Upgrade - 265: Nothing But Canned Answers

Episode Date: September 30, 2019

Jason finished his iPhone 11 review nearly two weeks after the fact, Myke is back in the Apple Watch game with a new Series 5 model, and we hear from a bunch of Apple Store employees.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 265 today's show is brought to you by pingdom fresh books and direct mail my name is mike hurley and i am joined by mr jason snell hello mr mike hurley welcome home hello jason snell I have a hashtag Snell talk question for you. Oh, could you believe that's how we're going to start the episode? That's unusual for us to start with the first segment, but okay, I'll allow it. It's gone to Raphael. Raphael asks what your daily average word count is. And I wanted to maybe refine it a little in case you don't know the answer to that question, but you may. And I wanted to add to it to say, like, this time of the year when you're writing reviews,

and we're going to talk about some of those later on, what is kind of the average amount of words that you will write in a day if you're really focused? Okay, so I don't – my job is not just sit and write words. So I don't have – I'm not a, like I know novelists and they have a target count for every day. And I'm sure when you have done NaNoWriMo,

you've tried to do like a target. Oh, sure. You have to. If you're going to write 50,000 words in 30 days, you've got to write 1,666 words a day. But the, is that the target? I can't even remember. Anyway, there's words a day. But the... Is that the target? I can't even remember.

Anyway, there's a target number. Write 2,000 words a day if you want. It's going to be in that ballpark. 1,666 times 30 is 49,980. So you'd have to write, I don't know, like 20 words of thank yous at the end or something. Well, yeah, yeah. You're right.

1,667 words a day. The truth is that my job is not just that. I have all sorts of other things I do, including this podcast and running my own little podcast sitting and writing full time and that was the only thing I did was just writing words, even then you have to actually use the stuff and do research. You know, you have to think about what you want to write about and you have to try stuff out. And so the words are just a part of the just one part of the job. So I think your refining of this question is good. I would say, you know, my Macworld column is usually about a thousand words. A lot of the pieces that I write are a thousand words. Link pieces are much shorter, obviously,

when I'm just quoting something and linking to it. I could, you know, so I don't have an average word count. Your refined answer, like if I'm really cranking, yeah, I could totally write six, seven, 8,000 words in a day if that's all I'm doing the whole day. And it's for something where I have a heavy deadline and i just have to do it um or i guess

happens sometimes similarly but in the inverse if it is something you are incredibly like focused on right like that there is a thing where you're like i am all in on this like not necessarily as a deadline but like you've you've had a spark right and you're just going for it sure although nothing really focuses you like a deadline and i find that those i find that those those days where i'm writing and writing and writing and writing are generally motivated by having something that has to get done or that i have to dive deep into because otherwise because it's taxing like writing that much you are doing nothing else. And you're, you get tired, you get mentally exhausted from the focus that's required of that. And so, you know, it's not something I could do at that level every day, but it does happen. The iPhone review that I just posted on Six Colors,

that's only about 4000 words. But usually my pieces are even, you know, OS reviews or whatever, they're a little bit longer. And, you know, I don't know. I don't know. I can definitely write several thousand words in a sitting if I need to. It just depends on the context of it. But there's a balance there of the research goes into it. You got to think about what you're going to write. You can't just write random words. So it's complicated. But I can be very, very productive when I want to slash need to be. Can't we all? Can't we all?

No, we can't all. It's hard. Well, maybe some of us can, some of us can't. We'll find out. Thank you so much to Raphael for the hashtag Snell Talk question. If you would like to send in a question

to help us open an episode of the show in the future, just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk question, if you would like to send in a question to help us open an episode of the show in the future, just send out a tweet with the hashtag Snell Talk and it will be picked up. I would like to, I think this may be the last time now that we talk about our St. Jude fundraiser that's been going on throughout the month of September, which has been absolutely incredible. We have been raising money for St. Jude Children's Cancer Research Hospital throughout the entire month. We've done many special events, including our podcast-a-thon. I will remind you we started with a goal of $75,000. As we are sitting here today, as we

are approaching the very final day of September, we have currently raised $296,000. Jason, $296,000, Jason. $296,738 has been raised by the RelayFM audience for St. Jude, which is absolutely unbelievable. It is an unfathomable amount of money.

Thank you so much to everybody who has donated. This is an incredible showing of support for a wonderful cause. You can still donate. Put yourself at $300,000. Maybe we will hit that before the end of the day. I really do hope so, because why not just hit another incredible amount of money? Just thank you so much. It's really from the bottom of my heart, and I'll say it for Stephen too,

and all of us here at RelayFM. The amount of money that has been generated for this cause really means the world to us, so thank you so much. You can go to stjude.org to donate to support childhood cancer around the world. That is stjude.org. St. Jude are an incredible

organization that helps so many people, so thank you so much for that. Isn't that an amazing amount of money? On one level, I am completely blown away because I remember you standing at my house in my backyard and saying, well, we're really, we're going to get

to 75,000, so we're really going to have a goal of 100,000. And here you are at nearly triple that goal. Also, I start to think about what the heck we're going to do for next year. I don't even want to think about that yet if we hit 300 000 we could droop with our original like 75 goal but yes sure tripled the 100 which we tripled the secret goal yeah i don't know what we'll do next year but boy howdy we're gonna try so we'll think about that we heard from lots of

people uh in app in apple retail uh over the last week about the retail experience. Jason, before we do this, though, actually, I would like to share an Apple retail experience that I had because it also kind of sucked. Listener Mike. I'm upgrading Mike. Tell me your story. I want to tell this story before we talk about the feedback that we got. So we'll talk about this later on in the episode, but I am now an owner of an Apple Watch. I pre-ordered it.

What? No. Come on. I would never have guessed who could have imagined that i would have ended up buying an apple watch a ceramic one after the conversation ceramic oh what a surprise surprise it's everybody's surprise um i ordered it you know as you do out of my pickup window i went and then waited for 30 minutes just at a table while you know there were other people coming in other people that

were coming in after me getting picked up before me i had to go and remind the guy that i was there before anybody came over you know and it's this whole thing of like go wait at this table go wait at the table it's like 20 people around the table they do this wild thing we're in their system they're like describing what you look like i saw a friend of the show alex cox having an issue where uh they took off a sweater and then couldn't be found by an Apple Store employee. They were telling me about this like a couple of days ago. Yeah. Yeah. Don't change your, that would be a great thing to do, right? Go in with like a jacket and a hat and sunglasses. And then as soon as they leave,

take those all off and see how long it takes for them to figure out who you are. Yeah. So I didn't have a great experience in the App Store either. Would you like to go through some of the feedback that we did get from App Store employees about what's going on here? Yeah, we definitely heard from a bunch of people trying to, you know, some of it was explained, some of it was defend, some of it was, there was a lot of stuff because we're talking about the retail experience and obviously it's close to them because they're working in it. Definitely got some feedback from people who basically were saying, look, this is really hard. It's very busy.

We did a pretty good job given how much pressure there is on a launch event, which I totally get. I don't think our point when we talk about this stuff is to say that Apple Store employees are not doing a good job. This is not on the employees at all. It's a system that is created around them. Exactly right. Our point is not, hey, Apple Store employees, you work harder or anything like that. It's that Apple needs to be solving some of these issues

that come up and considering ways to refine and improve the process next time. But it's a process issue that we're talking about. And I believe that they are. In the same way that the upgrading process from phone to phone gets better every year, I wouldn't be surprised if every year they are refining they are refining but neither thing is perfect right yeah i've actually even heard through the grapevine that they're at least toying with the idea of some of the stuff that we mentioned um the idea of for

example if you have an online order like i was saying about how i ordered my watch and they said it's gonna it's not gonna be there for however long for a few weeks but it's in stock at my local store having you know they're apparently at least through the grapevine this is what i hear uh at least investigating the possibility of how could you convert an online order into a store breaking news jason snell says uh that apple is somebody might be considering i mean that's not a guarantee that it'll happen but i think that that's not surprising what we said is it's not surprising that um apple would be looking i mean right they would be if you're an apple store executive you were not doing your job if you

aren't realizing all the places that you think the system is a little bit weak and are wondering. And some of the answers may be, wow, that's not going to solve this, right? But thinking about it, thinking about it, because there are some issues, right? Like if you order your Apple Watch and it's not going to be there for two weeks and it hasn't shipped yet and you go into the store can they convert it maybe but what if it's already shipped well can they can they divert your ups package at that point or they're like sorry it's already shipped uh but as we said last week you end up this in this situation and this happened to me where uh you go and buy an apple watch and then you have to do a return because then the other one comes a week later and it's got one of them has to be returned at that point.

And that's not great for Apple because they have to they have to restock it and there's cost associated with it. So I'm sure they're looking at stuff like that. The question is, you know, how complicated is it? How much work do they want to do to make it happen? And does it, you know, does it work out in terms of their set of priorities for next year? But I have no doubt that they're looking at it. And so that's good. That's good to hear. I also heard that, you know, at some stores, they will, in the example of the letter writer we got last week, at some stores, I heard from somebody who said, you know, at our store,

if that happened, we would absolutely see if that Apple Watch was in stock. And if you're already being helped, like they'll bring out the watch in the band and ring you out. And that's the end of it. Like the reservation system is supposed to be for peak times when they don't have enough employees. It should not be deployed ideally when what the letter writer said was there's basically nobody there and the store had just opened and there was nobody waiting in line and that letter writer was told, make an online order and come back in two hours. And so I definitely heard that that sounded unusual, at least to one particular Apple store employee in their store. I also heard from somebody, just an interesting bullet point about wired transfer,

you know, where you can actually plug the phones in and transfer the data over a wire, which is not particularly, uh, faster than doing the wireless connection. And what they said was wired connections are really good in the Apple store because everywhere in the Apple store are iPhones that are shooting out data over Wi-Fi to do transfers or whatever. And it is a hostile environment for data transfer. I bet. Right? Yeah.

And as well, just having that as an option, just so you are confident that even if the Wi-Fi for the entire store dropped, that you're not going to have to start this process all over again right yeah yeah i mean it's just it's it's a it's a smart thing i mean i don't think again i don't i don't think it's the wi-fi of the store because i don't i think this is all point to point device to device but the problem is they're all using the exact same spectrum which means that you know for those who remember way back to when Steve Jobs had to tell everybody to turn off their computers so that he could demo a Wi-Fi feature,

like, you can saturate the spectrum around you with Wi-Fi and then the connections break. A billion devices connected to the Wi-Fi in any Apple store at one time. Exactly. Or transferring data over a wireless transfer, right? Like there's so many different ways that work. So anyway, that was an interesting little data point that the wire, one of the

ways that that wire transfer feature makes sense is actually in Apple stores when they're doing that. And then I heard from a few people that the delays with the watch and getting the watches out to you and why they need to build in time to do it is actually about what we speculated about, which is that the watch studio approach, which is very clever because they're no longer kind of saying, well, you can only have this watch with this band because now they've got a bunch of boxes with bands and a bunch of boxes with watches and they put them together in the little wrapper, the little cardboard wrapper that goes over them with the two tabs. And now, oh, you've got an Apple Watch with a band, but you got to pick.

That's great. They got to put those together backstage and then bring them out to you. And that is a delay because you can imagine that they are getting, they're prepping all of their watches for pickup from customers. And they've got a backlog. And there's somebody back there who has to. And it's not just sticking them in, right? They've got to, like, scan them and mark them as being for this order. And it's like, there's a lot going on to do that.

And this is an example where there is a potentially frustrating buying experience on the outside of the store that needs to be improved, but it's actually being caused by an innovation that they're doing that is less customer hostile, which is you don't have to buy a band you don't want. You can buy the band you want instead of what they used to do, which is you had to buy the watch with a band you don't want a lot of the time and then separately get the band you do. Or you have to wait because while they have your watch and they have your band, they don't have them together. And so there's nothing you can do about it. It's great that they're taking that part and separating it,

but the bad side of that is that it can cause some delays while the assembly is happening in the back. Okay, that makes sense. But yeah, the big issue is like when we talk about the iPhone setup experience or any other aspect of this, what we're not saying is,

in this case, the Apple retail employees are doing a bad job. What we're saying is, how could this be better? And what are the weak spots? And is Apple trying to figure this out? And what are some possibilities? And I think that the Apple Store employees are working hard under difficult circumstances whenever there's a product launch. But those moments of stress are where we can glean some insight into what's working and what's not working at Apple Retail. And they've shown in the past that they are interested in improving the system. And that will make the process better for the employees and the customers, hopefully. I just have a couple of headlines for Upstream.

Apple has released three trailers to highlight its children's content for Apple TV+. So Snoopy in Space, which we've seen already, but they've got another trailer for that. Ghost Writer, which is a show where four friends team up to figure out why a ghost at a haunted bookstore is releasing fictional characters into the world and it's a mix of like live action and cg uh and in the trailer that's a remake yeah it's it's a yeah they bought that property right

it was a 90s yeah tv show yeah and uh i believe in the trailer you can see the kids all using iphones which is there you go if you're under that kind of stuff it's a product placement uh and another trailer for helpsters which is the sesame workshop project this had stage time during the apple event if you remember when big bird came on and introduced another character and they talk about like coding and stuff like that right that's this show um all of these three will be premiering on november 1st as part of the original slate of programming that apple will have available, which is in just about a month before Apple TV Plus will be rolled out to people.

And TiVo, Jason, your favorite. TiVo customers will soon see ads before their recordings. Pre-roll ads for all customers, no matter what their subscription level is on any device that runs the software called TiVo Experience 4,

which is their operating system, they will be skippable ads, which makes me wonder why even bother. Well, I mean, TiVo has ad skipping anyway. And so it feels like they've just decided, well, why don't we just put pre-rolls in and people can skip those too or not? And I don't think it makes any sense.

TiVo is not the company that made tivo it's a company called rovio that renamed itself tivo after it bought the assets of tivo it uh that's a confusing sentence all right so it's right well it's not the original company anymore is what you're saying no okay no they got they got bought by a company that owns a whole bunch of intellectual property and various patents on various things and stuff like that. And they are, I'm not, I'm really not sure what they're doing other than trying a bunch of stuff out. It seems kind of baffling to me when this was first reported, I think everybody kind of assumed, oh, this might be a way because there's a monthly fee to do TiVo, that this might be a way to try and encourage people to buy the product

by making, you know, Amazon style, right? With special offers, like a cheaper version of TiVo or the TiVo service that has some ads in it. And then you can, you know, or you can pay more, but they, they said, Nope, we're just going to put this everywhere. And the demo is really disappointing. The other thing about this as well, what's a, what's the big deal if you press play and it starts with an ad, because maybe your recording started with an ad anyway, and you just press the ad skip button that you press anyway, and you skip the ad. Well, it's like two things. One is your question, which is if the people who use your service skip ads, why are you putting an ad in and making it skippable?

Because it's like, okay, first off, they don't want to see the ads. It's like one of the main selling points of the entire product, right? Is it just that there are some people who don't know how to do that and they just press play and sit there? I don't think, I mean, I'm sure some of those people exist, but it seems very, very strange to focus on that kind of a market. So it doesn't make any sense.

And then the second thing is the actual experience. You talk about us picking apart Apple store experiences. The TiVo experience, at least in the beta that somebody posted on the internet, you press play on your recording and then you wait because it's slow and it's loading. And so you have to sit through the pause as it loads the ad and then it starts playing the video ad. And then you press the skip button and then you wait because it's bad software until it shifts to your actual recording. And then you can see the recording.

So if it were seamless and they were patching in, it would be one thing. But you're also sort of like waiting for the ad to buffer or something. I don't even know what. It's such a bad idea. And I would be more up in arms about it except for two things. One of which is I am not on TiVo Experience 4, which is also called Hydra. It's their really lousy overhauling of their user interface. I don't like it at all.

So I'm not using it. I'm still using the old version and which they've had for 15 years, 20 years, and it's great. And the other thing is, I feel like the, the era of the DVR box is coming to an end. And this is why I think it's really dumb for them to do this is all they're doing is providing an impetus for people to finally just cut the cord and stop using TiVo and use a cloud DVR and just be done with TiVo or go to their cable company's DVR. Their whole idea here is they're a better experience and you have to pay for it. And it's a third party experience, but it's better for me,

like the time is coming and I can see it coming now where I just don't have a TiVo anymore. And I'm using an app for an over the top, you know, TV service that's got a cloud DVR, whether that is Hulu or PlayStation view or YouTube TV or something else, direct TV. There are, there are a bunch of other options. And once if TiVo degrades its, its service, that'll be a reason to jump. But I will probably jump eventually. Anyway, the number of TV shows that I watch that come over the traditional, even though I have a cable subscription and I watched shows that come from the fact that I'm paying for cable, the number that I'm watching off the hard drive of my DVR dwindles by the week. Because even like I watched a new CBS show yesterday, um, I didn't even bother recording it cause I have CBS all

access. So I just watched it on CBS all access. I didn't even need to watch because I have CBS All Access. So I just watched it on CBS All Access. I didn't even need to watch it. I could just stream it. So I don't know. It's sad that this is how it's ending for TiVo. But this does feel, to me, it feels just like the death throes. Like they're desperate and they don't care. And they're trying to see what sticks.

And it's baffling to me that they would do it this way. But, oh, well, it was good while it lasted. It was the best DVR. But, you know, all things come to an end. So it goes. Let's do a good ad. This episode is brought to you by FreshBooks. The wonderful people at FreshBooks.

Hey, stop it. Stop it. You stop it over there. Let's talk about FreshBooks instead. FreshBooks save you time. Hey, stop it. Stop it. You stop it over there. Oh, sorry. Let's talk about FreshBooks instead. FreshBooks save you time. You don't have to worry about skipping stuff. You can save time with FreshBooks.

They simplify tasks like invoicing, expense tracking, and getting paid online. FreshBooks has drastically reduced the time it takes for over 10 million people to deal with their paperwork. RelayFM is one of these companies. We use FreshBooks here because it's so simple. It's so easy. Their invoicing system is so wonderful. You can just go in and choose from some dropdowns, just type in some basic information. Stuff is saved, so you don't have to re-enter line items every single month. They're saved into their system. I love that we can set up all of our clients there, so we can just select a person, select the line items that we're billing, and

it's really easy to do. And also, you see when you're creating the invoice, it shows in their system how you're going to see it. It's like a WYSIWYG editor, right? So you're going to know exactly how it's going to look when it lands with your customer. You can email them. You can even have FreshBooks mail invoices for you if you want that. Then once you've sent the invoice, once you've sent it out to your, if you've emailed it out to your client, FreshBooks will show you whenever it's been seen. You can see if it's been open multiple times. You can see if they've even printed it because they're going back to the FreshBooks page to grab that invoice. This puts an end to guessing games and you can even have FreshBooks automate late payment email reminders for you. So you don't have to actually spend that time chasing and just go back to doing

the work that you want to do. If you're listening to this and you haven't yet tried FreshBooks and you ever send invoices or ever do expenses and all that kind of stuff, you have to give them a try. They're offering an unrestricted 30-day free trial to listeners of this show. There's no credit card required. Just go to freshbooks.com slash upgrade and say when they ask you, you know, oh, how'd you hear about us, say, on the upgrade program? Our thanks to FreshBooks for their support of this show. That's freshbooks.com slash upgrade. So let's talk about the iPhone again. Okay.

We're going to talk about the iPhone and the Apple Watch again today because there's more. There's still more to say. There's still more to say. It's September. This is what we do. Have you heard the show? Things keep moving on right like 265 episodes later like you know what we're gonna do right we've had the phones for a couple

of weeks and yep i think especially even especially with this iphone the more i use it the more i have to say on it um because i keep finding new things or i keep you know new stuff keeps happening but you wrote your review um and i wanted to get matter with you a little bit you wrote your iphone 11 review uh which encapsulates both the 11 and the 11 pro right you kind of like review them both at the same time and yeah all the differences when needed but they're very similar phones um but i wanted to kind of ask you because you published it uh yesterday which is about a week or two after the original reviews went live and i kind of wondered is it tricky to write a review after the embargoed reviews have gone out? Yeah. Yeah, it's very much so because if you get the product under embargo,

then you know that your review is going to land with all of the other reviews at the firing of the starting gun, whatever that embargo is. Every review will drop then. The way it works generally is you get the phone probably at the event. You get a product either at the event or relatively soon thereafter and you're given a time so you can't post this

before 3 a.m on tuesday like all right so you've got a deadline and that that it's actually quite freeing in the sense that if you're handed it and there's no embargo um like if literally they they hand you something and that's happened to me where i've gotten, I think the iPad was like that, where I was given the iPad just before the review embargo dropped with that as my embargo. But it essentially meant that by the time I drove home, or like to, I think I drove to like Dan Frakes' house for Macworld, and then we wrote about it. Like everybody else had had time with it. It's one of those things where you, you can write about it now, but what will you say? You haven't used it.

So what would you do? And that's where you get a lot of those sort of like, anybody have any questions for me? Because I haven't used it yet. So if you're not in that first group where everybody's gotten time to look at it and consider it and they're all dropping and it really is the news about like,

what do the reviewers think of this thing that isn't out yet? After that happens, like I literally got, I knew those would be dropping on the day, the Tuesday morning, because I had a briefing at noon on Tuesday and I thought, oh, well, the embargo will be before that. That's sort of the second wave reviewers. That's what they do is they don't give it to you before that embargo drops, they give it to you right after. So I got my briefing. And then I'm sitting there having not used these products until just now. And there are already a dozen deeply considered several, you know, almost a week of time thinking about it reviews online.

There's no point in me even dashing off a review at that point, right? Like I'd be late, whatever, a day late and a week short of experience if I did something like that, and it wouldn't be any good. So then it becomes this kind of conundrum, which is, I still want to write about it, but I want to take the time to use the products. about it, but I want to take the time to use the products. And I can't be part of the, you know, tell me whether I want to buy this thing anyway, because so many people bought it on the pre-order date before any reviews were up. So, you know, in my audience, especially. So what is it? It becomes this question of like, what is it? What is this review even trying to do? And I struggle with that when it's one of these. I want to take my time with it. I don't want to rush something out because there's really no point. But at that point, it needs to have a

point of view. And it ends up becoming, in this case, it's different every time. And this was very hard to write because there was so much else going on. iOS 13 stuff that I was writing. I'm packing up my daughter to take her to college. there's lots of things going on i and so it was a it was a week later you can't write the review which is like let me tell you about what this phone's all about because we know that now and we already knew all the specs anyway i mean that's a challenge even if you're an embargoed reviewer. So what do you do? What do you do? And I just decided it's kind of a movie review after the fact of just like an essay about it. It's kind of about what's missing and what – it's kind of like big picture about like what does this mean strategically for Apple? What are the choices they made? And, you know, because in the end, basically what I thought was, this is my essay about

the iPhone 11 and what I think is interesting about it and what I think it means. Because in truth, I don't think it can serve the purpose. You know, if I was writing it for the Wirecut cutter or something, I would say to myself, well, what's going to happen is that this story about this big picture? Uh, what are the features that dropped, that jumped out at me, the decisions Apple made when they were making this thing, where do they go from here? Um, you know, and, and is that the right decision? I don't know. It's a weird position to be in where like they briefed me, they gave me the phones. I, I want to be on the record about it, but I'm not under embargo and I'm not interested in writing a quick hit piece that's, like I said, essentially a day late and a dollar short. So instead, it went on longer than I would have liked. I would have liked to

have posted this a week after, but like I said, with the other stuff I was working on and the fact that we were packing up my daughter and driving her eight hours and then the next day driving her back or driving back without her like I got I got got delayed so it took a little bit longer than I would have liked but it finally did pour out of me the last parts of it on on uh Saturday and uh that that was good because I guess as well right like the other thing is you have to find like an angle, right? Like you have to find a reason for it to exist. Right. And I wonder if like that is becoming, is that becoming more difficult over time?

Like because especially like these phones, they don't change a ton and it's true that probably makes it tricky and then they're also adding more to the lineup right there are like three phones now so i guess that makes it tricky but is it like you know you you do a good job with this is it practice for you like that you think in a different way like how do you end up being able to work out what your angle is going to be well i think the challenge is that it used to be a lot easier to take the big picture as the as the long lead review the long-term review because the short-term reviews were very focused on all the new features when there aren't a lot of new features uh i mean and you could see it like the verge review is like this and and john the Verge review is like this and John Gruber's review

is like this. Like when there aren't as many, those reviews end up being kind of the, let's step back and think about what this means. It's like, come on guys, leave me something. Like, I mean, you gotta just talk about the, just do a Geekbench score, okay? Throw me a bone here. Do some image samples and move on. So, but yeah, that's the challenge.

And so, you know, I think what I've come to is, at least in this cycle, and we'll see what happens next time, where I've come to is basically what I need to do is think about the big picture and write an essay about where the iphone is and where it's going for people who care about that stuff because i feel like those are the people who read my stuff and um and focus on that now you know could i have the challenge is that like all the iphone is so big that all the angles are taken because back in the Mac world days, what I would have probably done is focused on let's focus on speed and we'll do battery life testing. And we'll do so we'll do an image sample jury and compare it to other

phones and all that. But the fact is, most of those angles are taken by somebody, right? Like I'm sure, you know, Mark Spoonhour at Tom's guide is doing the comparison with the photography of the google pixel 3 and i'm sure that uh the display mate guy did his whole review of the display on the 11 pro and how it compared and said it was like everybody's got every little piece of that and then i fix it is taking it apart like all of those bits are out there so you know again I come back to what can I say that's you know even remotely interesting and different on this and that's where I ended up which is so so the piece a lot of it is I mean some of it's experiential about the about like night mode and how I think they really nailed that feature and how photoc when we talk about photography it's just the hardware, although it starts with the hardware,

it's also the software, about how you pick what you upgrade incrementally when you do an incremental upgrade like Apple does so often and how this year they picked the, I think, two most important things, which are battery and photography. And then I talk about the positioning,

which we talked about on the show a lot like the idea of making the 11 the center making them what was the 10r the mainstream phone and and what that means in terms of like saying no the iphone is a is uh is not a thousand dollar phone that's the pro model for and how I think that positioning marketing wise is way more appropriate for the product line and makes the, makes Apple look better to say, yeah, we do sell a thousand dollar phone, but it's the pro model up there. You, if that's a, if you don't want the pro features, just get this. It's, this is the iPhone. Like I, so I, I did a little bit about that. And, and, and in the end I did a little thing about like, where do they go from here?

And where I'm kind of musing to myself about like, what's left? What's the frontier for Apple here? And that, you know, you put it all together and it's a, you know, four or 5,000 word essay. And then you press save and take some pictures and you post it. I want to read a quote from you that I really liked. And it was an interesting thought that I hadn't considered and I hadn't seen anywhere, which is about the pricing changes. So I read a little quote from Jason's review, which is very good. And one of the reasons we have to talk about it is because you do surprise me, like how in these situations, you always turn out something that is interesting to read. And I read it and I think to myself, how did you manage to do that? Because I feel like I already know all this stuff.

That's why it took me all this time to figure out what to say. It's like, can I come up with something interesting here, please? It doesn't matter as long as you do. Right? Like it doesn't matter how long it takes as long as you have something good to say about it. But this is the quote I want to read. Let's all consider the narrative about Apple

trying to goose iPhone revenue in an era where sales are flat by raising prices. Yes, the top of the iPhone price list is the most expensive that it's ever been, but with the iPhone 11, Apple has cut $50 off the starting price of last year's iPhone XR. Granted, this is the same starting price as the iPhone 8 in 2017, and it's $50 more than the 7 1's 2016. Still, I wasn't expecting Apple to cut the starting price of any iPhone ever again, and here we are. This is fascinating to me, because there's a bunch of stuff about this iPhone

which is really interesting, right? People said, oh, 13 was so buggy they should have delayed it, but they couldn't delay it, because they delayed the iPhone, they would have pushed it into the next quarter, and Apple would have missed their guidance, and Wall Street would have just obliterated them, right?

Like it would have been a disaster if they would have done that. So they had to release it when they did. That's why iOS 13 has been so weird because the iPhone could not be delayed. But then I hadn't considered this, that all they have to show for the iPhone now is it's not unit sales, right?

It's just revenue now. Is that right? That's how they do it. So that's how they do it. Now that they are only focusing on the revenue they've cut the starting price of their most popular model and have repositioned that phone even more strongly that it should be the most popular model that is a very interesting decision that they've made right yeah it's it's and again i mean maybe you could make the argument that when the most interesting thing about an iphone i don't know if it's the most one of the most interesting things about

an iphone release is the marketing and pricing decision but i would argue that that it's always interesting i think i think that that that's one of the most interesting things at least for me about a lot of the choices Apple makes is why did they choose to price it that way? Why did they choose to call, especially like the naming, they try so many weird naming things across the product line. And we talk about it on this podcast. But so I look at this and I think, well, that's really interesting. Like they have, last year was a mess, right? Last year, it's like Roman numerals and then letters that are pronounced and there's Pro Max and all of those things.

Like, what does it all mean? And it was because they really wanted to do the iPhone X with the big X and charge $1,000 and blow people away. All right. But then they had to live it down last year. set 11 and made this decision not just to take the 10r and upgrade it and make it the you know and do a new version but to make it the 11 to make it the default and i know most of our audience is like i'm gonna get the pro right i i get it but the default iphone the iphone 11 not the oddball not the light not the you know that like the 10, which was sort of like this weird, like, what does the R mean? I don't know.

It's the iPhone 11 is that model. And that they did that. And that the more surprising thing is that it's $50 less than the XR was, which, as I said, I kind of gave up on Apple taking a price slot and reducing the price but they did it they did it and it benefits the entire product line to have that product there at that price um and the you know apple said it's the 10r was their best-selling phone last in the last year um presumably that's broken out pro and pro max separately but still you know that's that's pretty good so um i i just i think that that So I think it's an interesting move on their part. When you say last year, you don't mean Pro, Pro Max.

You just mean 11 and 11 Max. Well, I mean when they say the XR. XS and XS Max. Oh, my God. We're so confused. We're lost in this. I tried to correct you and made it more wrong. But I think people know what we're saying.

Right? Like the XR outsold. I don't think they mean outsold the 10s collectively i think they mean the the they didn't say but i assume they mean it outsold the individually the 10s or the 10s max exactly um but still pretty good so i i don't know i mean it's a risk on's part too, because if they say the cheaper phone is more central, are they going to end up selling more of them percentage-wise than they sell of the pro line? And does that hurt their revenue per unit? Does it hurt their revenue or does it help their

revenue because the lower price gets more people to buy? I don't know. It's a fascinating decision. But I think assuming that people are still going to buy the Pro because they want to buy the Pro because that's the one with all the fancy features and the different sizes and the better display and all of that. I think it's still better to have those be marketed as Pro phones. And so anyway, it's just it's fascinating because this is this is the biggest product consumer product around and they're still tinkering with how to sell it um it comes back something that you and i talked about six months ago maybe which is the idea that apple now has to market the iphone because it doesn't sell itself and that like in apple stores they're doing more aggressive like actual sales techniques in Apple retail stores.

This is like that too, right? This is Apple like mopping the sweat off of its brow a little bit and saying, all right, how do we, let's get down to business here. How do we really set up these iPhones so that they sell? I wanted to talk about the two main features,

camera and battery a little bit more because i've had more time we've all had more time to use the phone um i am absolutely unequivocally in love with the camera on this phone it is absolutely fantastic in every way uh i was just in munich this past weekend uh i was at my brother's stag in oktoberfest funnily enough tim arrived just they just as i was leaving i cannot talk about whether i spoke to tim i didn't uh but it was yeah he just he just pops up sometimes um and i'm going to include in the show notes uh an instagram story highlight that I made of just some of my photos that I took in Munich. And these are pretty much all edited in VSCO, the software that has filters and edits and stuff. So any of the photos that look good, they are edited in VSCO.

But what comes out of this camera is just stupendous like the i am absolutely in love with it i think it's fantastic i'm having so much fun taking pictures with all of the different lenses right like i'm working out which one's the right one and comparing them trying to understand when to use what um i had. I actually had a real-world instance where the auto-cropping thing worked for me. So there was a group shot that one of my brothers was cut out of, and the iPhone had actually automatically arranged it to bring him back in, where it's using the wide-angle lens.

Yeah, because they're doing some machine learning analysis of objects and people in video and in stills to figure out that there's something outside the boundary of the frame that you probably want and then automatically including it which is and i was you think about it that is amazing and i was so happy to see it like in a real world test it actually worked for me and i was like yeah thank you iphone you did it um i would say though that like so i crop a lot of my i crop my images uh before i post them to instagram just this is a top tip for people you post if you take a picture and you edit it and you want to look really nice on instagram stories crop it to 16 by 9 or 9 by 16 like in the portrait before you upload to instagram because otherwise

instagram does like a weird compression to it very strange i don't know why that happens but it does pictures always look better if you crop them first but when you go into that mode there's like an auto cropping and arranging now right that the system will try to do which is new and you can turn it on and off on a picture by picture basis it tries to crop it for you. But you can do a vertical and horizontal adjustment, which basically warps the image, makes it feel like it's coming towards you, right? My phone seems to do that a lot, and I have no idea what it's doing.

It's like, why would you make the image look like that? So there's still some tweaks to be made to some of the auto-cropping, but I was super impressed by the fact that it was able to fix that group photo for me which otherwise would have been completely lost so i really loved it um i absolutely love this camera it is fantastic and i also wanted to mention the battery i've been traveling it's not a battery case levels you know like it's not like you can go with this thing forever and ever

no matter how heavy you're using it right like if you've go with this thing forever and ever no matter how heavy you're using it right like if you've got like the battery case and i can't wait for the battery case because like who knows it's just like things that last forever but i was using my iphone incredibly heavily as i do whenever i travel um and just to save my own anxiety like i top it up a little bit when i was like back in a hotel room or whatever but i never hit red on my iphone and i'm taking pictures all the time i'm taking video all the time using it for directions podcasts and music when i'm walking around like when i'm traveling that's when i'm hitting my phone the hardest and i wasn't willing to go through the test of not topping it up when i

had the opportunity right but i never got into a situation where i had to turn on um the battery saving mode or it hit the red so the the battery on this phone is serious yeah it's i feel like what there's a lot of debate about like if you're really somebody like alex cox who is using these phones to do Pokemon Go and things like that and you're killing the battery. Or you're in extreme travel mode where you are using it for a long time or using it really intently. Like there are going to be scenarios where you're going to want to charge and top up or to have a battery case or to have an external battery. have a battery case or to have an external battery but i think in you know the normal normal use on an extended day not having to worry about it is basically what has happened which is good like that's that's i think that's the number one battery anxiety for a phone is just

am i going to be able to get through the end of the day? If you're doing something more extreme than that, then yeah, bring a, bring a battery or make sure to charge up. But you know, by, by adding several hours of battery, you're, you're able to get, you're not going to be able to go through a second day, right? It's still, it's not adding 12 hours of battery, but it's adding enough battery for you to get through your, your normal day without worrying about it. Yeah.'re just, it's a great phone. It's really, really great. That camera, boy, oh boy, that camera. I absolutely love it.

Blows me away. But that wasn't the only product. We actually didn't get to talk very much about the Apple Watch because you just got yours and I didn't have one. So we're going to talk a little bit more about the Apple Watch.

I have some questions for you, Jason, about the Apple Watch Series 5. I stand ready to answer. Thank you very much. But first, I want to talk a little bit more about the app watch i have some questions for you jason about the app watch series 5 i stand ready to answer thank you very much but first i want to thank a new sponsor to the show and that is direct mail an easy to use email marketing app designed exclusively for the mac to help you create and send wonderful looking email newsletters email marketing is still an incredibly cost-effective way to reach your customers and to grow your business and for the past 15 years mac users around the world have trusted direct mail to handle all of their email marketing needs. It is designed just for the Mac, which means it's fast, it's easy to use, and works great with other apps and services that you're already used to. You can save time by

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If you go to directmailmac.com slash upgrade, you can check it out. That is directmailmac.com slash upgrade, and you'll get 10% off when you opt for a full feature plan. Our thanks to Direct Mail for their support of this show and RelayFM. I bought the ceramic edition watch. It had been long rumored that I would do it by me and you, and I did it. So that's that.

Includes a sport band. Did you know that? The edition models, they include a sport band, no matter what band you get. For fun? They have the pins in a matching material. So I have the white sport band and it has a uh white ceramic pin in it which i'm very happy about because when the so there's a long story for me with this uh i love

this watch um and i've loved it for a while the white ceramic it's previously been around in the edition line and that was what it came paired with which was a white sport band with the white ceramic it's previously been around in the edition line and that was what it came paired with which was a white sport band with the white ceramic pin and i was really upset when they had the the configurator because they're like oh i can't get it it's not an option anymore but they include it in the box if you get a titanium you get a different color i think you get like a gray kind of stone i think they call it and i believe it has a titanium pin not the aluminium pin so i've been wearing it all white uh white on white for about a week. I absolutely love the way this watch looks as a piece, right? I'm not talking about like, this looks great for an Apple watch. I genuinely think this is a very good looking thing to wear,

which is why I opted for this one. For me, this is just like an item that I want to own because I think it's beautiful, right? It is not as, I would say, it is not as like fancy looking as the other watches that I own. I feel like even though it is an expensive item, it is more of a casual watch for me from look perspective. Like I wouldn't wear this if I was wearing a suit, right? If I'm going out for a nice dinner,

I would not wear the Apple Watch. I am still, this is, I think this is going to be a bit of a journey for me, Jason, because I am still not sure how and where the Apple Watch fits into my life. I can tell you unequivocally, no matter how much I enjoy it, this will not be an everyday watch for me.

Because I love my Apple Watches too, right? And no watch is like a watch that I wear always. I rotate. I have a couple and I rotate. I see one I'm feeling and one I want to wear. But the always-on display has made this a product that I could wear comfortably. Because without an always-on display has made this a product that I could wear comfortably because without an

always-on display the Apple Watch just can't work for me because I want to be able to see the time on my watch right like that's what I want and I noticed that I am catching it in the always-on display mode a lot because I'm using the California face and the red second hand that I have disappears, right? Yes. So I know I am reading it a lot, which tells me that if it wasn't an always-on display, I would be very frustrated

because I would not be able to see the time when I want to, right? Absolutely. And I assume, I mean, i know for you the always on display uh it's new for all of us but you were wearing apple watch right before yes so have you found that to be as nice an experience as you were looking for with the always on absolutely it's enormous like not only are the times where you where i have to train myself back into the habit of being able to glance at my watch without doing a kind of dramatic wrist flip. Yeah, I like that I haven't been doing that, right?

Because I'm not used to doing that, like raising my wrist up to my eye level to see the time. But I have imagined that all previous Apple Watch users are still trying to train themselves out of that motion for the time being, right? Well, and also what I've noticed is sort of an interim. So sometimes I'll just look at it and see what the time is and then note to myself that I did that and it wouldn't have worked before. Other times, though, what I'll do is I'll turn my wrist a little bit to look at the time and sometimes it will trigger and sometimes it won't trigger. Yes.

And I'll think to myself, well, this is good because I don't need to worry. I've, I've seen the time now. I don't need to trigger it. Whereas before I would have had to do a, another flourish in order to get it there. And when it does trigger, I think to myself, uh, well, you know, whatever, that's great. It will, it will dim almost immediately when I move my watch back. It's doing some very interesting things in software where, where if you, if all you do is just move slightly, it'll brighten up for a minute. And if you don't interact with it after that, it very quickly, or you move, like turn your wrist back away, it kind of like dims very suddenly.

It's funny how smart it's trying to be with the power saving. But the funny thing is that I will look at it and then it will brighten up but I've already seen what I need to see and then I just turn my wrist away and move on and it's just another reminder that before it was not just turn your wrist but turn your wrist and wait and now it's on and now you can see and then you can go about your day so yeah it's a fantastic feature. Marco on ATP last week made a very clear case for why this is the number one new feature of the Apple Watch, more than cellular. Because in the end, you know, a percentage of people actually use the cellular features. But, you know, everybody looks at the watch to see the time. And, you know, it's telling that apple's ad campaign is it tells the time right

like even apple is like yeah okay yeah you can you can see the time on it which is always was the joke right about when people would ask me when i was wearing a pebble they're like well how do you like the digital you know the computer watch and i'm like well tells the time like number one is it tells the time that you got to get that right. And the always-on makes it vastly superior. Yep. I think, like, you know, I'm in agreement. I think it's the biggest advancement to the Apple Watch since it originally came around. Everything else has been like, this is nice.

Oh, they're adding more sensors. That's great. But, like, this fundamentally changes the product in a way that it should definitely have. This is something that should have been around for a long time, and I'm pleased that it is. However, it is the watch faces themselves which would mean that I would never leave the analog world behind.

I'm going to be echoing some of what Marco said on ATP. It was a great segment. Great segment. I am in agreement with him well one is i feel like i can never get exactly what i want which is more frustrating to me here isn't like as as many options as the california face off offers it's still i still feel like they are very close in some ways to the face that i want yep but they still aren't there because my my realization the other day was that the face that i like the best is still utility, which they haven't updated for the new screen sizes, which means it's the old style complications.

And it's more limited, but the face itself is exactly the face that I want. It's the face. And it's honestly, some of that is just nostalgia. That's the face of the two analog watches I wore from, you know, from when I got married. And got married, and that was a wedding gift. And then I replaced that with another one that was similar, and they look just like that face. And it's like, I like that face, but they haven't updated it. And although you can get close with the California face, it's not quite the same. And Marco's point, I mean, Marco came strong out of the gate because he basically said, first he said that Apple can't design analog watch faces. And that's harsh, but I think

maybe fair. And his bigger point, which I think is the strongest point he made, which is for all the importance that watch faces have, they are the primary interface of your fancy computer watch. It sure feels like Apple doesn't spend proportionally as much time on it as they do other parts of the watch. And I think that's a strong point. I get that they need to build out an app store and they need to fix these bugs and they have to have to make new apis for standalone watch apps and like i get it but you got to do the it's like what we said last year right you got to do the faces right and if you're not going to do third party watch faces then it's incumbent on you you have taken by by preventing other people from building watch faces you are now responsible for doing a good job building watch

faces and although the watch face story is way better in this new version of watch os it really is way better because they have created more flexible faces like it's still with all the improvement that they've made still not good enough it's just not good enough given how important it is i like the california face but california with more than one uh when you take it from full screen to circular so you can add corner complications yes it's a horrific mess like in its square version i think it's the best looking apple watch face and it's like when it's filling up the screen and you have one complication uh or do you think you have two the date and a complication in the smaller style it's a nightmare and plus there's too many complications for me anyway i

don't want five or so i just want like a couple but i feel like that they there's still more they could do like i don't know just give me a piece of software to let me literally make my own from a bunch of drag and drop things like put it on my iphone right like let me make it let me do it give like give me the tools to build my own watch face right? Like, let me make it. Let me do it. Give me the tools to build my own watch face, right? Like, just, I don't know what you want to do if you don't want third parties to make them. But I think that ultimately, there is nothing that Apple can do ever to give me a watch face that I'm going to prefer over an analog watch face because it's the materials on a real watch that i love the different textures the way

that light hits it when you turn it this way or that way you know like sure the way that those hands stand up from the face right or like the way that the indices like the numbers and stuff like the way that they're layered and the material they're made of and how does it differ right like you can't give me that because it's an oled screen and it's always going to be an oled screen and like this is not a like a slam against apple but it's just like for if you are a person that enjoys these types of things in watches there's only ever so much that they can do anyway so but the thing that frustrates me is my computer watch can't be customized enough yeah and i'm just like what are you doing like let me do you you get they get so close but they never nail it and i'm not buying

mechanical watches and i am basically all in on the computer watch and i feel the same way as you right like i i'm not concerned about it being so good that it replaces a a mechanical watch i just want it to be good and i i think that apple knows and that's good that like there are things that it will never be able to do that a mechanical watch can give you and that's fine because it's it's got its own strengths it is its own thing it is a computer watch i get it um but yeah it it could be better and i think the frustration with the california face is in some ways it's exactly the right path for apple to go down and maybe this is the thing is that they did like these two new super flexible faces and um they and they put all their work into that. And then the others are around.

And that's okay. But I feel like they did a lot, but it's still not enough. And I don't know what the answer is there. I feel like the answer is either that they need way more people and resources put into making their faces good. And I don't know who is doing faces. I mean, what Marco said is, as a mechanical watch fan, he feels very strongly that whoever is making

these decisions at Apple doesn't understand watches. That they are maybe a designer who has a watch or likes watches, but he feels, and I can't say, maybe there is somebody who absolutely loves watches and for some other reason they don't get to be heard at Apple. But in the end, the output to somebody who is really into mechanical watches feels, and I totally get what he's saying, feels like they don't get it. And that it's people who don't wear watches designing watches. And that's a bad place to be in. You want somebody who is aware of, and I'm not saying that everything they do should be trying to fulfill the desires of people who like fancy watches, because that's absolutely not true, because that's not their whole audience. What I am saying is, I think there's truth in the idea that if you don't spend all your time thinking about how other designers have applied themselves to the issues of watches,

you're not going to have the best output. And I think that's where Marco is coming from when he talks about this. So I get that. And I feel it too, as somebody who is not an obsessive watch person, I feel that same way. I think it's really telling that this boring face that was part of the original watch face lineup is still my favorite even though they have done nothing to update it to the new complication formats or to the new screen size and it's still the one that i like the best i also like marco's bit about uh giving up on analog

faces altogether and embracing digital i use i use infograph modular way more often than i ever expected and and and it And it's ugly. But you know what? With the new watch, I'm not using it anymore. And that's because I don't want to look down at my wrist and see numbers. I want to look down at my wrist and see those hands. And now with the Always On Display, I can do that. So I'm back to the analog faces again.

I understand why people use the infograph faces because you are embracing what the wrist computer is, which is like to give you all of the data. And I used to be like that, but now my tastes have changed, right? So like, honestly, right now, my Apple Watch face has the date and then I'm using Underscore's new moon plus plus

because I think it's nice. Like, so it's a moon complication that actually uh it is accurately representing the moon as it is in your location and i just think that like it i have it in monochrome so it's black i have the black all black face and just everything's white so then when it goes into the always on mode the color doesn't change right because if i had like the blue or the like there's like a when on the edition watch it has like its own color called edition which is like a kind of off white if i have that color when i turn my wrist my watch lights up in my face which i don't like right so i like i now

have it so it's always so there's not too much difference between the dimmed mode and the regular mode right because that doesn't work for me i don't want my watch to shout at me that it is available to show me the time you following what i'm saying yeah right there if you have it as a color it just like just lights up no you that's not what i want but anyway i really like this i just think that it is a is just, I think the nicest looking that I've been able to get my watch to fit my own tastes as a, as a, as a person.

But I just don't think that it is. I have an option really to be, to make it like more computery. I am happy to have the health monitoring features back. It's good to know I've been doing the ECG stuff for fun, right? Like, but there is also when i'm putting it on and it's walking me through i set up as a new watch it's walking me through all the things that it does you know like it can do all the fall detection it can just monitor my heart whenever i want it's making sure i'm moving around i'm reminded again you know i hadn't forgotten but it was a nice like refresher of this is one of the

reasons that this thing is such a good product is that you have an extra peace of mind in your life that there is a device that is strapped to you which is making sure you're being healthy i like that um i'm really struggling with notifications though i feel like it doesn't matter how much i bring it down it's still too many and i'm wondering how you have your watch set up kind of like from a notifications mindset do you let it monitor mirror what's on your iphone no okay so you've what are you kind of like at a top level what kinds of things do you have uh going to your watch? Calendar notifications, messages, and a couple of smart home notifications, like when my door locks and unlocks, because I'm using that complication actually to unlock my door. It's one of these things that frustrates me is that my smart door lock will

pair with the Bluetooth in my phone, but not my watch. So when I leave with just the watch, I have to manually unlock the door when i come back because it should be able to pair via bluetooth and talk and they don't and it's i don't like that um so i've got those but that's it that's it like i i have turned off most of my notifications because i don't want them i want if somebody texts me i want to see it because that is i will feel that on my on my watch a lot and I actually really like that especially with the canned answers I can I can have whole conversations with people with nothing but canned answers it's great standard canned answers make you sound like a crazy person

I have I had a conversation the other day with I think with Stephen Hackett where I actually started answering with weird not quite right responses because i just thought it would be funny and they didn't say anything about it so kind of they are so straight to the point sometimes it's like if you answer like trying to have a conversation with somebody that they have no emotion in them i feel like then i i'm sure that there was supposed to be a little bit more smarts added to this stuff and i just don't feel it but i would like to i know you can add some of your own and i've done that in the past and i should do it again for this watch

but like i want to i've been thinking a lot about notifications right and here's one one thing that's been bugging me um because the most of the stuff that i have really it's like as you calendar i message slack right like they're basically the three applications and then maybe like my airline Because the most of the stuff that I have really, it's like calendar, iMessage, Slack, right? They're basically the three applications. And then maybe like my airline, right? Like my British Airways app can send me notifications because I feel if I'm traveling, I probably want to know. Yes, that's true. Yeah. It's like direct communication applications are the things that I want the most.

But so here is a thing that I want to put to you. If I'm sending you a message in Slack, I DM you, and I send you four DMs in a row, do you need to be notified four times? I don't think that you do. I agree, because it should be intelligent enough to know that I did a notification and you haven't seen it. Just wait. You know if I've seen it, watch. Just wait.

That's right. This is my biggest problem. and you haven't seen it just wait you know if i've seen it watch just wait that's right this is my biggest problem also i would say um just a little thing i i don't even have slack on my watch like i don't yeah i don't i i and i know you run your business on slack and and but like there is nothing in slack i don't have the app it's just the dms yeah no i but i don't have those turned on there is nothing in slack for me important enough to buzz me on my watch yeah i understand that for a lot of people that's not the way it is for me right like yeah i have like if you need me you need me but here's the here's the thing for you and the way you use the watch because what i'm really talking about is is when

i leave without my phone have it be on the phone and not go to the watch and then well that's how i have deal with it yeah but so like but i'm like this is it i'm trying to like work out what's best for me and again underscore who i mentioned already you made moon plus plus he said to me why don't you just turn haptics off i was like that's not a bad idea because then i can just check my notifications whenever i'm ready to so i'm thinking about trying that as like another thing because i find the haptics mostly distracting because of this idea right where like say there's like a group thread that i'm in i mean i have a bunch of group texts oh i don't wanna i know everybody's put some joint stuff i don't want to do that like i don't i don't feel like I need to do that. But like, if the group thread is popping off, tell me one time until I look.

I have had that happen. And that is very frustrating where suddenly a group thread that I'm on that I don't have notifications turned off. I will give you another little secret, which is a lot of my group threads, I've just turned off notifications. I see the little alerts on my phone, but I've turned off the haptics and all of that because it's, because it will, they're having, other people are having a conversation and I'll get buzzed. I will walk in the dog and I'm at the dog park and my watch will, will tap me like eight times in the span of two

minutes because other people are sending emojis to each other and it's like i don't please unsubscribe me from everything here and it is yes i agree it needs to be smarter about like oh there's a conversation going on now you know you haven't tapped through to look at it so please leave it alone i wouldn't give up haptics because i like them when you know i've gotten to a happy place where my distractions are so minimized that I really want to get tapped on my wrist when there's something going on. But I agree. If I was getting, if I was on a group text and I was getting tapped every 20 seconds, I would go bananas. I would just be like, and that's why I've turned off notifications for some of my threads. Because it's like, stop, you people, people stop i don't want to hear it and i feel like i i feel like i've been begging uh apple for this for a long time please let me get granular

yeah well and the intelligence thing and i think apple does this with iMessage to a certain degree and that's actually part of the funny thing is that um i think some of this may be that apple has to enable this for for third-party apps but maybe not maybe third-party apps could do some of this on their own but like yeah the intelligence to say i don't want to be notified like they made lots of notification center updates on the phone but i agree with you it does sort of feel like you need some notification more granular notification preferences for the watch of like roll up all the alerts like if i get a second alert from the same slack channel or dm like i don't i don't need it or or within a certain period of time it's like stop don't bombard with this. It's all part of the same thing.

One notification is all I need. But it doesn't seem to do that. Siri I found to be mostly okay. The raise to talk feature I really like. And I'm still kind of getting my head around how close you exactly need it to your mouth to get it to work. But I do like that feature.

The give me a moment type stuff is still eternally frustrating yeah i don't understand why that happens when when it uh i've had good luck with siri lately on the watch where it's actually worked pretty well um to do things like set timers which is most of what it is is i've got like i've put meat on the grill and my hands are um you know i'm trying not to touch anything with my hands until I can watch them. And I will lift my wrist and I'll tell it to set a timer. And that actually works most of the time.

But, yes, there is nothing more frustrating than having it do that kind of like loop where it's, you know, give me a moment. I'm not able to listen. And I don't know why that happens. And it's really frustrating. Yeah. So I would say that on the whole i've been happy with siri as well i've found that i have not had issues where i've asked it to do something and it has misunderstood me when i can get it to to listen right like when i when i and when it's executing the command

it is getting correctly what i'm saying to it so So I find that is, you know, as someone who's been away from the watch for a while, it's something that continues to get better. I have absolutely no battery life complaints. The watch is lasting a whole day for me. I had one day where I got the 20% warning at like 11pm, but that's it. I say this because it seems like it's a bit of a mixed bag for a lot of people about the battery life. I want to know what your feelings are on it. But for me, as somebody who never had a Series 4, that I find the battery life to be great. It's lasted me a whole day. Yep. I agree.

I have the larger model. I've heard the complaints with the smaller model. I also think John Syracuse's data point where his wife's uh series 4 lost battery life on ios 13 is interesting that there are some other bugs at play here i haven't had a problem with it okay yeah so i've had no issues there so i'm happy with that that's working it's working great for me so i don't know what my life is going to be like with the Apple Watch, but I like it. But I feel like I still need to get my head around the notifications part. I like it as a nice-looking product and as a nice watch. And it's a bonus that I can interact with it in computer-like ways.

But I will follow up with and when I work out how I'm going to actually be running this thing i might give the uh no haptics a go i don't know i'm still trying i'm still in the tweaking mode um but but i do like it but the one thing that i have recognized is that idea of like give me one notification for a conversation that that's all i require um and then move on from there all right let's do some hashtag ask upgrade to finish out today's episode.

But first, let me thank our final sponsor of this week. And that is our friends over at Pingdom. Pingdom are amazing because they help keep the sites that you love online, including your own,

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which is really useful. It doesn't matter what type of website you have. It doesn't matter how big it is. You need Pingdom. They have a no-fuss approach to get started. You just give them the URL that you want to monitor. They take care of everything else. So go to pingdom.com slash RelayFM.

Right now, you get a 14-day free trial of no credit card So go to pingdom.com slash RelayFM right now. You get a 14-day free trial of no credit card required. And use the code UPGRADE at checkout, and you'll get a wonderful 30% off your first invoice. So thanks to Pingdom for their support of this show and RelayFM. Let's do some hashtag ask upgrade questions. Delayed response on the lasers there, but I'm happy they finally came through.

The first one comes from Crazy Town. Crazy Town asks, Last week I upgraded to an iPhone 11 Pro from a 7 Plus. Based on rumors about the 2020 iPhone, should I return my Pro or stick with it or wait until next year? Now, this is a difficult question. We get these kinds of questions a lot, right? And I wanted to talk about this. You could wait forever for the next phone to come along.

Yes. If you like it, just keep it. Because look, the 2020 iPhone will be better than the 2019 iPhone. The 2021 iPhone will be better than the 2020 iPhone. If you waited from a 7 Plus to upgrade, you must be loving your phone right now. Just give it another few years and upgrade again. Don't focus on the future that much, right?

Unless you're like a few weeks away. If you just bought an iPhone after so many years, don't return it now and get, I don't know, like another 7 or whatever to wait for 2020. Get your next iPhone in 2023 and be happy about the advances that you'll get then yeah i did uh i i actually tested i brought i pulled out an iphone 7 and tested it uh did the speed test thing with the new iphone 11s and it's you know it's three times faster on single core

and four times faster on multi-core like it's a huge the 10 jump alone was a huge jump and seven is is preceding that so i agree with everything you said i think you should keep it i think next year yes will there be new iphones sure there will there will always be new iphones um you have a seven it's probably time to go um 5g is lurking next year but i think 5g is not going to be super relevant to people for a long time. And I think, honestly, with a 7 Plus, I think you've waited long enough, personally. I mean, you know, if you want to go back, go back. But I would say you are always going to be in the boat of, well, what about next year's model?

So don't worry about it. Because I bet you in 2020, then people are going to say, well, is Apple's foldable phone? You're just going to keep going forever oh yeah oh yeah well you know that uh that ming chi roger quo is going to have a report next july about what's in the 2021 phones and everybody's gonna be like well but the 2021 phone's gonna have this feature and like yeah okay you just have to buy a phone sometime there's always it's always going to be here here's bad news everybody the technology you buy this year will be obsolete at some point in the future. That's it. That's the sad truth. And there's nothing to be done about it. David asks, it seems weird to me that Apple launched Apple

Arcade without an update to the Apple TV, given that the product is two years old. Do you think this is a sign that Apple is giving up on Apple tv and that they're doing a rethink that isn't ready or something else i feel like well i actually look the apple tv hardware as it currently is is all that it needs to be to run the games like it can handle them they're built this way and i think apple putting arcade on the apple tv in the first place is a good sign of their belief in the apple tv product right i agree because they did it i think the apple tv 4k um doesn't i mean i'm sure they will update it at some point to put a faster processor in it but i think it's in a pretty good place and i agree with you mike i think that the fact that apple tv is part of their strategy for games is a is a good sign for

apple tv and the apple tv hardware so i i just don't think they feel they need to update it as part of their strategy for games is a good sign for Apple TV and the Apple TV hardware. So I just don't think they feel they need to update it that often and that it's good enough right now, the 4K model. And they only update the Apple TV every so often.

So it's just not, I think it's fine. I don't think it's a sign of anything. I took delivery today of an Xbox One S controller to pair with my Apple TV to try that whole experience out. I don't think it's a sign of anything. I took delivery today of an Xbox One S controller to pair with my Apple TV to try that whole experience out. I'm going to give that a go. Nice.

John says, Photos has mixed up the people options on my devices and it now thinks that me and my brother are the same person. Jason, is there any way to fix this? It's bad. I hate to say it, but I think what you need to do is go to the people album and uh and select all and delete which will basically um reset your people database and

then it's going to rescan and you're going to need to retag everything you could the other thing you could try to do is delete that person that is you and your brother, and then go in and manually tag a bunch of things as you and as your brother, and see if that will feed into them, the face scanner going back through. That might be a better first starting point.

First step, but I think in the end you may actually need to you may find that the right thing to do is to just delete the database and start again uh d krushev asks would you sacrifice the additional battery life on the current phones in exchange for the return of 3d touch i miss 3d touch because i think haptic touch is slow in places but the battery life is more important than 3d touch in the grand scheme of things

because especially because haptic touch can be made better apple can can tighten that up they can tweak that um and i really hope that they do some stuff it's just so slow like all everything on the lock screen getting notifications on the lock screen launching the camera it's slow and unreliable and i want to see apple get better at that. And I think that they can. But I believe that the battery life is a more important thing overall for more people. Would you agree? I agree completely. I don't miss 3D Touch much at all.

And the places where I do use it, they can tweak it a little bit and the battery life is more important. And it's a feature that I think most, I think Apple knows for a fact that it's a feature most people did not use. oh they wouldn't have got rid of it right if everyone was using it they wouldn't have gotten rid of it because it would have been wild uh eric asks what are your thoughts on the clear case for the iphone 11 have you used any other clear cases

i have i mean i don't like them and I bought a leather case for my iPhone 11 Pro. So that tells you how I feel about the clear cases. Jamie's got a clear case on her iPhone 11. We'll see how she likes it over time. I mean, the case tradeoff is always about protection. I mean, she wants to see her purple iPhone, and I get it. If you want to see it and you want to show it off, like you want to see it, then you want to show it off. Like you want to have the clear case.

I don't love it, but I don't love that case regardless of whether it was clear or not. I just, I don't like the feel of it. I don't particularly like the look of it. And so it's leather case for me as usual. So I would say the clear case has gotten more grippy for me.

I don't even want to think about why that's happened, but it's less slippery now the oils in your skin are slowly denaturing the plastic i don't want to talk about that right now but thank you uh yeah it's gotten grippier bacteria from your hands have transferred to the okay and the pop socket helps too right i mean i'm not telling everybody to do that but that is the thing that that i use um the biggest problem with the clear case is that lint gets in it. And oh boy, it just gets everywhere. And you can see it because the phone case is clear.

But I really love my midnight green iPhone and I want to see it. And I don't want to do what Casey did and drop it and smash. Lint is on the inside. Lint is on the inside. Look, I don't want to talk about it. That's terrifying. It happens. By the way, my advice for Casey who dropped his phone and broke the back of it, is get

the leather case and you won't even see that it's broken and you can live your life. That's what I say. No, I think he just needs to go and get it fixed because that's wild that he's not going to fix it. Anyway, last question comes from John. This is related. Mike, does your pop socket show up in frame when you use the ultra wide camera no it does not but my fingers do sometimes which is kind of hilarious uh whenever better hold the phone differently have you seen that like it's

like there's my fingers but no i put my popsocket it's now over the apple logo because it goes in the middle of the phone uh and i never seen my pop socket in the ultra wide. I know a bunch of people ask me that so fear not. It depends where you put it though. If you put it next to the camera then yeah you probably will but that seems like a terrible place to put a pop socket anyway. If you would like to send in a question for us to answer on the show just send out a tweet with the hashtag

askupgrade and it will go into the document and we can pick it out for future consideration. I'd like to... Oh wow, there's more lasers. Thank you to... The hashtag lasers this week. Exactly. And direct mail and fresh books for their support of this show.

Don't forget, you can still donate to St. Jude. Go to stjude.org. As we finish this episode, Jason, we're at $298,218. So it feels very possible now that we will hit uh 300 000 so thank you so so so so so so much to everybody that has helped us raise that money for saint jude this month if you want to find jason online go to sixcolors.com you should definitely go there and read jason's iphone 11 review because it's awesome uh you can also find him at jason j s n e double l i am i

mike i am yke on social platforms you should follow me on instagram if you want to see some of the photos i've been taking oh i did want to mention as well i took a picture of adina i don't know if you saw this picture uh and it's quite possibly i think the best photo i've ever taken and it's portrait mode photo i absolutely love this camera jason oh it's so good so good it makes me feel like such a professional um so yeah if you want more more uh of examples of the pictures that i'm taking you can go there i'm finding uh mobile photography to be becoming more of a hobby of mine and it's because the the software and stuff is so. And again, I'll recommend VSCO for that if you are interested in trying to just bump things up

and try out some different ways. Play around with what these apps have to offer. It's really fun. There's loads of great editing tools. Anyway, we'll be back next time. Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Slash pineapple.