Upgrade - 63: Crying about the Peripherals

Episode Date: November 16, 2015

The iPad Pro has arrived, and Myke and Jason are joined by special guest Serenity Caldwell to discuss our first impressions of the new product, our iPad workflows, and the frustrating lack of availability of the Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 63 today's show is brought to you by lynda.com fracture and stamps.com my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by mr jason snell hi mike how's it going i'm very well mr snell. Snell. How are you today? I'm pretty good. We got our iPads Pro, did we not? Yes, the iPads who are pro, yes, the professional iPads. Professional iPads. Yes. How are you? I'm good. So we had to bring in a professional guest to help us talk about this professional product today. It's important. And we have iMore's own Serenity Caldwell. Hello. Hello, Ren.

How are you? I'm good. Thank you so much for joining us today. Absolutely. I love to be part of professional conversations. This is all very serious today. This is Upgrade Pro now. Very serious.

Upgrade Pro is a different product line in the upgrade podcast product line but you know what isn't serious jason but i'll follow up it really isn't uh we have two items in the follow-up one is completely unrelated we talked about emoji last week and how they're adding 60 emoji. And I just wanted to point out, we had on Clockwise last week, one of our sponsors has a sock-related product. We can talk about it. It's Foot Cardigan. They haven't sponsored this episode,

but it's totally fine. It's the same network. You're one of the hosts, I think. I think it's okay. It's Foot Cardigan. And we were... It was a funny and fun ad read from a company that's got a good sense of humor. All their communications with customers are funny. It was funny.

But I realized after we were done that – and the conclusion we came to in the end was that we needed to change the name of the podcast to Sock Wise and just make it all about socks, 30 minutes about socks every week. Is that any more ridiculous than a podcast entirely about pens i ask you don't answer um anyway there's no sock emoji that was that's my entire point there's no sock emoji and you you consulted uh jeremy at emojipedia i assume yes and what jeremy said was um it's a slippery slope that leads to lots of emoji of underpants and do i really want to live in that world which i said actually yeah i think i do but because i want to because i want to sock emoji but i think there should be an underpants emoji there probably should be an underpants there should probably be a boxer boxers uh emoji and a briefs emoji i agree i agree we should have

emoji for everything perhaps there are other types of undergarments that we're not familiar with in our culture. In male culture, Jason? Yeah, indeed. Well, I was going to ask, I'm not going to presume what undergarments worn by women should be part of the emoji spec. I will leave that to others. Good watch. So what do you think? Equal opportunity emojis for underwear. Well, this is why they have a committee.

You know, ladies have very nice frilly underwear that usually doesn't get seen because it is designed to be worn under clothes. So why not have a fun emoji with frilly underwear? It would be fun. Unicode emoji subcommittee, take note. We very quickly devolved away from the professional show. It did not take long at all, did it? No, no, this is a follow-up. Follow-up is not part of the actual show.

This is the unprofessional follow-up from the previous weeks. The other thing I wanted to mention is listener Kyle Seth Gray was reporting that he was in a Starbucks and his stickers, his relay stickers on his laptop drew the attention of somebody in the store. And I believe as the story goes, he sent a series of tweets that the person who was taking note of the relay stickers actually listens to all the great shows and is an Upgradian. So they're out there. You may run into them. We need to create the secret handshake and symbol for Upgradian. So they're out there. You may run into them in the, we need to create the secret handshake

and symbol for Upgradians so that they can recognize themselves in the wild. But I thought that was just a fun little story. Upgradians are out there. It's a fun little story. They are out there, if you know where to look. Next week is going to be a Mike at the Movies week.

Jason, what have you chosen for me? Our, our movie next week. So I was thinking, you know, our remit is generally the eighties, although we may have to stray from that occasionally, but generally we're looking for things in the eighties.

And I asked you if you wanted to go comedy or sort of sci-fi action. And you said always comedy if I get to choose. So we're going to veer back to comedy. And I thought, you know, we've done, uh, John Cusack movies.

We did say anything. We've done Rob Reiner with This is Spinal Tap and The Princess Bride. Why not put them both together with an underappreciated film that is, while on its surface, like some of the other movies we've seen, could be said is a sort of a teen romantic comedy or a teen sex comedy from the 80s, is, I think, underappreciated and has a little bit more going for it. Although, you'll be the judge when you watch it. It's called The Sure Thing from 1985. And I decree it the next Mike in the Movies pick. I have grown a great affinity for 80s Cusack movies. So I'm looking forward to this one. And have you even ever heard of this movie? I mean, I've heard that phrase,

but so that might- Well, it is a phrase. Exactly. So my brain might be thinking like, yeah, I've heard of that, but I may have just heard people say the sure thing before. So I'm going to say, I know nothing about this movie

other than what you've just told me. Okay. Well, it's, like I said, underappreciated, but we'll be the judge in watching it back. Perhaps, I haven't seen it in years. perhaps we will have different feelings about it next week. I don't know. But that's the choice. So rev up your hot tub time machines and go back to 1985 for the sure thing. And that's it.

That's it for follow-up. So let's kick off with some iPad Pro talk. iPad Pro! I'm assuming all three of us, all have ipad pros right i'm looking at one right now yeah i've got it right in front of me mine's behind me uh i actually started putting stickers onto it today to the horror of many people directly onto it or onto a casing that you have wrapped around it directly onto the back that escalated quickly i guess you're keeping it i guess you decided to around it. Directly onto the back. That escalated quickly. I guess you're keeping it. I guess you decided to keep it then and not return it.

Even that risked it. It's going to be a very lengthy cleaning process before I return it. Right now it feels like this is a device that I'm going to be keeping and we'll probably talk about why. I picked mine up on Wednesday. I actually went to a store and bought one. They were out in the stores so I went and picked mine up on Wednesday. I actually went to a store and bought one. They were out in the

stores, so I went and picked one up. No accessories yet. We'll talk about that in a bit. But Jason, what is your impression from a work perspective? I mean, I know that you and Ren share a lot of the qualities in both being writers and doing a lot of that kind of stuff for a living. So I'm wondering what you guys think about this tool as a writing tool so rent why don't you let me know what what you think um the ipad pro well uh my confession about ipads in general and i feel like a horrible ipad person for saying this but like after after the original iPad, my iPad usage dramatically declined in that I was using it primarily to sketch and draw. And then once I got the mini, I just abandoned my original iPad and then went to the mini and I gave the original to my mother. And then once I got once I upgraded to the 6S Plus with the bigger screen and 3D Touch, I just abandoned my iPad altogether and started using

the iPhone because I'm like, oh, I can use a jot dash to sketch on the iPhone and zooming and this is really nice. So the iPad Pro is really my first venture back into iPad-dom, full-time iPad-dom in quite some time. And I am pleasantly surprised. I had written the iPad off pretty heavily for for tasks that I do every day in my job, because I try and do a lot of them on my iPhone. And I hate doing them on my iPhone. It's just uncomfortable. I hate virtual keyboards. The iPad Pro, for one thing, I didn't think that the additional screen real estate would really make that much of a difference, but it does. It makes it feel like a real computer, not a real computer, but it makes it feel like a power machine, like it deserves to run a lot of stuff and be worthy of your day to day professional business routine. your day-to-day professional business routine. And the other thing, I did not pick up any of Apple's official accessories, but I did pick up a Logitech Create case, which is one of the first keyboard accessories that uses Apple's smart connector. And that has just completely changed

how I look at writing on an iPad, because I've hated every other Bluetooth keyboard I've used with an iPad. Even Apple's own Bluetooth keyboard is frustrating because you have to remember to turn it on and it's bulky and you have to carry it around. And this Logitech keyboard is a little bulky. Yes. And the case is awful. It just doesn't fit right. But the keyboard itself is amazing. And there is backlights. And the fact that it just turns on when I connect my iPad to it, like I just snap my iPad into it and the keyboard is there within seconds. And then as soon as I don't want the keyboard, I just pick my iPad up out of the keyboard and then the keyboard turns off. I don't have to worry about switches. I don't have to worry about batteries. Um, it's just, it's made going from all touch interface to touch and typing to just typing, um, back to touching just seamless. It's, it's really cool. It's really cool. Um, yeah, I mean, I'm, I'm doing an experiment this week where I'm just using my iPad, which has resulted in this weird hack that I'm doing right now where I have, uh, Adobe screens open my ipad pro and I'm using it to control my mac as a giant sound recorder for this podcast because I don't have a it's just a really big microphone interface that's what it is it is that's what I said on twitter I'm like essentially my iMac has been reduced to a giant sound recorder that has headphones

um and that is definitely a compromise. That is not something that makes the iPad easier to use as a sound recording machine or easier to use than a computer. But overall, all of the tasks that I have been doing so far in my day to day, I've actually found to be just as easy, if not easier on the iPad Pro. And that is something that I did not expect. I was really, I was really planning on running into a lot more problems when I first started. So that's kind of my overall. There was something that I wanted to mention. You said a moment ago that you had written off the iPad. Yeah. What was it that made you feel that way? Was it like, did you not think it was powerful enough at the time?

Was there like a lack of apps? Like how long ago would you say that you felt that way and what kind of brought you to that conclusion? So a lot of it was lack of apps and lack of speed. I mean, I had the original iPad until I got the first generation iPad mini. So I skipped the iPad two and the iPad three. And then the next full size iPad I had was the iPad Air two. And I hate to say that the iPad Air two basically was nothing but a game device for playing the room, but it really was. And it,

even though I knew that this was a powerful device and like and could clearly do a lot um from a gaming perspective i just i don't know when i when i went to conceivably do productive work on an ipad all i could think of was my first experience with an ipad back in 2010 where it was really fun to sketch on um and the sketch programs have only gotten better and better, but I have been so hesitant on using it for productivity uses, because for me, the majority of my workday requires a keyboard, and I am very, very anti-software keyboard. I'm more of a fan of the iPad Pro keyboard than I am of previous iPad keyboards. And that's because of the size.

Um, on the iPad Air 2, on the iPad mini, especially, it just isn't comfortable to try and type the way that I'm accustomed to typing, which is to say not one finger at a time, um, on a, on a traditional hardware keyboard. I like being able to type quickly when I'm doing work work when I'm not just like typing out tweets. When I have to write an article, I don't want to touch type I don't want to be like, th e space like that's it just it's too long. And it again, if we're talking about making the iPad fit seamlessly into your workflow versus forcing the iPad into your workflow, I never wanted to force the iPad

into my workflow. That just didn't feel good to me. I'm like, I'm not going to use a device that doesn't feel right for my workflow. Just just to use it just to be just to do a gimmick. Which is why I was kind of so excited about my project this week. Because this is it is part gimmick being like, I'm just going to use an iPad Pro. But also it's, it's legitimately allowed me to rediscover just how powerful the iPad platform has become and how far it's, how far it's come and what has changed since I, as you said, since I wrote it off, since I basically said, nope, iPad, iPad is not for me as a writer. It's just not, not what I like it for. And I'm willing to eat some

claim chowder here. There's a lot that's changed. And honestly, as a writer, I almost feel like this device is in some ways better for me than my MacBook Air, which is something that I did not expect I was going to be saying before I started this. And does this claim kind of really exist for just the iPad Pro? I'd think to a lesser extent the iPad Air 2 is true. iOS 9's multitasking features are, of course, a huge asset. But I really do think, at least for me personally, the iPad Pro is what makes it feasible because of the screen size. So that split view actually makes some amount of sense. I still feel like split view on the iPad Air 2 feels more gimmicky than realistic in terms of –

Especially if the software keyboard is slid out, yeah. Yes, exactly. When the software keyboard is covering half the screen, then you just have this little tiny boxes. And it's essentially like you have two iPhones glued next to each other. It just doesn't feel workable. The iPad Pro has the bigger screen, has more real estate. It seems much faster than the Air 2. I know the Air 2 is very powerful, but the Pro just blows it out of the water. And the fact that the on-screen keyboard is full size and the hardware keyboard is full size. And not full size cramped, but full size with some breathing room. The Logitech Create, despite, again, having a terrible top case, the keyboard itself feels so good on my hands. And it has this beautiful top row that has a button to go back

to the home screen and a button to deal with, to go to the search screen, the spotlight screen. My favorite button, a button to bring up universal keyboards. So you can actually switch without having to touch the screen between your regular keyboard and your emoji keyboard or a different language keyboard. If you like third-party keyboards, this physical button suddenly makes third-carded keyboards really, really easy to use. And it's just little things like that that really, really have improved the experience for me. Jason, does this mirror any of your thoughts, like writing with the iPad Pro?

Is it more of a machine that you're willing to do this thoughts, like writing with the iPad Pro? Is it more of a machine that you're willing to do this type of work on than the iPad Air 2? Because I know that when we were speaking about this a couple of weeks ago, you still weren't really using your iPad Air 2 in that kind of way. I occasionally use the iPad Mini and Air as a writing tool, sort of as a change of pace or if I was somewhere only with that but and we can mention this later for podcasting reasons it's very hard for me to travel without a laptop because of things that the laptop really is required for but for this yeah it like we said with the iPad ipad air 2 as nice as the multitasking is if you're especially on a uh on a without an external keyboard then there's very little room it is very cramped up there and on the ipad pro even with the slide out keyboard

it feels like you can use that uh split mode and have it be much, there's more room to see information and it's just more comfortable. And then if you have an external keyboard, then it is a vast amount of space. I mean, it's like you've got a big, almost like a landscape iPad Air app and an iPhone app running together. Or if you go 50-50, you basically have two kind of portrait iPad apps running side by side. And the fact is a lot of the iPad apps are really great. There is a compatibility issue here, which surprised me. There are some apps that work really well on the iPad Pro. They've been updated to take advantage and resize themselves on the bigger screen. And then there's some that haven't. And it's a little bit like going to the iPhone 6 where you notice that the keyboard is wrong.

And the bar- Hello, big keyboard. Yeah, giant keyboard. And the time, suddenly the time and the thing that says iPad up on the top bar are much larger than they just were because we're in a compatibility mode now. And it's usable, but everything is just kind of blown up. And that's kind of unfriendly. Also, iOS 9.1 that ships on the iPad Pro has a bug where even when you've got an external keyboard attached, like the smart keyboard or the Logitech keyboard, it will still slide out the software keyboard every time when you enter a text field. And that's fixed in the 9.2 betas, apparently.

But in 9.1, that's a bug that is just annoying. So there are some software issues in the OS, and there's definitely some issues where some of the, are just not up to speed. And where I really noticed it was in productivity app stuff, like a lot of the Markdown text editors don't have support for it yet, which is problematic, especially since some of them like to lay extra rows of software keyboard that don't go away even when you've got an external keyboard attached or they don't work well with the, they can't use the new keyboard

so you get the giant keyboard plus another row, which is not great. And Google Docs, all the Google apps are- They're so bad. Are unusable, essentially. I was using, I took a screenshot on Friday. I wrote an entire article in an orthodontist waiting room because my daughter was getting braces

and I just sat there and I actually had the smart keyboard in my lap. And it worked. It was, I think this is what people who use the Surface say about using it in their lap is sort of, you know, if your lap is stable, you can use it. It's a little bit kind of balanced, but it's, you can, you can make it work. I wrote a whole article, but I wrote it in Microsoft Word. And why did I do that? Because Microsoft Word has been updated to support the iPad Pro, and I was able to run it in Split View and use the smart keyboard, and it all worked really great. And then I wrote another article in OneWriter, which has also been updated and was very good. But a lot of these apps just haven't been updated, and the Google stuff

is just, it's almost unusable. Like, its text inputs all messed up. And the other thing that disappointed me is the comic book apps, like Marvel Unlimited, Comixology, they haven't been updated either. So while you've got a comic on a big screen and it looks great because it's a little bit bigger than the actual physical comic, those apps are upscaled right now. They aren't providing any extra resolution because they're all just scaled in the compatibility mode so there's definitely some new device pain here it's not as painful as some of the other device iOS screen size transitions have been but there's definitely some of that too but bottom line I wrote two articles on the iPad Pro on Friday with with the external keyboard and and was

able to do a little more with the multitasking split view uh whether it was checking in on slack or something like that or whether it was having a web browser open so i could get some information off the web and then put it in the article i'm conf i'm a big google drive user uh like docsets, I'm confident that they will update because Chrome has been updated. But my feeling about this, and I don't know what's going on behind the scenes, but just looking at what Google Docs is doing on iOS, I expect there is a ton of custom stuff in there. And I feel like, which I was thinking about this today. I was listening to ATP and they were talking about kind of windowing and all that kind of stuff. And I was thinking about apps that aren't currently using the split screen stuff.

And it seems like a lot of the apps that currently aren't updated for the split screen stuff are bigger companies. So Google, right? You mentioned Comixologyology which is owned by amazon and i started thinking about the problem that apple creates for itself with its secrecy because big companies like google are not going to i would assume put a ton of uh work and time and money into updating and developing their apps until they know they need to. Right. So when all this stuff like the auto layout stuff, I can imagine that a lot of these companies don't really start working on it seriously until they know it's needed. So they see the devices

come out because, you know, I kind of think about it. It's like, why would you? Like, if I am Google, I kind of think about it, it's like, why would you? If I am Google, I'm not going to start putting man hours and time into projects that are potentially beneficial. And I think that Apple, so you end up with a product like the iPad Pro or just iOS 9 multitasking on the iPad in general, and a lot of apps still aren't supporting it. And I believe it's because they started working on it the day that the product in general, and a lot of apps still aren't supporting it. And I believe it's because they just haven't, they started working on it the day that the product came out, as opposed to when the APIs were put into iOS 9.

Yeah, they could have gone, this is the story that savvy Apple developers know this, right? It's like once Apple starts talking about this stuff, that's a hint, right? It's like you should implement it because it will it will pay off later and recently apple's track record there has been very good that when they say you should do this you should do it and yet yes there are some developers like well we'll see and then a new product drops and they're like oh i guess i should do that thing that apple told me to do two years ago and that does that does happen um and also they're they're big organizations. I think you're right, Mike. Google probably has a very specific sort of product development cycle

for their iOS apps. And they're probably working on a milestone release that perhaps will have this in it. But they're not necessarily capable of dropping that on day one of the iPad Pro. But I will say Apple released a professional productivity iPad and Microsoft was there day one and Google wasn't. Well, I think the reason for that is Apple approached Microsoft and next they put them on stage. Perhaps that is part of it, but be that as it may, you know know all of those apps were there and a bunch of the independent apps were there and google stuff you know google google's known the ipad pro was coming since september 9th so it's not like they didn't have two months of awareness that this was a product so it's fine i'm sure they'll i'm sure they'll update it but as for now i was trying

to update we do a lot of our stuff for this show in google docs and i have a google spreadsheet i tried to use google sheets on the ipad pro and I just gave up. It was ridiculous. It's painful. It works though. Like I'm still using it every day. It definitely works. It's just a little bit comical. Try it with the external keyboard and you'll find that it doesn't always work. Half the time it won't accept keyboard input until you get into a very particular state where it will. Anyway, this isn't about Google Sheets being terrible on the iPad Pro, but suffice it to say, it is. Anyway. It's the problem with apps in general.

You know, you buy this product day one. We are early adopters in that we kind of expect that things are going to be broken and things aren't maybe going to be 100%. But people who are just seeing, oh, big iPad, maybe this could replace my laptop. Maybe this could just be a new device that I use in my house. They go and they pick it up. And they're like, what do you mean? I can't buy my my keyboard for it. What do you mean? I can't buy a pencil for it. You guys were advertising that. What do you mean my PDF software doesn't work the way that I want it to? What do you mean that I can't use Google Docs right now? It's just it's a unfortunately, because this device relies so much on key

software. It's almost worse to me that the software works poorly than it just doesn't work or is not available at all. Because then it just feels like a bad experience. Whereas I feel like if it wasn't available at all, then it's a okay, well, but it's probably coming soon, right? But if you have a Oh, it's, it works, but it takes up two thirds of the screen with a with a virtual keyboard, despite the fact that you're using a physical keyboard or collaborating with somebody just doesn't work because the comments won't show up. That kind of bugginess is really frustrating. And the average user doesn't think, oh, someone hasn't updated their app. It's, oh, Apple is broken with Google Docs. What am I going to do? Yeah. Yep. I agree. And I wonder like what it

takes to get to that point. But I feel like there could be the potential for Apple to maybe be more willing to work with these companies. I don't know how much they are. But I think at the end of the day, it is a problem for Apple more than it is for Google. I got to say, I put this entirely on Google. It's Google's fault. I'm not going to give Google an out and say Apple should have done more to work with them. Size classes have been part of the discussion at WWDC since 2013, I believe. Yeah, for years now. Not even 2014. 2013. And this product has been announced for two months and rumored for a lot longer than that.

This product has existed for, has been announced for two months and rumored for a lot longer than that. And Google, if Google had wanted to make an effort to support it on day one, it could have. And it didn't. And we can, I can excuse it by saying Google's got a different product cycle and they're working on something perhaps that we'll see. But, you know, I think could Apple have been more aggressive in courting other developers to get them on board? Sure. And they chose, obviously, to work with Microsoft so that they could get them on stage. But I don't think I'm going to give Google a pass for not having their productivity apps ready for the iPad Pro when it was released. And we'll see.

This is not a big deal if they release an update in a week that does it. The question is, will it be in a week? Will it be in a month? Will it be in three months? That's, I think, an open question with Google. on-demand video courses that are there to help you strengthen your business technology and creative skills. You can get yourself a free 10-day trial as a listener of this show by going to lynda.com slash upgrade. Lynda.com has incredible videos that are made by experts, people who really, really know what they are talking about, people who are passionate about teaching and absolute experts on their topics. Topics like, you know, if you look at some kind of overall themes, right, design and business and technology, that kind of stuff, they're the bigger themes. And when you start drilling down, you see some of the incredible stuff that lynda.com has. So I mentioned design.

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Your lynda.com membership will give you unlimited access to training on hundreds of topics for one flat rate. Whether you're looking to become an industry expert, you're passionate about a hobby, or you just want to learn something new, go ahead and visit lynda.com. That's lynda.com slash upgrade and sign up for your free 10-day trial. Thank you so much, lynda.com, for the continued support of this show and RelayFM. So one thing we did mention that I wanted to talk about was about the size of this thing and what context in which it works and what context in which it does not work. Because I think that's interesting. And I'm curious what the both of you have experienced with this. I'll say for me, what surprised me is, yeah, sitting on a desk,

sitting on the bar and my kitchen counter, even at the orthodontist office in my lap on the smart keyboard, it felt fine and it worked well. And I actually found that sitting on my couch in my living room, when I tried to hold it and use it like an iPad Air, it was uncomfortable. But I seem to have adapted to the size of it and the weight of it and where my hands need to be in order to use the on-screen keyboard. And I kind of got, I think, a good place for that. The one place where I felt like it just didn't work for me is in bed where I wake up in the morning and I want to check Twitter and Slack. And it's a very lean back experience or I'm going to bed and I'm going to read Twitter. I'm going to read some webpages.

I'm going to read some Instapaper, whatever it is. And those are cases where I'm not doing much text input and I'm not sitting up. And in those places, it felt just like overkill. Like it was just too huge. It was this huge screen. I didn't really need it to be huge. It's huge and heavier. And

in that context, I felt like it was not a great experience. And I think it's unlikely, and this is one of the challenges, if you're somebody who uses an iPad in that scenario, I think this is an issue because I don't think people are going to have their night iPad and their day iPad, right right but i feel like the pro while while bringing you all of these other things when you put it on a table or a desk uh when you are in a kind of a casual lean back environment and not watching a movie where the big screen is going to really do it do it but you're just sort of like reading and you're about to go to bed or you just woke up it's kind kind of crazy big. And I have not found it as

pleasurable in that scenario. I'm curious where you guys have found it to be good and if there are any particular settings where it's not working for you. For me, I look at the iPad Pro like I look at something like my laptop or even a coffee table book. It's something that to me doesn't belong. Like I wouldn't bring a coffee table book into bed with me. Just, you know, they're nice to look at and I like reading them. But it's something that is a little unwieldy to hold when you're groggy and wanting to go to bed or just waking up in the morning. unwieldy to hold when you're groggy and wanting to go to bed or just waking up in the morning. So I, I did use the iPad Pro last week in bed with the keyboard case when I was recuperating.

And that I thought was fine. That felt very similarly to how I use my MacBook Air if I'm sick and just want to, you know, curl up under covers and also write. But as a as a casual bedside device, I much I vastly prefer the the 6s plus as sort of my you know, this that has a big enough screen where I can read well, without necessarily needing something as large as a mini or a full size iPad. But I will say, in contrast, Jason, I actually really, really like taking the iPad out of the Logitech case and reading it in portrait for big articles. I subscribe to a social network that just went out of beta called This, where it's basically like Twitter, except you can only send one tweet per day, and it's basically a link. So you're basically saying this is the best link that I found today. This is the most interesting story I've found today.

And at the end of the day, the editors of that service collect five or six articles that you have to basically the best articles that have been shared today that you should absolutely read. So at the end of the day, after I've done with work, I'll usually take or I have been taking the iPad, turning it into portrait, and relaxing and reading those five or six articles. And that has actually been a really pleasurable experience, especially because those linked articles are usually like big spreads from the Atlantic or the New York Times and really well designed with CSS. JJ Abrams' Star Wars Wired interview was one of them a week back or so, and I was catching up. In that regards, I actually, I really like it. I, again,

I look at it like a coffee table book, where it's, it's not for your average web reading, but if you want to sit back and really enjoy you know something long form or enjoy something that has great photos um then i think it's worth the extra extra girth uh but no i have no i have no desire to hold it over my face and have it break my nose in the morning so i have i have transitioned the ipad pro to be the device that I use at home when I'm not at my Mac. So this was previously my iPad Air 2. I use my iPhone for little bits and bobs, but it's not the primary machine when I'm at home. That is when I'm kind of out and about in the world. So the iPad Pro has taken over all the duties of the air. So this is kind of lounging around,

but also like in bed in the evening and in bed in the morning when I'm kind of like finishing my day and starting my day, I am using the iPad Pro for this. It is a lot bigger. It is a little bit more uncomfortable to hold when reading and stuff like that, but I'm working it into my life and kind of changing my habits about like the way that I'll hold it and the way that I use it because whilst it's not necessarily as perfect a device there it is way better than my other devices in other areas so I'm like finding a balance like for example watching Netflix it's way better than my MacBook the screen sizes are about the same, but the screen looks way nicer and it sounds way better.

The sound. It's so good. The sound is great. The funny thing is, whilst this is the iPad Pro, it's also the best iPad they've ever made for content consumption. It really is. I keep saying this phrase and people think it's silly, but it's the most iPad iPad that has ever been made.

It's like everything that is good about an ipad this is turned up to 11. also physically it is the most ipad exactly it is the most it is but you're right you're right this is one of the reasons why um it's wrong to say this is only a device for for professional users to use to do um to do professional work because of that, because watching a movie on that big screen and through those speakers, which are far and away the best iOS device speakers ever made. It's not going to replace a giant home theater or something, but they're so much better. The dynamic range is so much better and they're so much louder. And so, yeah, it is the

best movie watching on an iPad experience you're ever going to have. It's also better, in my opinion, the speakers are better than most Macs right now. I think the iMac probably edges it out a little bit. But comparing that to every single laptop that I have in my house, it sounds cleaner, crisper, and more surround, in part due to, of course, the speakers being everywhere. But it really is a different experience than listening to sound on a laptop. It's vastly superior to my MacBook Pro. It's like night and day.

We just don't use that now to watch anything. We just use the iPad. And it's really taken that spot for me. But it is also just an excellent device to get work done. The fact that you can have, you know, in landscape, you effectively had to portray iPads is amazing. But it is forcing me to rethink some of the apps that I use, right? I've spoken about it on this show and on other shows. am a mailbox user but it looks like nothing's happening anymore with mailbox there hasn't really been any significant changes to that app in a

while and i've been kind of like struggling along on other platforms and trying not to let go because it's just the app that i'm used to and the one that i use but it's it's bad times on the ipad pro it looks ridiculous and it's not going to change. So like it's forcing me to rethink some of that stuff and I'm happy to do it. And in the same way that I'm happy to rethink the way that I kind of use an iPad at home, because I really, really love the iPad Pro. I really, really do. It is awesome. Just for this type of stuff that I use my iPad for, it is just fantastic. And I really, really want to be able to replace my MacBook with this completely. And it's so close, except for podcast editing. So I do like, I do 99% of my podcast editing on my iMac, obviously. And I use my MacBook Pro when I go out and work in other

places. The only other time that I use my MacBook Pro in a different way is when I'm traveling and say I'm flying or whatever. And I always now edit podcasts on planes. If I'm on a plane, I will make sure I stack up some podcast editing to do as was taught to me by Mr. Jason Snell, because airplanes are fantastic places to edit podcasts. They really are. So I use my MacBook Pro for that because I can get logic and obviously having an iPad over a MacBook is perfect when you're traveling it's like the ideal time for it but I still am not comfortable with some of the other solutions and we're going to talk about one that Jason used in a moment

because logic is what I know. Logic is what I trust and it does everything that I need. And considering this is my business, I'm a little bit apprehensive of trusting an app other than logic right now. You might start to think about it though. So tell me about this app that you use. Is it Ferret?

Ferrite? Ferrite? I don't think it's ferret because that is a creature but what's ferrite uh isn't that like iron an iron ore yes it's iron yeah iron or iron alloys uh and they're also used in magnets but we're gonna call it ferrite. Well, I'm going to call it ferret, but everybody else can call it ferret. No, don't call it a ferret. Why is a weasel editing your podcast now? That is what people are going to say, and nobody should do that. It's an app from a company.

We had fun with ferret. It's a company called Woojee Juice. See? Okay. Yep, the ferret is drinking woogee juice right now it's a free app uh with two in-app purchases that are basically there's a ten dollar in-app purchase and there's a a twenty dollar in-app purchase that includes the contents of the ten dollar in-app purchase so you could think of it as a sort of a stair step of two ten dollar in-app purchases um as you as you go it enables more stuff it as a sort of a stair step of two $10 in-app purchases. As you go, it enables more stuff.

It's a multi-track editor. It looks a lot like Logic. There are other multi-track editors. On iOS, I used Aurea a little bit. But I would say that although they're powerful, their interfaces have a lot to be desired. They feel like kind of almost like PC software interfaces that have been ported over to the iPad, whereas Ferrite's interface is really nice. It feels very much like an iOS native interface.

It's fun to use. And most importantly, on Friday night, Thursday night? Thursday night, actually. It was when I got the iPad Pro. Thursday night, I thought, you know what I'm going to try to do? One of the things I should try to do this week is edit a podcast using this app, and I could do it on the iPad Pro, and then I could write about it in a couple of different contexts, and that would be a lot of fun. Now, I did this knowing that I would probably give up, right? Because that's what's happened

in the past when I've tried it, is I've done it for a little while, and then I thought, give up, right? Because that's what's happened in the past when I've tried it is I've done it for a little while. And then I thought, no, this is this is going to take forever. It's not there. So I imported all of the audio files from my Mac. I actually used iTunes to do it. So I dragged the files over because they're huge. I could have used iCloud Drive or Dropbox, but I just dragged them over, attached it by a lightning cable, dragged the files in of all the recordings for this weekend's, this past weekend's Incomparable episode. So sort of five audio files plus the theme song. And I imported them all into Ferrite and I sat down with Ferrite and about an hour and a half or two hours later, which is my normal editing time for an episode of the Incomparable,

I had the entire episode edited in Ferrite. It didn't really slow me down very much. There were a few little things that I've written to the developer about, but it has all of the tools that I use and the techniques I use for editing podcasts. It has a strip silence feature. It has a compressor and a noise gate. There's a select all, there's a gesture to select all the clips that are forward from whatever item you've selected, which is a huge thing for me on Logic. And it's why I switched to Logic from GarageBand. You actually tap on a clip and then you triple tap on that same clip and it selects everything forward of it in the project, everything that's later in the project, and then you can slide slide it around and I was able to edit the podcast with no problem I there are a few things that

made me attach the keyboard because there are some things that were noticeably more sort of sluggish or harder to engage on on the touchscreen where you had to sort of like tap something and then tap again and hold and it would bring up a context menu and then you'd tap that on the keyboard was a keyboard shortcut. So there were a few of those, but mostly I could totally edit podcasts on an iPad, probably on an iPad Air too.

The iPad Pro was nice because it was bigger, but I think it would have probably been fine even on the iPad Air. So I was very impressed with that. And that's a story that's, again, not just about the iPad Air. So I was very impressed with that. And that's a story that's, again, not just about the iPad Pro, but about the software. But that's a real thing that can really do it. It turned out in the end, Mike, you'll be amused to know, the developer of this product, or one of the developers of it, came to our meetup in London. And I had forgotten that.

And I vaguely remember that somebody emailed me in June, I think, asking for some sample files from The Incomparable because they were working on an iOS podcast editor and they wanted to use like real material that a real podcaster would use instead of just their sample files. And I sent them a whole bunch of the same sort of like individual people's audio files and theme song and stuff. And it turns out it was this developer. So I'm using this app thinking, wow, this app does all the things that I want it to do. This is amazing. And it turns out one of the reasons may be because the developer has read the things I've written about podcast editing and said, oh, I should do that feature. So there's a little telepathy involved, which is kind of fun. But in the end, it's pretty great.

A $20 multitrack podcast editor, and you can try it for free because it's all in-app purchase. And I would say I could edit at more or less the same speed, other than getting the files on and off, which is an issue. I could certainly now travel with just an iPad Air or an iPad Pro and Ferrite and edit podcasts and feel like I could do that on the road without a MacBook around. But it doesn't export to MP3, does it? That is a problem. In fact, it doesn't export to Wave or AIFF right now. It only exports to AAC.

Now, apparently, they're going to do a lossless export in their next update, I think is what they said to me. I hope that wasn't a secret. They're working on it, basically, whether it's their next update, I don't know. And MP3 is more problematic, although there are other apps that do MP3 exports, including and conversions. So workflow will... Indeed, you can actually run the sharing extension from workflow inside Ferrite when you export and have an extension that generates an MP3 and uploads it to Dropbox or to an FTP server, like the one I use for Incomparable. And I did that after the fact, and it totally worked. So the only issue there is it's double encoding at that point, which I'd prefer. So I'd prefer it to not do that.

But very, very close. Very, very close. And other than the time thing of having to copy a bunch of files off of Dropbox that are very large, that part works well too. So I was kind of blown away. And it was just a combination

of getting that hardware and trying out the software. And we're getting there. The problem is recording podcasts are not when you're on Skype, like we are most of the software. And, you know, we're getting there. The problem is recording podcasts are not, when you're on Skype, like we are most of the time, that's difficult to do on iOS now because it's not that there isn't a way

to transfer audio from one app to another because there is this audio bus thing that actually will do it. But none of the kind of conversation apps that we use, Skype, for actually will do it. But none of the kind of conversation apps that we use, Skype, for example, support it. So right now you can't have a Skype conversation and record that conversation on the same device. So this is why the Federico Vittici, the Vittici exemption, as we might call it, where he does everything on the iPad except record his podcast.

That's why it exists right now, still. Just to wrap up that ferret thing quickly, actually, that is interesting to me. The idea of being able to export lossless and then maybe converting the file in another app like Workflow, that's interesting. When they add that in, I might be more willing to give it a go and see if I can actually produce something on there. But one of the big issues about all of this, the same with editing shows and recording shows on an iPad, isn't even so much the fact that the tools don't exist. It's that the tools have to exist and then exist reliably for some time before I'm willing to go ahead and start using it seriously to do

the stuff that actually puts food on my table. Oh, I should say, but speaking of reliability, somebody asked me if it didn't crash all the time. And I said, no, I had, I think, one crash with it. And when I went back, that was one of the moments of truth of like, well, am I going to just give up now? And when I went back, it had everything from when I had crashed. It didn't lose a thing. So even when it did crash and it only crashed once, it didn't actually lose any of my data. But I understood, I mean, this is one of the challenges with any mission critical workflow software is it needs to not just be provable that it works. That's step one. And then it needs to work reliably and you need to talk to people who've used it and then you need to try it out and see if it works for you. And

it's a long process before you give it the big bear hug and say, okay, you're part of my workflow now. Yeah. Yeah. One of the things that made iMovie finally usable for me on both the iPhone and the iPad was the, well, I know it's going to crash, but okay, when I reload it, everything's still there. And I haven't actually lost anything, despite the fact that this program is occasionally buggy. And that's something I could probably say about the iPad as a whole right now, where there are a lot of things that aren't working quite right. Because it's a brand new product. and they're running into interesting software bugs um but at least things are if not if not perfect seem to be reliable in most of the apps that i'm

using yeah it's just like it's one of those things right it's like i don't i understand that completely right that your things crash and it's all okay, but I really don't want to put that test in place. Oh, yeah. I'll be like, oh, I'll try this app. Maybe it will be fine after I give it a go for a couple of hours and put this in and then it crashes. But oh, great, it's all fine, it's all on iOS.

But I don't want to get to the point where I'm like, let me try. Especially I'm not willing to get to the point where I'm like, let me try, especially I'm not willing to do it in the scenarios where I would need it. Right. So I'm very, very unlikely to do this whilst on a trip. Right. To start using these apps to see if I can edit shows whilst on a trip. I need to try and do it here for a while first before I take the plunge on that. But then the other part of me is like, do I really have the time to mess around with this stuff? Like when I could just be using logic and getting the work done. And at a certain point, I do genuinely believe that there will be a tip and it will work, right? Like there will be a tipping point for this

and I will be more willing to do it. I just think that like right now, it's not so much. But as we move forward with later versions of iOS, which are hopefully going to continue to push down this productivity line and then later versions of the iPad Pro as it maybe gets stronger and more powerful, I believe that I will be more willing

to give this stuff a try mike it feels like to me that you are where i was in 2010 with the ipad where it was like oh there's so much potential and possibility but too much work and not enough not enough time in which to experiment and not not enough uh not enough time to risk losing potential important things as a result of the experiment. I'm a happy user of my iPad for a lot of work tasks like email and show prep and research, but just not the main thing that makes my money, which is recording and editing podcasts. I'm just

a little bit uh a little bit nervous of that right now uh should we start talking about the peripherals the keyboard and the pencil i think that's a good idea we start crying about the peripherals in just a moment so this episode is brought to you by fracture the company that will take your favorite images and print them directly onto glass for you to proudly display or give as gifts. First off, just want to give a huge thank you from Fracture and from us as well. For everybody who has

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clear why. If you've ever seen one of these things, you know how incredible they look. If you haven't seen one, what are you doing? Go and order a Fracture right now. Go to fractureme.com, upload an image that you love and get it printed on a lovely sheet of glass. These things look fantastic. They look great on the wall. They look great on your desk. They're perfect as gifts. They're a great way to show off achievements or lovely moments from your life or from the lives of your friends and family. They just really are absolutely fantastic to look at. And I want to mention that the holidays are fast approaching and every fracture gets hand printed and assembled in their fractury in Gainesville, Florida. So because of this process,

if they get really busy at the holiday season, which I'm sure that they will, you may face some delays in getting your fracture before the holidays. So if you're interested in this, you want to make sure that you get your plans in immediately, right? You want to just stop the podcast right now, pause this show, go to fractureme.com to get started, upload your picture and use the code, upgrade at checkout, you'll get yourself a lovely 15% of your first order

and support this show. It's time to rescue those photos that are hidden away on your devices and pick a few to have on show. Thank you so much to Fracture for their support of this show and RelayFM. So, Jason, you are a lucky person. Yes. And I say this with gritted teeth because you have all of the peripherals. The pencil is the one that I'm most interested in. I have the smart keyboard and the pencil.

I don't have the Logitech Create, which some people got, although Ren's got it. So among us, we've got them covered. And do you have the smart keyboard too? No, you don't. No. You only have the Create. Yeah, I only have the Create.

And honestly, I think I prefer... I would not have bought the smart keyboard had it been available in stores. So where should we start here? You want me to talk about the smart keyboard a little bit? Please. Yeah. Yeah.

It is, it's a mixed bag to me, I would say. I, there are things I like about it and there are things I don't like about it. I actually think the typing feel is fine. it and the things I don't like about it. I actually think the typing feel is fine. I know that seems strange since I was critical of the MacBook keyboard, but on a thing this thin, I feel like maybe I'm just giving it the benefit of the doubt. For something this thin to have any typing feel at all is kind of miraculous, and it does. It has an okay feel. I was able to type, like I said, I wrote multiple articles on this smart keyboard last week, and it worked fine. I will say that I'm not a fan of the fact that it's missing a row of keys.

That I really, let me back up. On my Mac, I have a keyboard with media control keys on it, you know, play, pause and things like that. I never use them. I never use them because I've actually got a third party app that remaps my keyboard shortcuts for turning my music on and off and stuff like that to keyboard shortcuts that I have been using since the days of the Apple CD player app in the 90s. And I still use those keyboard shortcuts.

So I don't use the media keys, but I use the media keys when I'm using an iPad all the time because you don't have those other keyboard shortcuts. And it's really nice to be able to turn the volume up and down, to play or pause music, and also not media control, but to control the brightness of the screen. And I really like having those keys.

And they don't exist on the smart keyboard. And it bugs me. It makes me sad. I wish it did. So that's a negative. I would say that it works really well as a keyboard. You keep with you all the time. You take it with you.

And that's the nice thing about it. But as a smart cover, I would have to say, I think it's not very good. I found myself often just tearing it off in frustration because it was just, it's just too much in a lot of contexts because you don't need the keyboard, but you've got this keyboard cover that is a lot heavier and bulkier than a regular smart cover would be. And so I find myself wanting a regular smart cover and only using this cover when I absolutely know that I'm going to be unfolding it and using it as a keyboard, because it's just a little, it's a, you know, it's a good, it's a good keyboard as a keyboard that's hidden in a cover. But it's not a good cover because it's too heavy and bulky. So it's a compromise. And if, you know, if you always want to have a keyboard with you and not tote it around, that part of it is good. But if you want to have a lighter kind of iPad experience, then you're going to

either pull it off or you're going to want to have a different item, a different accessory that is not this cover. Because it is, you know, it's bulky and heavy. And I noticed and it wasn't particularly enjoyable to use. But it was great to have the keyboard there when I wanted it. So that's the trade-off. So basically, it's a little too much as a smart cover. So what I found myself really wanting was a smart cover, a regular smart cover, and an external keyboard. And that, whether it's something like the Create, even that, you have to sort of snap it in to this frame of almost like a laptop. this like frame of almost like a laptop. I'm not sure even if that's what I want so much as just a stand for it or a smart cover that can be folded into a stand and a Bluetooth keyboard or something like that. So, you know, it works as a keyboard. It is, I think not, it does not work as a cover

very well. It's really compromised and heavy and that doesn't work. And then the other thing I wanted to mention, which is not really about the of the smart keyboard because it's true of all these keyboards, which is iOS and external keyboards autocorrect is still problematic. I was finding, you know, I found at several points that I had, it was assuming I was going to type a capital letter and I wasn't. But, you know, it gets into that mode on the software keyboard. It makes sense where it's like, oh, we're shifted now. You want to type a capital letter here. But I was on an external keyboard and it was forcing me to type a capital letter and I couldn't get out of it. I had to backspace and go back.

So that and a lot of really weird autocorrect that I've been experiencing. that I've been experiencing. And as far as I can tell, you can't turn off autocorrect for everything on an external keyboard. You have to turn it off for everything, period. And some apps will turn off autocorrect within, let you turn it off for that app. But I realized I would really like a scenario

where autocorrect is on when I'm using the software keyboard and completely off when I'm using a hardware keyboard. And I don't believe that's a feature that's offered. So I got really frustrated where I was typing articles and typing exactly the characters that I wanted to type, and they were all getting autocorrected into things that were wrong. And I ended up turning off autocorrect. But then when I would type on the software keyboard, I would get frustrated because I have all these expectations that if I don't type the apostrophe, it's just going to fix it because this is a known word and then it didn't fix them.

So I had some issues with that where I feel like iOS needs to do – when I'm trying to treat this like a laptop, it ought to type it like it's on a laptop and it's overriding my typing a little too much. So that's my download on the smart keyboard. If you've got any questions, I'm happy to ask them. I am also curious about how the – if Bry if friends got any more stories about the Create. In regards to the smart keyboard, Jason, do you think that you're maybe a little bit more forgiving of the keyboard because of the device? So you expect a better keyboard on a MacBook, so you're really down on that one. But on the iPad, you're kind of going from glass to something. Yes. And the fact that it's a cover, right? So it's supposed to be ridiculously thin

and it's supposed to be a compromised thing. Whereas on a laptop, I kind of don't believe that it needed to be that thin, that it could have been a little bit thicker and a much better keyboard. So yes, some of this is just what direction I'm coming from, where the MacBook keyboard, I look at it and think, come on, you should have done a better keyboard. And from this direction, I'm like, well, as a keyboard hidden in a cover goes, it's pretty good. So, yeah, that's some of it. Definitely the context is part of it. So on my end, I don't want a keyboard hidden in a cover. And I don't want to – if I'm going to require myself a hardware keyboard, I want a proper hardware keyboard. And that's one of the reasons that an iPad has previously been untenable for me as a work machine is I want a good hardware keyboard. I'm not willing to sacrifice small, weird keys or bad Bluetooth connections. It's just not been interesting to me.

The Logitech is not perfect in that the case that surrounds it, that you hook the iPad into it, is quite frankly kind of ugly and very heavy. And overall, it reminds me of the old iBook of 2001. And it adds an extra pound, pound and a half to the iPad. So the iPad. Yeah. So the iPad is now with the Logitech Create keyboard. The iPad Pro 128 becomes almost three pounds. So it's the same weight as the MacBook Air 13 inch,

which I was initially like, are you kidding me? That isn't the whole point of an iPad for it to be light. So I'm that part I really don't like. I kind of hope that Logitech comes out with a version of the Create that doesn't have all of this extra nonsense that's just the keyboard and maybe a slight a very thin prop prop up on the bottom um i'm guessing a lot of why the the case is so heavy is to counterbalance the weight of the screen because the pro is a pretty hefty machine the pro is about a pound and a half on its own. So it's going to start leaning backwards if it doesn't have a good counterweight. And I will say the Logitech's counterweight is excellent.

I've never been in a position, like I've had it on a desk. I've had it on my lap in a car. I've had it on a train. I've had it just in bed, on a couch. And I've never felt like the iPad is going to tip backwards. And I'm not going to be able to type properly on it, which is awesome. I also do like the fact that the Logitech, it's a hard base. It's, I believe, a plastic, a gold plastic base, and that adds some security to typing on it, so it doesn't feel, again, it doesn't feel flimsy.

It doesn't feel fabric-y. And I like that. And the keys are awesome. The keys feel better than the new Magic Keyboard. They just, they travel well, they're comfortable to type on. You can type really hard or really soft depending on your, your key style. And that, that top row is really, the top row is what absolutely sold me over the, is what absolutely sold me over the smart cover keyboard because I just wasn't interested in a keyboard that didn't have shortcuts. And the backlighting is huge. I wasn't even thinking about backlighting for a keyboard,

for an iPad keyboard. I just, it wasn't even in my mind. And then once I discovered that the Logitech had it, I'm like, of course, why would why would you ever not have backlighting if you want an app if you want a proper keyboard for your for your iPad. And the fact that the smart connector powers it means that all of that, you know, you don't have to worry about, oh, it's a Bluetooth keyboard, but it's only going to last

seven hours because it's backlit. No, it's. No, it leeches power smartly from the iPad. And that is the biggest bit that has impressed me so far about the third-party keyboard, is just how little battery it drains overall from the iPad and how smooth and simple it feels to switch between touch input and keyboard input or combination touch and keyboard input. I really like not having to, you know, the fact that I can just pop it.

I'm popping it out of the case right now and then I lay it on top and I don't even have to take it out of the case. I can just take it out of the smart connector and lay it on top of the keyboard. And the back of the Logitech case folds over. So you've got a nice little, I don't know, 15 degree incline just to use your, use the pro as a tablet, as a straight tablet. And you can pick that up too. And it works pretty well. Overall, it just, it feels really, really, the keyboard is one of the best third- party keyboards I've ever used on an iPad. And I have used a lot despite not liking very many of them. The case is bulky.

The case is whatever. But I would recommend trying the Create. I'm really hoping that they release some. I just hope they release something that can be a little bit less of a production to put on your iPad. That is exactly what I was going to say. I feel like the ultimate keyboard for the iPad Pro is one that has that extra row of control keys that is backlit. Although I know where the keys are, so I don't actually care about keyboard backlit. Although I know where the keys are, so I don't actually care about keyboard backlighting because I know where the keys are.

I don't look at the keys ever, so I don't actually care. It's fun to have keyboard backlighting. It's like, yay, it's lighting up, but I kind of don't care. But the ultimate one is one where it's like a tray and you drop the iPad Pro onto it, so it is going to hold it up in a good angle. It's going to click into the smart connector. And then when I'm done typing, that I lift it off and I go away.

Because I feel like I'm not impressed with either of these products in terms of, well, you know, it's also a case. Or you snap it in and it makes it more like a laptop. And I know some people that want that kind of experience, but my experience with the smart pro. Yeah. My experience with the smart keyboard is like, yeah, it's,

it's a crappy case. It's just a good, it's a good keyboard. And for a case that's got a keyboard in it, Hey, great. But I wouldn't choose it just like if all I want is a case, cause it's too much.

It's ungainly. It's just no good. And the create, I look at it and think, I don't want to snap my brand new iPad Pro into this weird contraption just so that I can have a keyboard. So I feel like the ideal keyboard for the iPad Pro does not yet exist. And in fact, today, I would prefer to use the Apple Bluetooth keyboard or my Logitech Bluetooth keyboard and a regular smart cover or

some other kind of thing that can be folded into a stand. That would be my preferred accessory today. Not either of these other keyboards. See, if I, I would agree with you if you already had those things lying around and you were just like, this is what I'm using until something better comes along. The smart cover is, or the smart connector is just so easy to use. Oh, it is. It is. I'm just assuming sort of everybody's got a Bluetooth keyboard kicking around somewhere that they can dig out and use for now. You're right.

Not having to deal with a battery and not having to worry about Bluetooth pairing and just having it work is, that product is out there, right? That product will happen. It's just not, I think, either of these. The great thing about the smart keyboard is the fact that you don't have to feel like you're lugging a keyboard with you everywhere, sort of, because it's super thin and light. But you are lugging a keyboard with you. It is way heavier than if you take it off your iPad.

So I don't know although you know i was debating this um just in terms of the weight differential because i'm like three pounds that's you know three pounds is half a pound heavier than my 11 inch macbook air and i'm like that kind of stinks but looking at it on the flip side i'm like if i take my macbook air out someplace there's a 90 chance that I'm taking its power cable out with me. And my MacBook Air's power cable, probably with the additional, with the extension attachment, I would guess is close to half a pound. I wouldn't, I don't know for sure because I haven't weighed it, but I would be curious

just how much that extra peripheral weighs me down. curious just how much that extra peripheral weighs me down. And because when I put the when I put this in the Logitech case in my in my laptop bag, and I carried it a variety of places over the weekend, it really didn't feel that much heavier, if at all, than my iPad or than my MacBook Air. In fact, it felt about the same. So I'm curious if that's just, you know, maybe if it's just I can't tell the difference in weight or if the adapter really does make that much of a difference. Because that is one thing that the iPad has heads over shoulders against a laptop is that the battery life is supreme.

I mean, my iPad Air or my my MacBook Air supposedly gets six or seven hours of battery life, but really, I can squeeze about three or four before I need to charge the mat, the the iPad Pro. This is the first time I am charging it since I juiced it up to full Friday morning today, which is crazy to me. And I've, it's not like I've, it's just been sitting in a bag. I've been writing on it. I've been using Slack up and again. Um, you know, I've been editing photos in Pixelmator. I was working on workflows this morning and the fact that, you know, it's at 5% battery right now, but I've been using it essentially for almost four days and the battery

hasn't died yet. That's incredible to me. I have a desire for a keyboard, right? Especially if I want to like kind of replace my MacBook Pro with this in a lot of situations. I just haven't decided on the one that I want to get yet. Cause I have one of those, uh, I have a Logitech Bluetooth keyboard that I've used the previous iPads, um'll probably continue to use for the time being I think I'm leaning towards the magic keyboard because I'm not I'm not like as I'm not really gonna be writing articles right it's not what I do I'm like responding to emails and tweeting so I'm not to create I'm not to um fuss with the key key travel because this is not really something that interests me so much. I need to try out the Magic Keyboard a little bit more in the store,

which I will do and kind of see how I feel about it. But I do like the idea of just something light and thin that just goes straight on there because of my needs. I don't want to add all that weight on with the case like the Create when it's not really that important to me. So I want to try it out a little bit more but the the it is all about that smart uh connector that is just super secret sauce there that is a genius move the fact that you don't need to charge it anymore right that is that's the real

real awesome thing we should also point out um because i know a bunch of people have asked about the how the smart connector works the smart connector itself is not magnetic so the side of the ipad's got magnets in, just like all the iPads since the two, right, have magnets in it so that you can align a cover on the side or anything else that has got the magnets that line up in that way. But that's the magnetic attachment. The actual three metal connectors of the smart connector don't have, they're not magnetic.

They just touch and are held in place just for what it's worth. That's how it works. But there is the elephant in the room right now is the pencil. It's in the room with me. Please don't. So I think anybody that knows me and has listened to this show will know that I am dying to get one of these things, as anybody that follows Ren would know the same, right? Ren is like, you know, you are an artist, right? I guess you would describe yourself as such, that you like to draw and doodle and paint and that kind of stuff.

I love to take handwritten notes. We are the perfect people, right, in two different worlds to have a pencil. However, Apple believes that they just shouldn't stock them anywhere. And this is the situation that we're in right now. For some reason, these things are impossible to get. The current shipping times are like four to five weeks, and it got to four to five weeks after maybe like an hour or two of being on sale. And immediately when they were put on sale,

correct me if I'm wrong, they never had like shipping this week. It was always like at least a week or two away. I have now tried in multiple Apple stores in London. Nobody has them. And I was able to get through on the phone today to somebody who could actually check stock so apple have changed something recently with their support lines or used to be able to call and you'd get through to the stores and you could ask them do you have now it's going to the online store exactly so i've tried a couple of times and they're like you can buy it online i'm like you are useless to me you are are useless. But today, I got through to a lady on the phone and she actually checked stock.

She checked stock in all of the major stores in London and there was not a pencil in any of them. The thing that annoys me about this is this isn't a third-party product. This is Apple's product. And the pencil seems to be a pretty important part of the iPad Pro. And what it would appear to be right now is there are supply chain problems. Either it was never going to be ready or something's changed and it's not ready.

And maybe in like three weeks' time, you won't be able to move for pencils in stores. So my thinking with this is why is the ipad pro on sale now like could it have not just been held for a couple of weeks thanksgiving i think it's getting getting how seasonal is apple right it's the it's the quarter you got to get it out right thanksgiving is coming too yeah i mean if black black friday, as much as Apple doesn't actively participate in Black Friday beyond like a minor deal sheet, Black Friday still remains one of the biggest shopping holidays and the start of the shopping season for the year. And, you know, whatever your feelings on capitalism and consumerism and all of that uh apple is a business and unfortunately if you're selling a plus thousand dollar product you need to have it on sale in time for the holidays that said the pencil not having the pencil ready to ship or not having

an announcement that the pencil wouldn't be ready to ship the same time as the pro and not and let's remind ourselves not even it's not just the pencil it's the keyboard to ship the same time as the pro and not and let's remind ourselves not even it's not just the pencil it's the keyboard too so it's none the only accessory that's available launch day with the ipad pro is the logitech create keyboard and the smart cover right and well i guess in this and the cover yes exactly not the keyboard but the top the top of the ipad pro is available if you want to cover if you want to cover its screen uh which is it's just insane to me the fact that you're going to launch a flagship product um that really depends on users uh being able to use it professionally and and for me that's that involves a hardware keyboard and it also involves a stylus.

If I want to really seriously use this as an artist's tool, there there wasn't something from tim about this just to be like you know even when they were announcing the ipad pro is going to be available this week pencils will be available the first week of december or something like that like just setting expectations especially since he's been talking to every single news outlet in Europe for the last two weeks. Yeah. Setting expectations is crucial at this point, especially when you're launching a new product with accessories that I don't want to say hinge the product's success or failure, because the iPad Pro, I have found lots to love about the iPad Pro and I don't need a pencil, but I also have a jot dash and I have, you know, five other styluses and the, the screen refresh rate makes it much better overall for drawing. Sure. But is it anywhere near what the pencil could be? No. Is it infuriating to me that

they, they don't even, they have maybe two or three pencils set up on display at the Apple stores. Like they don't even have enough display units to really do proper demos, which is crazy to me. There's a line for pencil demos every time I come into the Apple store. And, you know, and for, you know, on the reporting side, or on the artistic side, it was interesting to me, you know, the the folks who have gotten review units and all of that, the majority, again, is tech press. But there are very few outlets who are, you know, strong creatives or right for creatives who got a hold of the pro and the pencil. And I look at that as just like, what? Apple, what are you thinking to a certain extent? Like I, if you want pros to buy your machine, you need to show them what it looks like in the hands of a pro. Because I can, you know, Renee can draw pretty good Batmans and I doodle and I, you know, I, I do pretty, you know, I'm not a, I'm not a professional artist. I have gotten paid for my artistic work maybe three or four times in my life.

And it is really more of a hobby than a career for me. But I know a lot of people who are in the comics industry, who are in the video industry, who are graphics effects artists, people who are looking at this potentially as a huge game changer in the field, as their opportunity to get off Wacom or to convince people not you know, to convince their firm, oh, let's I'm glad we held off on the surface because this is going to be a better fit for us. You know, you saw Apple showing Disney and showing Pixar these these iPad pros early on, you heard little rumors of it, but Pixar and Disney artists didn't really get a platform to say, oh, this is what I like about it. And this is what's really great.

We've gotten occasional tweets from like Dr. Wave, but there hasn't really been outside of arts online, a big comprehensive piece from somebody in the graphics industry. I guess there's that piece on Vox, too. There's like little bits and pieces here, but there's really no one being like, I am an artist, and I can now use this in my day-to-day use. I can use AstroPad and a pencil to connect to my computer and draw natively in Photoshop with pressure sensitivity and palm rejection, and it's awesome. Like, that's the article, or I can try this and it's not awesome that's the article i've been waiting for and the article that i wanted to write if i had had a

pencil um but but it just it doesn't exist right now you mentioned that thing from vox i'm going to put a link in to a youtube video of a vox designer's review of the ipad pro especially the pencil and it's really great because you get to see somebody's thinking who does this type of stuff for a living and how the device works. But whilst that's good, it still doesn't fix the issue of like, that was Vox taking a chance because the Verge got review units. Like Apple haven't given these products to anybody who is coming at it from that perspective, at least that I've seen. And it's like, that is, you know, I agree with you and it's so perplexing because, I mean, I've tried one in a store

and people say, oh, there's no lag. There is. There is definitely lag. Well, in certain programs. Which programs did you try? Well, I mean, I even tried the Notes app. And when I say lag, it's not one-to-one, right? But for somebody who maybe doesn't

use a pen or a pencil very often it does feel great because it's the closest that it's ever been but it's nothing like me taking notes right here with a pencil and paper so it's like my thinking with that is like there aren't people like yourself who have had the chance to try these things out um but it's not even so much to trying out i just want to buy one i i want to give you my money apple in exchange for one of these things it is it's crazy making to me i it's really dangerous that um that the pencils aren't connected to anything in the apple store i know i i did i i'm not kidding this is so. I was standing outside the store today again to see if whilst I was waiting for them to open. And I thought to myself, like, you could just take it, right? It was just that one millisecond. I was like, you could just. I was like, no, you minded people. We're probably one of the, you know, more of the goody two shoes variety. But, but yeah, it's, it's so frustrating. All I want to do is do stylus tests and then use it every day and make it my new baby. the time that I've played with it and with the apps that I've played with it, it is very good.

It's not perfect. Um, it's not, it's not going to be, you know, it is not going to replace pen and paper. Um, but will it replace a Wacom tablet? That's, that is a definitive maybe. Like I'd need more hands-on time. I need probably a week and a half, maybe two weeks, um, doing dedicated work to say definitively, yes, this could replace your Cintiq. Um, but I am really potentially excited about that prospect, um, and, and comparing it against a surface. We got a very brief, uh, video from Mashable in doing that, but like, I don't know, there are just there are so many things that I would have liked to see day one from the pencil that I just haven't seen. And from Apple just being like, yo, how hard is it to say? Even in bureaucratical speak, our shipments were delayed. So iPad Pro available Wednesday, pencils and smart keyboard available in December, in early December. There you go. Now you've set your expectations. Instead, it's just like pick up unavailable. These are not the styluses that you're looking for. four arriving in random stores across new england but good luck because you can't reserve any of

them so you just have to pray that you're lining up at the right one and pray that no one's decided to line up before you i am literally going to camp out in front of providence's store this week i am i'm going there every single morning to ask if they have pencils and it is i'm like how have i been reduced to like 11 year old buying star wars tickets to get a 99 dollar accessory that yes i want to use but also i just want to review like i just want to give people more information about it so that they know if it's even worth their their while like it is insane to me and it just makes me so mad i I've been reviewing styluses for five years. You know what makes a good stylus and a bad stylus? Pretty quickly.

I think it's an interesting supply chain question that if you don't have enough to fulfill demand, do you hold off and say it's not available until you've got enough to fulfill at least some of the demand or do you just make all your customers play this game and i think it's a good i think it's a good question that um they made the decision that they would let the styluses trickle out there instead the pencil and uh and even the keyboards let let that stuff trickle out there and that would be the other way to go you're absolutely right is to say available december and then you know the reviewers would have them or whatever but the the you wouldn't have to play the game where you're waiting in front of a store or calling a bunch of apple

stores in your region and saying do you have a pencil can you hold it for me you can't hold it how fast can i drive that kind of thing um because that's not a fun for most people that's not a fun game i'm sure somebody finds that fun to race around like that and have a scavenger hunt for an apple pencil but i think um you know does apple think that that's the best experience or would it be better for them to say look you're just not going to be able to get one until december 1st at which point they'll be available um but they or we're only going to sell these online right now because we don't have enough and we need to control what the demand is and we'll put you on a waiting list but instead it's this uh it's this kind of old-fashioned game of uh from before we had instant gratification on the internet which is you just have to go to the store

and hope it's furbies all over again that's right cabbage patch kids yeah their pencils instead i just don't get it i mean the pencil is clearly a hot item. It was going to be a hot item. Yeah, well, I've heard from people who said, who said, you know, this is, it's in the ads. Like, this is the reason you get an iPad Pro and then you get in the store and you can buy your iPad Pro, but you can't get the pencil. It's, it is perplexing.

Yeah. But unfortunately for me and Ren, Jason does have one. In so much as Jason has been sending me little pictures all week. Little guilt tripping pictures. Yeah. have one uh in so much as jason has been sending me little pictures all week uh whenever i talk about guilt tripping pictures yeah so jason we are interested to know what you what your thoughts are but you want to thank stamps.com and then we'll talk about your feelings about the apple pencil indeed uh one of our sponsors this week is stamps.com the holidays are almost here uh you don't have time to go to the post office the uh not only not only are you busy but the

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no brainer. And here's how you can sign up. Go to stamps.com. Use the promo code upgrade. You click in the microphone at the top of the homepage at stamps.com and enter in upgrade. You'll get access as a result to this wonderful offer for four-week trial of stamps.com. And there's a $110 bonus offer that includes postage and a digital scale. So don't wait, go to stamps.com, click the microphone at the top of the homepage, type in upgrade, that's stamps.com, enter upgrade. Thank you to stamps.com for sponsoring upgrade. So you do have an Apple Pencil, Jason. I do. I do. The person who doesn't like pens and can't draw and does not have readable handwriting is the person here that

has the Apple Pencil. And if I had a portal, if I had a transport device that would magically send, unfortunately, stamps.com will not do this. We asked them. They do not have a portal system. I have to use the mail. They do not yet have the teleportation technology available. I would pass it off to one of you in a heartbeat because I would love to see what you think of it. As for me, as a savage, I have been trying it out and sending you drawings, mostly pictures of you being sad that you don't have one. And I'm not really that sorry about that. It seemed only fitting.

I did do a whole thing while you guys were talking about the supply chain and how angry you were and sent that to you. And it's in the chat room too. Little notes. Notes I'm making. Also drawings of you being sad.

It's slippery. It's completely Yeah. Little notes. Notes I'm making. Also drawings of you being sad. Thanks. It's slippery. It's completely perfectly round. It's not like those pencils that have, you know, the little, they're actually like, I don't know whether they're like a hexagon or something like that, but they've got the little kind of like a series of flat ridges. Instead, it's completely smooth and circular, which I find that that makes it actually a little bit slippery um but and and famously you know it's weighted so that it will actually stop and the little pencil uh name on the silver band that's up by the by the uh what would be an eraser but it's the cap that you take off in order to charge it um show says apple pencil comes up right there um super easy to use plug it in it does a pairing

um the battery lasts a long time and then you can charge it quickly it comes with a little uh little lightning cable extension so you don't have to plug it in directly to the ipad and make that little sign that you can't hold up that says i've got an apple pencil uh what are your questions about it and then i will be unable to answer them because i don't know anything about pencils it just makes me sad uh i mean i don't really know if I have questions for you specifically, right? Because a lot of the things that interest me the most, I think I'm maybe have a potential answer to them, but I need to know myself. Like one of the big things that I was interested in is, is this going to be like writing on a piece of paper in so much as I can write really, really small? And I've tested this out. And I now know that this is possible. I know, Ren,

you'll agree with me, I'm sure, that there hasn't really been a product that has been great for handwriting so far. No. JotDash and Jot, yeah, the Jot series have probably come the closest, but still not great. Because it always ends up that what what you're writing is is way bigger than what you intend it to be i i have done some of that i actually did some uh of it in evernote and i took some you know fake notes but as a test but i did that where i where i um held it like in in uh in portrait orientation and uh took a page of notes as if I was taking notes in a class or something. And it felt perfectly natural to me. It felt like I was taking notes in my notebook in a college class. And the nice thing about OneNote, did I say Evernote? I used OneNote. Did I say Evernote? I used OneNote. I used Microsoft OneNote.

Right. Okay. Microsoft OneNote. Okay. And it's got the... You can have it look like different pieces of paper. If you really want to have the college rule lined or a graph paper, you can do that. But it has an OCR, handwriting recognition, basically, feature. And I thought it would be interesting to see if it could even attempt to read my handwriting because my handwriting is so terrible. And I thought that would be interesting to see if it could even attempt to read my handwriting because my handwriting is so terrible. And it totally worked. I was able to do searches for words that I'd put in my, in my note, in OneNote. And, uh, and it was able to come up with that document and the exact place on the page where I wrote that word. So I was impressed by

that just because my handwriting is terrible. And yes, there are some, it's smart where if it can't figure out what the word is, it thinks it might be five different things. It puts all five of those things in the index. And so if you search on any of them, you will find it. But yeah, so as a writing implement, it totally felt to me as a, as a layman that I was, I was experiencing the same experience as if I was writing with a pen on paper or a pencil on paper. And then, you know, then I try to draw stick figures and I'm very good at drawing stick figures and nothing else. And yeah, I, it, I don't get any of the lag, you know, even when I'm erasing I put it in the erase mode and I'm very quickly moving over something because I want to erase it. You don't get that thing where you go swish, swish, swish with a pen and then stop and watch as the swish, swish, swish happens.

It's a little bit behind, but very close. And if you're writing at the speed at which I'm writing words with a pencil on the screen, my handwriting speed, it's essentially lagless to me, I would say. At that rate, I never get that disconnect. I think it's a little bit like when you're watching a movie and if the speaker delay is off by a little bit, there's like your brain patches it all together, but beyond a certain point, it kind of breaks and you lose the illusion and now it's just out of sync. I think that maybe there's something like that for lag with a pen. And in most cases, I didn't feel it. Like if I looked really closely, I could tell that it was actually a little bit behind,

but when regularly using it, I felt like the illusion was there that I was putting ink on paper. Right. And I wanted to know from you, because I know that, you know, I felt like the illusion was there that I was putting ink on paper. Ren, I wanted to know from you, because I know that, you know, I'm sure you have some experience with things like the Wacom Cintiqs and stuff like that. What is the type of lag in those sort of devices? So the Cintiq does have a bit of lag, as does the Intuos, which, of which of course the intuos you're not even drawing on the direct screen you're drawing on essentially a tablet with no screen and then that's you have to look up at the screen as you're drawing um the cintiq's lag at least the most recent cintiq that i've used is probably under 100 milliseconds like you're not, it's not where you have a line

trailing behind your pencil, right? Where it's a very minor sort of thing. The Apple Pencil to me is fairly consistent with that, which is to say that when you make a line and when you make very quick lines in succession, you are seeing the lines as you make them. In some cases, you're seeing the prediction of the line, which I think is very strange but cool technology from Apple to sort of course correct if it thinks you've accidentally

made a jitter in your drawing. It thinks you've accidentally made a jitter in your drawing. But overall, I think we're looking at something that's very, very similar latency. The issue in the past, why latency is such a big deal, especially on the iPad, is that previous styluses, first of all, the iPad screen refresh rates have been much much lower than this current the iPad Pro has 240 hertz refresh rate which means that you're you're seeing more and more pixels come up as you draw previous generations iPads and iPhones had much much lower which made it much harder to catch up to what the peripherals were doing. You also had to deal with the fact that initially styluses were pretending to be fingers, and so they were fat and imprecise, and the first iPads had basically touch-sensitive grids that were designed for fat fingers.

So when people started using them to draw and started saying, oh, we'll make styluses, it was very hard to create pinpoint accuracy with a fat stylus, with a rubber nib stylus, because you were essentially hitting like a one by one grid in terms of finding out, oh, my finger slash stylus is in this point part of the screen. And to try and hit that grid multiple times or pieces of that grid was almost impossible um when zoom came into effect when when apps started adding in zooming it became a little bit easier because then you could essentially that one by one grid you could enlarge uh and actually address the the individual pieces of the drawing.

And it's gotten to the point where pairing with Bluetooth, you've been able, third-party stylus makers have been able to simulate low latency by basically using the Bluetooth connection and specific APIs within apps and simulate pinpoint accuracy. But ultimately, that's what they are. They're simulations. And because they have to simulate something that the OS could be doing naturally, there's going to be inherent lag built in that. You look at any of the Bluetooth-capable styluses, including Adonit's own jot touch including 10 ones uh stylus including the 53 pencil all of them have much better pinpoint accuracy than they have in the past but the lag

is painful especially in paper is can be very very painful because of the processing that they're doing simultaneous processing to make sure that what you're entering on the screen with a physical device ends up being represented appropriately on the page. So my hope has always been Apple makes a device that actually communicates with the iPad natively rather than having to go through all of these backdoor weird APIs put on top of basically addressing iPad flaws. Now the flaw, the former flaws that were preventing the iPad

from being great, um, have been reconfigured to work with a stylus and with the pencil, with my very limited time with it, um, I can see a major difference in how writing with a pencil feels and sketch scrolling with adaptive movement, where you see adaptive movement scrolling on an iOS device or on a Mac, and it just feels seamless, right? It just it feels comfortable, it makes sense. And then you see a web app try and do adaptive scrolling, or you see Windows try and do adaptive scrolling, Android try and do adaptive scrolling. And you can just it just doesn't feel the same, right? There's a there's a different, there's a different interactivity there, it just doesn't bounce the way that you want it to. And that's, to me, that's the difference between having a native tool versus having a third party

tool. Is it just it instinctually, it feels more stilted. So I've been taking notes on my iPad as you've been talking. And I wanted to add OneNote, which is about OneNote. What Apple's doing with the Notes app is very impressive. And the Notes app shows very little lag. When I switch to something like paper or when I switched to OneNote and I'm taking notes in my reporter style where I'm summarizing conversation

and doing some verbatim quotes and the things that I do, if I'm interviewing somebody, these are the skills that I learned when I would interview people for stories with a notepad and paper, right? In notes, the illusion is perfect. In OneNote and paper, the illusion is not perfect there is much more lag and i don't know whether that's just that they need to be updated to take

advantage of this particular input device or not i assume so because notes can do it like perfectly it's the it's the difference between something that was built in-house. You know, they've had how long to work with the pencil. In fact, when you tap on the stylus dropdown in OneNote, it lets you pick pencil by 53 or other stylus. So clearly OneNote doesn't really know about the Apple Pencil. Maybe they can't buy one. Maybe there aren't any at the Bellevue Apple Store, the University Avenue Apple Store in Seattle. So my understanding is that there are new APIs that can make this stuff better, right? Yes and no. So I haven't really dug into them myself because a lot of it's over my head.

What I will say is the increased refresh rate is good for all of the all of the pens, because it just again, it just means that what you're drawing, it shows up faster, which is great. And you're still going to have that you're still going to have the latency between the connection. So any Bluetooth styluses are still going to have that sort of hiccup because they have to talk to the device over Bluetooth. The stylus that I've actually been enjoying most on the iPad Pro is the JotDash, is a Donitz JotDash, because it's not Bluetooth connected. It just has a small USB charged battery in it, and it doesn't work as a stylus when it's off.

It just doesn't. as a stylus when it's off. It just doesn't. It's a dead device. But if you tap the bottom like you would a pen click, you can just tap it to turn on. And then it works just as a regular stylus except that it has a 2 millimeter or I guess 1.9 millimeter pixel point tip. So it's designed to take advantage of the iPad's smaller grids and retina size grids now that the iPad is so gigantic. And it's designed to take advantage of the refresh rate by sort of future proofing itself by saying, well, we've developed this technology and it doesn't require APIs and it doesn't require special things. We're just we're banking that Apple's hardware technology is going to get better. And we're developing developing a pen that can hypothetically work well with that.

And it works decently with the iPad Air 2. It works very well with the 6S Plus and it works close but not identically to the pencil in notes. That that drawing that I sent earlier to to the relay channel was done with a jot dash. And I'm like, well, you know, it's, you know, you can still do quite impressive things in the notes app and in other apps with these other styluses. The difference is, of course, you've got lack of palm rejection. You've got, um, lack of first party integration. Uh, but the third, I mean, I don't think the, I don't think it's doom and gloom for third party stylus makers.

I think that there are still things that they can position themselves to do. For one thing, not everybody is going to want to buy a hundred dollar pencil. Um, and right now people having, you know, offering themselves as like the jot dash is like the $50 equivalent of the Apple pencil. There are styluses that you can buy for nine or $10 if you just want a really, really inaccurate, really inaccurate basis device for sketching or writing. So there are, I think there are still avenues that Apple hasn't covered here. And I do think that the improvements that they've made in the iPad Pro can be taken advantage of by stylus makers.

Just depends on how they'll adapt their apps to deal with it. And we'll just keep our fingers crossed that we will have them sometime within the next couple of weeks keep watching the skies and stalking the stores i guess is what i would say if nothing else i'm just going to um i'm going to book a a hypothetical genius appointment that i'm never going to show up for but i'm going to check in for it and then spend the next 45 minutes writing my pencil review because i just i feel like there's there's no better way there's no better way oh do we have anything more that we wanted to cover today on this no i think we i think we've

done it so i think we're going to skip ask upgrade this week we'll come back with a bumper ask upgrade next week along with a mic at the movies don't forget if you want to uh watch along with the sure thing 1985 uh cusack hit for next week's episode of upgrade ren thank you so much for joining us it's been an absolute pleasure and you've provided a lot of great color on all of this stuff from a from a perspective that me or jason wouldn't have had so thank you so much for joining us absolutely thank you for having me and uh hi for your sake and mine i hope pencils show up in stores soon yeah yeah i i had really hoped that you would get one in time for this episode and uh but it was interesting that you didn't so yeah thank you for being here i tried we both tried we both really tried so hard i know every single day every single day i'm going back

where can people keep up with you online and see what you're working on i am on twitter and instagram at settern s-e-t-t-e-r-n and i am writing a whole ton of ipad pro coverage over on imore.com right now i'm doing my week with ip Pro experiment. So, day three, coming soon to iMore.com near you. If you want to catch up with Jason's work online, you can head on over to SixColors.com. And he is at Jsnell on Twitter, J-S-N-E-L-L.

And I am at iMike, I-M-Y-K-E. Thank you so much again to our sponsors this week, Stamps.com, Fracture, and Lynda.com. And thank you for listening. Until next time, say goodbye, everybody. Goodbye.

Goodbye.