Upgrade - 87: Unchartable Tidbits

Episode Date: May 2, 2016

Jason and Myke are joined by follow-up guest Scott McNulty to review the Kindle Oasis (including its Kindle hump), then switch gears to break down the complexities of Apple’s quarterly results, Dropbox’s infinite solution to an old conundrum, and Jason’s review of USB audio interfaces.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode number 87 today's show is kindly brought to you by squarespace mail route and pingdom my name is mike hurley and i am joined by senor jason snell hi mike how's it going? Good, how are you? Good, you know, it's Monday morning It's for me, so I'm waking up I'm getting into it But I'm glad to be here to start my week with you Thank you, it's always a pleasure And in our tradition of continuing to advance the medium

We are going to be today having some guest follow-ups So we have Mr. Scott McNulty with us today It's afternoon here in philadelphia but yes happy lunchtime to you thank you um we yeah so scott was on a couple weeks ago and we were talking about the kindle oasis but we couldn't actually uh give any hands-on perspective about it because it had it like like we did when we talked to serenity for an entire episode about the apple pencil and she didn't have one. We did an entire episode about the Kindle Oasis and we didn't have it.

But we have them now. And so I thought that this would be a good way to start is with some follow-up with guests about the Kindle Oasis. So, Scott. This is a question. Mike, who doesn't care about Kindles, This is a question he's prepared for us. So, Mike, why don't you ask your question as an expert? Scott, do you like it? These are the hard-hitting questions that I was not prepared for.

This is the kind of journalism you can only get on Upgrade. The Kindle always says, I do like it. Once again, generally I have this thing where the most recent Kindle is my favorite Kindle, and I think that that streak continues with the Kindle Oasis. Yeah, which is a good sign, right, that they're making things better in some ways. I like it, too.

I was really, I was skeptical of this one. I don't know, what about it? The idea that it was this, you know, well, they're doing the Apple thing, if we're going to make it thinner and lighter and you have to get it with a case. And then I opened the box and I was kind of shocked at how small it was. Like I have in my mind like what, how big a Kindle should be. And it was a lot smaller than that. And the case, I pulled the case out of its little slip that it was in, and I thought, this is it? It's so tiny.

Was there a mistake? Where's the actual case? Because it's all very small and thin and light in a way that I didn't expect. I don't know what your reactions were when you picked it up. I was surprised by the size of it. I have trouble visualizing sizes, so I can read the specs and I can see a picture with someone's hand next of it. I have trouble visualizing sizes. So, you know, I can read the specs and I can see a picture with someone's hand next to it. That still is meaningless to me until I'm actually can see it with my own eyes and hold it with my own hands. And it is surprisingly small

and the screen is the same size. So that's great. And it's also very light, especially when you don't have the cover on it. Although I think with the cover, it's still not very heavy. It's certainly maybe a tiny bit heavier than my Voyage, although I can't really discern the difference. But yeah, and I was also pleasantly surprised to see in the little package there that the cover and the Kindle came in two different boxes in the same little box. So that led me to believe that perhaps in the future, you can buy just the Oasis or just the cover.

But that's just me assuming that maybe that's what that means. But it could just mean it's easier to ship things that way. I don't know. There's a certain weirdness in offering a product that comes with another product. It's very strange to me. You buy the Kindle and it comes with the battery case it feels like it's an option that they give you it's it's kind of strange yeah um although so

so here's one thing that i noticed in using it um because they've made the main kindle so much lighter and thinner i think they've done away with some of the battery and i i just it's hard for me to tell but the battery seems to drain on it when it's not attached to the case pretty fast like faster than i'm used to with a kindle and i'm wondering if this was why they bundled it all together is that um they it's like yeah well on own, we really took a hit to battery life. But if you've always got the case around, then the case will supplement that battery life and give you back an extended range of it. Because I don't know if you noticed this, Scott, but it felt to me like every time I checked when I was just reading on the Kindle without the battery cover attached, like I could see it over like the course of a day. I could see the battery percentage go down, which never really happened on my older Kindles.

Oh, I think that's totally true and totally why they have the battery cover at all in their quest to make it super thin and super light, which they have achieved. Good job, Amazon. They had to, one assumes, squish everything into the little, I'll call it the Kindle hump on the side. I don't think Amazon calls it that. And so it has a smaller battery in the main device. And so it doesn't last as long. Also something I didn't realize, but which Amazon makes, doesn't hide it. This Kindle doesn't have auto brightness,

the Voyage. So the Voyage will automatically dim or brighten the screen based on the light in the room, which is a feature I really liked. And I didn't realize how much I liked it until I was using a Kindle that does not have it, which the Oasis does not have. And I think that also impacts the battery usage, especially for me, because I keep it bright probably more than I should. And then, you know, it goes through the battery. Yeah, obviously, I took out a sensor probably in order to make it

thinner and lighter they took out that light sensor i never liked that feature because i would always find it adjusting the light at a weird time when i'd be like no why are you getting dim brighter now brighter well it did have the problem where you would cover the sensor with your finger and then it would be like a completely dark room let me crank the brightness really down yeah yeah exactly but i you know it's i i just when they announced it i rolled my eyes at the whole idea of uh of oh thinner and lighter do we really need that but having picked it up like the first time i picked it up i was like oh i see it now like i get i get it because although you would never call the kindle voyage or the paperwhite

like a big heavy device they're small this is like it feels appreciably different like in a way the voyage didn't feel appreciably different from the paperwhite it was a little bit different but it very much you know it was super subtle the the the oasis is remarkably thinner and lighter um and even with the case on it feels compact but with the case off, um, it's, it's, and it's a pleasure. It's a, it's a really, it's really nice thing. When I picked it up for the first time, I thought, oh, I'm not sending this back. That's never, that's never going to happen.

Like this is a keeper because it is, uh, it's so pleasant to hold it. And it's got the physical page turn buttons, which they, they finally went back to. And on the pictures, it was unclear. I'm like, I don't trust amazon anymore i think about some of this stuff because they took those buttons off it's like when they put them back and they were just silkscreen things that you squeezed and it vibrated i was like all right well we'll see if those are physical page turn buttons they're actual things you depress them they depress the page turns it's you know i know it's not rocket science but they did

a good job with that they they feel good to turn the pages. And one of the things that I didn't think would impact my usage all that much, but it has totally made this device even better for me is the automatic flipping of the screen. So when you move it from one hand to another and it just automatically switches a small thing. But it's just like fantastic because the buttons are always in the right place. Yeah, every iOS device has had an accelerometer to determine the orientation of the device, and no Kindle has had it. And for this, because they only have the page turn buttons on the one side, it's especially important that they have the ability for you to flip the orientation.

I found that I actually prefer it in my left hand, which means that it would be upside down, I think, in terms of how you would orient it. And it doesn't matter, right? And if I want to switch to the other hand to turn the pages, I just flip it over and it auto-rotates, which is, again, a feature that seems very basic but was not present before. So it's good to see that they finally did it. And the Kindle OS had rotation built into it. It just did not auto-rotate. So you could go into a menu and move it around, but that was just a pain. So having that auto-rotate is super great.

And I like the cover itself. I didn't think I would like the cover all that much. I mean, I thought I'd like the battery part of it, and I do. But I actually like the, I don't know if it's real leather or not, but I like it. It feels like a book when you're holding it. It looks nice. It's the leather, it's super thin.

One of the problems I had with a lot of leather cases in the old, I had a leather Kindle case at one point, and it was thick and weighty. And this is super thin. It actually reminded me of kind of like the Apple Watch leather watch bands where they're leather, but they're almost like papery thin and sort of lightly textured. And it's a little bit like that. And then the battery on the back, you know, it's not one of these big wraparound cases. It's like a battery that is the shape of the indentation that's not the Kindle hump.

The non-hump portion, I believe they call it. And it just magnetically attaches. So at that point, it's a bigger device with a little battery and it extends the battery life. And I think one of the ways they want you to use this is the main Kindle has enough battery life that you can just carry it around without the case on it. But they'll figure you'll have the case around, and at some point, you'll store it in the case, at which point the battery will just top up the battery on the device. And another funny thing is you can't charge the case. The case charges through the Kindle and the micro USB port is on the Kindle, which I also thought was interesting because I thought, well, maybe you just leave the battery case charging somewhere while you're out.

But that's not how it works either. Although I do, that's how I am. They've made it very easy to take it off with magnets and all that. That's how I am. They've made it very easy to take it off with magnets and all that. So I've been just ripping it off and leaving it by my bedside table, the cover, and walking around and reading on my Kindle. And then when it's time to go to sleep, I put it back in and I don't even bother to plug in the USB thing because it's just charging off of the battery case. So cool yeah i like that and that means that your device itself is is basically always charged once it's spent some time in the in the case and you just have to remember every so often to charge it with the case uh so it's it they move the battery it's it's an interesting idea and it's a little bit kludgy but i i get why they did it that the idea of moving some of the battery weight and size out of the device itself

but into this kind of convenient product that's that's by its side uh but it also explains why they are sold together because i think people would probably notice how much less battery there is in the main device if they didn't yeah i think amazon says it's something like two weeks without the cover which is ridiculously uh short amount of time for a kindle so yeah and i imagine that if you have that that's if you keep the brightness down and have wi-fi turned off and you read like for 30 minutes a day or something like that so there are a lot of uh asterisks next to that third uh two week window lies lies about batteries lots of lies about batteries And another very small thing that

I like, obviously the face of the Kindle, there's not a lot of room there, but they took off all of the Kindle branding on the face of it. So it's just a frame, a black frame without a little Kindle logo at the bottom. Actually, I don't think it has a Kindle logo anywhere on it, even on the battery case, but it has a couple of Amazon logos, but, uh, so it's not distracting you. Yeah, I know. I really like that, that there's nothing, nothing on the face. Uh, the bezels are, are a lot smaller. The screen is the same as on the voyage, but, uh, I like it. I think the backlighting or the sidelighting, whatever is, uh, is, is good. I read a book on it this weekend and, uh, yeah, it's really, it's really pleasant, but it's funny. It's one of those things where you kind of almost have to hold it in your hands to get why it costs so much more than the Paperwhite and why that might be worth it for some people.

It's a nice case, and it's a nice device, and I definitely agree. When we talked about the Voyage, Scott, last year, I remember being very much kind of on the fence about it i was like i decided to keep it but i thought about even sending it back because i didn't think it was that much better than the paperwhite and i kept recommending to people just get the paperwhite the paperwhite's really good um i i i don't think that the oasis is just slightly better than the voyage of the paperwhite i i'd say it's better. It's really nice. Uh, I still wouldn't recommend that most people buy it because it is a lot more expensive. You could buy like three paper whites for the cost of the Oasis. So, uh, I would recommend doing that and reading three books at once instead for most people, but it's a really nice piece of hardware. It's just,

you know, it's probably not what, you know, if you're a Kindle addict like me, and that could be a new podcast, Mike, take notes, the Kindle addict, like me and like Scott. But, you know, right, Scott? I mean, the Paperwhite's a really nice product, and at 99 or like 100 bucks, it's a pretty great deal, too. Yeah, and I think so the Paperwhite kind of redefined what a Kindle was when it came out and compared to all the other Kindles you thought, oh, this is what they were trying to get at. And I think while the Voyage redefined, you know, it refined what the paper white was doing. It didn't really it wasn't as great a leap forward. Whereas I think the Oasis is once again, another thing of they're getting even closer to what they're trying to do. once again another thing of they're getting even closer to what they're trying to do and uh if you like you said jason if you have the money and you are really into kindles uh the oasis is the kindle

you should get if you just want to read a couple books a year probably spending three hundred dollars on a single use device is not the best use of your money but uh who am i to tell you what to do with your money yeah well our friend dan moranin bought a Paperwhite, and I think he was in that moment like, oh, geez, they're going to announce new Kindles. But this is probably, now that they cut the price on this, this is probably worth it for me. And I think he made a good decision, I think, for him. And for most people, I think, if you want to get into the Kindles. I would not recommend that $60 low-end Kindle, but the Paperwhite that lights itself and has a good clear screen on it is – and no page turn buttons or anything, but you tap on the touchscreen to turn the page. And it's a very good product.

Yeah, and now Amazon is selling that entry-level $60 Kindle, which no one should buy. The Paperwhite, which most people should buy. The Voyage, which at this point I don't think anyone should should buy and i'm not quite sure why amazon is still selling it uh and the oasis which you should buy if you were in the market for a voyage because the voyage is a lot more expensive than the paper white so just spend a little bit more and get an even better kindle yeah the voyage almost feels like paper white two or paper white three whatever it is because i think there've been two generations of paper white and i wonder if over time that's what will happen is either it will go away or it will be even you know it will replace the paperwhite and they'll keep cutting the price on it.

But I'm not clear kind of why the Voyage needs to exist with the paperwhite because they're so similar now. And there's this other product that's so clearly above them. Oh, a couple other things I wanted to mention. One is it doesn't let you rotate horizontally, except through the menus. But I actually think that this thing is so thin and light that there's probably people who would hold it horizontally and read that way. And you could do it. I haven't tried it. It's a little bit strange. But you could do that if you wanted to. But you could do that if you wanted to. If people are into fonts, it has a new font, Amazon Ember, which I guess is a sans serif. I can never remember what serif or sans serif is, but it's one of those. It's either sans or, yeah, no, it's a sans serif font.

But they have Booker Lee, which is the serif font. Now they've got Ember, which is a sans serif font that they did along with their other. I don't love their typography. We said that a couple weeks ago, but it's fine. It's fine. I still wish you could turn off justification, forced justification, but they've improved their typography some, and it's still worth... I love reading books on my Kindle, so I'm happy to have it. I have some thoughts about this actually

because listening to you guys here welcome back mike hi how you doing nice to see you do you like your kindle oasis mike i absolutely love it it's almost like a mirage i'm very confused about this product especially in hearing you talk about it because what it seems like amazon have done is make the kindle better by just kind of cutting it in half and giving you both pieces but you seem really happy both of you about the fact that that's happened like it just seems very strange it's like we're gonna take the battery life and the thickness out of the kindle put it into a case give you the case and then you think that we've solved the thickness problem it just seems very strange to me like and i'm not saying that you guys are wrong but it seems like a

very peculiar approach that i'm not sure many other companies could get away with like if apple came out and said the iphone is now as thin as a piece of paper and it's great it will last a couple of hours and you just need to put this battery case on it that we're going to give you and then you can get the regular day's charge out of it. Well, I think there's two very different use cases with a phone and a book reader. Right. And I think that the the weight of like I don't my phone does not need to be any lighter or thinner. I'm sure it will be. But I think that I'm holding in one hand for hours at a time while I'm trying to read needs to be as light as it can be. And I think that's what Amazon is going towards. And I put it down at night, right?

So it doesn't matter. I'm not going to use it for those several hours. Whereas my phone, I might use, like it might wake me up or something. I don't know. My phone often does. My Kindle never wakes me up. So two points to the Kindle. phone often does my kindle never wakes me up so uh two two points to the kindle i mean this is what i mean about like the fact that maybe amazon's the only person the only company who could get

away with this right because of the product that they make right i think the the the e-reader market can get away with it because it's a very different device that's doing a different thing like if it was if amazon's fire tablets they did the same thing i don't think they would be as successful with that uh although i don't know't think they would be as successful with that. Although I don't know if they're being all that successful with their Fire tablets or not. But yeah, I think it's just a very different class of device. I don't think the Kindle use case is the same, like Scott said, as the phone,

because I think the Kindle Oasis without the battery cover will be good for you to read all day. Like, I think it would be good to read all day. Like I think it would be good to read all day. I think the difference is maybe the old one you could read all weekend and into the next week without ever plugging it in and it wouldn't be a problem with Wi-Fi turned on. And this one, you know, after a day, day and a half, maybe you would need to plug it in. So the equivalent for a phone would be, imagine you've got a phone that runs for five days without being plugged in. That doesn't exist, but imagine it, just dream about it.

And then imagine that Apple says, hey, what we're going to do is we're going to pair it back to one day, but also sell this really nifty battery case that makes it a little heavier that will give you the full five or six or eight day experience. That's sort of what Amazon's doing here. It's like at some point they've, they've kind of had battery to give, I guess I would say. Um, and so they get, they, they gave it and said, okay, here, here, we made it thinner and lighter. It'll get you through, you know, a couple of days. You didn't need a week or two of battery life uh all the time on just the device but we also had this case that will recharge you so it's it's a little bit different because the the use case is different because the kindles have had way longer battery life than than an

iphone has ever had so if you plug the kindle into the case it charges the kindle as well as give extra battery life correct yeah, it charges it back up. Like if you leave it even in for like an hour in the case and then you pick it up again, it's back to being basically full. It's very interesting. Yeah. And I think the other thing that I would say is this isn't just like even with the case on it, it's just not just like one of the older Kindles because they have reduced the bezel around most of the edges and then added to it on the one side to give you that kind of grippable area. And so it does feel like it's pushing, like Scott was alluding to, pushing toward Amazon's vision for what the Kindle ultimately is, which is that it should disappear. That's really what they've said. Jeff Bezos has said that. The goal is to disappear.

You're just in the reading experience. It's all about the words on the page. And, you know, the Oasis, because it's that much thinner and lighter, it is sort of like getting to that point where it's starting to vanish. And it's a nice piece of hardware. I think they did a good job. Like with the case on, it feels like this little tiny compact, almost like a notebook or something like a little digest that you would carry you would carry around and like a like a field notes kind of thing almost um and i like the feel of it too even with the case on it it feels compact in a way that the other ones didn't the only things that i miss about my kindle voyage are the auto brightness thing which i already talked about and the cover that i had for that which was the amazon origami thing which would make it into a little stand so i would write

when i was like eating my lunch i wouldn't have to hold up my kindle like a savage but now i'm back to holding up my kindle well now i just rested against like a cup or so it's so light i rested against a feather and it's fine the other thing that it's weird about this in like what you've mentioned scott and kind of talking about the previous kindles as well amazon seemed to not really mind too much about giving features and then taking them away when a product is replaced. It's also a very strange way of doing this stuff. Like, oh, we have a new, even better Kindle.

It has some additional features, and so we've also taken some away as well. There aren't a lot of companies that do that. You could argue that Apple used to be more like that, and now that Apple has become more successful, it's harder for apple to take things away from their large not that they won't do it but that it makes it harder and amazon with this product seems very much in that space of being like uh you know an artist who's like no you don't get that anymore we have moved on we've made a decision and here's the new thing and the buttons are gone just deal with it the buttons are gone now the buttons are back yeah and now they're back because i think they

heard from people that the and it was a weird case where they took the buttons off entirely and it was just touch screen and then they're like well we'll bring back these funny buttons that aren't buttons and then they're like okay fine buttons here you go you get your buttons back happy now yeah i i am although i wanted to throw out one other thing which is that the kiddo oasis is 290 which is pricey um it is given that the paper white's 100 um but the thing that really actually bugs me about it is they're still doing their thing where it's it's 290 with special offers and if you want to turn the ads off it's $2.90 with special offers. And if you want to turn the ads off, it's another $20. And since everything comes with the case, that means that by default, unless you pay the extra

$20, when you open the case, it wakes up to show you an ad, but you still have to swipe in order to get to your book. And for $100, I feel like that's an okay thing to do. At $2.90, that's a that's an okay thing to do at 290 i think there should be no ads i i think i think having everybody have to pay 310 in order to remove the amazon ads from the screen and have the experience that when you open the cover the the book just appears i think at some point they amazon should kind of cut it off and say you know know, this this you can cheap out by twenty dollars in order to not see ads is kind of unbecoming of a product in this price range. But that's what they did. That jump should be a lot bigger. Oh, yeah.

You think so? If they're going to do it right. The gap between those prices should be way, way bigger. Yeah. It's not like the special offers aren't bad, but I think from a usability standpoint, like if you're going to have a device with a cover that is this magnetic cover that automatically wakes and sleeps the screen, just like an iPad smart cover would be, the special offers really get in the way. Like they kind of wreck that experience by having the special offers

in the way in a way that, and now every single one of these devices right now is shipping with that cover, which means they're all getting the special offers in the way unless they pay $20. And yeah, you're right, Mike, maybe if maybe you put special offers in and you offer this for $250 and it's a $50 or $60 savings, then that's a little bit different experience. But for the $20 with a $290 product, it seems like a miscalculation to me. But for the $20 with a $290 product, it seems like a miscalculation to me. On the other end of this as well, it's very surprising to me that there isn't yet a free Kindle with a Prime subscription. Well, I think free is hard, right?

Because if you give something away, people get it and not actually want to use it. I mean want to i mean the the base kindle at 60 is getting perilously close yeah exactly and i do wonder if you know they do a special for prime members at some point where it's 20 or something like that i think we're going to get there where it's nearly free not quite free but nearly free for them right and they do have uh the kindle fire seven inch is 40 uh so you know for 20 less you get a tablet that has a Kindle app on it. It's not obviously if you're going to get a Kindle e-ink Kindle, they are better for reading. See, those prices are why I think it's surprising they haven't done free

because for those devices, they're basically free, right? It's just strange for them they don't just say hey if you want one let us know and we'll send you one they always seem to send me one uh but it's not free yeah yeah it's it's i mean i think free making any product free you're gonna get a lot of people who get it because it's free and then don't use it and if you're taking a loss on it then there's no point in doing that i think they do want to make money or at least break even and then have the upside of selling you things. So like when they did the Fire TV stick for $29 or something like that, I think that was one of those cases where that's sort of pushing it, where some people bought Chromecasts

and Fire TV sticks with unclear about whether they would ever use them just because it seemed like an irresistible price. And, you know, if you're Amazon below a certain point, it doesn't make sense for you to give them away because you're not going to get that money back because people are just going to get them and then not use them as well as they as you need them to. So, you know, free, I don't know. Although you're right. Prime membership, if you're a prime member saying, you know, you basically are eligible to get a free Fire tablet or Kindle once every two years at this base level and we'll be happy to send it to you as a thank you, maybe that will happen sometime. I'm a little surprised they haven't experimented with that as part of the membership deal. Yeah.

I mean when I say free, I mean free for Prime members, not like free for everyone. Yeah, free with your paid subscription yeah yeah or they could do what they do with the dash buttons right you pay them five dollars but that turns into a credit for your first dash order so it's kind of like a deposit yeah and it makes you makes you try it out right it makes you want to use it and then you find out whether you like it or not that's all i've got about the about the oasis except to say yeah i like it and i would not recommend it for most people because it is the high high end and it's got a high price but it's a nice product they're not wrong in in in uh you know saying it's a premium product that that uh at that premium price it it's very nice

most people should probably just buy the paperwhite but it's a really nice product i'm very happy with it it's uh It's really quite pleasant. It is better than I thought it would be, and I thought it would be pretty good. All right. I think that's it for our guest follow-up. Scott, thank you so much for taking time out of your workday to do some guest FU about the Kindle. My pleasure. Anytime you need me, just turn on the Kindle sign and I will appear.

We'll shine the Kindle signal and Scott will appear. Thank you to Mr. McNulty for joining us today. And let's take a quick break. And then we actually have some other follow-up to get into, Jason. It's just between me and you. And of course, the listeners too. This week's episode is brought to you by Pingdom, a new sponsor for the show. Start monitoring your websites and servers today at pingdom.com. You'll be able to get yourself

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Let's get back in to our follow-up. We had a great email from Ryan who was talking to us about a potential reason for the Apple car and its existence from what we were talking about last week. Ryan said, wouldn't designing a car

be like the ultimate challenge for Johnny Ive? Surely he would jump at the chance to want to do this and might be kind of helping spearhead the project. For him to do to cars what he did for phones, computer design, and things like that would kind of put him, as Ryan says, in the Mount Rushmore of design. After his hand in designing the new Apple campus, quite literally the car is the only thing he has left.

Well, that's probably true. Although you're not going to hire hundreds of people or thousands of people and spend a billion dollars just because you want to keep Johnny Ive engaged. No way. But I mean, he might be there helping push it forward, right? Sure, sure. And he's probably, if he's involved in this, I would assume he would be involved with this. And then he's probably working with a team of designers who have, uh, some

background. I know that he loves cars and drives a Bentley and all of these things. Um, Bentley, by the way, so I'm not a car guy, but I've seen, I see pictures of Bentleys. I'm like, wow, that's one ugly car, but okay. Yeah. They, they seem really horrendously ugly to guy, but I see pictures of Bentleys and I'm like, wow, that's one ugly car. I don't like Bentleys either. Yeah, they seem really horrendously ugly to me, but Johnny Ive likes them, so okay. Sorry, Bentleys. Bentley owners out there, I'm sorry. I'd like to apologize, but I don't like them. They're ugly.

So, yeah, I don't know. I mean, sure. I'm sure Johnny Ive would love this. Although Ryan also says after the new Apple Campus, the car is the only thing left. I don't think Johnny Ive designed the Apple Campus. I think there was a world-famous architect who designed the new Apple Campus.

Well, he's had a big hand in it. I'm sure. And the materials on the inside and all that. I'm sure he's been involved, right? But I think not at the level like he designs hardware. Yeah, because I think that profile kind of spoke about him really being involved in it, right? Like, was it in New York Times or something? Do you remember that big, big Johnny Ive profile?

Yeah, sure. I think that's where that might have come from, whether it's true or not, like as to how much involvement he actually had. But they were really kind of talking about that. I'm sure, but he's like uh you know he's part he's one of the clients uh you know he's the client but there's an architecture firm that's building the thing and i i don't i think it's but that probably a lot of what johnny i've does these days is at that level of remove where he's you know he's looking at the big picture of a lot of stuff and then maybe he's diving into very specific things and perhaps the car is a place for him to play i feel like i feel like the design of the shape of the car while i don't want

to say it's not important to apple doing a car but i think i would say it's not the most difficult thing about apple doing a car so um yeah i guess i would say to ryan yeah um it's interesting to think about johnny i've doing this and having it be an interesting challenge to keep him engaged at apple um i i don't dispute that um i just that that's about as far as i'd go i think i think in the in the grand scheme of things it's not really uh an important aspect of the story and it's not the hardest thing that they have to do about how it looks. I'm intrigued to think of what an Apple-designed car might actually look like inside and out. That intrigues me.

But I feel like there's just so much more to the story than just that. That's sort of how I approach it. You wrote a big review thing about USB interfaces for audio work. Can you talk a little bit about this and why you did it? Yeah, I tried to deal with the fact that we have, I get a lot of questions about like, what microphone should I use? Like I'm a podcaster and I'm looking for a better microphone. What microphones should I use? And we've talked a lot about, uh, you know, there are USB microphones where you have a microphone, you plug it into your computer and you use that. And then the, the like blue Yeti is one of those. And there are a bunch of those.

Uh, and then there are the XLR microphones, which are traditional, more traditional microphones. They've got a big thick cable, and then you plug those into a usb interface and that is what goes to the computer and converts the audio signal into something that the that's a digital signal that the computer can understand and i didn't have enough experience with the low-cost uh audio interfaces to make any recommendations there so i bought like five of them that were 150 ish or or below and tested them and basically came up with a recommendation of what I thought the the the right one to buy is if you are looking to go to an XLR a low-cost XLR interface right now and the Tascam USB 2x2 for I think it's a streeting at one 19. When I, when I wrote the story is, uh, is the one that I liked the best. It's super kind of heavy industrial feeling, which I like,

I don't love the design of it, but I feel like it's the best in terms of, uh, the, it and the presonus audio box to two were, um, were the best in terms of the sound quality and uh the task cam has the headphone jack on the front and the pre-sonus has the headphone jack on the back which i do not understand and so for me i feel like that was enough to kind of like nudge plus the pre-sonus was was a lot more it was like 50 more uh so the task cam is the one that i like the best but i feel like right now um oh and i use use those microphones that Marco really likes that are the $20 knockoffs of the Shure microphones. And I found that one of the problems with them is that they're really prone to interference if you get it near a source of interference. So if you're like a cell phone or something.

Or a computer, right? And like if you're right next to the computer with those microphones, they put out, they're very noisy in the way that the Shure microphones aren't. And so, yes, you could get a Tascam in one of those pile cheap microphones. And if you're in the right place and you've got your cables positioned so that they're not going over a power source or something and draining the interference, you could get a fairly good sounding cheap setup for about 140 bucks, 130 bucks. You got to buy some cables and stuff. That all said, it still feels to me like your best option is something like the Audio Technica ATR2100, which is a USB mic that also is an XLR mic if you want it to be. All the links for these are in the review,

by the way, which will be in the show notes. Yeah. And it's, it's, uh, you know, that one is,

is a relatively inexpensive microphone that is, it's about 60 bucks and it's a USB microphone and it repels, uh, sound that unless you're very close to it, it like really shuts down like echoes and things aren't picked up. You've got to be very close to it when you talk through it. But you know, you should be that you should do that anyway. That's what it's for is for you being close to it and talking and being on a podcast. So I've got one of those here. I'm going to spend a little more time with that one

too. So I can I can see for myself but from from everything that everybody I've talked to, who's used it a lot, that seems to be the best, the best buy. So the XLR stuff, it's really for like people who want to record multiple microphones at once or have, you know, have them be more, you know, flexible about being able to plug them into soundboards or,

or remote recordings plus attached to a computer. But I'd say for most people, regular old people who are doing podcasts a little bit, a USB mic like the Audio-Technica mic is probably the best bet. I've recommended the Yeti over the years, but the Audio-Technica mic is cheaper. And I think it, from everything I've heard, and again, I need to spend more time with it myself, it seems to sound better and it's cheaper and it's more reliable. The only thing that's got going against it is it doesn't seem to have a mute uh mute uh it doesn't have a mute button on it so you have to kind of like mute

skype or something like that but for most people that's not a big deal one thing that i don't like about the um task cam is that a lot of the settings are in software yeah there are i mentioned that there it's not a lot but there are some preferences basically that. It's not a lot, but there are some preferences, basically, that you have to open a little control panel and check the box in order to set it. Instead of having it be, like on the very expensive ones that we have, there are dip switches that are for all the settings. So you never have to have any software. You don't have to have any software on the Tascam to record. But if you want to tell it to monitor in stereo instead of mono through the headphones you actually do have to launch a piece of software and check a box and then close the piece of software but most of it's not like that but uh still still i feel like that one that one is is again for 120 bucks that's a

pretty good deal uh and you live with some of the downsides of that yeah i mean look if i'm paying 120 then like if the software dies after two years and i can't change settings anymore like i've not blown a lot of money like if i was you know something like the the usb pre which we use which is what like 600 bucks if that was software configurable i would never buy it um but i you know i it's just a bit like i really wish that this wasn't the case you know like it's just like i really would much prefer to have all of the settings be physical as opposed to software yeah i agree i i definitely agree um and it's harder to get that on a cheap piece of one thing i will say is

i i'm not a fan i had somebody recommend another one of these things that's you know it's sort of like a next generation mixer and it's got a screen and it's got special software. And I tried one of those and I don't like them. Like more, more special software. I, I, you shouldn't have to install custom special software in order to get your mixer to work. And in fact, uh, what you're doing there, we had this happen to Mac world where twice our mixer basically was fine and we couldn't use it anymore because we had to stop updating our hardware and software or it would stop working and that's not cool where like the developer the the builder of the hardware uh keeps the software up to date for a couple of years and then there's an os update that breaks it and the hardware manufacturer is like sorry

and uh that doesn't happen when it's just a kind of a vanilla usb device that you plug in and it just works with the software and doesn't require your special stuff in order to function so yeah yeah anyway i know this is really insidery but i actually i had just this weekend i was talking to somebody about like what's what's my podcast setup and you know what should i buy and things like that so i decided that i um that was an area marco armand didn't kind of go too far down into when he did his big microphone roundup and so i kind of wanted to do it just so i could say you know basically the task cam is good the presonus is good uh and i didn't like the the focus right scarlet and you know there was another one that was okay um just

so i can i can start down that path of being able to say that with some authority instead of it being like well i hear that this one's okay but i don't actually know yeah i'm this is a good resource to have i think that it's it's interesting to do the the lower price stuff because i i do really feel like at least just so from me being in and around this all day that more people were wanting to get involved in this like people wanted to start blogs like i'm starting to feel that that kind of um enthusiast like i have a thing that i like to talk about and i want to do this and i know i don't want to spend too much money but i want to make it sound good you know like yeah they don't want to spend hundreds of

dollars and and but they but some people it's like, yeah, they don't want to spend hundreds of dollars. And, and, but they, but some people it's like, yeah, but I also don't want it to sound bad. So, you know, you have to kind of balance that. I think, I think right now, like I said,

I think that maybe the audio technical mic, 60 bucks with a really good microphone. That's a USB microphone. That might be, that might be a good, a good place for people to start.

But definitely I get that sense. And I've said this before, you know, a few years ago, I did a panel at a science fiction convention about podcasting. And it really struck me that the people there really were excited about podcasting, but they were not like a $30 microphone. They're like, that's kind of pricey. Like these are people with not not a lot of money to spend on technology. So that was a good perspective to have for all the talk of spending. We, as professional podcasters, might decide to spend $800 on microphones and a mixer and all of that. But I think it's really important to try and find that product. Like, Marco's number one and two

products are like these $600 microphones that require a multi-hundred dollar USB interface to work. And it's like, that's great, But, you know, that's for a tiny percentage of the audience. And the bigger percentage is going to be people who are on a budget, and they want something that sounds good, that isn't going to break the bank. And so that's what I'm trying to look at is, you know, in that price range, you know, 150 and below, what is there? Yeah, I mean, me and you got to the levels that we're at right now, after many years of using cheaper microphones totally yeah right so like this it's just a progression if you if you become really serious about it not necessarily like oh it's a business

for you but it's something that you consider to you end up getting very serious about as time goes on as with any kind of hobby really you'll start spending more and more money on it and that's when you can go to get something like the neumann kms 105 which is what i use now and i love it um but even then like that was a it was even a big step for me because boy it weren't cheap but yeah this microphone for me is absolutely fantastic but this is what you do all day right exactly like the first time i heard it i I was like, oh, wow, that's my voice. That's how my voice sounds. Yeah. And this is the microphone that's been the closest to be able to reproduce the way that I hear myself.

And that's why I love it. Yeah. All right. So there's something that I wanted to just bring up because me, he spoke about this a long time ago. It's something that I wanted to just bring up because me and you spoke about this a long time ago. Dropbox seems to be announcing and trialing out something called Dropbox Infinite. Now, I can't for the life of me work out if this is going to be something that's available for everyone or just for business. I feel like it's going to be available for everyone. And basically what it is is it's making Dropbox on desktop computers a little bit more like Dropbox on mobile. So on iPhone apps and Android

apps, you see kind of placeholders for your files, which you can then click and access, and it will download the data from Dropbox. And now they're looking at trying to do this on desktop as well. So you'll be able to save for maybe the specific files and specific folders i don't want that 20 gigabyte file always taking up hard drive space unless i need it and then you can go and grab it so this is defeating something that me and you spoke about a long time ago which is like i have a one terabyte dropbox account and i don't have any machine that has a terabyte of data on it. So I can never fill it up. And this is now hopefully going to be what can solve that problem.

Yeah, I wrote about this on Six Colors too. It's interesting. They announced it at a business conference. That doesn't necessarily mean that it's only a business feature. Also that they're testing it with their, they had like a weird phrase for it. Like they're, they're, oh, what do they call them? Sponsor customers. I don't even know what that is. But yeah, my, my feeling is this has to be part of their core product eventually. Maybe it's not, maybe it's not there for free users. Although even there, I think you could argue that it probably should be. The idea here is too fundamental to how Dropbox works. The idea that you can see everything on your Dropbox and then choose what syncs and doesn't sync into your hard drive space, or maybe

even choose the maximum amount of Dropbox space to take up and have it sort of cache things on the fly down the road. So I think those are all important features and they're key to the fundamentals of Dropbox. It means you don't have to fish around in the selective syncing button in the settings in order to say, oh no, that giant folder, I don't, I don't want it. Cause the truth is, yeah, our, our, our hard drives, I've got a, I've got a terabyte hard drive on my iMac, an SSD. Um, and it, it doesn't, it's not, it can't fit that. It's like, it can't fit just my Dropbox folder. Cause it's got the rest of it that it has to, it has to deal with. Um, I don't know. And I take it back. I don't even have the terabyte. I have the half terabyte.

I have the 500 gigabyte storage. So I literally can't on any of my devices except for my server in my house, sync my Dropbox entirely. So this is cool because you can say, you know, sync these files or even double click on a file and it syncs over and then opens.

So it's smart. And I went down, there's a Hacker News thread from somebody who used to work at Dropbox who said that it's a very smart feature that he thought that it was, even at the command line level, it does the right thing. So they put a lot of work into this and it works on Mac and Windows, um, to, to have it be that you basically your files are there on demand and you can also set them to be there at all times if you are going to go offline. Uh, and I think it's the right thing to do for Dropbox because they are making all of this, uh, you know, if you pay for Dropbox, even as an individual, you get a terabyte of storage and you probably can't use it all locally, nor should you need to use it all locally. Like my, um, I'm going to review the MacBook and I set it up with Dropbox so I could get a lot of my files and it wants to download my Dropbox. I have to like check a bunch of boxes. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no. Don't,

don't download any of these things. It still wants to download a huge amount of data. I would much rather be able to turn Dropbox on on on that computer and have it see my Dropbox, but not download anything until I tell it to. That's a much better experience. So I hope Dropbox rolls this out, not just for its business customers, but for everybody, certainly for all of its paying customers, because I think it just makes the metaphor of the product more in line with reality of devices today. Plus, calling it Infinite is so genius. What a fantastic brand name. I just love that. It's perfect.

Project Infinite. Yeah, and I had the terabyte conundrum was what I had been talking about. So Project Infinite has solved the terabyte conundrum. Sounds very scientific. Yeah. Oh, yeah. It's all science.

Should we take a break? Yeah. We're happy to say that this week's episode is of course brought to you by our friends over at Squarespace they are the simplest way for anyone to create a beautiful landing page website or online store start building your own website today at squarespace.com

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felt a lot of what you were talking about but maybe we should actually have a conversation about it too because your take i when i was reading your articles the many thousands of words that you've written about the last apple results i was feeling quite a conflict in you which you can correct me if i'm wrong, because there was, you know, there is the whole argument, which it kind of frustrates me of, oh, but you know, they made so much money. So it was not too bad. It was actually really great. But then on the other side of it, there's also the fact that like, this is the first time in 13 years where the numbers are down. And, you know, no matter how you want to place it, Apple decides that they want to be in

the wall street world they participate in it you know they are a public company you know they made the decision and they pay everybody attention 40 years ago they made the decision yeah but they go ahead and they pay the attention that they need to everyone and they have the conference calls and stuff right they have to they have to they have to do it this they're a public company that's just how it is right but like you know but what i'm saying is that they are involved in that scenario um so they're in they are in that world and that is part and they play to it and they do what they need to do to try and help you know they they definitely don't ignore the share price right they they make decisions and do things to try and influence that i'm sure because they're a public company so the fact that the results have changed and that they are now

down year on year which is the first time it's happened in 13 years has made this results and then the next ones peculiar well i i think uh you know about Apple, one of the challenges is there's so much stupid stuff that's written about Apple that it's problematic to get around. Yeah, there are the knee jerk reactions. Like I mentioned this on maybe on the Six Colors podcast. I mentioned that there was a Colbert report today, or not report, right? The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. Stephen Colbert played a video about, his monologue was about the Apple results last week

at one point. It was just kind of mind boggling to think about it. And he's a big Apple guy. He's got all the devices. He had a video at the keynote, all those things, right? But the local news broadcast that they played was Apple releases its worst results, its worst corporate results in 13 years or something.

And that's the challenge about this story. It's not technically inaccurate. No, it's wrong. That is the wrong statement because that is making it about second level. It's about growth, right? No, actually, Apple released its, what, fifth most profitable quarter? Ah, I see what you're saying.

Yeah. Eighth most profitable quarter. It's their worst result in like six quarters in terms of profit, in terms of revenue. The only thing it's the worst in 13 years is year over year growth. And this is the challenge of writing about this, right? Or talking about it, is how do you define that? And if you define it by the way Wall Street defines it, which is perfectly valid, and this is part of the challenge that I feel and that you probably sense is I don't like it when people who should know better say it's totally unfair that Apple's stock price goes down

after they report their earnings because they made a lot of money. And this year, it happens all the time, but it certainly happened this quarter. That really bothers me because, come on, this is how Wall Street works. The expectations of where the company is going are built into the stock price already. They have given guidance. People know what the results are going to be. And then Wall Street is reacting to future growth, future ways to make money with this company because you put your money into it and you want to see it grow. Now, what I would say is that that distorts our view of businesses. So it's a little bit of both. Like, it's so easy to be like that local news reporter and just say Apple had its worst quarter in 13 years. And it's just not true.

Investors are unhappy with Apple's least amount of growth, or in this case, negative growth of shrinkage year over year in 13 years. But that is so specific. And I think if that's your mark of whether something was good or not, you are really deep down in a distorted view of the world. Now, if you're an investor, if you're an institutional investor, if you're a Wall Street person, then that's how you view the world because you're viewing it through that lens. But you know what? Most people aren't.

And I think it's misleading. So I think when you want to understand what we saw, you need to look at all of it. You need to look at the fact that, yes, all of Apple's products were receding last quarter, year over year. Absolutely true. Do not soft pedal it. Um, it's going to get worse or at least continue to be bad. That's one of the things I met. I said to end one of the pieces I wrote last week, their guidance is down next quarter too, right? I mean, 2016 is going to be down next quarter too right i mean 2016 is going to be down every quarter from 2015 for apple that's

just how it's going to be um it's interesting to wonder why and look at the um the story apple's telling which is that the uptake on the six was huge and the uptake on the success is sort of like a little better than the 5s which means perhaps what we're really seeing here is uh an aberration because the 6 was such a huge hit because there was so much pent-up enthusiasm for a big apple phone that drove sales of the 6 and that if you take the 6 out of the equation entirely take sort of delete 2015, then 2016 seems like a reasonable follow-on of slow growth from 2014. But 2015 was this aberrant success. And if everything you measure is year over year, guess what? That was the mountaintop. Even if you keep growing from here slowly, year over year, you're going to look terrible so um i'm not

saying that they're going to continue growing they could shrink and that that's part of the fear i think that drives some of the uh the stock price stuff but you know so so there's a lot going on here i guess and and it's complicated because what i don't want to do is say no no everything's going to be fine apple's great it doesn't matter because like to your point this is the game that they're playing and they have written their success that they've been writing has not just been about profits and revenue it has also been about growth and you can't suddenly say well it's really just about profits and revenue yeah yeah you can't ignore the fact that for the last was how many years was it again 13 13 you can't ignore for the fact that for the last 13 years we've all been like look how great we're doing you know and then when this happens it's like oh

no but it's not about that anymore because we've all been so excited to see those graphs go up it's one right it's one of the dimensions of apple's success that has stopped. And you can't say now it doesn't matter. And it was really about the other two. That said, you also can't say it's the only one that matters. Well, you can. And if you're a Wall Street investor, you can. I would argue that most people should not do that. Right. Because I actually think it's corrosive. If the endless, the endless quest for growth as the only thing that's valuable destroys companies with great profitable businesses that could potentially jeopardize those businesses because they need to find the next growth thing. And that's one of my worries about Apple is that Apple is going to get so concerned with growth that they're going to lose focus, you know, even more over their core products, because they've got to find the next big thing, whether it's a car or something else, right? That

I do, that worries me a little bit. But, you know, so, so I think it's healthy to say, look, Apple is very profitable, and has huge revenue. And the only way that we're concerned about this is because 2015 was so good and by pre-2015 apple standards this quarter was actually quite good it's just that last year was so good that this year doesn't look as good um and i i think it's that's that's complicated right that's not a it was great it was terrible everything's going to be fine everything is awful right it's not either of those things it's kind of in the middle and so it's a challenge and i know people people on both both sides of those arguments are also up in arms and trying to find uh you know find people who are behaving the other way and attack them too i got a little of that uh i wrote a piece for imor on friday that was like literally, if you take the iPhone out of the equation, what's happening with Apple's other businesses?

And the whole goal of it was to say, let's not lose sight because the graph is so huge on the iPhone. And we've lost the scale of what the Mac business does, where it chugs along making, you know, Starbucks profits every year, essentially. Starbucks profits every year, essentially. Yeah, also that profit number, that's something that people bring up a lot. And that's another thing that kind of frustrates me. Like, oh, even on a down quarter, they make more profit than X company.

But it's all relative though. You know, like I know that people are like, oh, why are we ignoring the fact that they've made so much profit? But I've made so much profit for so long that now it's kind of just the number, right? Yeah, I mean, but in the end, your profit is what keeps you afloat, is that they're making a profit. I don't have a problem. I mean, profits, like I said, revenue is important, profit is important,

and growth is important. They're all important. And they have hit a bump on growth. But they're still profitable. And that's, you know, it leads, I think one of the issues is it can lead to a narrative that like Apple's in trouble, which is funny because Apple's not in trouble. Apple has really shown no signs of trouble. The only trouble Apple is in is with investors who wanted to have a continual huge growth percentage every year. Because I don't think that's going to happen, right?

And so they should be in trouble for that. And that's the other part of this is you can't soft pedal that. It's like, yeah, I mean, one of the analysts asked Tim Cook, do you see this? Are you still a growth company? And he did not answer that question. He's totally sidestepped that question and said, no, no, I'm really optimistic about how great things are.

And he didn't answer the question. And I think it's a fair question to ask, which is, you know, yeah, I know you've got room for some smart incremental smartphone growth here. But is Apple going to be a company that grows 20% year over year regularly again? Or is it going to be a company that doesn't grow a whole lot, maybe a little tiny bit, but will continue to throw off 10, $15 billion in profit every quarter, which makes it one of the most profitable businesses in the world, but it's not growing anymore. And that's, you know, that I think that's a fair question to ask. But that's different from Apple's losing money. You know, iPhone sales are in the tank.

I think the iPhone quarter was like, again, the if you go back five quarters or six quarters, it would have been the record number of iPhones sold. It's just that last year, year and a quarter that were even higher. So it's about keeping perspective. But it's weird, right? Because it's profitable and lots of revenue, but it's not growing anymore. And you got to call it that. You got to admit that that is not happening.

And that's a, you know, it's a muddy argument to make. There was a lot of other interesting stuff, by the way, in the numbers, which is why I wrote so many stories last week about it. Because, you know, beyond the big picture of like, oh, no, they lost, you know, they failed to grow year over year for the first time in 13 years. Absolutely true. There were some other interesting things in the numbers, but I don't know. It was a weird quarter.

And I think people just need to, who are thinking, oh, well, they'll turn it around next quarter. They're not gonna. The guidance is what it is. That's one of the reasons that the stock was down is not just because of the results, because the results were within guidance. It's because their guidance for next quarter is more of the same. And traditionally that is a down quarter over the second financial quarter. And they said it would be down year over year. So it's going to, you know, this, this will happen again. The gnashing of teeth will happen again in three months. get ready and probably in six months too still there still with me yeah i am i am one of the things that i liked that you pointed out that

i didn't really uh see too much of and i know dr drang wrote something about this a while ago is if you imagine 2015 never happened there was no. And it really did seem like 2015 was just this year for Apple that may never happen again. And you kind of would hope wouldn't happen again because it was just too much in one year, right? It was like there was too much stuff happening. Think of the pent-up demand for a bigger iPhone. I mean, bottom line, the pent-up demand for a bigger iPhone. bigger iPhone. I mean, bottom line, the pent up demand for a bigger iPhone, the people wanted to get a bigger iPhone, whether they were using an Android phone because they wanted a bigger phone and were like, oh, finally, I can get an iPhone that's big. Or they were iPhone users. They're

like, yeah, nothing really excites me. I'm going to stick with this phone. And then the big, the six come, six and six plus come out and they're like, oh yeah, now is the time. But for whatever reason, the six was a huge hit and you're measuring growth that's the problem is if you have a huge hit then measuring growth the next one has to be huger and if it's not then you've just lost your growth that's that's how it works that's that's how math math works so it's uh it's true dr drang wrote that piece in January, too. Gruber linked to it. I was looking at it. He called it, right? Which is the, you know, if you look at 2015 from Apple and thought, aha, look, they're accelerating again.

And they're going to put these numbers up in 2016 and 2017 and 2018. It's just going to keep on going to the stratosphere. If you thought that, you absolutely should be disappointed. I could argue that nobody should have really thought that, but the fact remains that they're not selling iPhone 6s like they sold iPhone 6s for whatever reason. Can we talk about the iPhone SE for a second? Of course. Can we talk about the iPhone SE for a second? Of course.

I thought this was really one of the fascinating things about the call was the iPhone SE, the call with analysts. So when's the last time that an iPhone was unable to be purchased because it was oversold? The last couple of years, they've gotten really good at making lots and lots of iPhones so that they could fill the channel. But the iPhone SE, they can't make them fast enough, which I find interesting. I feel like there has to be qualification though, because how many did Apple expect to sell? Because if they didn't expect to sell a lot and they've sold some, then it's a different scenario, right? We don't know those numbers. I think that's why it's interesting, though, is that they copped to it in the call. They said, we didn't expect this much demand for the iPhone SE. So that's good.

I think maybe it says as much about Apple's internal culture as it does about the iPhone SE. Right. And that they just were like, no one wants this. This is just a placeholder product well i mean we and we've heard it from people in our community too that uh for when we talked about the four inch phone last year we heard from a lot of people are like bigger is better you know iphone people a little less than people who have more exposure to android but the on the android side the the point of pride of having gigantic phone sizes, especially when the iPhone didn't have them, was like part of the culture. And on tech sites, you would

definitely see it like bigger is better. Bigger is always better. And the iPhone SE goes against that. It's not bigger. And I think people, at least some people at Apple, I suspect fall into that trap of like, come on, nobody wants a small phone anymore. Everybody likes a big phone. The fact is there's an audience for the small phone. They were selling an old version of the small phone and getting like 13% of the iPhone sold where the old version of the small phone. So the fact that they admitted that they, and very specifically admitted that they misjudged demand for this phone because it was smaller, that they realize now that there was a market

that they underestimated who wanted the smaller phone. So I think it's kind of cool because I think the iPhone SE is actually a little bit of a sleeper hit that it took Apple by surprise, that Apple was thinking maybe it was market of people that was they just don't want a bigger phone which i think we all tried to tell the world about but uh there's there was always skepticism about it and they and tim cook copped to it which i thought was really kind of uh interesting he's like yep we underestimated this and so we are an out of balance with our production. And we have to ramp up production to fulfill the need for the iPhone SE. And I don't think that means anything beyond maybe it will be 17 or maybe even if they're really going good, 20% of the mix of iPhones for this year.

Still, I think that's really interesting that that product has sold better than expected and that they were kind of caught unaware of how many people wanted a smaller phone. So here's the other part of it then, right? We have been expecting that this will be the product that will remain for many years to replace the 5S. If the demand is this great, may it encourage Apple to update this phone more frequently? Wouldn't surprise me. I still am imagining this is on a two-year cycle, but who knows? I think one of the challenges everybody faces, and this is another question that came up that I feel like Tim Cook didn't have a good answer to on the analyst call, is sticker shock.

on the analyst call is sticker shock, is the idea that people are, especially in countries like the US where we used to bury everything in a two-year contract, people are seeing the actual prices of phones now. And is that going to lengthen the amount of time between purchases of phones? And so that's a question of like, do you really need a new iPhone SE every year

or is every other year okay? Because the speed of the iPhone 6S and the features of the iPhone 6S are going to be fine in a year. No, they won't be the same as the 7, but they're close enough that it'll got, you know, for $399, you just get the phone and it's yours. And that's free and clear. And that's a, you know, Apple needs to, without contracts in those markets, the prices matter more. And you can't hide that you've been buying, oh, I didn't realize I've been buying a $700 phone every two years. Well, yeah, you have, it's been in your phone bill that whole time, But now it's out right in your face and that can change buying behavior. So that may accumulate to the success of a product like the SE2. I don't know. I'll wait and see on this one. I mean, you know, we're never going to get the numbers, but. No, we're not. Well, they might throw out

one of those, you know, unchartable tidbits like they did with saying that they sold a certain, you know, how many million four-inch iPhones did they sell in the last year when they announced the SE? That was a, we don't know the time period exactly, you know, but they threw that out there. So they may do that again at some point with the SE to say, you know, it's actually been a very successful product. It's made up. They might even say it's made up 15% of our mix or 20% of our mix. And that's all we'll ever hear about it. But they might. It's possible that they'll do that at some point.

The other thing I wanted to mention is services, just because I thought that was another interesting thing that came up in the call is, you know, the last quarter, they did the whole appendix. And I think we talked about it here about how like, hey, everybody, look how much money we make on services. And I think the service line actually surpassed, it was the only product line that grew this quarter. And I think services revenue, like met or eclipsed Mac revenue. And this is, you know know it's app store and apple music and stuff like that um oh they also said that their music sales have been falling which they've never talked about before but they talked about it in the context of apple music halting the fall of apple's music revenue which i thought was interesting never talk about the bad news only

talk about when the bad news is over apparently why would the why would apple music stop the fall of music sales uh well it's a music revenue music revenue okay so they're encapsulating the subscription inside of that as well at least for the purposes of this conversation where they basically said that their their music revenue is going down and now it's reached what they called an inflection point. So it's probably still down, but has stopped its fall. And they anticipate that it will go back up because Apple Music subscriptions are now offsetting the loss in iTunes sales. You know, like the services thing is where they have to go next, right? It's like you potentially, you know, with a bunch of caveats, Apple have sold iPhones to the maximum amount of people

that will want to buy them, right? That's kind of what the numbers would suggest, right? If the growth on the iPhone is stopping, then everybody that wants one within reason has got one. So now how do you make more money out of those people? I think that's the next question that they're looking to answer. Apple Music is one of them. Apple Video might be another one.

They're going to make maybe more stuff with the App Store, and then they can carry on from there because you have these money-making machines in people's hands. How do you squeeze the money out of them? Yeah, I mean, Apple would say that they still have room for growth that they're seeing record numbers of android switchers and that there are markets that they are growing in that they have that they like india where they have not been in before and that they feel like they can make an impact and there's some skepticism among people who know that market about that but

um it's uh yeah the thing that i am intrigued by about this whole services thing is when they brought this up last time, I really felt like it gave me the heebie-jeebies a little bit. It made me a little concerned that what Apple was saying is we're going to nickel and dime you, that we're going to scrape even more money out of all of our existing customers and find ways to do growth there, because that's all we can do now to find growth where we need to find growth somewhere we're desperate for it. iPhone sales are are slacking off in terms of growth. And so the way only way we're going to grow is to just pull more money out of every single iPhone user. And that leads to a bad place potentially, right? That leads to a place where, you know, what they're selling you is kind of an empty box. And then you get it open, and it starts asking you buy this, buy this, buy this other feature, you know, in app purchases for OS features, or whatever, right?

And that really reduces the user experience that makes it that, you know, Apple supposed to be this maker of a premium product, you should be paying for the product and get a good product. And then if there are additional services you want that should sort of like that you should naturally flow into them and not have them throw up a big barrier that says, you know, nope, you really need to pay for this thing, even though you thought that you should get that for free. called them on it. Steve Milanovich of UBS asked on the phone call, is it a driver of earnings? Or is it more about creating ecosystems to support the hardware? And that was a question I had. So thank you to Steve Milanovich for asking it. And Tim Cook's response was the most important thing is the customer experience. Overwhelmingly, the thing that drives us is to embark on services that help become part of the ecosystem.

And that in doing so, we've created a profitable business that grows. So we wanted to call it out. And I felt like that was exactly the response I wanted to hear. Because what it was is Cook saying, no, what we're not saying is that we're

going to keep cranking up services revenue by nickel and diming our customers. We haven't changed our philosophy there. We made this a big deal because it's growing a lot and we want to show that off. But we're not expressing a shift in strategy to try to squeeze more money out of our existing user base. Now, you know, maybe they will anyway, but he said the right thing. And I'm taking some encouragement from that because I was a little worried that this is one of those cases where, well, if Apple really is trying to drive growth, would they compromise here? Would they compromise and start making the products worse, essentially,

unless you pay? Well, I mean, you you know there's some grumbling in the chat room over this and i see it like if you're not an apple music subscriber the music app really tries to make you yeah i know it keeps it keeps uh putting it right in your face it is it's really annoying and you know what that is that's big company mentality you know it's like the the person who's got the target and they decide to keep prompting you about it. I mean, that's why, look, I'm not worried. I'm not running for the hills. But hearing things like that and seeing things like this,

this is how these things tend to roll, right? Like company needs growth. Company decides that they have service. Company needs to sell service, so they keep hijacking parts of their uh software to show service to you yeah i i i mean i wouldn't have been as concerned as i was when that appendix came out if i weren't already kind of mad about the fact that they have the free five gigabytes for one account icloud storage thing that they haven't changed that I think is a huge usability problem. I hear from lots of regular people who say, oh, I'm getting this iCloud. Something's wrong with my

phone. I'm getting this iCloud error. What should I do? It's telling me to pay. And it's like, they feel like they're being held hostage by their iPhone unless they pay Apple. Like, for basic backup, Apple should probably change the way that works so that, you know, the average user can get by with a backup of their most important stuff without paying and then open up to like, look at all the things you can do by paying for more space. you know, and they haven't, they haven't gotten that together. Families can't share their iCloud storage space, which is a problem too, because I am actually paying for more iCloud storage space, but my wife's phone still tells her that she needs to pay for more backup. And I'm not going to pay Apple again for storage space that I already have. Right. So she just gets those errors and I try to manage her backups or back her up to a computer. And so, yeah, these things all erode the user experience. So I was glad to hear Tim Cook say that because at the very least, that implies that they're not admitting that they're doing this or that maybe they are going to not push as hard into it as they could.

But it doesn't mean that this isn't going to be an ongoing problem, which is shiny, shiny service revenue looks really good. How do we make more of that? And the answer is we get in the way of everybody who uses the music app on their iPhone and try to sell them Apple music. And we get, you know, and we, we throw up an emergency scary dialogue box about failed storage, uh, failed, uh, amounts of, uh, failed backup because of, uh, not having enough storage as a way to upsell them on iCloud storage space. That's not, you know, that's not good user experience, which is what Apple should be focused on. I don't, I don't, I have no problem with Apple charging for services, right? I mean,

I think that's only right and fair. But it's a tough line when you're selling a premium bit of hardware. That is a tough place to draw a line of what is enough and when are you nickel and diming somebody or when are you giving them a generous amount for their big purchase and then offering additional add-on services. And in some cases, they are not drawing the line in the right place. And that's my concern. How far away is the Apple Music ad from Kindle with special offers? Well, yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. Well, it's funny that it's come back to that, but it's the same thing, right? For a premium product, certain kinds of requests seem inappropriate and lead to a bad user experience. is inappropriate and lead to a bad user experience. And I would say, yeah, in terms of the Kindle Oasis, paying $300 for an e-reader and opening the cover, your leather cover of your super thin, fancy e-reader and seeing an ad that you have to swipe every time you open the cover,

I think that's a user experience problem. It's not whatever you're charging to turn that off. It's like, don't do that. Just raise your price and turn that off, it's like, don't do that. Just raise your price and turn it off. Because your product is not, that's not appropriate for that kind of product. And so, yeah, it's going to be a challenge for Apple because that services revenue is certainly tantalizing, right? So we'll see where it goes. But what I didn't hear Tim Cook say was, oh, yeah, Steve, this is a new direction for us.

We're very excited to increase revenue per user. We've got lots of great ideas of ways to get more money out of our existing user base. We really think that this is one of those assets that we can monetize in order to make to really reignite the growth engine. And so you can look forward in the forthcoming quarters to more announcements from Apple about ways that we'll be able to charge our existing users for more of what they need out of their iphones but on the flip side he did say this is our first solution service and you can look at that on whatever way you want to look at it well i think apple offering more subscription services if they have value and if they don't get in the way of the existing product is perfectly fine i think that's great but that's the trick yeah this is a brave new world it is different it is different and that and you know you see

apple trying to figure out what's their what's their business now are we going to do are we going to do cars are we going to increase services revenue how do we do all of this and that's again that's you know that's why i thought that the numbers last week were interesting, not just the questions of what grew and what didn't grow. And we didn't even talk about the iPad, which my joke about the iPad figures is I feel like they haven't hit rock bottom, but the iPad can now see the bottom. So it's still going to hit bottom next quarter, probably, maybe. But Tim Cook was optimistic, strangely optimistic, as he always is about the iPad. But in this case, what he said was, next quarter will be the best year over year compare, which is, you know, jargon, but of iPad revenue, but that they would still be down on units. So I don't know what that means mike other than to say that i guess what they are saying is that ipad year over year revenue decline will be

in single digits which will be the best in a couple of years and that uh they'll they'll be down on they'll be down on units but not way down so it's like the bleeding is stopping my imagination in that is that the ipad pros they make more money from maybe if they also count the pencils and the keyboards in there too yeah they might be making more money per unit on the ipad pro yeah but it doesn't fill me with a lot of optimism um to think that we still haven't hit the bottom of this product line. How many ways does he qualify that, right? It's like our best year-over-year comparison in terms of revenue. And then meanwhile, elsewhere, the guidance is,

yeah, units will be down. The fact that he's going that far and stretching it that far tells me that the use is still not good you know otherwise you just say like i'm bullish and it's going to be a great quarter like but he didn't say that yeah i mean i i think i this was his his corporate way of saying um we you know we think we are seeing the bottom without saying it that way which is like this is good news but just as we we said earlier that uh defining the worst quarter based on growth maybe is not entirely accurate i think saying that the ipad is turning it around when what they're talking about is the reducing the rate of decline also is not really turning it around right it's slowing the descent

turning it around is increase not slowing the bad stuff yeah so like i said i think it's still waiting to hit bottom but you might be able to see the bottom like oh what's that down there thump right they're they're they haven't thumped yet they just they're just seeing like maybe there's some uh some some a floor down there that they're going to hit. But Cook is really good at this because just as an aside, in a segment of the column about mainland China, he did this incredible bit of ledger domain where he's like, well, we're down 26%. But in mainland China, as opposed to the greater China region that we reported, we were only down 11%.

And if you take a constant currency base, it's actually only 7%. And if you really look at sell-through, which is totally the most important thing that we do, it's really only down 5%. And in three sentences, he took it 26 to 11 to 7 to 5. And then I don't know where he goes from there. But yeah, in terms of shiny happiness, we were way up. So we're up. It's like, kill me now. Just do it.

He's very good. He's very good at that. But I mean, come on. He's like, that's how I mean, that's why he's the CEO, I suppose. But you take a 26% decline and you turn into a 5% decline in a couple of steps by redefining what what you're looking at. There was some of that this quarter, too. So yeah, interesting times for Apple trying to decide what it wants to be and where it goes from here, while again, still presiding over a machine that is generating incredibly high revenue and profits, but not really knowing where they're going next in terms of growth. It's going to be interesting to watch. And the usual suspects will still freak out and say that apple is falling apart and it's terrible and doom doom doom um but it's also wrong to say everything's fine because you know they are at a crossroads here so it'll be interesting to see what happens next let's finish up with some ask upgrade jason who sponsors our scottwood this week uh ask this week brought to you by the good friends that we have over at MailRoute.

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10% off of the lifetime of your account. If you work in an IT department somewhere, you're getting your company like a 10% discount forever. Because you listen to upgrade. How great is that? Or if you don't want to go to that address mail route.net slash upgrade, you can also send an email to the good people at sales at mail route.net. So mail route, protecting your email from spam and viruses. That's it. That's what they do. They do it better and have been doing it longer than anywhere else. Who else would you trust? Go to mail route.net slash upgrade and thank you to mail route for sponsoring upgrade. Rajiv would like to know what is the appeal of the addition of a cell radio in the Apple Watch?

Wouldn't it be more cumbersome without an iPhone? Jason? Yeah, we need to do a whole episode about the Apple Watch today, and we've been putting it off, so maybe next week. We'll see. But I think it's inevitable, and I think the idea there is that the Apple Watch can count on getting data at all times, even if it can't connect to your iPhone. So I think that's, if what you're thinking is, why would I talk on the iPhone or talk on the watch and not the iPhone or something like that, I think that's a fair point. But I think the idea here is if you have, let's say you want to go for a run with your Apple Watch and you don't want to bring your iPhone with you and you can listen to music streamed from the Apple Watch and it'll monitor your heartbeat and it'll do all of those things, which are great. But what if you get a call or what if you get a text?

Right now, that stuff is turned off, basically, because unless you're near a known Wi-Fi network, the Apple Watch can't help you if it's not near its paired iPhone. So that's the advantage is the watch can get to the internet for data all the time. And that opens up a lot for apps, and it allows you to be independent from the iPhone. It allows you to work better if it loses connection with the iPhone, which sometimes happens. Even if the iPhone is around, it's got a fallback in addition to Wi-Fi. So I think there are lots of reasons why it makes it a little more of an independent device. So I think, yeah, in the long run, the Apple Watch absolutely needs access to a data network

because it makes it a more independent product, which makes it more useful. Paul would like to know where I store my watch bands. I just have them in my bedside table, in a drawer in my bedside table. I don't have anything fancy. I don't have like a watch band box or anything. I just have a drawer in the top drawer. They just go in there and they stay nice and snug.

I recently acquired, well, I actually ordered this when it came out, one of the royal blue nylon bands so i have like the the gold one which i just picked up in a store because i wanted to grab it but i got the royal blue one and i i really like these nylon bands a lot a lot a lot they're very very comfortable and they're much more comfortable for me than the sport bands so two thumbs up for those if you've been thinking about them um i now have my second one i think i'm up to like seven or something like that now watch bands you might have a well we'll talk more about watch

bands maybe next time too um i i have a little basket on top of uh my uh the armoire next to my bedside that is where the apple watch bands sit much fancier have a basket and an armoire i just have a bedside table there's lots of junk in the basket and apple watch bands it's not an elegant solution but it's a place for me to dump the apple watch bands when i'm not using them brian wants to know jason i have no idea for this i want to see if you can help all right i want to keep the battery healthy on my mac but keep it plugged in most of the time is there a way to run off the battery while still safely having it plugged in so i'm assuming that brian uh has a macbook or a macbook pro that he wants to just keep plugged in maybe yeah he has it connected to a monitor or something and the kind of the get the understood

knowledge i think over time is that's bad for the battery so how can brian kind of keep his battery healthy well one of the secrets of your Mac battery is that the Mac battery, my understanding is, actually does cycle a little bit when it's plugged in. Like they will, the system will, when it gets full, it will actually stop charging, I believe, and let it run down a little bit. I know this is true for iPhones. I think this is true for Macs too. And then it will run down a little bit. I know this is true for iPhones. I think this is true for Macs too. And then it will run down a little bit and then it will charge back up. And the idea there is to not have it

just be maxed out all the time. But I don't think there's any way for regular users to do that. If they're right in, if there is a way. So, you know, my recommendation is, I have to say it just kind of simple is run it unplugged a little bit. Just, I know, and like every so often, like not even,

not even every week necessarily, but every so often run it unplugged and let it run down. And then, you know, I'm, I am not a battery expert. I'm sure battery experts are all right in. I think Apple is aware of this as an issue and tries to do some things behind the scenes. But I don't think there's something you can do to sort of like check a box and have the battery be used while you still got your power cord engaged. I think you have to pull the plug. And finally today, Gary asked that on Six Colors,

tea has been covered in the past and in the magazine stuff. I know that you and Dan have gone through tea. So Gary wants to know what my coffee ritual is because i am a coffee drinker um so i tend now to have two coffees a day i've gone up from one coffee a day uh my morning cup all of my coffee is made of an aeropress um and i there's a company in the uk called packed coffee p-a-C-T, and they deliver coffee to me. So it's like if you've ever heard of Tonks, it's like that but in the UK. And I like their coffee a lot. I get a bag from them every week, and it's ground for me to be used in the AeroPress. And in the morning, I kind of wake up.

I get started with some work, and then afterwards, like checking Twitter and email and Slack and stuff like that, I go downstairs, make my coffee in the the morning and it makes me very happy uh and then you know i tend to have coffee with milk so i'll make coffee in the aeropress and i'll add some milk and then i will drink it from a big mug and then later on in the day usually after lunchtime i will make myself an iced coffee so i'll just basically the whole scenario again with the aeropress and the some milk and i throw some ice in and some simple syrup and that's my second coffee of the day that's how i run all right that's good to know i don't understand anything about it

because i don't drink coffee that's okay though So I just make tea and then I drink it. And I like the coffee. You're a terrible Englishman. Yeah. And you're a terrible American. Fair enough. High five! Woohoo! Thank you so much for listening to

this week's episode of Upgrade. If you'd like to find our show notes, head on over to relay.fm slash upgrade slash 87. Thanks again to our sponsors, the great people over at Squarespace, MailRoute, and Pingdom. If you'd like to find Jason online, head on over to sixcolors.com

and he is at jsnell, J-S-N-E-L-L on Twitter. I am at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. And thanks again to Scott McNulty for joining us at the top of the show and most of all, thank you for listening. Until next time, say goodbye Jason. Cheerio!