors are and they should probably do something they should probably make some options so that you could change what the color mix is for people who have vision uh color limitations let's say but that's also a fun uh

kind of soothing puzzle puzzle game but mini motorway for sure do you have a favorite yet uh sayonara wild hunts yeah i have decided that i did not like playing it with the swipe interface and i haven't paired a controller what i really want to do is play it on an apple tv but we i'm gonna get a controller for it but let me tell you something that will make it easier to swiping go into the settings and change the sensitivity i saw that i saw that it was and i will try it with that setting because i have i changed the sensitivity but i just i kept thinking to myself this does not feel like a Swipeman game but you know maybe yeah this is definitely I haven't played

it with a controller yet but I can feel like it will be better with a controller so I'm going to be getting on that when I finally get back home again which hopefully will be today if you would like to send in a question uh to open the show just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk and yours may be included for a future show but we start today's episode with some follow-up so we've been talking a little bit about the potential for apple to be creating a like a kind of tracking device right using especially the u1 chip in the new iphones mac rumors has shown some evidence of a product so let's call it apple tags which i don't like that name but we'll call it that for now they've obtained screenshots that show a new tab in find my called items it replaces like the account tab that's currently in there and you can the screenshots that they've shown you can click

on it and it shows those little icons of like a suitcase and a bicycle and there's some text which they have obtained in a screenshot which says keep track of everyday items tag your everyday items with b389 and never lose them again i prefer the name apple tags to b389 but you know whatever apple wants to go with i suppose it could be like your fun uh like a droid like uh beep boop everybody i'm b389 and i can find your stuff for you beep boop yeah that would be actually be pretty amazing if they want to build a character called b389 but i don't think that's the way apple's going to go is clearly the code name while it's in development uh so you know this is one of those things it's like yeah i believe these screenshots are real because there's a lot of smoke for this fire right now but um it doesn't necessarily mean that anything's coming anytime soon i think what we know for sure is that apple has had a plan to do this

product i think what we don't know since it didn't get announced is are they still making this product or did something happen and and they're like you know what we're not going to do it let's just kill it and that that is a possibility like we don't have until it ships it's just as likely that uh you know the debate isn't not whether it existed or not the debate is does it still exist or did they kill it is it delayed or is it dead because the evidence would be the same in both cases so i hope it is just delayed uh we were talking a little bit about um the potential for bilateral charging and what may have happened there right so being able to use charging on one device

or to let you charge other things. So using your iPhone to let you charge your AirPods. iFixit have done their teardown of the iPhone 11 Pro. And this is no confirmation, like they themselves kind of can't confirm it, but there seems to be some boards and wires which could potentially have been intended to be used for bilateral charging

again they say it could be used for this or that but there seems to be the possibility that this may have been uh intended to be included um or for real conspiracy theorists is included and could be uh turned on the software update but it does at least seem from their uh perspective that there is a possibility that this was actually built into the hardware at some point if not already in there so who knows this is such a gentle bit of discovery like they're really kind of shrugging and the pressure and the interest in their teardown was so much about this particular feature because this was the thought that this was a late removal and that it might have hardware evidence and the fact that they can't come out and say yep this is definitely it

i it makes me wonder like are we trying a little too hard to find this thing that may or may not exist um yes also i will just i'm going to say it again and i think i've said it before so uh i'm not sure bilateral bilateral charging is a very interesting feature. Personally, I don't think it's that interesting because how slow, how inefficient this stuff is. I get that it might be, you know, a fun feature and could charge an AirPods case or something like that. But, and I can see the argument that AirPodspods or a second device or maybe even an apple watch in certain circumstances if you had the you know if they were compatible um face down plugged in and then charging something else overnight from the phone but you know it seems like a stretch

to me this whole thing and when i've seen the samsung ads with it where it's like oh this guy needs power oh the lady in the cafe has a phone that can charge his phone yay and they touch their phones together it's great and then they don't cut to like an hour later where he's gained two percent on his battery uh and she's like i i need to go dude he's like no right like i don't think it's that great a feature honestly so just the way the way it works, it's not efficient and it's stealing your battery. And, you know, I don't think it's a big deal that it's not there. It's not the biggest deal. No, it's not the biggest deal at all.

It would have just been, it was really kind of looking nice to have, but the amount of times that we use it is slim. Yeah. But it was at least, could have been at least a feature in a phone that, we can get to this later on. We're going to be doing our review today of the 11 Pro, mostly. It was a phone that maybe didn't have

a lot of features. Yeah, it would be another addition to the feature list, and it's not there. Yeah. September is Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, and we've been raising money all month, and we'll get to that in a moment, to help St. Jude Children's Research Hospital.

They assist with organizations and other people all around the world, and they're committed to transforming cancer care with the goal of curing at least 60% of children worldwide with six of the most common cancers by 2030. That is a huge goal, and with your support, you can help St. Jude stay true to its life-saving mission, finding cures and saving children. Donate to support childhood cancer around the world at stjude.org slash pineapple. That is stjude.org slash pineapple. So, we have raised now over a quarter of a million dollars for St. Jude.

Good job, nerds. It gives me goosebumps to say that. I wished this was an explicit show right now so i could tell you how i truly feel about this because non-curse words are not helping me to explain how much this means to me um it really is like i don't have language that I can give to you to explain how I truly feel about the generosity that RelayFM and its listeners have been able to show for this. We wanted to raise $75,000. We've raised a quarter of a million. We have raised an amount of money that, like, it makes a significant difference to the hospital.

Like, it's significant. So, we raised um we raised about sixty thousand dollars a few days ago uh during the podcast of funds we were talking about this the relay fm podcast of fun for saint jude um if you are unable to catch it for any reason uh we have a couple of ways that you can we've posted the entire video uh it is a long video right it's like six hours but it really was a ton of fun uh jason put together a family feud event if you hadn't seen that then you should because that was wonderful and it gave us a nice break which we're very thankful for um and there's we've

also put the audio up as well if that's your bag but i do really recommend if you want to enjoy this content to watch it um because there's a lot of hijinks that are mostly visual. But it was an incredible event and I was blown away by the amount of people that were watching and were engaged and St. Jude were really excited about it too. So it was really just a wonderful, wonderful event, but it helped push us to the level that we're at right now, which is just over $250, 250 000 so from the bottom of my heart i thank you for making this such an incredible success for us yep absolutely well just unbelievable i'm really blown away by it just it's very very touching very touching

should we do some upstream news jason yeah that sounds good we we we predicted it uh nbc the streaming service is going to be called peacock we were so close with peacock plus which was the name that we lovingly gave maybe the ad free tier will be peacock plus i'm still holding out it's i mean they are doing tiers so maybe right like maybe that's what we're gonna do it's an n Universal. Yep. We made a bunch of announcements. They're going to be rebooting a bunch of shows. The ones that are given the most detail on are Battlestar Galactica from Sam Esmail, who created Mr. Robot. There's going to be a Saved by the Bell and Punky Brewster reboots. There's a show from Mike Schirr and ed helms right

so there's like a bunch of stuff going on and of course they have huge catalog shows including the office 30 rock frazier snl i will tell you jason when they published their like this is our catalog i was like okay yeah right like okay nbc like if you want to give that to me i'll probably throw some money away especially on adf or it could be pretty cheap right like it you know it probably won't be too bad for that it's unclear long term what their international um strategy is going to be they say they will have one but it's it's literally like yes there will be one and that's all they're saying but keep in mind nbc universal owned by comcast the cable tv giant in america and so their business model is a little different so one of the things they're going to do is like if you have comcast which i actually do you get peacock like

it's it's in there i think basically what they're going for with this is it's free with a cable login because they like you to have cable tv and then if you don't have a cable login you can pay for it and then either way i think if you pay a little if you pay extra you can get it without ads but by default it will be with ads because that's the business that they're in is the advertising business but you know as i say like an advertising support assuming service might be pretty cheap i mean it's up to you whether you you want to stomach that or not but like that that is definitely that is definitely an option yep but they have a lot of great stuff um uh apple have ordered a tv series based on a novel called the mosquito coast it will star justin thoreau and his uncle wrote the book so yeah i was gonna say next thing i was

gonna say the funny thing is that his uncle wrote the book uh and uh this was a movie with harrison ford back in the 80s i want to say but they're uh they're gonna make a uh you know here's the funny thing movies are like short stories and tv series are like novels and yet for the longest time the only thing that really made sense was for a novel to be made into a movie and then you lose a lot of the detail because it's a movie it only runs runs a couple of hours. And what we're seeing in our modern era of streaming television and different kinds of ways of doing these shows and these movies and these miniseries, that a lot of book adaptations are going or going back, if they got adapted before, to be turned into miniseries because they get more time and it's going to fit better

with the storytelling of the novel i think uh i think it makes a lot of sense hbo max has secured exclusive domestic streaming rights to the big bang theory for five years um it's also going to be on tv as well syndicated on tbs until 2020 this is all warner media right so warner media owns tbs that's where it'll be on tv and if you want it on streaming it'll be on hbo max it is expected that this total deal including the tv and streaming stuff is worth billions of dollars which is wow keep in mind there is a price here because there is this um and we've we've mentioned this before the people involved in big bang theory one of the ways that they get paid is based on syndication and streaming sales. And so as a result, what you can't do, and it's not legal to do this, you'll be sued if you do this, although they sometimes try, is, you know, oh, HBO Max has bought it from Warner Media for a dollar, right? And they're

like, sorry, everybody who had profit participation or who had royalties based on a percentage of syndication sales, it only sold for a dollar. They can't do that. So they have to have it be at least, you know, to a certain degree bid on by various streaming services and this has happened with other shows as well but in the end uh the the truth of it is that the money being bid isn't the same because the money that netflix bids for the big bang theory is going to be um money that it transfers from netflix to warner the money that warner bids for the big bang theory is money that Warner bids for the Big Bang Theory is money that it pays itself. And so it's always going to win those deals. It's always going to be the highest bidder. And so that's what you see with something like this.

Somebody asked on Twitter why CBS would let the Big Bang Theory go because this is a CBS show. But the fact is it's produced by Warner. This is one of the reasons why networks cancel most shows that are not produced by themselves, by the way. This is a great example of that. Because while Big Bang Theory was very, very good for CBS, they didn't own it, which meant that ultimately, Warner is the owner and can walk away and make huge amounts of money in syndication and in selling it to streaming so once the show went off the air which it finished in uh this spring uh cbs is basically no longer a participant in the airing of big bang theory and so it will disappear or has already disappeared from like cbs's streaming service and things like that so that's part of it the other

angle that's fascinating here is we've been talking about like the intelligence of uh like uh what do we have as a brand at warder media it's like well we have hbo it's probably smart to use hbo so they created hbo max which is going to be their streaming service however this deal calls out how hbo max is not hbo right because this is a very traditional multi-camera laugh track sitcom that was on network tv and uh somebody i think maybe it was ben thompson but somebody uh last week pointed out the long time strategy for hbo was it's not tv it's hbo but what this deal shows is hbo max it's tv that's just they have a streaming service to sell now it's not prestige it's not your prestige television you once knew and loved so they're gonna lose some of that cachet on the

hbo brand even if hbo proper stays this way uh they're gonna lose some of that and i'm just gonna put it out here i'm not saying it's gonna be successful but i think this is what apple's trying to be i think apple's trying to be hbo like as we knew it yes and to be successful but i think this is what apple's trying to be i think apple's trying to be hbo like as we knew it yes and just be those those premium high concept big name not too many but they're all going to be big swings for critical success and popular success but like prestige and if hbo kind of has to abandon that in order to fulfill warner media's needs to be huge um you know maybe there is a a shot that apple could take at fulfilling that kind of um that kind of thing and being a different kind of streaming service that's not having to be all things to all people

like hbo max it clearly has to be yeah i mean let's not forget as well the big bang theory is like the most popular show in america like if you get the opportunity to put it in your streaming service you put it on your streaming service because people will want it yeah you know it's a selling point uh you had some follow-up about seinfeld uh yeah we had uh we got a note from somebody that was a very smart note um so we were like why would sony do this uh when and the answer is it doesn't have a streaming service and so it's just selling it to other people and they'll regret it later and and this uh a letter writer pointed out seinfeld actually has a very complex ownership sony is

only the distributor of seinfeld it's not the owner of seinfeld and so it gets paid as kind of an agent uh it gets to pay take a percentage of what it sells. But Seinfeld's actually owned by a complex series of owners, including Castle Rock, including Seinfeld, Jerry Seinfeld, including Larry David. WarnerMedia actually has a piece of Seinfeld. I mean, I'm sure there are other examples, but it's different in that it's not just a product of a monolithic corporation where, like Big Bang Theory, it's like, well, you know what? We own it, and we're going to use it as an asset, or the office or something like that. Seinfeld is more complicated than that. And so Sony's not in a position where they own it and they just want to kind of hoard it for whatever they're doing because that's not actually their job in that case. They're just acting as a distributor. And finally, Oprah's Book Club is going to be premiering on Apple TV Plus on November 1st.

There will be new episodes every two months. The Book Club books that will be selected will be available in the book flap in both e-book form and audio book form. And for every book sold, Apple will be making a contribution to the american library association so this is part of the huge deal they have with oprah this is one of the things that she announced would be happening when they brought her out during the streaming event that the book club would be returning and there's going to be a new episode every couple of months i guess that gives you enough time to read the previous book so that will be at Apple TV Plus show and the first episode will be there on launch day. Yeah. All right.

Today's episode is brought to you by Zapier. Growing a business is a tricky thing, especially when you're spending hours and hours every single day moving data from emails to spreadsheets to wherever else. Wouldn't it be easy if all these things just work together without you needing to lift a finger? Zapier is the easiest way to automate your work. It connects all of your business software and handles work for you so you can

focus on the things that matter most to you. You don't need to waste any more time on tasks that you know could be automated because that's what Zapier was built to do and it lets you do it easily. So if you work in sales, for example, Zapier could let you instantly engage with leads and send them to a CRM tool or a spreadsheet and then notify your team so they can act fast on every opportunity. But whatever your business, you can build the exact solution you need in minutes without writing code or needing to ask a developer for help. And with support for more than 1,500 business applications, it's no wonder that more than 4.5 million people are saving 40 hours a month using Zapier. So at the beginning of this show, we have a hashtag snow talk. And at the end of the show, we have hashtag ask upgrade. Those tweets are collected for me by Zapier and put

into a Google sheet. I've been doing this for years, so I don't have to search for everything. And also I can set it up to have just the fields that I need. So with Zapier, I can get the person's name from their Twitter account and the tweet and a link. And I can choose to just have those things dropped into a Google sheet and then they're available for me whenever I need them. I would be lost without Zapier for this. It's like I have, I use Zapier for tons of things, but just to collect these tweets is something that's super important for me. It saves me so much time than having to go and do the searches and copy and paste and write the name and all that kind of nonsense. Zapier makes it easy. Right now, through November, you can try Zapier for free by going to this special URL, zapier.com slash

upgrade. That's Z-A-P-I-E-r.com slash upgrade for your 14 day free trial go there right now check it out it's going to save you a ton of time that's zapier.com slash upgrade our thanks to Zapier for their support of this show

and RelayFM it is time to review the iPhone 11 I only have the Pro I know that you have what do you have? you have all the great phones. All the great phones, yes.

So I guess really just for the sake of clarity, we'll probably be focusing more on the 11 Pro, but a lot of this stuff counts for both, right? Yeah. I mean, they're very similar in most respects, right? Yeah. Yeah, exactly. I mean, really there isn't a lot of

differences but just just for the sake of just clarity because that's what uh that's what i have and it's probably what i'm assuming you've been using most would be the smaller one right you'd be using the regular pro yeah and that's that's the one that i bought is the regular pro so right but i've been but i've used all three what ones do you have what colors do you have what are the finishes oh i mean i bought space gray and all the um phones i got from apple for review units are space gray and white so they're boring i saw the white today though because uh alex cox friend of the show uh who's helping me today with this we've recorded this episode uh they have a white one and i thought it was really nice. It's actually white this time on the back rather than silver when you look at it.

It's got much more of a white look. It is, unlike the sort of silver Pro that looks sort of white but is also sort of silver. Jamie's is purple. My daughter's college phone is purple, and it is very pretty. Very nice looking. I need to say that I was wrong. I have the green. It was given to me by Stephen during the podcast-a-thon.

He surprised me with the green. And I absolutely love the green, the midnight green. This is going to be my color. I was really surprised about it. It does not look as green as I thought it did. It doesn't look as green as in Apple's photos. A lot of the time it looks gray to me, not green.

But more gray than the space gray. Like it's like space gray is more towards black. This is more towards a lighter gray. And I really love the green kind of stainless steel around it. I was totally wrong. I apologize. And I am of stainless steel around it. I was totally wrong. I apologize, and I'm hashtag green club. Okay.

I don't know if that was, I mean, was it a big thing that you didn't like the green? Anyway. I made a point of it on this show, and then every other show I recorded since. So I'm starting my apology tour right now. My briefing at Apple was with, I was there with Roman Loyola from from mac world and um roman and i are both colorblind perfect and it was amazing because we put the space gray and the green next

to each other and we stood from like 10 different angles and he never could tell the difference and i had one angle where i could tell the difference and then i never got that angle back all the other angles every other attempt i made they looked exactly the same to me i am not colorblind and i could even struggle with it right so what i'm saying extremely difficult for you it's subtle it's uh it's very subtle it's a very subtle green um the texture on the back is nice i don't know why in my mind i assumed that a matte glass texture would add more grip but it definitely does not do that but i do like the way it looks i love i am a big big fan of the um the difference where the camera bump is like i really like that it goes matte to glossy i actually think that there's a part of me that's like you know what i give props to apple on this one because they 100 have embraced

something which is objectively ugly they embraced it and i think have actually improved the look by doing that because they made it something like they made it a design element even though in theory it is an ugly thing so i actually kind of like it i'm used to it as is always i've gotten used to it and now i'm appreciating the parts of like it i'm used to it as is always i've gotten used to it and now i'm appreciating the parts of it that i appreciate yeah i think the problem with all the industrial design on these phones though is that they are beautiful objects of their own right but they're also beautiful beautiful breakable glass objects and that means that most people use them in cases and this is the problem is that they're beautiful objects and uh up until the iphone 8 i used my phone without a case but this design

is slippery and so i want to have a case on it and the problem there is that um then you're looking at the case more than you're looking at the object because like i have once again i have bought a midnight blue leather iphone case and it's great and i love it and it looks good but it does completely hide other than the little bit of the stainless that's at the bottom and the front face which is basically black and blank it hides that beautiful design and and you can see the cut the camera bump which is nice but that's it so i mean this is the problem and i know that um a lot of people have been trying including alex you mentioned alex i know they had a problem with this too like the clear case not a lot of people not liking the clear case because it's uh

because it's kind of slippery i mean the good news bad news is clear case slippery uh a lot of people not liking the clear case because it's uh because it's kind of slippery i mean the good news bad news is clear case slippery good news is if you drop your phone in the clear case it's in a case but uh yeah yeah we'll see jamie's got a clear case and we'll see how she does it yeah i'm trying to live with it it's super slippery i don't have a pop socket on yet i think that will help because that is how i tend to grip my phone anyway um i will report back i mean this could be a complete placebo thing but i think the case is getting grippier now that i'm using it um but i mean that that definitely happens with the silicone cases i have no idea if it's actually going to happen with this clear case maybe my maybe I'm just getting used to how I hold this phone with its slippery nature.

But I like that I can see the color of my phone. That's what I wanted. So I'm going to keep trying it out. Then you're going to cover part of it up with a popsocket. Only the logo. It's fine. It's totally fine. I see the rest of it.

It's a popsocket small. It's a small thing. We have a long history on this show of talking about what it's like to set up new iphones yes and i wanted to touch on a brand new setup option called direct transfer because that's what i did when setting up this phone so can i walk you through what what happened to me here i don't know if you if you tried this but i just want to talk to you about my experience a little bit jason okay so um i i set up my phone the night of the podcastathon so like i didn't because that was when i was given it by steven uh so i i wasn't

going to spend a ton of time playing with it i was just going to start it going before i went to sleep i was in a hotel right and so i figured all right i'll set it up before i go to bed and then maybe the icloud restore will be done by the morning so So as I'm setting up the new phone, I did that thing, which I love now, right? Where you take the new phone and you scan it basically against the old phone using that like Apple Watch-y like thing through the camera, right? And it transfers a bunch of settings over.

And then I was just given the option, like, do you want to do direct transfer? And it said to me, this will take 90 minutes. Or would you like to do an iCloud restore? You'll be able to use it basically immediately but everything gets downloaded from the cloud and I was thinking to myself I'm on hotel wi-fi right now right so I went with a direct route so what I did I was going to bed and I set them both up and left them because both phones are unusable during this period of time right like while they're doing whatever it is they're doing.

So I plugged them both in, put them down. When I woke up in the morning, everything was set. Like I cannot believe how easy this was. There was like a bunch of applications, like my email app, like so you Spark, all of my accounts were set. Slack, even Slack accounts have two-factor authentication, all set. Like one password, didn't need to enter in anything. There were a few apps

that I needed to kind of reset up, like all my banking apps and stuff, but I kind of expected that because they're, like, really harsh on security. I don't exactly know how this transfer process works, but it reminds me of the encrypted iTunes backup, right?

Where, like, whatever it's doing, it's just, it's basically like transferring the state from one phone to another. So I stay logged into everything. So I think this is a great feature. I think that the strongest things about it are if you're on unreliable or slow or metered internet access. Apple's old approach was very much like, unless you were tethered to a computer and doing an iTunes backup, you got to download it all from the cloud and what if that takes forever what if you

get charged a fortune for downloading it from the cloud what if you can't for whatever reason like being in a hotel with bad wi-fi uh rely on your internet connection um i think that i think that's all great and you can do it uh you can do it via wireless or you can actually plug in a cable and do it believe it or not um yeah yeah that's if you i don't think it goes faster if you have a cable it's just like in case you have like really bad wi-fi yeah so well and i think it's i think it's using direct wi-fi i think they're talking to each other i think uh oh interesting yeah so so that's all that's all good um when I do cloud backups these days, it's much better than it used to be about asking for passwords.

I think the big thing is, so it takes longer if you've got a lot of files on your phone, if you've got a large phone. But what you do get is some stuff that doesn't, like if you've got a lot of music, it'll transfer the music. And I hate that because iCloud because when you do it by icloud it doesn't do it you have to re-download all your music yeah exactly right so there's there's stuff like that that is an advantage of doing it even though it takes longer i did it on one of the devices i think i did it from my phone um that i got on friday not the review units, but the one that I bought. And it took about an hour. But you're right, it was pretty easy. I mean, the advantage of doing

the iCloud transfer is you do get your phone back after 15 minutes, and it's partially non functional, and it gradually becomes functional over time. And you have to force download things and stuff like that. But it's, it's uh if you need to use your phone in the next hour it's a better option but if you want to do the full transfer maybe overnight i think they've done a good job with this feature i think it needs to get better i had the experience where i began the transfer and my new phone was setting up and the old phone i realized i was going to have to switch the sim out of one to the other. So I took it out of its case. And the act of taking it out of its case depressed the sleep button.

Just momentarily put the phone to sleep. And so I woke it right back up and it said, oh, you canceled. This failed. Worse, the other phone continued to prepare for about about 20 minutes and then stepped me through a whole setup process and then as soon as it reached the last question of the setup process it said oh the other device canceled therefore you need to and it was one of those things where you're in one of these kind of step-by-step wizard things um where there was no way out like you couldn't go back okay or forward all you could

do is wipe the phone completely and start again and i thought okay a few things going on like a good first try but the transfer needs to be more resilient that better you need to be able to pick it up if you lose it temporarily and say oh no no i found it again here's that phone again um you know it just and and if you are in that process and you lose connection with the other device, you should notice it immediately and not wait 20 minutes before asking you again. So there are issues with this.

Or what it should say is like, it just pauses it and it's like, get the other device back and going again. Right. Like something, you know, and then it resumes. Yes.

That's what it should be doing. Also pushing a button inadvertently should not cancel the transfer no that 100 because so many people would think oh my screen's on i'll turn the screen off but that all said since we've been doing this show so it can't be more than five years and i'm not sure i think it was maybe four years ago that we did that episode where we talked about how the act of buying a new iphone which should be so pleasurable gets kind of beaten down because it's so unpleasant to do the transfer of your data and your passwords and all of that and apple has made

since and we're not taking credit for it i'm using it as a milestone like that was not great and in the intervening four years apple has done a huge amount of work this better they have added something significant to make the process better yeah and this is this is the thing they added this year and it's good it it needs to be better but it's good because this is one of those things that android has had that apple has just not had on on the iphones i was like could i just plug one into another or just let them shoot over their local Wi-Fi, just transfer all my data without having to go to the cloud, especially if you're, like I said, slow internet, metered, no internet, whatever, like shouldn't need it, shouldn't need the internet. All my

data is on that phone and this feature does that. So, you know, it's got issues, but I love that Apple keeps making strides about making it easy to set up a new iphone and transfer all your data let's start talking about some of the features of the of the pro phones one of them before we get to the big one we'll talk about battery life a little bit so i mean i've been using this phone while traveling and i will say i don't have numbers i can't give you exact numbers but it is very solid. Like this phone is lasting noticeably longer than my 10 S max. Like I am very impressed by the battery life of this phone. You know, like I can tell you that I can give you like my battery statistics, right?

If you, if people would want them, but I can tell you anecdotally that it is lasting. It's, it's doing a great job. Um. Like in the last 24 hours, I had five and a half hours of screen time and my phone never dipped below 50%, right? Like it's very, very solid. Like I am a big, big fan of the battery life on this thing. I think that it is definitely approaching a level at which I would feel I could travel with it and not be freaking out, which is how I am because I don't have a battery case, right?

I've been using my 10S Max with a battery case for when I'm doing things like today. Like today, I'm leaving Chicago at like 11.30 p.m. and I'm feeling totally fine about my phone. It's like one o'clock now. I have 75% battery life left and I've been using it all morning and doing all kinds of stuff, listening to podcasts, watching videos, ordering lifts, talking to people, making phone calls.

I've been using my phone a lot today and I'm really pleased with the battery life. I think that it's very, very good. That addition, like five hours, if that's what it is, you're going to notice that. And whilst I've not been sitting with a number spreadsheet recording all of my times i can tell you that like this battery life is better because i'm noticing it i'm surprised

when i see the little battery indicator and how full it is at different times of the day yeah and keep in mind too that when you're down at 33 battery battery, that means, you know, more hours than it used to because the whole life is longer. So yeah, it is. Um, I feel like there are two key features when you're thinking of upgrading your smartphone and their battery life and camera, and you got to give it to Apple.

Like those are the two features that they iterated primarily this time. And those are, those are the right features that they iterated primarily this time and those those are the right features and this is a huge leap like they have found a way to extend by many hours the battery life of these phones through adding battery capacity and making the processor more efficient and making the screen more efficient and making other components more efficient like they did lots of stuff and it is i think maybe doesn't get enough credit for being the single biggest leap in battery quoted battery life that the iphone has ever had which is you know astounding wild that it's happening now whilst everything's getting so much more powerful

but shows the work that apple's doing in a bunch of areas to enable it, right? And so, like, hats off to them. This is a wonderful feature, but I don't expect to get it next year. I don't expect this to keep happening. So let's talk about the camera. So just as like a kind of a very quick overview, there are a bunch of different things going on here. The Pro line now have three lenses, the regular wide angle the telephoto

that this have for years and also an ultra wide uh there is uh upgrades to the selfie camera so the front facing camera and then also night mode um what are your overall thoughts on the cameras that are that are in the pro phones my big problem with the 10r was that it doesn't let me zoom and of course the 11 doesn't let me zoom either so i i like having the pro phone that's got the telephoto lens because i use that all the time but having the ultra wide is fun i haven't really had enough experience yet with the sort of uh you know seeing around the edges and backing up or cropping wider or any of those kind of features that that are there where the wide kind of i've had it happen so yeah i i turned it on right you

know that you can and i took a picture and there was a little icon that i didn't understand it was like a square with a star star what does this mean like and i couldn't tap on it or anything but i figured what it was telling me was this feature, right? And then when I went into edit and crop, I could zoom out. So I've heard that everybody that wrote their reviews said, like, this is going to be improved in 13.1, and maybe it's turned on automatically. So it's actually something you have to enable in settings right now on the current, on 13.

So maybe in 13.1, it's enabled by default and or is made a little bit clearer, but it seems like that's something that's not working very well right now, but I have seen it work. It's interesting. It's a work in progress, but, and there are camera features

that aren't even in 13.1. So there's more to come. The sweater mode, whatever it's called. What is it called deep sweater deep sweat i've been using night mode a lot though and that has been that has been fun because it's nice to have that on i had that before just on the pixel the original pixel which is okay but like on really a much better camera on this iphone and being able to take those shots out in the twilight uh pretty nice the night mode is wild like i still have to do more testing myself right because i

really want to try the uh putting on a tripod some of the shots that i've seen of the like even the one that you took just i think i think it may have been handheld just in the street and you can see the stars in the sky but like i've seen people like what people have been able to do with it on a tripod when you can get like the 29 second uh exposure time like i love the i love everything about this feature i love the way that the photos look like they're developing in front of you it's like just like a very beautiful user experience and that's also the feedback to continue to hold your phone steady right like it's a very clever construction where they're animating that process of the of the photo brightening in as a way to give you feedback

that you need to keep on holding still it's very clever and kind of elegantly built i think and i have noticed that even though the phone a lot will like suggest an exposure time to you if you tap the little night mode thing a lot of the times you can actually extend it like it will let you do it for longer but it but you know you're maybe not going to get as steady look in a shot but like you can play around with it if you want to and uh like we were playing around with this on the podcast-a-thon and the result that we got like that's in that video is wild because we turned all the lights off and there were just two lights from laptops there was two laptop screens illuminating me and the photo that it took was crazy like you could still see like colors it was wild it was

just really wild right and everything that i've seen of this is like this is just like a fun thing to play around with and that's my kind of overall takeaway from the new camera system i think it is really fun to have new ways to take photos i consider that like a real like joy because i'm having a lot of fun experimenting right now with taking ultra wide photos as well like i don't fully know when i should be using the ultra wide camera over the wide so right now whenever i'm taking a photo i take both and compare them and then i can kind of learn when is this a good thing to use and when is it not um so that's been like a lot of fun for me so far like to kind of tinker around and see what

different kind of effect i get from each lens so i you know i encourage people to do the same thing um i really like the portrait mode you know you get the lens options now so you can use either the telephoto for portrait or the regular wide angle for portrait that's really good because you get completely different effects and that's awesome the selfie camera is so greatly improved the detail you get now i'm so pleased that they've made the the upgrade there that they have and i really like that you can get the wide angle in now is too um i i i'm really uh enjoying this i will say that like there's been a lot in all the reviews that i read everyone's saying that you know like well when you use when you're using video and you zoom between the cameras you barely notice a difference i totally notice a difference

between the lenses switching um it's not like me it's way better than before where it's like this snap but as you're like zooming in and going from lens to lens i see a little judder every time yeah i've got an animated uh a little animation on the um six colors where you can see it where i was just zooming out a little bit and right across the boundary line you know the detail changes the color changes a little bit it's just apple talks a lot about how these are all calibrated and they match and and and it's pretty seamless and in at least shooting video it is not seamless it is it's impressive but it's not even close to seamless so yeah that's what that's how i say it's like you know what this is pretty good but you can notice it so you know

i don't know if maybe it's different for different people maybe me and you are just in the same boat but we are definitely in the same boat um i want to talk about 3d Touch. Okay. This is where the phone falls over for me a bit. I am a heavy 3D Touch user, and Haptic Touch is not as good. It is slower. It feels less intuitive. Interacting with notifications is so much clunkier now than it used to be. I would get a notification,

press down and get the options immediately. Now I have to wait every time. Like I would find myself, you know, in the mornings, I would wake up and I'd have a bunch of notifications that I want to clear. Maybe they were emails or whatever, and I just want to archive them. They used to take me seconds. Like now, like I noticed it this morning. I'm waiting for the notification to open and then press archive.

Press and wait and then press archive. The action to turn on the camera isn't as reliable like i've had times where i've pressed it and nothing's happened because you have to long press it you should just tap that little icon now it shouldn't be a long press anymore yeah i know you can swipe the screen to bring up the camera but sometimes you have notifications you open the notifications like it's not consistent i i hit on a feeling about it yesterday this is a thing that makes my expensive phone feel a little less premium yeah it has taken a step backwards and it's made an experience i enjoy feel clunky and awkward it is literally a feature regression right you are getting the 10r experience

now instead of the the 10s experience on the 11 pro because it totally doesn't help that i have used the 10r right so like i know what it felt like before yeah which is why i think i'm really locked into this feeling of like i feel like you you've you've cheaped out on me here um but you know i really miss it i do really miss it feels to me like this is something that apple could adjust in software and make better by targeting like haptic touch when it originally started wasn't quite right and in ios 13 haptic touch is a much more close analog to 3d touch in a lot of ways where it wasn't before and that's good but i feel like there are tweaks they can make and like not in ios 14 there are tweaks they could make as 13

moves along even to make this a better experience because it doesn't feel like this needs to be rethought as much as they need some very specific scenarios where it works differently and on the lock screen for the camera and the flashlight is a good example um the i think the cursor movement stuff where you used to be able to three and who knows how many people did this, but you could 3D touch on the keyboard and you got a cursor and you can move it around. And now you have to tap and hold on the space bar and wait for that to be determined to be a long press. And then you can move the cursor around there. And, you know, there are probably ways that they can tweak timing.

There are probably ways that they can tweak timing and who knows, maybe even detect in other ways, ways of making this stuff feel a little more natural. But that's an example where it does feel like a regression. There's no doubt about it. And they can make it better, I think, than it is today. But you're right. Like, if you're somebody who used 3D Touch, even if it's only for a couple of gestures and they're gone like i've seen a lot of people complaining about the cursor movement thing because it just becomes part of your muscle memory to move that cursor around with a 3d touch that's i think that's basically the only 3d touch thing i did on my phone and it's gone and i every time i have to go oh right spacebar wait now i can

move it around and i don't know what the other options are. I kind of think that they should just use the iPad thing and let you put two fingers down on the keyboard, but oh, well. Face ID, still portrait only, doesn't work in landscape. So they didn't do whatever they did for the iPad. I would say it's like a little faster, but I only noticed the speed difference when I put both phones next to each other.

I don't feel it on its own. And I would say like it doesn't work dramatically better at weird angles like being on the desk or whatever. This really feels like minor updates to Face ID. It's not big. I tested this out with two phones, with a XS and with the 11 pro on a tabletop and i did the thing where i mean it was almost like um doing a doing a sit-up or testing your posture i was like you know trying to unlock them it's like not won't unlock won't unlock lean forward a little bit more won't unlock won't unlock lean forward a little bit more and then the uh 11 pro unlocked and the 10s didn't and then

i leaned slightly forward again and then the 10s unlocked and so i i thought to myself okay it is better but not in a way that anyone would notice yeah that is exactly it all right it's like you can you can do speed tests of a stopwatch if you want. But like in your daily life, I don't think people are going to recognize too much of a difference here. I want to see them keep making it better. But Face ID has not had its like Touch ID version two moment yet. And I think I was expecting that. And that has not happened. Maybe, you know, it's better on the iPad than it is on the iPhone, which is weird. I don't know what's going on there. The screen, the Super Retina XDR screen. I don't really know what to say about this. I will say today is a sunny day in Chicago. Yesterday was a very overcast and rainy day. And I do feel like the screen looked really good in bright sunlight. And I know that's what it's supposed to do. That's one of the bigger benefits of this screen.

Before then, I was like, I don't see any difference with the screen, but I did notice that. It looked really good today when I was outside in bright sunlight, better than my old phone, so I noticed that. Aside from that, I mean, I don't really have much experience with the HDR content. I don't know if you've spent time looking at nice-looking videos, but I don't know. It feels like a nice upgrade to the screen. I don't know if they needed to rebrand it. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It's very much like what I could say about the face ID thing, which is, is it better? I'm sure it is. Did I, could I notice even when I was looking at an HDR movie, one next to the other?

No. It's a good screen. And the sound is good. It's all good. And I'm sure it's incrementally better. But if you're coming, these are features that it's Apple pushing things forward, which is great. But unless you're coming from two or three years back, it's irrelevant. Because if you're coming from a year back, which some people are,

most people aren't, it's not anything you'd notice. So it's an incremental feature that doesn't matter, I guess, compared to the camera and the battery, which are incremental features that really do matter. So, you know, it depends on whether you're reviewing this for somebody who's coming from last year's model or who wants to know like how Apple is pushing its devices forward versus what's the difference between this and my phone that's two or three years old, in which case it's a bigger deal. Although I would argue like the iPhone 10 screen and the 11 Pro screen, you know, is there that big a difference even between those two yeah i don't know like if you're coming from a non-oled to an oled screen you'll you'll notice much more of a difference so like edina is going to be moving from a 10 to an 11 pro and i'm really keen to see what her experience is what does she pick out as the notable improvements because that should be a

big jump for her and i'm keen to see what she notices and what she doesn't so that i'm going to be paying attention to that i would say that overall i am happy with my phone and i love the new camera stuff but i am finding myself thinking all right what else does this new phone do and there isn't an answer like camera updates are a huge deal for a lot of people. And with the 11 Pro, they were a really big deal. Like the shots that I've gotten so far, I'm super happy with. And I've just kind of started scratching the surface.

Like I'm sure as the weeks go on, we're all going to have more to say about some of the photos that we're taking, right? As we're taking more photos in different conditions. But you have to really want a better camera for this phone to make sense to you of a year a year year over year upgrade i think is kind of my biggest takeaway or if you're somebody who who just desperately wants more battery but there are there are much cheaper ways to solve your battery problem right like you can buy a battery case from apple if

you're on a previous phone yeah so yes but that said as somebody who doesn't i'm never gonna buy a battery case and i do have an external battery with a with a wire that i can carry around you know alex cox style to keep my phone charged right like i could do that but i prefer not to um and you know know, so for me, it's like, well, yeah, you could get another external device. Yeah, but if I don't have to, because my phone lasts four hours longer, that like puts off how long I need to go

before I need to start thinking about having an emergency backup battery in place. That does matter. It doesn't, it can't be solved in the same way, you know, you can't clamp another camera lens really on another native camera lens onto your iphone after the fact like you can attach a battery but i do think that it is is still a big deal and it's more than just the lenses right apple's clearly changed the processing of these photos in these phones because there's i mean they said there's much but you can see the differences um so like i am a i am becoming more and more of a iphone photography person and i have in the last

year like i'm enjoying taking more pictures and sharing them like especially on instagram like that has become a thing that has become a joy in my life so it makes perfect sense for me to want to get a better camera from my camera and like so i'm happy with my upgrade but you have to really want it you have to really want camera and and as jason rightly pointed out really want battery for this to make sense to you if that's not your thing i don't know if you need this phone but if those are your things this is huge upgrades to both of them so yeah yeah and most people don't need a new phone every year bottom line but some people are on a plan where they get a new phone every year that's great and some people just want the new phone and that's fine that's fine these are where you're going to see the differences in

fact i would argue as a year over year upgrade this one's pretty great especially for a third generation third of the uh of the 10 it's pretty great and then on the 11 side of it like the 11 is cheaper than the 10r it's got most of the capabilities of the pro models one fewer camera like and a very very very good display even though it's not oled Like that's the other part of this story is that the 11 is a legitimate iPhone, a very good iPhone for a lot, you know, cheaper than the $1,000 iPhone 10 era that we're in and have been in for the last couple of years. So there's a lot to be said for that phone too. And that's obviously that's the second generation of that phone. But so there's a lot of good stuff going on here for Apple. Again, though, it really just sort of depends. Smart um so there's a lot of good stuff going on here for apple again though it

really just sort of depends smartphone buying now is a a very much a uh a collection of a whole bunch of different buying profiles right there's no one thing it's all fragmented so you know your judgment about a phone is going to be different depending on where you're coming from, what your budget is. If you're a every year upgrader, every two, every three, every four, right? Like there's completely different ways to, uh, to address it. And it's, uh, you can see it in some of the reviews in some of the, the big publications that are trying to kind of frame their iPhone reviews around, do you need, you know, to buy a new phone phone every year which the answer has been no for a little while now if not for a long while but you can see everybody kind of struggling with that all right this wasn't the only new product uh there's something else we want to talk about

including how we bought said products uh but let's take a break and thank our second sponsor and that is our friends over at sameboxBox. I'm sure that every single upgradian has something that they don't like about email, and that is why you should try SaneBox. While it would be lovely, it's not practical to just select all, delete all of your email. There's going to be some stuff in there you have to deal with. But one of the big problems about email is that all email from the face of it looks the same. At a glance, it's so difficult to try and decipher which messages need your attention. It's just this big long list.

Wouldn't it be lovely if your email could be pre-sorted before it even hits your inbox? That is what SaneBox is all about. SaneBox sorts through your email and moves all of the trivial stuff to different folders. So the only messages in your inbox are the ones that you actually need to deal with. And the great thing is that it will work seamlessly

with your current system and with any app. One of the best features of SaneBox is called the black hole. So if you get an email from an unwanted sender and they keep bugging you, right? Like, hey, answer this email, answer this email, and you don't want anything to do with it. Take that email, put it into the black hole, and you will never hear from that person ever again. With SaneBox, you can also set up email reminders, snooze your email, and so much more. One of the things that I love about SaneBox is the SaneNews folder, which collects all of the email newsletters that I subscribe to. I love a lot of email newsletters, like the Six Colors email newsletter. But the problem with newsletters is they also sit in my inbox with the emails that I need to do for my work stuff. emails that I need to do for my work stuff. And I love that with SaneBox, they can just be put into a different folder. So then when I'm ready to read them, I can go and read them at my leisure

rather than them filling up my inbox. So I love that. To help you get a little more organization in your email inbox, we've worked with SaneBox to get you a great deal. Just go to SaneBox.com slash UpgradeFM right now, and you'll get a two-week free trial and an extra $25 credit just because you listen to this show. You don't have to do any credit card information unless you decide to buy, so there's nothing to lose. Go check it out today and get your email finally under control. That is S-A-N-E-B-O-X, SaneBox.com slash upgrade, U-P-G-R-A-D-E-F-M, upgrade FM, SaneBox.com slash upgrade FM. Our our thanks to samebox for their support of this show and relay fm so uh do you want to talk about your apple store experience a little bit yeah i

think it's worth mentioning that one of the things that it goes on in this week is it's like christmas in the apple store it's their one of their busiest weeks of the year and i went to my local apple store and i think you and steven went to a store in memphis is that right yeah we went to a store in memphis uh steven went to pick up the phones which also included a phone for me which i didn't know about and i was just like playing around with stuff including trying on the ceramic apple watch which oh my god jason i'm absolutely in love with uh it's bad it It's very bad. All your friends could have told you that would happen. Yes. I absolutely love the white ceramic Apple Watch

and I'm possibly at the moment trying to hunt one down. No comment. But I adore it. It's wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we hear from people too. This is a lot of people's only or primary Apple Store experience.

I went on Sunday and got an Apple watch because I wanted to talk about it on the show and I didn't have one yet because mine wasn't coming until later because they turned on the pre-orders for it while I was covering the event. And so I was a little late in the process. I got an email from an upgradian named troy who was talking about his experience on saturday buying a watch and and i think this is an interesting way to frame kind of how apple works with this stuff he said it was bonkers i had to order it standing in the store on my phone for in-store pickup and then choose a pickup window that was three hours later i saw them do this today i went into the store in chicago and they have this little line for if you want to come in and then choose a pickup window that was three hours later. I saw them do this today. I went into the store in Chicago and they have this little line for if you want to come in and buy stuff.

And they were walking people through this process like, oh, just do this and then they'll text you a pickup window. Yeah. And he says, I have to choose a pickup window. It was three hours later. Why? I have no idea. I was there 20 minutes after they opened.

There were more employees than customers in the store. There was no line to pick up a product it's like yeah i mean probably they need some amount of time because they actually have to put the watch and the case together which they which they didn't but that you don't need three hours so i now i will i got mine on sund, and what I did was I pre-ordered the watch from the app from my house, and then picked the first time, which was a couple hours later, and then went and got it. And it took 10 minutes, maybe, and I just walked right out with it. But it was a very busy store, and they can be pretty chaotic. And they can be pretty chaotic.

I struggle with Apple's desire to fulfill customers at retail with its taking of pre-orders. And I think Troy's point is a good one, which is, if there's nobody here, why do I need to wait three hours to get my watch? And why do I have to order it using your app? Can I not just tell you this? Do you have this watch in stock stock can you bring it to me and i'll give you my money i mean he used the uh futurama shut up and take my money image like i mean really i think i get why there are extenuating circumstances but i also look at this and say this is just weird apple like there's there's nobody there and it's opening time and it's not the first day, it's day two and you have his watch in stock.

Why can you not just take his money and bring him a watch? Even if he has to wait 10 minutes or 20 minutes, why have him go to an app, place an order and then tell him to come back to right where he's standing three hours later when there's nobody waiting? It doesn't make a lot of sense i also get frustrated that i pre-ordered the watch on day one but a little bit late and was told you'll get it on october 1st or you know late september but the day after they came out i could literally just walk into my local Apple store and get it.

Which again, I know why they do that. Because what they don't want is to fulfill all the pre-orders and have it be that if you come to an Apple store curious about the new watch, they say, oh, we're backordered. You can't get one for three weeks. They're worried that they're going to lose walk-in sales. They're going to lose casual sales from people who do not think about pre-ordering. At the same time, I've said it before. I'll say it again. I kind of want Apple to send me a little ping saying, this model that you ordered that's backordered is also in stock at your local store.

Would you like me to convert this order? Because I'll just say, that other order is still coming and i'm not keeping two watches so apple is going to take back one of my purchases as a return and have to process it and that's a cost for them and that's a cost for them and so i get not wanting to make it like automatic but maybe if you've got my watch a mile from my house and I'm supposed to wait here for a week, maybe give me a heads up and say, would you like to just go pick it up today instead? And then convert that and then stop that shipment. But that's not how their supply chain and their retail chain are set up right now.

And I just, they're like when we were talking about ways of improving haptic touch. It's like I look at this and I say, this is fixable. There are things that could be done. I don't know all the ins and outs. I don't know all the complexity. I'm sure that they are making difficult decisions. But in what Troy talks about, in what I experienced, it's like, I think they could do better. I think they could do a better job with some of this stuff.

And it's the first iPhone launch for Deirdre O'Brien as the head of retail. Hopefully, she and her team will take some lessons away and make some tweaks for next time. But this could still be a better experience. Because as much as Apple has done to tweak over the last four years, the iPhone upgrade experience, the retail experience. And I also heard from a lot of people, I should say, who got their appointment on day one and went there and then they were in line for an hour. Like, that's got to change. You can't, you just can't do it.

You can't do it that way. Do you want to talk about the Apple Watch Series 5? Like, I've only kind of seen them in stores and I've seen people wearing them and the always on screen, like friends and stuff, the always on screen looks i think it looks really nice i think they did a great job of it yeah that's that's the short version of this we talk about battery life and and uh and stuff like that the camera on the iphone the feature on the series 5 is that always on screen like that is why you get a series 5 and i I will tell you, Mike, if I had to choose, keep using the Series 4 or keep using the iPhone XS, and I don't have to choose. But if I had to choose, if I had to choose, I would keep using the old iPhone.

Because I think the always- on display is an enormous feature. It's as enormous as getting the cellular connectivity. And I have the cellular watch as well. And so I can leave my house without my phone and I'm still connected. Like it's a huge leap forward for the watch. And yeah, otherwise the watch is basically the same, like looks the same unless you're getting like the titanium or the ceramic looks the same, acts the same. Like it looks the same unless you're getting like the titanium or the ceramic. Looks the same, acts the same. It's about as fast. All those things are the same.

But the always on, the fact that I have to retrain myself because I have this whole kind of muscle memory now of aggressively flipping my wrist over to check the time. of aggressively flipping my wrist over to check the time when at several times i've caught myself kind of like accessing gestures from back in the day where i wore a watch that showed the time all the time where you just look down at your wrist and see the time and then you move on with your life instead of having to lift your wrist and flick it like oh yeah that's right and lauren is very happy about it because she says she used to sneak glances at my watch to check the time all the time. And ever since I started wearing an Apple watch, it's frustrating because it's just blank and she can't do it.

And she has to look somewhere else to try to figure out what time it is. I'm like, yeah, yeah, it's a big, it's a big deal. I like it a lot. There's some weird things about it. The infograph modular face, the way they've chosen to do it, it seems, is like when it's dimmed, everything's slightly smaller, which has this effect. I think it's slightly smaller. I don't think it's an effect of the brightness.

But when you flip it open and it comes active, it's like it kind of like pops up, like it's coming slightly toward you, which is kind of fun, but also kind of weird. But, you know, it's all good i like it i'm i'm so happy that they finally did it yeah i'm i'm intrigued to play with it more and see like what it would i'm i mean i'm just intrigued to see if this if that feature dot would change my apple watch experience in the way that i think it would because it was one of the things that really turned me off of the apple watch so um do you have anything anything much more to say about the apple watch now or is this maybe something to follow back up on in future episodes you and i'll follow up once you get your

ceramic apple watch we'll talk about it some more uh when so um but in the meantime uh the only other thing i would say and this has come up it just came up in the chat room it's come up on twitter i've seen it um always on watch display like the battery life isn't as good now i feel like their battery life was so good that it doesn't matter um but is is it using battery at a pace that's a little bit greater than the series 4 it is yeah i i think i've seen that too and it's hard to tell in the early days because there's all sorts of other weird things that happen when you get a new device and battery life kind of settles over time um but you know it seems to me that the battery gets discharged a little bit faster but i think they had hours to play with yeah i've seen some people that seem to be having weird issues like casey casey was really struggling with his but seems like maybe it was an outlier rather than the norm.

I don't know. I'm intrigued to see more feedback from people over the period of time where they're getting used to what the battery life change is like. Because, as you say, it may just be like, it's fine. You just charge it every day like you would always. But it seems like some people might be struggling a little bit more. But this is just one of those things we're going have to wait and see on i think the battery life stuff um i also wanted to touch on ios 13 it is buggy on the new phones whoa um i didn't have a ton of it ios 13 on my 10s max was fine it is not fine on my 11 pro the camera app sometimes just doesn't open i can just get left

with a blank screen my favorite bug well okay so there's two i have two bugs here pulling down on the home screen to access spotlight sometimes it's just huge delays like i'm just waiting i can't tap anything my favorite bug though this has happened to me multiple times i pull down on spotlight and every tap that i make just enters the letter q into the search field that's all it does so i tap an app icon q i tap any keyboard letter q q q q q q q q over and over again until i swipe up to get rid of it and try again so super buggy but 13.1 is coming now on the 24th which is tomorrow as we record this, not the 31st. I expect because of stuff like this, right?

Like it's buggy and people have just got their new phones. So Apple have brought 13.1 forward a little bit to probably help some of that stuff. Yeah, it's going to be a busy fall, I think, in terms of software updates. I think Apple's going to keep on pushing them out. Yeah, I've seen the one where you pull down to search and the keyboard just is invisible that's a good one i think you can still type on it too but there are no keys that are visible uh yeah there's a lot of weird quirks it's funny after a summer of using the betas you get a you kind of get used to the quirks um and then you have to remind yourself oh this is shipping and it's still a little bit weird

it's a work in progress i'll say i'm a big fan of uh all of the third-party apps that are shipping with dark modes now like i have way more dark modes and i'm pleased about that um and also using the photos app on my iphone which is where i tend to look at my photos right because i hadn't had 13 on uh my iphone i really love it i love the the new kind of photos to have with the days and the way that everything animates and it like shows stuff automatically and does its best to try and like choose the best photos to show me for days months and years i think it's really nice i'm a big fan of that feature actually so i think that's a really good one right like i i think the stuff that they've done to photos is actually really nice.

I know you are the photos guy. Are you mostly in agreement with that assessment? Yeah, there are more editing tools than there used to be. They killed the black and white editing tools, but you can basically get the same effects by using the black and white themes. Like, there are filters, and then you can adjust inside them. But there's a lot of new stuff in there. I'm still frustrated that you can adjust inside them but uh there's a lot of uh of new stuff in there i'm still frustrated that you can't do retouching there's no retouching tool on ios so you have to use a an external app to do that but uh but yeah it's it's good lots of good stuff in

there all right and again there's still more to unpack with 13 right like i'm waiting to see a lot of ipad updates with multi-window support i haven't seen a lot of that yet, and I'm really keen to see how it's going to change my iPad experience. So there's still much more to come with this stuff over the next few weeks. I feel like usually at this time of year, it's like, oh, we're going to go quiet for a bit. The new phones are out and the software's out and that's it. But I do feel like this year, especially with a lot of the iOS 13 stuff, it's going to take longer to really gestate than usual

until I understand the impact of the software changes. So I'm excited about that myself. All right, today's episode is also brought to you by Smile, and I want to talk to you about their wonderful service, TextExpander. You can unlock your productivity with TextExpander, making everything that you write repetitively available everywhere that you type. You can talk about text, spreadsheets, web forms, or more. No matter where you're typing, you're going to have these snippets available to you, keeping your messages consistent, accurate, and up to date. By sharing snippets of all of your co-workers, you can make

sure that everyone is on the same page. TextExpander for Teams is a great collaboration tool. It makes it easy to organize snippets for your support, customer service and other departments. So you can give your teams only the snippets that they need to make sure that they're keeping everything up to date.

And we do that here at RelayFM. We work with a bunch of people now. It's wonderful, but we sometimes need to make sure that we've got a consistency in the messaging that we have to companies that we work with. So setting up TextExpander snippets

to do that is great. So, you know, the emails that we're sending, make sure it has all the necessary information. We have fill-in fields, so everything's nice and easy to do. Wonderful. Love it. TextExpander is available for macOS, Windows, iPhone, iPad, and Chrome as well. And show listeners can get 20% off their first year. Just go to textexpander.com slash podcast.

That is textexpander.com slash podcast. That is texexpander.com slash podcast. If you've been meaning to try it out, do it now. texexpander.com slash podcast for that 20% off your first year. Our thanks to TexExpander for their support of this show and all of RelayFM. So it's time for some hashtag ask upgrade questions, Jason. First one comes from Greg. Greg wants to know,

what is your stance on sharing locations of your friends and family with find my do you care that your friends can see where you are at all times do you toggle your location on and off i don't toggle my location on and off i don't care that my friends can see where i am at all times if i had a kind of random friend who was close to me, like if I had a friend who I was sharing location with, who was like in my town or in my nearby, in my region, I might feel a little bit weird about it, but most of my friends are far away.

And when they travel, I can see that they are off in another place and I can send them a little note saying, oh, you know, like Lex Friedman is a Find My Friends friend of mine. and he travels so much and it's very, it's really fun to be like, where's Lex today? Oh, he's in LA today. Okay.

He's in New York City today. Now he's in Seattle. Like he gets around and it's fun. And I can see that, you know, your dot and Stephen's dot are together in Memphis. That's really fun. So it just doesn't bug me. If it did bug me, I wouldn't share my location location but in most cases it's more kind of novel and then when we're together it's actually very convenient um i will say i will admit it here my mother knows my location at all times

and that does lead to her occasionally sending me a text saying oh i see you were at this location but you know what i think it makes her feel good and it doesn't really bother me because like, and I could totally turn off my location if I wanted her to not see where I was, but I don't care. So yeah, for me, it's just a personal choice for me.

I think it's just kind of fun and it's not a big deal. And my family, it's basically, that's an agreed upon thing in our family is that, you know, for safety reasons and also for parenting reasons, um, we keep our locations shared at all times.

I am in agreement with you on everything. Uh, so yeah, um, big thumbs up. Uh, Ryan says, how hot does it get to wear a suit for six hours in a studio? So Ryan's referring to the podcast I was wearing a lovely jacket, and so it's like basically a suit. I was wearing a whole suit, effectively. But that studio is a very, very professional studio they have in St. Jude, so the temperature control was wonderful. I was perfectly comfortable for the entire time.

Usually when we do live shows, I'm a big hot sweaty mess by the end of it, but this one was awesome. So it was perfectly fine to wear for six hours brian asks now that ios 13 and many apps are giving dark mode away for free what will this mean for apps that treat dark mode as a premium feature behind a subscription great question because this has been a thing for a while right where applications have been including hey you want to sign up for our premium you also get themes in dark mode but now dark mode is becoming way more expected yeah because the system does it

so my kind of feeling on this really is that i'm sorry but i think developers have to give it up now i think this is a feature you have to give up yeah i think that everybody's going to make their own decisions but my gut feeling is that that's going to need to move out into just a regular feature and you'll need to come up with some other multiple dark mode themes that you pay for right but like this i think for a lot of apps there should be a standard dark mode but then you could have different colors and stuff like that and you could make people pay for those but the idea of being able to just toggle a dark mode on and putting it behind a paywall i think that time may may have come to an end yeah i agree i think it's the best practices you should be uh available in light and

dark mode if you're in the app yeah yep matthew asks i hope that if disney plus supports the tv app that it will get netflix to reconsider what do you think the odds are of this i think disney plus is going to get you know on be on the apple tv app and and have connectivity to the tv app but um netflix you know netflix data they feel very proprietary about i don't what are the odds that netflix is gonna give apple access to its data very low slim i also you know i i've had disagreements with friends on this but i think that you will agree with me netflix doesn't need it netflix will get nothing for for doing this right like i know it's a better user experience but netflix is still dominant netflix is like a

whole different thing to streaming it's like there are streaming services and then there's netflix it's like a whole different thing all of its own now i don't think it hurts them to not be a part of the apple tv app i think the most likely scenario would be that netflix and apple would make a deal that would be basically apple caving where apple would yes allow netflix to provide less than what they're supposed to provide as a partner and And the danger in that is that other partners will then want that deal. Like if Apple goes to Netflix and says, well, could you give us like a feed

of like the five most recently viewed things or something like that? But Netflix response is gonna be, if we update that feed all the time, you now have a complete viewing history for every customer of ours who's also on your platform. And we don't wanna give you that. And I can see why. and we don't want to give you that and i see i can see

why so i don't know i think it's not very likely brian asks should i get a ps4 xbox controller to use with apple arcade games i have a switch of pro controllers but those aren't compatible so it's the same question that they got on ask atp this week i think it was it well well no i'm taking it because this is our segment damn it xbox so you like the xbox better than the ps4 the xbox controller is more comfortable than the playstation controller in my opinion john syracuse basically said you should try them both if you can go to a friend's house or go to a microsoft store or whatever whatever you need to do because different people have different hands and they might find one more comfortable than the

other i agree with that but i think the xbox one is the more comfortable right like that is my if you can't do what john says i mean you could probably go to a best buy and hold them both right like you could go to a store where they have gaming setups and you could hold them yep um bring some hand sanitizer with you yeah please but xbox controllers i think are more ergonomically designed than a playstation controller yeah and rajiv asks does silence unknown callers in ios 13 work on just calls of unknown caller ids or are all numbers that are not in your contact list silenced for instance if i order a pizza and the pizza place calls me to confirm the order would that call be silenced by this option so i did some digging around in settings and it's the setting says incoming calls will continue to ring from people in your contacts

recent outgoing calls and serious suggestions so my expectation would probably be that unless you had the pizza place in your contacts it's probably not going to ring no if you call the pizza place to make the order and they call you called yes but i'm thinking that maybe it was made online and then they call that's my thinking right because that's how i would then you need them in your contacts or it wouldn't ring yeah yeah or unless somehow sirius picked it up um i would i like the thought of this feature but i'm not going to turn it on because i can imagine too many scenarios that makes me nervous like what if i if I have a family member in the hospital and the hospital calls? And I know that they might leave a message board if they don't.

I just haven't turned this on yet. I don't know if I'm going to. I get it, but I don't get... I get, I would say, an average amount of spam calls. If I was getting bombarded with them, like I know some people, some of my friends are, I would turn it on. But it's not that bad for me right now especially considering my phone is pretty much always on do not disturb anyway so it's not really a thing that bothers me but have you turned that feature on i haven't but um i might maybe it's worth trying out i don't know but we'll see thank you to

everybody that sent in a hashtag ask upgrade. Just send out a tweet with that hashtag, and it may be included for a future episode. If you want to find show notes for this week, you can go to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 264. Jason, I'm sure you're working on some big articles right now over at sixcolors.com. You know, reviews and some more features of iOS 13. You know, the usual. The usual. You can also follow Jason at JasonL on Twitter. I am at

iMike. I am YKE. If you want to see some of the photos I'm taking with my new iPhone, you can follow me on Instagram. I'm iMike on Instagram as well. Go to stjude.org slash pineapple to donate. We're still donating. Still raising money until the end of September. So we've still got a week to go.

So you can still go and donate yes we have raised over a quarter of a million dollars due to your wonderful incredible generosity but if you still haven't donated to St Jude you still can and don't forget the podcast video is available now on YouTube and we'll put a link to that in the show notes

as well in case you want to go and watch our hijinks. Thanks again to our sponsors this week, the fine folk over at SaneBox, Zapier and Smile and we'll be back next time. Until then say goodbye Jason Snell. Goodbye everybody.