Upgrade - 53: Everything is Off The Charts

Episode Date: September 10, 2015

Just hours after Apple's September event, Jason is joined by Stephen Hackett to talk about updates to the Apple Watch and Apple TV, as well as the new iPad Pro, iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus.

Hello and welcome to episode 53 of Upgrade from RelayFM. It's a big day today in the Apple world and I am joined by your normal host, or what's left of your normal host, Mr. Jason Snell. I'm mostly here. Hi Steven, how's Mr. Jason Snell. I'm mostly here. Hi, Stephen. How's it going? I'm mostly here. It's good. We should say that I'm not Mike in case people haven't noticed that yet. Yeah, your voice has a slightly different timbre. Also, not English. And we're recording this on Wednesday, September 9th. Not the usual day, not the usual co-host. But that's all because Apple made our lives hard by, you know, introducing a bazillion

things. And we decided, why don't we talk about what Apple did today rather than talk about what Apple would do in a couple of days on Monday. So here we are, event's over. I drove home. I'm sitting in my garage. I got my microphone ready to go. Very cool. Mike is on a plane on his way to XOXO where you and I will be, I don't want to say rendezvousing, but I'm going to say rendezvousing tomorrow. So we'll see each other very shortly. You said it. You might not want to, but you said it. There it is. I did. Words just come out. It's very confusing. So big day today. Really one of the most

densely packed Apple events I can i can think of in recent history we're gonna we're gonna get into what they announced and break it down and your thoughts on it um but so sort of from a meta perspective it's a little bit of a unique event right usually they have two fall events uh the iphone being one and the ipad being the other those were together today they didn't say anything, I don't think, about an October event happening or not, but sort of a weird event, weird venue, right? A venue they haven't used in a long, long time.

And what were your thoughts? Did it feel any different being there? You know, some of the details change. You know, it's a different venue. It's in a different, not really different part of town. It's about five or six blocks away from a different, not really different part of town. It's about five or six blocks away from Moscone, I would say. Well, maybe seven or eight.

So I parked in a different parking lot. There's a routine to some of these places because we've been there so many times. And this is different because this was the Civic Auditorium in San Francisco right next to City Hall. So a little bit different. And it was also like one of the hottest days of the year in next to City Hall. So a little bit different. And it was also like one of the hottest days of the year in San Francisco. So that was a little bit different. But, you know, once you get in there, I will say the seats in that theater are fantastic. We were packed in like sardines at the Flint Center in Cupertino.

And the setup that they had at the Civic was really, really nice. So once, you know, you see the same people and you say hello and the doors open and you go in and you sit down and you do your job. And, you know, it was a different kind of place, but it was very nice, really well. They obviously spent a huge amount of time setting up the venue to be exactly the way they wanted it. And then they had room left over for these hands-on areas on opposite sides of the hall. So there are two different hands-on areas. And yeah, it was information dense. It was packed, which when the rumors started to swirl yesterday, especially that they weren't potentially going to even do an event in October and they were just going to unload everything today. It had to be this way because there's just so much. I saw some people sort of

talking on Twitter. Was it true that The Bliss does not have air conditioning? I know it's different in California, so that sounds brutal. There is air conditioning, although it looked like there were just these big things on the outside of the venue with these giant tubes running into the building. So I don't know whether there was temporary air conditioning or whether that's the air conditioning system for that venue. San Francisco does not usually get very warm. Today, as I'm speaking to you, it's 97 degrees outside, and that does not happen here. I'm a little north of San Francisco. We're usually a little bit warmer, but not a lot. And San Francisco today, likewise, beautiful, warm day, hot day, very rare.

And people who live in San Francisco don't have air conditioning. So it wasn't too surprising. From where we were sitting up, we were sitting dead center. My group was right behind the camera well. So toward the top, it was hot. It was definitely hot, but, um, you know, but I think there was some air conditioning. You could actually hear the air conditioning when things were quiet. You could actually hear a hum that was the air conditioning being left on because otherwise we would have all died.

When you got into the hands-on areas, they were like meat lockers. It was beautiful, actually. After sitting for two hours in the warmth and in a stuffy environment, it was really nice to go into the hands-on area. And down there, not only were you low down, so it was cooler, but I think that's where the AC was coming in. And that was glorious. I saw a tweet from Gruber saying that there were a lot of Apple employees there, more than he felt was was normal which is nice i think yeah yeah it was a well it's a huge venue and the thing is they don't size the press list based on the size of the venue they size the press list based on the size of the hands-on areas because you know you can't have a thousand press and only have a handful of iPad Pros and iPhones and Apple TVs to show people

because it just becomes a zoo. They're actually, they limit how many people, the fire marshal sets a limit on how many people can get into each of those areas. So they have to constrain by that, but they can have Apple employees come. And what was funny is they were sitting on the sides and we were kind of in the middle. And so you can't see this in the video, but you could hear it in the venue.

Like you could tell when it was sort of a general like applause line when somebody was saying something impressive and there was sort of general applause. And you could tell when there was kind of like the Apple employees were told to applaud because the sound came from just the sides and not the middle so much, but yeah, there were a lot of Apple employees there and VIPs and then some press. But my, yeah, my impression is that it was like four digit number of Apple employees and three digit number of press, like low three digit number of press. Well, you know,

Tim Cook opened up saying that there was a lot to do and there was no time for updates. Skipped over the normal, this is how retail is doing, this is how the app store is doing stuff. And kind of jumped right into the first topic of the day, which was Apple Watch. Which is what will be the beginning of, throughout a theme throughout this episode, of Jason was right. So, Mike was right about some things, but you are right today. Mike was right about some things, but you are right today. He was. About some things.

I got some things right too. Mike, you know, when we talked about last week about whether they would really pack it all in, I said, eh, I could see how they would do it, but my gut feeling was that they wouldn't go that way. And, you know, I'm fortunate that my fallback was right. But yeah, it was super packed. And I like the no time for updates.

Quite honestly, the updates stuff, although it can be interesting, especially if you're doing some Apple, you know, tea leaf reading about like, what did they choose to say? And what numbers did they throw out? Sometimes those numbers are numbers you can't get anywhere else. But come on, it's padding. It's filler. It's because they don't have more to say and tim cook seems to be much less uh concerned about dumping it than steve jobs was tim cook is is i feel like

this is going to be the new normal now is that we're not going to get updates or if we do get updates they're going to be a different kind of updates because they still didn't update but they did the update in the iphone section about the iphone they didn't do like a general business update about retail and stuff like that at the beginning. And that's fine. Nobody is there to see that stuff. So I think it's good that they said, no time for updates.

Yeah, so they jump right into the Apple Watch. And again, there's a little bit of an update, sort of a little fake update talking about the customer satisfaction being 97%. Yes. Good customer sat. Tim didn't say customer sat. He said customer satisfaction being 97%. Yes. Good customer sat. Tim didn't say customer sat. He said customer satisfaction.

I wonder if they coached him out of customer sat. Yeah. I want to give whoever coached him out of it a high five. But they talked about how people have really connected and really enjoyed the product. There was a line about closing the rings has become a healthy obsession, which I thought was nice.

And I think I see that in a lot of my nerd friends, you know, using the Apple Watch for fitness where they didn't necessarily think they would. So kind of a nice, like a feel good little update on the watch. And then they talked about Watch OS 2 again. You know, Apple kind of revisits these software updates as they get closer. Yeah. The watch was introduced a year ago, and it's been in the public consciousness for a year.

Even though it's only been in our hands for a few months, it's been known for a year. And so they needed to set the stage there. They're not going to ship a new watch, right? So what do they do? The answer is they talk about watchOS 2, which is coming next week. And they talked about some new hardware. And I think that's interesting that, you know, you don't have to update the internals, but you can do some new metal finishes.

You can do some new bands. And they did both of those. Rose gold and gold in the sport model, which, you know, if you wanted a gold watch, if you think, you know, your clothes, your complexion, whatever, go better with gold than with silver jewelry. Now you can do something that isn't a solid gold watch because you can get the anodized aluminum gold. I think that's good. Lots of different bands. And then also there's that Hermes deal that they make. And I, forgive me if I'm mangling that, but this is,

you know, high, high end brand, um, with a specific band and a specific face that you can get that is a custom Hermes, uh, band or a face. And that's an interesting deal. And we'll see, um, whether we see more of those where a luxury brand is kind of making a deal with Apple to do a version of the Apple Watch that is highlighting their brand. So there's a lot of Apple Watch news for a product that didn't get updated because it really only shipped a few months ago. Yeah, the band stuff was sort of expected, and they kind of talked about, this is some new ways to make it your own,

additional customization. And I, for one, liked the new colors of the sports bands. There was an orange one that kind of jumped out at me, and having more options is nice. If you go on that band page now on the store, there are just lots of options for the sports bands. The leather one got updated. Just a lot of good stuff.

Yeah, I think it's really good. So my wife's birthday is next week, and we had talked about getting her an Apple Watch. She wants an Apple Watch. And we got to the point where we basically would have bought one last week, except we figured there'd be new stuff today. And it's great because now she's got that much more to choose from, I think, including she didn't love a lot of the sport band colors. So she's got those

and some different leather options. And I think, you know, and different color options for the sport model if she wants the sport model. So it's all good. I think that's really great. I think the more, just as maddening as it is to have all those choices because you end up being super conflicted, it's good to have the choices. Because people choose to buy or not buy, sometimes based on some very specific things. Like if the color band you want isn't available, that might be enough to get you to say no. So now there are more bands. It's good. So they said that Watch OS 2 is going to be out on, what did they say, the 16th alongside iOS 9?

If that's what you heard, then that's great. One of the things about being inside the event bubble is if you missed it as it flew by the first time, you missed it. And I still haven't caught up because I've only seen what I've seen and heard what I've heard. And there's lots of details that are in PR and on the website and I just absolutely like if you ask me to name all the colors of the of the watch uh watch bands I couldn't do that either I have a picture of them that I took but I don't know so sounds right I mean next week is when iOS 9 and watchOS 2 should be happening I think yeah so it's it's coming up um you know it's it's it's always interesting to watch how Apple paces these things or watch

OS two, you know, got a lot of basically got announced at WWDC, got a lot of stage time and they always have these events right before the release to kind of, you know, remind people to get the last, the,

the GMs are out. So the last beta builds of iOS nine and watch it was two and all this stuff shipped today, kind of get everybody ready and pointing in the same direction for the 16th. So it's going to be a busy couple weeks. Yeah, this is the high season. I mean, I know this is Inside Baseball for people who listen to us, but for the people who write and talk about Apple stuff,

this is the busiest time of year. In some ways, it's a culmination. If you've been working on stuff over the summer, like how our friend Federico Fatici is working on his iOS review, which he now has a very clear deadline for that one. And then we also got some clarity in an offhanded way about the El Capitan release, which is going to be by the end of the month, September 30th. way about the El Capitan release, which is going to be by the end of the month, September 30th.

So, you know, I'm going to be writing tens of thousands of words in the next two weeks and about various products in the next three weeks, really. And so will most of my colleagues, or we'll be talking about them. I mean, this is it. This is the big season for Apple stuff. So it's going to be crazy. So we're going to get into some more of that, but we are going to take a quick break. Upgrade This Week is brought to you by the fine folks at GoToMeeting. If you think about the time, money, and hassle it takes to hold a meeting, you've got to get people in the same place. You've got to get the projector set up. You've got to find that weird dongle for the guy's laptop.

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Thank you so much for GoToMeeting for supporting Upgrade and all of RelayFM. So Jason, up next on the Tim Cook checklist today, iPad Pro. Yes. iPad Pro. He. iPad Pro. He seemed very excited. It's real. He seemed very excited on stage. Tim Cook loves that iPad.

He always talks about how much he loves that iPad. And so this is the, this is it. This is the next step, which is an enormous iPad. Yeah, so it's, we can knock through the specs real quick. 12.9 inch display.

27.32 by 2048. The width of it is actually like the height of the iPad Air. They had some weird overlay to show that you can have a full iPad Air sized application and a slide over at the same time, which is really crazy.

And a split view. That's right. A split screen, not a slide over at the same time, which is really crazy. And a split view, a split screen, not a slide over. So, yeah, it's pretty crazy that, you know, holding an iPad Air upright in portrait mode, that's one side of the screen in landscape orientation on the iPad Pro, and then there's room for another app next to it. Did it? So I saw some hands-on photos and stuff, like places like The Verge had one. Does it look as huge in person as it does in photos?

I mean, it's big, but we're trained to think of the iPad a certain way, and this goes against that. What struck me about it, it reminded big, but we're trained to think of the iPad a certain way, and this goes against that. What struck me about it, it reminded me of when I reviewed a Sony tablet a few years ago for TechHive, and I remember how light it was and thinking how much denser and heavier the iPads felt. And the iPad Air came out, and it was like, all right, this is better. But I'll tell you, so it weighs what the original iPad weighed, but it's spread out over this 13-inch diagonal display area. And as a result, it feels super light because although it's very large, it's so light that it doesn't feel particularly dense to me to the point where you can hold it with one hand. Totally reasonable.

Like it's that light it doesn't matter that it's it's big because it is still um you know remarkably light and uh but yeah if you're used to a full-size ipad you'll look at this and be like oh my god this is huge but you know it's like it's like tearing the display off of a 13-inch laptop not Not recommended. Do not try it at home. No, don't do it. So it's big, but Apple also drove home the power behind it, right? So it's A9X.

They say it's 1.8 times faster than the Air 2. Console class GPU, which I think is a really interesting turn of phrase. This is a statement they made, and it's sort of a weird way of putting it i think but according to apple the ipad pro is faster than 80 percent of portable pcs that shipped in the last six months and the graphics are faster than 90 of those same pcs that's sort of a i see where

they're going with that right they're saying this saying this has the power of a laptop and actually a really good laptop. But it's sort of a weird way to frame it because they didn't really sell why that power was there, I don't think. Yeah, it's, I don't know. Yeah, it's, I don't know. Apple, when they do these presentations, how they frame stuff can be fascinating and how they cannot talk about the competition a lot of the time. Sometimes they will bring up the competition to ridicule them. Other times they will sort of define the universe as being like what Apple does. And then other stuff is like not even worth talking about.

And this was an interesting one where it's like, yeah, it than most pcs um that have shipped in the last in the last six months but uh we're not going to get into it more than that and i don't know it's this is this whole story is funny because this is they're saying this is a an ipad with the power of a pc but it's still an ipad and that is you know very different than the windows tablets that are pcs that are also tablets and that you know they're convertibles or it's something like the surface where you can is very different than the Windows tablets that are PCs that are also tablets. And they're convertibles or something like the Surface where you can attach a keyboard and a pointing device, and then you've got something that's different. So what are they trying to say here? I mean, they're trying to say, look, this is a super powerful thing, and that's why it costs what a PC costs, because it's got the power of a PC in it. It's just an interesting idea to wrap your head around,

like an even more expensive, even larger iPad with even more power. Although I was talking to somebody who is a very smart person who was saying, I don't need more graphics power. I don't need more processor power. Put more RAM in it. And I'm not sure we know how much RAM is in this thing, but that's what this person was saying is, I'd just take it with, even if it's got what the iPad Air 2 has, which is two gigs of RAM, it's like not enough.

Give me more. Give me four. Because you wouldn't ship a PC with two gigs of RAM. So it'll be interesting to see what my gut feeling is that it probably doesn't. It probably only has two gigs of RAM, but I don't know. Yeah, the RAM's always interesting with these things. You know, a lot of people, myself included, really hope the 6S Plus has more RAM. The 6 Plus has a tendency to sort of get hamstrung when it gets memory constrained. And Apple draws this graph of like, this is what the CPU does, this is what the GPU does.

But their RAM has moved so much slower than those other things, they just don't talk about it. And so you wait till review units go out and people start testing it and they kind of figure out how much RAM has it. Or you wait till iFixit tears it down and they look up the part number. But I tend to agree with you. That's an important metric that Apple's just really silent on. And I understand why they do that. But at the same time, it's a little frustrating they don't bring it up, at least when it changes. Yeah.

Yeah. Well, there's a lot of stuff that Apple, you know, Apple's happy to put these context list graphs up that say, you know, or stats of like it's 80 percent or here about how much faster we've, we are than the last model or how much we've grown in the last five years. They're happy to do that. It's a little harder to get them to get into the details of the tech specs. And it is interesting to what tech specs they get into and what they don't. Cause they were happy to say that it's the A9X processor, but they were not happy to talk about things like how much RAM it has or what the clock speed of the processor is. It does have, they did,

your 10 hours of battery life, Jason, your iPad battery life. Yep, you and me both. That's the solving for X thing. There it is. What a shock. 10 hours of battery life. You don't say. That's what they shoot for.

Speakers seem better, but 10 hours of battery life. You don't say. That's what they shoot for. That's what it is. Speakers seem better. But of course the real story here hardware-wise is the keyboard and the Apple Pencil. Yeah, I suppose so. I mean, I'm excited. We just did the Clockwise podcast

from right outside and we spent time talking about the keyboard and the pencil. I'm more excited by the fact that this is an iPad Pro and that it's got a giant screen and that you can do interesting things with all those iOS 9 split screen features. I'm more excited about that than I am by the peripherals. I think the peripherals are interesting, and it's fine to be excited about them but you know i'm i'm excited about what this means that there's a new like super powerful ios device and and uh a lot of the features of the ios 9 seem to have been designed for it even though we we found about out about them sooner and we're told that it worked with the air 2 now we now we really understand why they were developed that way. And like the keyboard, you know, just as the iPhone 6 Plus gets a few extra keys, the software keyboard

on the iPad Pro has like extra rows of keys and extra columns of keys. So there's lots of stuff like that that kind of fascinates me. I'm not a, as Mike knows all too well, I'm not a stylus or pencil or pen person. So my feelings about the Apple Pencil are not particularly strong. I didn't get a chance to use it. I saw it in action. I don't know what I would have used it for anyway. It would have been embarrassing and weird for me to scribble something on the screen. Microsoft did a demo of scribbling on things in Word.

Apple had a sample of scribbling on an in Word. Apple had a sample of like scribbling on an email using a pen. And I look at that stuff and think maybe somebody uses that, but that seems completely unrealistic to me. I think artists are going to be very excited by it, designers, people for whom a pen input makes more sense. And it sounds like this is the same old story with the Apple Pencil where it's, you know, Apple is integrating it as well as it can with the hardware and the software. And that gives them a huge advantage over the third-party

makers of pens for the iPad, because Apple can do stuff that they can't, because Apple can put hooks in the software that make their pen work way better than any other pen. And that's probably what will happen here. It won't kill all the other styluses because they don't work on the iPad Pro. And I don't think there are still going to be people who want to use a stylus on an iPad or an iPad mini, but it's going to hurt them for sure, because a lot of their customers will go and buy an iPad Pro and they're going to want the, they're going to want the pencil. Yeah, the Microsoft demo was interesting. The only thing I could think about was, A, the keyboard kind of looks like the Surface keyboard. And then you have –

Yeah, and Apple said something funny like, you've never seen a keyboard like this before. And it's like, well, we've seen one that's pretty close to this. I mean – No, what they said was that, like, nobody's used a keyboard like this before or something like that. And I was like, I guess they're saying nobody used the Surface, which might be true, but weird. Yeah, I was thinking that too. And then they brought Microsoft. I mean, the truth is Microsoft's iOS apps are really good.

Their iPad apps are really good. Office for iPad is excellent. So, you know, they should be on stage for that. Yeah, so the Pencil is just for the iPad Pro at this point. I mean, I assume that at some point the other iPads might pick up support for this. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe.

Maybe down the road it's possible. But it's all of the, from my understanding, all of the force sensitivity and, you know, it can tell if it's tilted over and all that stuff is happening in the stylus itself, not on the glass, where it is scanning for touch more rapidly when the when the pencil is engaged but uh it's not like the glass is where the the levels of sensitivity are it's actually in the tip itself right in the in the pens yeah yeah there's no force sensitivity happening in the actual device unlike other ios devices announced. Yeah, it's interesting. Instead of having an eraser,

it's got a little cap with a lightning port underneath it, and you just plug it into the iPad Pro, and it charges it. And they say that you can plug it in for 15 seconds and get 30 minutes of use out of it, which is pretty cool. So if you run out of battery, you just pop it in,

wait for a minute, and then pop it back out, and then you can continue your work. Artists are going to love it. We talked about this in previous episodes, um, Mike and I, that artists are going to love it. Um, there are a lot of, a lot of creative people who have really wanted, they like iOS as a platform. They like Apple stuff. Um, but they, they really wanted something better than what, what Apple was giving them. And this is one of those areas where Apple just seemed to not care about that market. And with the iPad Pro, they suddenly care because they feel like this is a product that

market is going to embrace with the big screen and the integrated, optional, but designed for that product stylus. So we have to address, there's an elephant in the room, right, with an Apple stylus um so so we get we have to address there's an elephant in the room right with an apple stylus uh there's a very famous moment you know the elephant's trunk is so delicate that it could hold a stylus i don't know if that's true i just made that up but it could be true it's beautiful so 2007 steve jobs is on stage. A very famous image is who wants a stylus? Ick. And now, stylus.

So I can reconcile this. What do you think about it? Well, Steve Jobs was talking about the old capacitive touchscreens required you to use a stylus to do all your touching. So, I mean, people talk about that a lot, but that, that was the context back then was literally like, if you had to pull out a stylus in order to do things on the iPhone, um, then, then Apple would have failed because they didn't want to do that. Um, I think that when Apple shows this pen and shows it being used for, for drawing and other things that, uh, a finger is not good enough for, I think that it's, uh, a thing that anybody actually wants. Again, maybe I'm wrong, but that was when it kind of, my skepticism was strong on that point. But, you know, it's not, it's an optional product.

It's an accessory for certain kinds of input on a big screen. You know, there are styluses for the iPad and have been for ages. So it's not that great a leap, I would say. I'd say it would be a different story if there were things you just couldn't do without the stylus and it had to come bundled with it and it had a little stylus pocket and things like that. But it doesn't have those things. So it's not a big deal. Yeah. I mean, even the demos, the Microsoft guys were using their hands, using their fingers to draw.

And they'd only pick up the pencil when it was time to do something really in-depth. And the same thing with the 3D medical demo, where she's kind of spinning it around and looking at different parts. I think it was like a leg and a knee. And then they go into virtual surgery and use the pencil like a scalpel or a knife, which was very upsetting. But yeah, that sort of mixed use, I think, is what Apple is hoping people will, how people will approach it.

Yeah, look, I can draw on arthritis. Woo, yeah, yeah, we'll see. I mean, there are gonna be certain apps for whom, and certain users for whom using that is gonna be appropriate. And that's fine. That's, you know, that's great. Yep, so it sits above the iPad Air in the line.

I think it's more expensive than than i thought it would be i was a little surprised did did we jump over the keyboard did we not talk about the keyboard so we should talk about the keyboard oh yeah we just said it looks like the surface keyboard but it's uh it's built into the case and it sort of snaps down this thing has yeah it's it's like a smart it's like a smart cover um with a full extra fold thing so you fold the keyboard keycaps into the into the cover and then the cover goes over the screen so it's unlike the surface keyboard which i think is just the keys go up against the screen this one's got like an extra fold um but for then from the outside it looks like a uh you know it looks like a standard ipad

keyboard cover or i mean uh smart cover but it's actually a keyboard with uh little uh the little dome switches just like the ones in the macbook and they you know it's got kind of this meshy kind of material and the keys do move a very small amount and i could type on it pretty fast, which is nice. Um, it's, you know, the trade-off is you could bring a Bluetooth keyboard with you with mechanical keys and get much more feel and probably type faster, but that Bluetooth keyboard is not going to fold over your, your iPad screen, um, super thin, like a, uh, like a like a smart cover. Well, you're not trying hard enough, Jason. It'll fold.

It'll fold if you really get on it. And the more you make it like a thing that can be folded over the screen, then the more sacrifice you're making on one end or another. But I can see the appeal for some people. It's the thing you carry around. It's your cover. And if you fold it out, it's also some people. It's the thing you carry around. It's your cover. And if you hold it out, it's also a keyboard. That's cool.

And it's got these new three little dots on the side that is a new access point for this keyboard and apparently for third-party devices of other kinds too that I think Logitech made. According to Dan Frakes, he got some press releases that Logitech announced that they're making something that works with this too. So it provides power and input so you don't need to use wireless to get input in. So that's interesting too that there may be other accessories that use those little three dots that are on the side of the iPad Pro. It's nice that it passes power. I reviewed a bunch of Bluetooth keyboards recently and you have to pair them all and it's kind of a pain.

And then you got to make sure they're charged. The last thing you want to do is charge the keyboard. That's just the last thing anyone wants to do. And so having it draw power from the iPad itself, I think, is a really good move. It means that it will always work, right? That there's nothing finicky that could go wrong. You pop that thing in there, and you know you'll be good to go.

It's good. Yeah, sure. Good. Yeah yeah i'm kind of with you i don't i don't really see that's not a huge attraction to me i mean i've got a keyboard that i use in my ipad sometimes but it's it's really not like i'm not the target audience for this but i think the people who are going to like that it's so much better integrated with what they already have. You know, the iPad and the keyboard are sort of, they're not one, but they're much closer, closely related now than they were, you know, on other iPads with third-party hardware keyboards. Yeah, sure, sure. It's surprising it took Apple this long to provide a keyboard as an option for the iPad because there's just, you know,

other companies have been selling them for a while now. Right. There's money to be made there. But, you know, here we've got it. It's just for the iPad Pro. You know, it's good. It's a, you know, it seems like a very nice keyboard for, you know, for what it is, which is a very super thin thing that can be folded back up against the screen and then you're not even thinking that you've got a keyboard with you the um so yeah so it's and they're the keyboard and pencil are both sold separately neither neither of these things are bundled the keyboard is 169 bucks the pencil is 100 bucks um pricey accessories but it's a pricey tablet honestly yeah it's priced like a you know like a laptop basically it starts at $799 $128 model is $949 you're in macbook air territory at that point if you throw in a uh you know a smart the smart keyboard's $169, the pencil's $99. I mean, it adds up. This is a,

this is not a, it's not a cheap product. It's a high-end iPad. It's so high-end that it is pushed into the, you know, into the laptop category. And that's, I think, one reason why they're not shying away from it so much. Yeah, I think the price is, I think they tried to link the power and the price a little bit of, hey, this is more powerful than 70% of PCs out there or whatever they said. That helps justify the cost, I think, to some people. Like, hey, this thing is much closer to what I'm doing on my notebook as far as CPU and GPU performance. I think that's all sort of the same story. This thing is bigger, it's more powerful,

it can do more, it's going to cost more. It starts at $799 for the 32 gig, $949 for the 128, and then $1079 for the 128GB with LTE. It's the only LTE model on the Pro, which I was a little surprised to see that LTE only be available on the high-end one. I could see this, if they're pitching this as a laptop replacement for certain types of people, it'd be nice to have that

always on data option on both models maybe but I'm biased in that I've only bought LTE iPads for several years now and I really like having data on my iPad anywhere so I know that I'm not in the majority there but

what about you? Do you care about LTE on an iPad at all? And some people don't. I kind of don't. You know, I always liked the idea of it, but as long as I can, as long as I can tether to my iPhone, I kind of don't care. And I can tether to my iPhone, so I kind of don't care. I would have to spend an extra $10 a month. I'm very rarely in a situation where I feel like, oh, if only I had data on my iPad right now. Well, my iPad mini actually is a cellular model and I've got the T-Mobile SIM that gives me the 200 megabytes for free every month. And I never use it. I just, I never use it. I use the iPad. I never use that feature. So, you know, because my plan works fine with

tethering, I don't pay any extra for the tethering and I'd pay extra if I put it on my data plan into the shared pool, I'd pay $10 a month and, uh, plus buying that model. So I haven't done that. And you know, it's there, it's making that a premium feature and charging more for it. That's part of the game that Apple has played with other products and other, and other features all along. So not too surprising, I would say. This is not a cheap product, but it's not meant to be. Is it a product that you are interested in as an iPad user? Oh, I don't know. I don't know.

I'd say I'm intrigued by it because of the big screen space and that I use an iPad a lot. But I'm still, having used the iPad Air 2 this summer, I'm only now coming around to the fact that maybe I don't want the iPad Mini 4 because the iPad Air 2, it's nice having that extra screen space. And it is so light that, you know, I'm not sure I want to go back to the Mini. When I did go back to the Mini for a week when I was on my trip, I was like, oh, it's so little. It's so nice. So I'm completely at sea now about what iPad is right for me. I'm not sure because since I don't, I mean, I'm not,

the size kind of doesn't matter in terms of toting it around. And so at that point, when you want the big one, other than the expense of it, when you want the big one, everything's big and beautiful. And you can use all the multitasking features, which are kind of cramped, honestly, on the iPad Air 2, but will not be cramped so much on this thing. I don't know. Probably not. But if I could get to the point where I could be more productive, I would say this. If I could get to the point where I could be more productive, I would say this.

It's great that this product is here, and it's great that iOS 9 has some features that make productivity on the iPad better and fit well with the existence of this product. But boy, Apple should have been doing productivity features on the iPad version of iOS for years now. You know, that, the stuff that they're introducing this time, maybe they couldn't do split screen stuff until they had more RAM. I can see that. But things like the insertion point on the keyboard and maybe slide over and some other, you know, better support for Bluetooth keyboards. I feel like there's so much more to do here in terms of making iOS a better professional productivity operating system. And that Apple only really kind of realized that was a thing they needed to worry about this year. And I think that's disappointing because they could be further along than they are.

Because I look at this and I think, could I use this as my traveling machine? And the answer is no, because there's some stuff. And some of that's because, you know, I do podcasts and that's a weird thing. I know that most people aren't going to do, but there's probably other equivalent things for other use cases. For me, the fact that iOS is not capable of doing the sound stuff that macOS is, that you can't plug in a microphone and record what you're talking about while it's also piping through an app, that doesn't work.

It works on the Mac great, and it doesn't work, and podcasters rely on that. It's just, it's not there. So I can't use it. And I feel like eventually, I don't want them to clutter it up with a lot of junk, but there's a lot of things that iOS just kind of doesn't do or doesn't do well, like in the demo that they had for Microsoft,

and they had Excel, and they had Word, and they had a chart, and they said, look, you can copy it over here and paste it over there. It's like they're right next to each other. Why can't you drag and drop? Well, iOS doesn't do that, right? I mean, we just don't do that. We got them side by side. Give us time.

We'll do drag and drop eventually, but not yet. Now you just got to copy from one and go over to the other one and paste it in. It's like they'll get there, but it does feel, I get that feeling a little bit of like maybe they should have started earlier. So I don't know. I feel like this is great hardware that maybe is let down a little bit by the fact that the OS is still not mature for tasks like this. Yeah, I totally agree. I mean, as capable as this tablet looks and as I look at the pencil and there's a novelty aspect to it for me, but it's not something that I could replace i could replace my macbook pro with it's just not and for that reason with the price it's it's really not something i'm looking at picking up

honestly yeah yeah i i other than as a comic book reader i look at it and go you're reading comics on that would be really really great they'd be big and pretty and all that. But yeah, it's probably not there yet. You want to take a break? Yeah. This week, this is mine. Although I could talk to, I could send things to you. This episode is being brought to you by stamps.com. I've talked about them before. When I talk about this with Mike, I can't, you know, I can send him things, but he can't send things back to me because he is not in America. Although I guess he is right now. He could get a stamp or he could use stamps.com and he could send things to me now. Because this is a service for people in the US. It is better than leasing a postage meter because that is expensive. There are multi-year commitments and hidden fees. multi-year commitments and hidden fees. It's better than going to the post office because if you're like me, you don't really want to walk over there. It takes time. You don't want to drive over there. At least I can walk to my post office. That is true. But then you wait in line and there are people and you have to interact with people. Sometimes I just don't want to

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no-brainer. I have used it recently. I used it to send some stuff. We bought some stuff in Spokane at the science fiction convention that I went to for people who work on the Incomparable podcast, one of my many other podcasts that I do. And I needed to send one of those people a package with some of the stuff from Spokane. And I used stamps.com to put that package together, handed it to my letter carrier, and I was done. And they got it a couple days later. It was great. So right now you can use our promo code upgrade for our special offer, no risk trial, $110 bonus offer includes a digital scale and up to $55 in free postage. Don't wait, go to stamps.com. Before you do anything else, click on the

microphone at the top of the homepage and type in upgrade. That's stamps.com, enter upgrade. Thank you so much to stamps.com for supporting this show and all of RelayFM. All right. So we've had the watch. We've had the iPad Pro. And now we're in the living room, Jason. We have moved into the living room with the new Apple TV. We are in the living room. Welcome to the living room. New Apple TV. I was writing stories about how the Apple TV would be great with apps like three or four years ago. And look, it finally happened. You're a thought leader is what the kids say.

Yeah, I was leading a little too far here, I think. So it's new hardware, which enables all this new software stuff. They're still selling the Apple TV as we know it today, but it doesn't get any of the new stuff, which is kind of sad. know it today but it doesn't get any of the new stuff which is kind of sad um but you know cook opened this with kind of the the phrase that the tv experience has it changed very much in decades and he compared it to smartphones in the mobile industry which of course has just completely changed uh over over time uh really since 2007 with the iPhone, 2010 with the iPad. And his argument was that the apps are a core to that. So you have these really rich apps that provide content or provide entertainment.

And Apple seems to think that, hey, it worked for the smartphone, it worked for the tablet, it can work for the TV as well. Yeah, it is funny. You know, I applaud them for the way they phrase this about how the future of TV is apps. Because if you're going to be on, if you're not going to be replacing people's primary input, which is like traditional cable, then what do you have? And the answer is, we've got apps. You've got all the apps that are other ways, alternate ways from traditional TV. So I think it's smart on that level

because what they aren't offering is their own over-the-top video service or something like that. They're still sort of input number two. And so saying apps is what we're about right now is the right thing to do because that's pretty accurate. They're saying this is the universe what we're about right now is the right thing to do because that's pretty accurate. They're saying this is the universe that we're playing in.

And also the strength of Apple in terms of its development community, like the App Store and app development, that's really a place where they have it up on like Roku. I mean, I know there are apps for Roku and people develop some apps for Roku, but come on. Like Apple on day one is going to have a better developer story and a better supported platform for apps than Roku. On day one, it will. And you know, I've got Rokus. They're nice. And you can do apps for them and you can play Angry Birds on them and stuff. But come on. I mean, because the iOS development sphere is so huge, it takes very little effort, in fact, on Apple's part to get just to get the Apple TV to have an enormous set of things that can run on it. And Fire TV from Amazon has a decent amount of apps because they are tied in with, you know, you can basically

port Android apps to it or convert them enough to get them in the store, do enough work on them to work with the interface model. And, you know, because it's based on Android, there's a better story for Fire TV. And Roku is good, but their story isn't as good. Amazon's story isn't as good. So Apple, you know, this is their strength. So why would you not play it up and say, iOS developers, now you have access to the TV. Now, a lot of iOS developers don't want it or care about it. But if you're in certain fields, especially games, but also entertainment, if you've got video or audio content, I think that you're going to want to be there.

And then they demoed some other kind of wacky uses like Zillow and Gilt where you're doing shopping for houses or clothes or things like that. I suspect that will be less popular. But isn't it nice that somebody like Major League Baseball can make an MLB app for the Apple TV with all these cool features in it, as opposed to the bare bones version that they were able to do using the private secret Apple, old Apple TV channel building interface where everything was super simple and basically looked like something out of the first Apple TV and, you know,

their demo app that they did on stage looked great. I mean, they're great developers who didn't have a chance to, to really do something cool on Apple TV until now. And you'll see that from others too. Yeah, you know, it was interesting. I was talking to my wife about it after the event, and I brought up the Airbnb app, which they showed on stage. And she actually liked the idea. You know, we've been looking at doing some traveling and especially with Airbnb, right? you're like looking at an iPad and you're sort of like the family's huddled around it's like what about this place what about that place and I agree with you that I don't think that's going to be like the mainstream

type of app I think I think the mainstream apps are going to be what you expect on a TV games and content I do think there is room for this these other types of apps where it's helpful if more than one person is looking at it. You know, I don't think we're going to see a bunch of Twitter clients on the Apple TV. I hope that we don't. But I do think there is room for other types of stuff. And it seems, at least today, you know, just a couple hours after the event, that this is a pretty open thing. pretty open thing so if other content providers want to to bring stuff on board that it's very different than the old sort of you meet the apple employee in the alley and he gives you like the

codes and then you end up on apple tv unannounced that and no one wants you like well that's that's where did our developer go well he we send him to cupertino is that a euphemism for something no we actually sent him to cupertino because it's the only place you could build this thing. And now we're going to see, yeah, it's going to be, the product's going to be way better because they're going to, these apps are going to be able to do more. It's going to be better. The Apple TV interface is old. It is old. This is the second iteration of the Apple TV interface and it's, you know, it's okay, but it is, this is going to be much better. I mean, what I saw in the demo room, like it's fast, it looks great. And it's powerful. And these apps can be really smart and do interesting things. They won't all do interesting

things. I think Netflix is committed to basically having every Netflix on every device look exactly the same. But the nice thing about that is that Netflix on Apple TV will now look like it does everywhere else that you use Netflix. And that's what Netflix wants, and I think that's okay. I think there's no metaphor to break with the Apple TV anymore. It used to be they all had to look like an Apple TV app, and now they're apps. They can do whatever crazy thing they want, and that's probably good.

Right. And like you said, the UI is want. And that's probably good. Right. And like you said, the UI is different. The OS has been overhauled. We're going to get to the name in a second. But the interaction from a user perspective is totally new as well. So Gone is the little five-way aluminum remote. And its place is a remote with a glass touchpad, which you and Mike spoke about last week. Works with Bluetooth, so you don't have to point it at the thing. You can now hide your Apple TV because you don't need a lot of sight to it, which is nice if you care about that sort of thing.

And Siri is really a big component of this. You still have all the gestures. They didn't show a keyboard, at least in the keynote. I don't know if the OS has a keyboard in it anywhere. There is one there. You can do a picker and click in the keynote. I don't know if the OS has a keyboard in it anywhere. There is one there. You can do a picker and click on the little keys if you want to. But, yeah, it's got a trackpad, essentially. You can tap on or swipe on, and you can click it as well.

So it's got all of those sort of gestures available. And then it's got some buttons. So you can have some tactile buttons from menu and volume up and down and things like that. And it does have some of that universal remote support built into it so that theoretically you can control your TV just with that. Although I'm skeptical of that. Because people's TVs sometimes are too complicated for stuff like that. You know, because people's TVs sometimes are too complicated for stuff like that. So, yeah, the remote is funny in the sense that it's got an accelerometer and a gyroscope in it, too.

So you can use it as a gaming, like a Wii U kind of gaming device. Although there was that one demo of the sport game from harmonix where you're sort of like swinging a baseball bat to tie to the rhythm of a song you know you can do stuff like that in there but there seems to be nothing like general like an app on the apple or on the iphone that lets you turn an iphone into a game controller it's sort of like if you want to play a game with the apple the apple tv remote and an iphone a multiplayer game, you can do it. But you as the developer need to put the app on the iPhone that does that. So you've got to use the Crossy Road app to play two-player Crossy Road. You can't just launch the remote app and it turns your iPhone into a remote.

It doesn't work like that. It's all app-based. Yeah. I think the game demos were fun. I do wonder about the novelty of some of that. And I think it's going to take some time for developers to kind of figure out what works. On the Apple website, you have to really look for it, but the thing does come with

at least some sort of support for third-party controllers apple's not making one and i agree with with mike that by apple not making one they're making a statement the remote that apple made makes a statement about the type of games they expect to see on it and i think that's fine like i'm not i don't have any dogs in that fight but um i think i think it's interesting. But for me, as far as interface, the most exciting thing is the Siri stuff. And that it's using the same type of search that's in iOS 9. Where iOS 9, you can use the intelligence and use Siri to search within applications.

And that is here on the Apple TV as well. In a limited degree, I think they rattled off iTunes, Netflix, Hulu, HBO, and Showtime. So I can say, Amazon. Yeah, no Amazon. That's sort of the weird thing here. But they didn't make it clear if that search is something, hey, I hit that API and you can search me, or if it's opt-in.

But the fact that Siri can do so much more, I think is going to be great. You know, in the keynote, I think in the video, they're like show all the kids movies. And then someone else in the room says, Oh,

but show, just show the new ones. And then just show the animated ones. And it's whittling down the search. Yes. If that works, that's, that's a huge improvement.

You know, right now it's like, I want to watch this. I go into the Netflix app. Oh, it's not there. I go to Hulu. Oh, it's not there. And oh, oh, it's an ad. I ended up sort of rage buying it. And this may be able to help with that, which I think is, is really key to a

more fluid experience. Right now, the Apple TV feels like a bunch of silos kind of stapled together. And this feels like it could be much more cohesive. You don't, you don't staple silos together. Well, that's not what you do. I don't know what they do. I don't know what farmers do to connect their silos, but it probably doesn't involve staples. I'm just saying. Big industrial-sized, man-sized staples, Jason. Silo staples. This is good. You're right. You see the direction Apple's going with Siri and connecting it to more data sources, and here we're seeing it. Universal search is really great. Amazon not being there is disappointing, but they said they'll add others later.

I think that's the idea there is that they'll either make deals or they'll pick up data from other apps as they come online. Because, yeah, Amazon should be there. And maybe they will be at some point. Because it would be really nice if you knew that, you know, if I'm going to watch a movie or a TV show, let's look on the Apple TV because it's going to tell us where we can get it. And that sure beats other devices where you have to go over here and then go over there and then go to this other place. And what was that? Was that $4.99 or $5.99?

Are the prices the same? or $5.99 or the price is the same. I've bought a movie or rented a movie on iTunes and discovered that it was on Netflix before. Yep. That sucks. So this would be good if the more of this, the better. The danger with Siri demos is that they're demos and they're perfect because they're demos.

And then in the real world, like I saw in the demo area afterwards, somebody said, you know, show me all the movies with Sean Connery in it. And it came back as show me all the movies with Sean Connery and it. It said, I don't know what you're talking about. I'm like, well, probably you don't need in it. You probably can just say with Sean connery but also as a computer you you know do better right just do a better job sir you can do better and that that's gonna happen then you're gonna have to learn like the tricks of like what's the right way to speak to siri

to get what what i want to see but when it works it is an impressive collection of features and uh yeah i hope it works i think the thing that was most impressive to me during the Siri demo was watching Modern Family and the demo, the woman doing the demo basically didn't hear how the scene started. And so she said, what did she say? The Apple TV backs up 15 seconds and then turns on captions for that 15-second window, which is really cool. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. That's that, that was a smart feature. You know, I hope that I have more things like that. Cause that's a, that's a, that's,

that's good stuff. Yeah, absolutely. And that's the sort of stuff like that sort of little detail is one of the things that can really set this box apart. I mean, a lot, a lot of boxes do what the Apple TV does,

right? There's a lot of competition. You just ratted off a bunch of them. If this thing really works the way they say it'll work, then that sort of experience is going to draw customers. I'm excited to get

one. I have an Apple TV and I can say I can tell you right now, I will be replacing it with a new one this fall. Yep, yep, yep. Absolutely. I'm looking forward to it. I guess we should talk about the OS name real quick. Oh, you mean hashtag Jason was right? Hashtag Jason was right.

I got this one right. TV OS. I wrote a piece in Macworld a couple weeks ago, because it was August and we had nothing to talk about, saying, okay, here's my latest theory. Phil Schiller, when Gruber asked him, come on, watch OS, all lowercase with capital OS, you're killing me here. And Schiller said something really weird like, well, it'll all make sense soon or something like that. I'm like, what does that mean? And I've been advocating for

a while now of going back to Mac OS instead of OS X, getting off the X, moving along, getting to version 11, being done with the X. And now what we have is iOS, lowercase I capital OS, that runs the iPad and the iPhone and the iPod Touch. We have Watch OS,

which runs the Apple Watch. And now we have TV, lowercase TV capital OS, that runs the Apple Watch. And now we have a TV, lowercase TV, capital OS, that runs the Apple TV, which means that next year, will we see Mac OS, lowercase Mac, uppercase OS? Maybe. That might actually happen. But I called it on TV OS. And so, yeah. Yay. I don't like how it looks at all, but at least I was right. It does look a little weird, but I think the naming scheme makes sense. And I think that the Apple TV always had this identity problem where the OS didn't have a name, and maybe it didn't need one because you had to have that sort of backroom agreement to be on it.

But now that it is a development platform, it's got SDK, it's got APIs on it, it needed a name. And I think TVOS is a good one. It obviously fits in. It needed a name. And based on iOS is not a good name, right? It runs iOS, but not really not a good name. And then when your developers have to develop for it, you got to give it, you got to call it something. And it isn't really iOS, right?

Because it's weird because it's running on this outlier device. So TVOS, let's call it that. At least it's clear now. So we'll put a link to that article in the show notes. Jason, where can people find the show notes this week? Well, since this is episode 53 of Upgrade,

they can find the show notes at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 53, Stephen. That's how that works. Or, they can look in their podcast app of choice and it's probably already there. It's clever how we named these things, really. Uh-huh. Very straightforward.

So it's going to ship late October. If you're a developer, you can actually apply doing a raffle, it seems like, of a hardware dev kit so you can be putting apps on it and seeing how it goes. It's $149 for the 32 gig and $199 for the 64. Did they give you any sort of additional information about why they're two sizes in the hands-on area?

Is there any news there? No, I think the idea there is it's basically how much space do you want for apps? And it's not like you can download videos or anything or sync videos like you could on the first generation Apple TV. It's really that they want space for apps. Because if you have a lot of apps, you're going to want more space so you don't have to be installing them and uninstalling them. you're going to want more space so you don't have to be installing them and uninstalling them. There was a tweet going around earlier saying that

there doesn't seem to be any persistent storage which I really don't know what that means as far as can I at least keep so much game data on the Apple TV? Looks like apps are limited to 200 megabytes or something like that. This goes back to another

feature that they announced this year, which is this ability for levels and stuff to load dynamically. They load on the fly, so the app loads the next level and pulls it over the cloud. So instead of installing 20 gigs on your hard drive, like on a console, it instead kind of loads things on the fly. And that was announced for apps for iOS, but works with tvOS too. So that's what you're going to see is slimmed down apps that can load their content and delete their content as they go.

I think too there's questions around universal apps and there's some stuff on the developer site that maybe seems like you could do a universal app but then the TV app be an add-on and maybe you could charge for that. It's very early in all this so I'm sure there will be lots of follow up in the coming weeks but I for one am excited to see what developers

do with this. I think it's going to be great to have the Apple TV be a bigger part of the Apple ecosystem. It has always felt like this sort of like weird little guy, right? It was a hobby, right? That's what Apple, you know, Steve Jobs called it years ago. And I think it's finally graduated from that today. Yeah, they're changing the future of TV now, apparently.

So, yeah. I think it needs to sell well for it to not be a hobby, but that's where they're headed now. This is a real development platform, and it's all good. That's good. Good stuff. Apple TV is a conduit to get the power of app developers, apps, onto TV sets, onto big screens. developers apps onto tv sets onto big screens and uh you know i don't i don't feel like this is um i think it's a false thing to say does this mean that it's going to compete with game consoles

you know i i think not i think i think it sort of does but but more doesn't if that makes sense um maybe it doesn't make sense that that it's it's it might but not really like it it it's a different beast and it can play games but it's not an attempt to reach the game console market so much as reach another market that is uh that might want to play games on their tv but is not going to buy a console. Yeah, that's where I fit in. I don't consider myself a gamer. I don't own a console, haven't had a console since I was a kid.

But some casual games with the family on the Apple TV is something I could get behind. So I think it's more of a, it's sort of a second tier thing that it's not going after the Xbox. It's not going after the PlayStation, but, but you're right. There is this other audience of people who want something less hardcore. And I think that's a market that's been really underserved. And there was the, uh, there was a, what was the Android based one a couple of years ago?

You could put games on and you could put like ROMs on and stuff. I think Mike owns one. Um, but there hasn't really been. the oh yeah yeah the oh yeah the oh yeah yeah um sounds like a cheer really more than anything yep but there really isn't anything sort of in this power and price class until now and i think apple is is is smart to go out for that i think there's gonna be a lot of people who like it because it's not a console, if that makes sense. Anyways, good times in the TV land. But I think it's time to move out of the living room, Jason.

Oh, we have to leave the living room now? I think we do. It's time to move to our pockets. But first, do you want to tell us about our friends at FanDuel? See, I was going to say getting hot and stuffy in here, here but it's gonna be way hotter and stuffier in the pockets than it is in the living room but okay we'll go there after i tell you about fanduel big week i know you guys have been waiting for this week for ages because uh it's the first week of the nfl season also Apple event. Also new iPhones. Also new Apple TV. But if you like the sports and the sports ball,

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Sign up today. And thank you to FanDuel for sponsoring Upgrade. So we're in the pocket now, Jason. iPhone 6S. It's so small in the pocket now jason iphone 6s it's so small in the pocket it's so hard okay we're here here we are we're in the pocket with an iphone 6s and a 6s plus it's a big pocket in the same pocket that's no good two phone oh okay two pockets two pockets they're connected they're stapled together that's how they're connected, by staples. New iPhones. New iPhones have happened. At the end. At the end, not the beginning. I mean, they...

Apple events have a tendency, I think, to sort of ramp up to the most exciting thing, right? This time, I feel like it was sort of a bell curve. They sort of started slow, got big with the iPad Pro and the Apple TV, and then sort of tapered back down with the phones. I don't really know why that change took place this year, but it was like an hour and 20 minutes in until they got to the phones. But at least they got more than the eight minutes they did last year with the watch,

which is good. Yeah. Lots of things about numbers. Crazy year-over-year growth especially in china yeah that's one of those update non-update updates is we still got an iphone update just came at the end customer sat off the charts he said customer sat in this in this part i typed it out and as i was crying a little bit it's off the charts, Jason. You can't even see it from here. Doesn't the chart end at 100%?

You can't have more than everyone who has a phone be satisfied with it. It turns out Apple's charts for customer sat end at 90%. It sounds like the Amazon charts with no numbers at all. It's like everything's off the chart because the chart doesn't mean anything. It's an S year, right?

The outside is the same. The cases are the same. But it seems like they really played up. Hey, we did a lot of stuff internally. It's not just a speed bump like some previous S phones have been, but we've got a new cover glass. We've got new cameras. We've got new aluminum.

They're actually using 700 series aluminum like they're on the watch, which was 7,000. Yeah, it's that magic aerospace aluminum thing that is as predicted. It's made out of rockets, Jason. It is, it is. It's from space.

From space. And then of course the 3D Touch, which I think is probably the biggest thing. I think 3D Touch is what will define this iPhone in history. No doubt. So can you kind of break down, just watching it was sort of hard to kind of really get what they're trying to say. How is it using it? Kind of what are your thoughts on how they presented it and what you think about the feature?

how they presented it and what you think about the feature? It's, so I spent most of my time, well, I spent a lot of time with the iPad Pro and then I spent a lot of time with a 6S with this feature because I wanted to understand it. And, you know, you are pushing a little bit harder on an interface element to make something happen. And there are a few different ways that that manifests. In the launcher, it manifests as a little menu of common suggestions of things that you might want to do. And then it's launching the app, but it's launching the app with a deep linking, essentially. That's taking it to a very particular state. So in mail, if you 3D touch, I guess, if you press on the, on the mail icon, one of the options is search. And when you tap on search, or you can actually press and then sort of just

slide your finger down to search and let go. That also works. It will launch mail, but it will bring you to the search window with the insertion point in the search box and the keyboard showing. So you're ready to go. That as an example. Or if you 3D touch, you give that extra press on the camera app, you can slide your finger down to take a selfie or take a picture or take a video and let go. And then that feature will come up. So, you know, you'll already be with the front-facing camera, the FaceTime camera, or you'll already be in video mode. So that's clever.

And that's like a control click. That's a right click. That's a contextual thing, but it can help. I think that could be really great. Like in Maps, you press R on the Maps icon and you get a thing that says it can help. I think that could be really great. Like in Maps, you press R on the Maps icon and you get a thing that says, navigate to home. It's just a nice little shortcut to say, I just need to figure out how to get home from here. And then in apps, there are, I think developers can sort of do whatever they want, but this metaphor that Apple is using, and I think

Apple wants to be an example for app developers app developers are going to look at what apple does and say we should do that because all the system apps do that it's this idea of the uh of the peak and the pop so adorable really kind of cute names yeah yeah except the peak kind of pops up which which is weird because it's not a pop, it's a peak. I had the same thought. Yeah, yeah. But you press on an interface element, like let's say you're in the preview list of all of your messages. If you touch on one and press a little bit, you get a preview of that message. And that's called a peek.

And in some apps, you can actually do things from the peek. You can swipe your finger up and down or left and right and expose other options. Like if you swipe your finger up, from the bottom comes a list of buttons that you can press to do something to whatever you've got selected. If you want to fully commit to that thing you're just peeking at, you just continue to press a little bit harder and that the whole interface element just kind of pops and that's the pop into full, you know, regular mode, like as if you had tapped on it. So it's a way for you to, instead of the old mode, which would be, oh, let's see what message they sent, tap, slide in, oh, there it is, and tap, and you slide back out. Instead, you do this 3D touch, you look at the message, and if it is the one that you were looking for, then you press a little bit harder and it opens as if you had tapped it.

So it's cute. it's cute it does a little uh it's because there's the taptic engine now in the iphone 6s and 6s plus it does a little quick buzz kind of in your hand when you do both of those things so you get some some very light haptic feedback that these things are happening and i can see how it will become second nature to people who are using the these uh these devices to do it because apple's done it in a very kind of clever way it's's not just let's throw up a menu everywhere. I think they did a very good job. I think the fit and finish of it is really nice. I'm impressed with that.

And I could see how it could become a natural part of your gestural language in the future once you start using these devices. No, I definitely agree. We had spoken on Connected a couple weeks ago about the concern developers would be tempted to put UI elements behind a long press or behind a forced touch, as we were calling it,

and now it's not the name anymore. This is something different. It's all very confusing. But I agree with you. I think the way Apple's doing it is that there's nothing that this does that you can't do another way, right? You can launch the app and you can hit the button you want or you can tap on the email and open it.

But it's providing another level of accessibility to those things in a way that is clever, but I don't think developers or the OS itself are going to be hamstrung because a bunch of old devices don't have it yet. You know what I mean? It's a nice addition, but it doesn't really add any... There's no negative side to that that I can see at this point.

Yeah. We'll see. The ball is really in the court of the app developers now. There's a ball in this pocket, too? It's getting really crowded. Yeah. We'll see what they do. We'll see what they do with this and the clever ideas that come out of it.

But I like it. My first few minutes with it, I totally get what they're doing. It feels natural. It's harder to explain, but very easy when you experience it to see what you would do. It feels natural. It doesn't feel like you're trying to press through the screen. I didn't notice any accidental taps. I think that the software behind it is really smart about what it's sensing and how it behaves. I really think app developers are going to go to town with things like the shortcuts from the home screen. It makes the home screen more efficient efficient and being able to kind of pop in, or sorry, peek into various items in the UI

that you could get used to it really easily. So we'll see. Yeah, I think it's nice. Camry got a big jump this year as well. They've gone from 8 to 12 megapixel. They had a whole technical explanation about why they couldn't do that till now that, quite frankly, no human could understand um and i think the big thing with the camera is doing 4k video it seems i mean i don't mean to be a downer jason don't mean to be the way that i am but it

just seems i don't know i don't know why i don't know what I can do with 4K video at this point. Right? Like I, what am I going to do with 4K video, Jason? Well, zoom in on it. Yeah. I mean, I guess, and let it fill up my photo stream and my iCloud account. Or use image stabilization and have lots of extra pixels to use. I don't know. it's one of those

things when when they first did 1080 video i thought really what are we going to do 1080 video but then you know a few years pass and it seems reasonable this is one of those things where it's it's early but having it there uh will eventually seem nice and you know people will be shooting movies they're already shooting movies with iphones now they'll be shooting them in 4k yeah some of the chat rooms like you can watch the videos on your roku the apple tv doesn't support that's right okay but um yeah i mean joking aside i mean that's partially in jest i mean it's going to be really fun to play with i think but at the same time you have this argument it's it's been it's sort of been rekindled today on Twitter of, you know, I can take a couple of minutes of video and fill up,

you know, an eighth of my 16 gigabyte iPhone. And that's, I think that's problematic. Especially when photo and video, like that's what normal people do with their phones, right? A lot of people do this stuff. And I do think that the complaints we have heard from people and the complaints that have been voiced to Apple about the 16 gigabyte phone, it's only going to get louder now that you can really fill that thing up

with really high quality video. Yeah, yeah, we'll see. I mean, you'll also be filling it up with live photos so who knows there are lots of ways to fill up these these uh these phones so pity those who have the 16 gig model so what else with the camera they did they the five megapixel facetime camera the camera on the front and they're using the screen now as a as a They've done this in Photo Booth on the Mac forever. Yes. And I think Snapchat, I'm not young enough to understand Snapchat, but I've heard the children have told me that.

It snaps while it chats. Yes. It's an amazing invention. It uses the screen flash. Yeah. And they say three times as bright as the standard brightness. So they've got it. You know, they're cranking up the brightness momentarily in order to get that flash. It's like a little explosion. You can only do so many of them and your phone just disintegrates.

Sad. Possible. And then faster LTE, faster wireless, you know, stuff we see kind of every year. I mean, I feel like that stuff just kind of comes with the territory where you get new radios and they have new features. So they're like, yay, here they are. And they make claims that they're twice as fast. And it's usually never actually true except in ideal circumstances that never exist. But generally, over time, it ends up being faster as time goes on.

Maybe not as fast as they say because in the real world, things aren't ever that simple, but in the ballpark. The live photos thing, I am fascinated by this idea that, you know, these cameras all sort of bracket the images. They sort of take a bunch of images and pick a good one. I think that actually was happening on the iPhone before to a certain degree where, you know, it was taking whatever, 10 images or something, and then picking the one that it thought was the best of those and using that one. I think it was already doing that. But now what they're doing here is when you were in this live photo

mode, it is taking a still, but for a second and a half on either side, it's gathering data and then it generates, essentially it generates a still, and then it generates, it saves, they're unclear on this, but it's compressed. So it sounds like they're doing kind of quick timey stuff where they're tracking, like, I don't know if you can do, can you do a reverse keyframe? Maybe there are two keyframes, but that sounds like what's happening here is you've got your picture then there's there's data that they're using for the other stills in this live photo thing so

that when you you know when you hold on an image that's a live photo you see three seconds of movement it's like a really short vine right but but it's not video they were very clear about that no it's a it's a series of it's a series of stills you know using the still camera stuff and yet it's a series of stills, you know, using the still camera stuff. And yet it's also not stored as a stack of JPEGs, which is why I mentioned keyframes. Because it sounds more like what's happening is something like, that's how video compression works, right? Is you have a keyframe that's got all the information. And then for successive frames, up until the point where there's a new keyframe, what they're doing is detailing how this frame is different from the frame that came before it. And it sounds like they're doing something like that with the live photo stuff. But it's not a video.

So it's kind of like a video, but it's kind of not a video. It's complicated. Yeah, I'm looking forward to playing with it. I think it'll be fun with kids and pets and stuff. It's cute. Yeah, exactly right. And you get these little things and you hold it and that still picture you've got also has some motion data around it and it moves a little bit. And that can be kind of fun.

And there's audio optionally too. So, yeah, it's a fun idea. We'll see if it goes anywhere. But they're building support into iOS 9 and El Capitan. So you'll be able to see the stuff that's shot with this. And I'm unclear whether you can export it out as an animated GIF or something. I know. I said GIF.

You heard me. And watchOS. It was sort of a throwaway comment, but iOS 9, you can set a photo or a photo album as your watch face background. And they've said, again, just very off the cuff during the keynote, that you can do that with these as well. So if you have a little three-second thing of your kid smiling, you can make that your watch face, which I think is, I mean, I think these things will be fun, but I think that it's going to be for a certain type of person.

And there could be a lot of people who just don't care or don't understand. Or, you know, it's fine, but I can't export it to Instagram, so who cares? You know, I really want to see how the third-party support, if it exists, what that looks like before I'm willing to say this is going to be a huge hit. Anyway, so we talked about the business stuff a little bit. Sure. Does that mean we can leave the pocket? Yeah, we're now in the boardroom, Jason.

Okay. It's a good-looking suit. I love this leather chair here. It's a good-looking suit. Thanks. So your, I say Okay. That's a good looking suit. I love this leather chair here. Thanks. Uh, so your, uh,

I say yours, not really yours, but your six S's is not here. So the, the lineup now is five S six, six plus six S six S plus exhausting to say, uh, I'm surprised they kept the six plus.

I thought just the six would sit in the middle but um uh they got two options in the middle now and then the 5s is still around that in the u.s on contract uh on that sort of free tier of course now you know a lot of a lot of carriers are going to this monthly payment thing so they also broke that down of like hey this is you know average over these carriers you know 27 32 a month or something right which and then yes and then apple has its own uh its own program there'll be a link in the show notes they're calling it the iphone upgrade program and basically if you want an iphone every, you can go into the Apple store, tell them your carrier, and you get a monthly bill. And then you go back in the next year, give them the phone back, and they roll that debt over to the next phone or something.

I looked over this Apple website, and quite frankly, sort of my eyes glazed over. But it's there. It sounds like this is – yeah i i need to get more information about this it sounds like this is basically apple saying look we um we want to have the equivalent of what the carriers have which is a monthly um a monthly phone reimbursement program so that's what they created so So if you want to use Apple, and Apple's thing is a little different in that they've rolled AppleCare Plus into it, so it's going to be a little more expensive. But what they say is you get a new iPhone every year.

It sounds to me like you pay this monthly fee, and after a year, you can trade in your old iPhone and get a new iPhone, and then you pay the new monthly fee. And it's a two-year commitment, but I think you're buying yourself out of the second year by trading in your phone. I think so, yes. I think that's how it works. So it's a little more expensive, but put it this way, if you are more comfortable with your relationship with Apple than you are with your carrier, and I suspect a lot of Apple's customers are, this is an interesting approach where you're getting an unlocked phone, you can change your carrier anytime you want. You can travel internationally and put any SIM card in you want.

And yes, you are paying, instead of paying that $32 a month or $40 a month or whatever for, or $28 a month to AT&T for your plan or to T-Mobile or to Verizon, you pay it to Apple. And along with it, you get AppleCare. So you've got extra protection on it. And it's unlocked, so you can move at any point. Interesting. I don't know. Part of me says that this is largely to grease the skids of selling phones in Apple retail. That Apple really likes the idea of the two-year subsidy thing and hates the idea of having to sell an unlocked phone for $600 or whatever, $750. And now they don't have to because they have this plan that sounds a lot like plans people are going to be familiar with.

So interesting idea. I think it also, you know, the iPhone's gotten a lot simpler the last couple of versions where now there aren't a bunch of different SKUs for a bunch of different carriers. There's sort of an iPhone now. And that enables them to do this too

by saying, look, it's just for everybody, whatever. You know, every carrier will work with it. And that makes this more viable than it would have been even two or three years ago where, oh, you know, that's you can't use that phone on this carrier kind of stuff. It's just sort of swept away now. So it's cool. People will crunch the numbers and find out whether it's a good deal or not. Chances are it's going to be more expensive because like I said, they're rolling in AppleCare and stuff like that. So it'll probably be, you'll probably get a better deal from your carrier, depending on what you want, though.

If you want AppleCare, if you want the ability to dump your carrier on a moment's notice and have an unlocked phone, this may be a better deal. Yeah, I don't know. I'm sort of mid-contract right now with Verizon, but it is an interesting thing about making a change. And basically now, if you move carriers or you start over, you're basically more or less going to be in some sort of monthly installment thing. You know, the idea of I'm going to spend a couple hundred dollars if you buy unlocked several hundred dollars at once, and then I just pay my bill, and I'm tied to you for

a set amount of time, and then we can go our separate ways. That whole relationship, again, here in the U.S., is changing. And I think you're right. Apple has to respond to that somehow. And I do think that Apple would prefer its customers come into their own stores because then they can control the experience, right? Like we've all been to carrier stores that are terrible. Um, there's some good ones out there too,

but you know, we've all had that experience. If we go and just, it's just a nightmare and Apple, there's always, I always feel like there's this tension with Apple and the carriers. And maybe this is sort of the next round of that, of,

Hey, you guys are going to do this monthly installment plan. You know, all of a sudden Apple looks like the bad guy. If they don't have this, right. If next round of that, of, hey, you guys are going to do this monthly installment plan. All of a sudden, Apple looks like the bad guy if they don't have this. If you go to Apple's website, you can only buy a phone for $299. On paper, it's different, but the way it looks is like, whoa, what are you doing, Apple? Either that's an old way of thinking about it, or people don't understand why it's so much more expensive.

So Apple has to play ball here. And I think it's interesting and I am curious to see as this week goes on and as people sort of dive into the details of this agreement, how does it stack up versus what AT&T or Verizon or T-Mobile are doing on that fee? It's an interesting change. Yeah, interesting strategy. We'll see what happens with it. But I think, you know, Apple's got a lot more loyalty bound up in their brand than Verizon or AT&T or T-Mobile have in theirs with customers.

So why not do this? We'll see what happens. Yeah, so probably the only other thing they sort of announced was some iCloud price changing stuff um I don't know what it was before but the new prices are 99 cents for 50 gigs 299 for 200 and 999 for a terabyte that's that's monthly build monthly um it's cheaper I think because I didn't look up what the previous ones were but it's still expensive it's cheaper still expensive compared to some't look up what the previous ones were but it's still expensive it's cheaper still expensive compared to some other things out there but i think apple's realizing

that uh they've got to make some adjustments here yeah it's it's cheaper although i've got the 500 gig plan which is no longer there which is annoying to me because i think i'm using about 270 gigs of photos and video from the Photos app. So you're forced up to the terabyte. Well, which I think is what I'm paying. So I think, you know, and I'm probably grandfathered in, but I think that's what I'm paying. But that's too bad, right?

It's like, oh, I didn't get a cost savings. But still, it's good. I'm disappointed that their free tier didn't go a cost savings. But still, it's good. I'm disappointed that their free tier didn't go up to 10. Because I feel like there's so many bad user experiences that happen because you run out of a backup space. And I feel like, or that it's 5 gigs per device linked to an account up to 15 or something like that. Because if you have an iPhone and an iPad, you're going to be very close to running out of your five gigs of backup storage, like really easily. And then you get all these weird, obscure warnings. And I don't, you know,

maybe they sell some people on buying more storage stuff, but I think mostly it just annoys people and they ignore it and they stop. Their devices start getting backed up and it leads to bad things. And so I think they should, yeah, they should do something about that, but they didn't. Instead though, that 50 gig plan is now 99 cents a month. That's a pretty good deal. That's not bad just for like backups and some stuff. And I think in general, this will be good for people who use photos because making access to photos more reliable is a good thing. Yeah, 500. Previously, you got for $9.99 a month, you got 500 gigs, which was the plan that I was on. And so now I will basically be able to go up to a terabyte, but I can't go down.

My 500 gig plan goes away. So there's no place for me to fall in at $5.99 or something. I have to either go down to $200 or up to a terabyte. It is a big gap. But I mean, obviously, Apple has the data on how people are using this. And so I'm sure somewhere in some, not necessarily our boardroom that you and I are sitting in, but another boardroom. Yes. You know, someone looked at this and said, hey, we need to redraw these tiers. And at least Apple's paying attention to it. I mean, I was afraid that they had just put these prices on their website

and then the intern who did it was gone. And no one was like, how do we change it? No one knew. So at least they're looking at it, and hopefully over time they'll sort of settle closer to the reality that we think should come about. Yep. Busy day, Jason. Let's see.

Big day. Big day, big week. Lots going on. Big week. But yeah, it's good. It was dense. It was meaty. I'm glad.

I like having a lot to talk about and a lot to write about. And it's going to be a busy few weeks now. Good Lord. I've got to write about iOS 9 and then El capitan's coming right after that and we're gonna get that uh you know we're gonna have new hardware rolling out sooner and a little bit later and a little bit later all the way out to november with the ipad

pro so much to do and so much for uh all of us to talk about too so that's good the the drought of summer is over yeah oh yeah yeah not the actual drought. Sorry about that. I'm sensitive. Yeah. I'll die now. Goodbye. I'm drying up. I just dried up and now I'm going to blow away on a breeze. Oh, no. There's no breeze. No. Maybe you should go to sleep.

Nope. No sleep. Do we have any ask upgrade or you want to wrap this up uh let's do a couple quick ask upgrades i've got the ask upgrade window open here um and let's see if there's stuff that we haven't answered uh oliver asked if the computer's icon is still in the new apple tv ui it's not in any of the screenshots. Will ripped videos still work? I don't know if it's in there or not. I didn't see it either. It might appear when it senses computers around with sharing turned on. But I would also say that now that there's an app story here, presumably there'll be like Plex and other stuff that plays ripped videos on servers too. So I think in the end, it'll be fine.

But I don't know for sure if the direct sync from iTunes is gone or not. Raphael asks, is it the end of the iPad Air? I would say no. I think they're just taking a break. There's how many new versions can Apple do at any given time? So they brought the iPad Mini

up to the specs of the iPad Air 2. And I would imagine that the iPad Air will get revved next year. And, you know, there are a lot of these products. With the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, with the iPad mini Air and Pro, it's a lot of products. I think that we can't expect them all to get updated every year. And so the iPad seems to be a place where Apple's picking its spots with updates. And so the iPad seems to be a place where Apple's picking its spots with updates. Raya Amidon, who's also in the chat room, I think, asked if this is a good time to buy a refurbished Air 2.

I think, sure. There's not going to be a new one anytime soon. So if you really want one and you don't want an iPad Pro, now would be a great time, I would say. I bought a refurbished iPad Air 2 when they announced iOS 9 because I wanted to use the split screen features and it's really nice. Yeah, I really like the Air 2. I mean, if you're looking for a new iPad and the Pro is off-putting for some reason, the Air 2 is a great tablet. Yeah. Alan says, what about palm rejection on the iPad Pro? Apparently it's there. I did not use the Apple Pencil, so I have nothing to say about that. And any indication, he asked, if iPhone still only has one gig of RAM. We don't know.

And they gave no indication to the contrary. I sure hope that there's two gigs of RAM in the iPhones, especially the 6 Plus. And let's see. I want Apple Pencil, but I like the size of the regular iPad do you think the regular size iPad line will support it eventually you know maybe in a year maybe they'll do the little three dots and everything and add that connector thing to other devices I wouldn't count on it but I think there's a chance it might happen in a year and And Shereen asked how pink the rose gold iPhone is and my answer to that is

my color blindness requires me not to answer. There's some hands-on videos though you can find online. It looks fairly pink on video at least. Yeah, I guess. I had a hard time seeing it, but that's

me. I don't see pink very well that's pink is one of my weaknesses go and finally on the store timer call timer koala sing asked if we heard anything about home kit isn't that a huge omission if we didn't and the answer is we didn't hear anything about home kit so far as I could tell isn't

that interesting dead but it's sure not enjoying a great life. I mean, it seems like sort of... I think HomeKit's one of those things that takes time, and there have been reports out that Apple has been very involved with hardware partners to

certify things to work with HomeKit, and it just seems like a very slow, maybe painful process to roll that stuff out. Which I'm okay with. I want it to be well-tested. You know, my guess is to, on that real quick,

there was talk about the Apple TV being like a HomeKit hub or, you know, the thing certainly has the power to do that now with the hardware and it may be that that stuff is sort of laying dormant or they could add it later. I don't think HomeKit's dead. I just think it's... Siri has

the ability to tie into HomeKit, right? So it's possible that you'll be able to use Siri on the Apple TV to do stuff that ties into HomeKit. They just haven't said much. Yeah, but they didn't say anything about it, which is... Maybe it was just a victim of how packed it really was. Yeah, maybe so. Maybe. Yeah, maybe so.

Maybe. All right, I think we've reached the end. I think it is the end. Jason, thanks for letting me come hang out. Yeah. Well, thank you for filling in for Mike, who, while we were talking, arrived in our fair country. It's true.

He's in Portland. So we'll see him this weekend, and Mike and I are going to do the next episode of Upgrade. We'll record that over the weekend in Portland and that'll be next week's episode. And you and I will do Liftoff as well, the other show you and I have now about space.

Podcastamania. It's happening here at RelayFM, which is good because it's the podcast network, so there should be podcasts on the podcast. Don't you think podcast networks should release podcasts? I think so. I have found that to be beneficial to the bottom line. I agree. So if you want to find the show notes this week, we said it earlier,

but you can find them at relay.fm slash upgrade slash 53. If you want to follow Jason on Twitter, you can find him at jsnell and his writing at sixcolors.com. One of the most colorful websites. Aw. They're one of my favorites. Find me online as well at 512pixels.net or ISMH on Twitter. And until next time, bye-bye.

Bye, everybody. Bye, everybody.