MacBreak Weekly 420 (Transcript)

Leo LaPorte: It’s time for MacBreak Weekly. Andy and Rene and Alex. We’re all here. Getting over the Apple announcement. We’ve got some analysis, some surprises too from Apple. Things they’re not going to do. What did Tim Cook tell Charlie Rose? It’s all coming up next on MacBreak Weekly.

Net casts you love from people you trust. This is TWiT! Bandwidth for MacBreak Weekly is provided by Cachefly at cachefly.com.

This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 420. Recorded September 16, 2014.

Apple Hangover

MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by IT Pro TV. Are you looking to upgrade your IT skills or prepare for certification? IT Pro TV offers engaging and informative tutorials now with Mac management streams to your Roku, computer, or mobile device. For 30% off the lifetime of your account, go to itpro.tv/macbreak and use the code MACBREAK30. And by Square Space. The all in one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio. For a free two-week trial and 10% off, go to squarespace.com and use the offer code MACBREAK. And by lynda.com. Lynda.com is an easy and affordable way to help you learn. Instantly stream thousands of courses created by experts on business, software, web development, graphic design, and more. For a free trial, visit lynda.com/macbreak. That’s lynda.com/macbreak. It’s time for MacBreak Weekly, the show that covers all your Apple needs and today the hangover edition. After a crazy week, this is kind of limbo, isn’t it. Where we’re waiting. We’re between the announcement and ordering of iPhones and the actual arrival which is Friday. Andy Ihnatko is here from the Chicago Sun Times back in his lair.

Andy Ihnatko: Hello everybody. I might have built this up too much on Twitter. But how could I build this up too much? I’m debuting a brand new break-through technology right now. You see I’ve got a little bit of a different angle here in my home studio. That’s because this is being shot with my new innovation Crane Cam 3000. The future of video podcasting!

Leo: Unfortunately you can’t see Crane Cam when Crane Cam is being used. It’s a jib.

Andy: No, no! It’s not a jib. For a jib Leo, I’d call it a jib. It’s Crane Cam 3000, the future of video podcasting.

Leo: Okay. TMNDI. Very nice, very nice.

Andy: We’ll be incidentally looking at some of the features of Crane Cam 3000, the future of video podcasting throughout the show. I don’t want to make a big deal about it. I’m just very proud because I invented Crane Cam 3000, the future of video podcasting just 10 minutes before the show was supposed to start. To solve a simple problem when I decided to switch out the chair that I normally have for a chair and a table. And again, just like moldy bread led to penicillin and the saving of millions of lives, switching chairs has led to the creation of Crane Cam 3000, the future of video podcasting.

Leo: Accessory is the mother of Crane Cam.

Andy: I’m just going to keep phrasing Crane Cam 3000, the future of video podcasting. That’s all.

Leo: By the way, is that Crane Cam inter-capped? One-word inter-capped?

Andy: No it’s one word. It depends on the country of origin. In the past we were a little late starting so I did have time to start the trademark IP stuff going. It will depend. We’re still work shopping it. But it will be Crane Cam 3000, the future of video podcasting in your local country of origin pursuant to local law.

Rene Ritchie: How are you going to follow this?

Leo: I can’t! It’s all downhill from here. That’s why I’m saying hello to Rene Ritchie in Montreal. Back home, I’m sorry. That was mean. Do you have a Crane Cam?

Rene: I don’t. I have a cam on a tripod. I have a tri-cam.

Leo: Tri-cam!

Rene: Tri-cam 1000.

Leo: It’s good to see you guys back home. Did you have fun here in the bay area for your brief visit?

Rene: It was great. And then I started writing my iOS 8 review and I’m now 20,000 words into the weeds. And there’s no end in sight.

Leo: Well good. We’ll here at least 10,000 of those words coming up.

Rene: Yes.

Leo: Also from his new office in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania and looking mighty fine, it’s Alex Lindsay. Of course he’s looking fine, he’s the king of streaming video. Hello, Alex.

Alex Lindsay: Hey, how’s it going?

Leo: Going great! So this is it. This is the new place. Are you going to get a backdrop or anything?

Alex: You know me. It will get much more complicated. Just give me a couple weeks. There’s going to be a 70-inch monitor behind me and then I’ll have an array of monitors.

Leo: You can’t let Crane Cam 3000 take the honors for too long.

Alex: No, I’m going to have Moat-Control 4000.

Andy: Leo, I believe you meant to say Crane Cam 3000, the video of video podcasting.

Leo: Can we just say TFOVP?

Andy: I’ve been saying iWatch all week, too. It takes a while.

Leo: Alright everybody now settle down. Settle down. Gosh, I don’t know where to begin. Tomorrow, iOS 8 ships. You know I was kind of surprised when Sara told me yesterday on iPad; they didn’t mention that at all did they, in the event? Or did I miss it?

Alex: They announced it.

Leo: They said Wednesday you’ll get iOS 8?

Andy: Yea, they’ve been doing that for several years. iOS 2 came out the same date as the iPhone order. And that turned out to be a bad idea for everybody. So they moved it to the Wednesday.

Leo: A couple of days earlier. Is it ready? Is it baked? Rene, you’ve been writing a 10,000-word review of it.

Rene: Yea, it’s ready. Every dot-zero version of iOS comes with its own slew of brand new things. Because there is no QA in the world that can equal a hundred million users hitting your software. So I’m sure there’s going to be things; we’ll get battery life complaints, and we’ll get features that don’t work exactly the way people predicted. But it is as ready to go as any version of iOS. And quite a bit readier than iOS 7 when they dropped it.

Leo: And I guess that’s really what my question is. Should people install it tomorrow when it’s available? It would be prudent it sounds like to wait a little bit.

Rene: If you’re a nerd, you would install. But if you’re a nerd, you’re already running the gold master build. It’s always good to wait. If you don’t absolutely have to run it on day one, let other people hit those day one issues.

Leo: I guess I’m not a nerd because I always wait for the iOS till the actual release. And usually install it that day.

Alex: Can you open your Christmas presents on New Year, Leo? Really?

Leo: Yes, really. Well because you don’t want to bring your thing to its knees. Interesting the shots of iOS 8 on Apple’s page, apple.com/ios8, are featured on the iPhone 6.

Andy: Instantaneously that whole site changed.

Leo: So is the look and feel different? It’s not as different as iOS 7 was. It’s a continuation of iOS 7.

Rene: So iOS 7 was the complete visual redesign where iOS 8 is a huge functional redesign because you have continuity and extensibility and the framework for developers like home kit and touch ID and things like that.

Leo: Well not so fast Canadian man. It looks like, is continuity day and date? No, they’re waiting till next month, aren’t they?

Rene: Continuity is several things. Continuity lets your devices all work together. So the stuff that involves the Mac has to wait for Yosemite. And SMS specifically has to wait till October. But for example continuity handoff between iPhone and iPad is currently working.

Leo: So all the iOS functionality will work.

Rene: Yes, so you can answer calls on your iPad. You can continue emails from your iPhone to your iPad. So all that kind of stuff is going to work.

Leo: That’s nice. And it’s interesting what they say on the webpage. Huge for developers, massive for everyone else. They really are saying a lot of this is under the hood. Things like extensibility extensions?

Rene: Extensibility is the system, extensions are what they’re using on the individual parts.

Leo: That to me is something we’ve needed for a long time. The ability for apps to interoperate better within each other.

Rene: It’s in a super-secure way. It’s actually really interesting. A couple years ago, Apple ported X-PC which is their cross-app communication platform from Mac to iOS. And then they broke springboard in too. Springboard and backboard. Then they built this little daemon that basically runs and coordinates all this. So the apps never really talk to themselves. You have a host app and a container app. And iOS intermediates everything so your data is always private to those applications unless the developer makes it available to share. And you actually do an action to choose to share it. So it’s secure, it’s private. But it lets you do all the workflows across app. So it’s really cool.

Leo: It would remiss of me to not point out that anybody who’s been using Android for a while is going to look at these lists of new features and go really you didn’t have that?

Rene: Android L’s big feature was system-wide animation. So they both started at different ends and are racing towards the middle.

Leo: For instance, the keyboard suggestions, is something I had on my BlackBerry. I feel like that’s been around for a long time. In fact, I was surprised to hear that iOS didn’t have that.

Rene: They do all this in one way. Extensibility makes all this functionality possible. And because they wanted to do it all in the same way, and even make sure you’re doing it the same way on the Mac, it would’ve been easier to do it on separate systems. But they wanted to make sure it worked in one way so developers could target it one way. So that means they had to wait until all of that was ready to do all of it.

Alex: Another thing is I don’t think Apple really specializes in; they do some things first. But I think a lot of times they’re attempting to do things right. Having a feature list and having it work well are two very…

Leo: Some people say Apple specializes in not innovation but refinement. Is that fair?

Alex: I think they do that often very well. Sometimes they don’t get it right. Sometimes they do still put things out first. And broken. But I think that one of the things they do better than everyone else, is look at what everyone else has done, and really isolate the things that are working and not working. And throwing away a lot of stuff and focusing on a handful of things that really work. And somebody don’t like that because it’s really controlled and slow-moving in some ways. But I think there’s obviously a lot of people that don’t want to think about it. They just want it to work.

Andy: The whole package works fine. I think if you go through the list of things that are quote Android-first unquote, you will see a bunch of things that don’t work as well as they probably should have. And other things like the way that apps can interact with each other, makes you wonder gee I mean, it works great. It’s incredibly easy to use. It really extends the functionality of the device. Why did we have to wait so many years for this on iOS?

Leo: And I don’t want to foster this silly religious war. You use what you use.

Andy: If the iPhone were not a better total package for people, it would not be selling so well. People are not buying it because…

Leo: I disagree. That’s completely untrue. Look at Samsung sales which are driven entirely by marketing. I think it’s completely fair to say that Apple has its adherence. But whether they’re doing that based on a full and complete knowledge of the choices or because of superior marketing is not clear.

Andy: Okay, I’ll agree that you’re never going to be able to break that down by category. But again look at me, I was unhappy with iPhones so I switched. I also know other people that don’t have the benefit of being able to test Android phones all the time and know what that’s like. It’s more like damn, I really wish it were easier to move a file from one thing onto my phone. I really wish it were easier to put something into EverNote. And then they hang out with people in their office or personal life that are doing this thing. And that’s what’s making them curious about other things. But they might say gee, but I tried a Samsung Galaxy S4 and it felt cheap. It had all this crap on it. It makes all these stupid water noises when you move your finger across it. As much as I wish I had that one feature, I’m willing to accept what I have with the iPhone.

Leo: We’re very fortunate because we get to try them all. And have probably a better global view of this than most people do. I think we’re now at the stage, and it’s very much like the PC market was 10-20 years ago, where people have made a choice. They’ve gone with a platform. Android, Windows Phone, or iOS. And at this point they’re just going to carry on. So the discussion that you see a lot of Android, especially Samsung fan boys posting those Samsung ads, saying hey we’ve had this for two years. But to the normal user, that’s not really germane. Because they’re not going to switch to Samsung anyway.

Alex: Apple is also a very patient and stubborn company. And they could have made big phones years ago.

Leo: Tim Cook said that.

Alex: Apple had projects very similar to extensibility they started years ago, and they did not like the compromises. At the end of the day, this runs very similar to OS 10. They could have turned on multi-tasking on the first version. They could have turned on inter-app communication on the first version. But they waited to get the technology right. It’s very similar to how Android L, there’s a lot of things that people say, well iPhone had that in version one. Sure, but if you talk to the Google engineer that implemented the GL stack and had to get all the graphic optimization done, it took a long time to get it to the point where it works the way it does in Android L. None of these things are as easy as us, and none of the resources are as unlimited as us, who says why don’t we just take all these phones and mash them together. And they’ll do everything brilliantly. They’re all choices about what we can do today and what we’re going to choose to wait to do when we can do them the way that we want tomorrow.

Leo: Let me just add, because a lot of people have seen it and will see it, is Samsung making a mistake saying this?

[Voice]: When the Galaxy Note launched in 2011, it was ahead of its time. And naturally when things are new and different, sometimes people aren’t ready for them. Experts saw the bigger screen and were like, you look like you’re talking into a piece of toast! The Note is an unwieldy beast. Now it’s not being dismissed by competitors. It’s being imitated.

Leo: BGR, Boy Genius Report. The truth hurts Apple fans. You can thank Samsung for big new iPhone displays.

[Voice]: It’s more than big. It’s about being more productive.

Leo: Wait for it. I like that part.

[Voice]: More innovative.

Andy: Notice they’re showing things you still can’t do on the iPhone 6 Plus.

Alex: Also they’re using an app that rips off DJ, which I think is an odd choice.

Leo: Yea, that is a bad choice because it looks like DJ. The turntables are predate smartphones.

Andy: But they showed off active stylist, they showed off two independent apps working side by side.

Leo: Is this preaching to the choir? Somebody asked me about this on the radio show. I said you have to understand this is for the team Samsung. Because people choose teams now. This is for the team Samsung people, say don’t worry it’s okay. The iPhone isn’t giving them anything you didn’t already have. It’s an ad not to sell stuff but to reassure people.

Andy: Well Samsung I think is very aware of their reputation of, well of course all they do is copy stuff that Apple has. So when they have a case where they can legitimately say no we had this years before, and everyone said that we’re stupid for doing it. But it became so successful, Apple decided they wanted to have a phone exactly this size. So you can certainly argue as to whether it’s really productive to spend ad dollars and the attention of your audience talking about hey the thing we had for three years, now the really famous styling company that’s known for doing things incredibly well has the exact same screen size. So maybe you don’t want to buy ours, maybe you want to buy the Apple one now. Maybe that’s not the smart thing to do, but it’s certainly a legitimate operation. I do want to say one thing about something Rene said earlier. Sometimes Apple waits to get things right. Sometimes it’s just a case of they just don’t have enough interest in doing that as good as this idea is, as easy it would be to implement. Because the only reason why I want to make a mention of that is that I think too many people talk about; I’m not talking about Rene, I’m talking about the broader blogosphere; when they talk about well Apple got it right, that indicates to the rest of us who have been using larger-screen phones, we’re idiots for using phones that did big screen wrong. No they didn’t. For the past couple years at least, the Galaxy Note gets fine battery life, these 4.7 and 5 inch Android phones. They certainly have no compromises whatsoever. This is just a case of Apple deciding that we’re going to have to respond to this market eventually. Do we want to do this right away or do we want to take our time doing it? And they simply decided that well, we’re not just going to rush into this.

Alex: It was the same with LTE. The Thunderbolt had LTE long before the iPhone did. And they were willing to make certain compromises. The big-screen Android phones used pentile RGB layouts because they couldn’t do proper RGB screens. They went with Salient.

Rene: I love that they do that. I love that Samsung does stuff early. I love that they’ve done six generations of smart watches and will do six more before the Apple watch ships. Because I might want a smart watch now. I own a Pebble because I’m not going to wait and I like that we have the choice to get cutting-edge technology today. And I like that a company like Apple has a very particular idea of what they want and they’re willing to wait for that. And I think we as consumers benefit by having both philosophies and both companies.

Andy: Apple doesn’t have the ability to do that stuff, not because they’re silly or arrogant. But only because they are the only makers of iPhone and if they want to make a big-screen phone, that is going to be 50% of all the brand new 2014 model iPhones that are ever going to be out. So they really have to do that a lot more carefully than a maker who can say, you know what this is a good idea. Let’s just do it. All I want to put into the discussion is that again, the first LTE phone was junk. But it didn’t take very long for them to be not junk. And now you’re just not having LTE because you’re not at that point on the roadmap for the iPhone. I’ve seen some people, not Rene, use this as, well you know what, I’m glad I didn’t have to use that crappy Samsung Galaxy Note 1, 2, 3, and 4. Because finally this is the big-screen phone that’s worth having. It’s like no, that’s not true. You’re buying into the logo there.

Alex: I think also you have lock-in. A lot of people like me; I have both. I have an Android phone and an iPhone and I use them both every day. Almost every day. But the problem is that almost all my apps, all the apps that I paid for are on my iPhone. And I’m a little resistant to starting to build up a whole paid library on my Android phone.

Leo: It costs a lot less than your phone, I’ll tell you. Maybe $50, you’re not going to spend that much money. Your phone costs a lot more than the library of apps. Unless you have some very unusual apps.

Alex: I’ve got a pretty big library. There’s those kinds of apps in there. I didn’t get that one yet that’s $1000. But I have a couple of them that are in the $50; there’s a couple high-end film tools that are there. Point is, is that I look at the Android right now still as something. I really like my N8 actually. I definitely enjoy using it. But it’s still the sidekick because most of my apps that I use on a day to day basis are on my iPhone. And I think that’s the lock-in that Apple continues to be able to build because also Apple users buy more apps than Android users. Again, maybe they’re a fraction of the cost of the app but you still think about it, I’ve got $100 or $200 or $300 worth of apps. And I’ve got data in there and all these other things. So both sides have a certain level of lock-in from that reality.

Leo: We’re going to take a break. When we come back, Apple confirms to the cult of Mac, that the NFC chip in the iPhone 6 will be locked down and only usable for Apple Pay. That kind of eliminates my pick of the week. I was going to show off these cool NFC rings, but they’re no good to me now.

Alex: That’s why they did it, Leo.

Rene: They’re protecting you from yourself.

Leo: I’m really curious about what you guys think of this. Don’t say anything! Think about your position.

Andy: Before we get to that advertisement, just on the wire, the other advertisement for Crane Cam, the future of video podcasting.

Leo: Andy, you bought ads!

Andy: That’s the crap 2K model. Crane Cam 3000, the future of video podcasting.

Leo: Who did that? Is that f’ing done?

Andy: This is very much the Apple to that Samsung.

Rene: Here, 3000, there we are.

Leo: Again, you see how quickly they have to copy what the market leader is doing. It’s almost sad really. Their attitude towards intellectual property is very disappointing, I might add. Our show today brought to you by our friends at IT Pro TV. Tim and Don, and I mean friends. They’re great guys. They came by the studio; they’ve come by many times. What I didn’t know at the time was to steal our ideas. But that’s okay. No, we very freely shared with IT Pro TV. Tim and Don have been teaching people how to get their IT certs, how to polish their IT skills for more than a decade. They’re really good IT trainers. And they saw what was going on here; they were fans of tech TV. And they said what if we built a TWiT for IT professionals so they can get their certs easier, have more fun doing it, and that’s why they created IT Pro TV. And it is absolutely as they say, an easy entertaining approach to online training. I’m going to log into my IT Pro TV account so I can show you just what you’ll get as a user of IT Pro TV. The first thing you’ll note at the top of the page, there’s an on-air button and it’s blinking red. That means they’re live right now as we are. You can watch them live. They’ve got a program guide on the right. You can chat with them just as you do with us. Hey, there’s Don. And it does look a little bit like; see those Hile PI-40s in the background? They’ve got a Tricaster, the same lights, they’ve got everything we do. But what’s different is this is unabashedly IT focused stuff which is really great. You can watch from your computer. They have a Roku app which means you can watch them on the big screen. There’s Tim on the right and Don on the left. I guess they’re getting ready to do a show. An A+ episode coming up they said, in just a little bit. Hundreds of hours of content on the library. They do 30 new hours a week, as much as we do. And if you look, there’s free content so you can see a guided tour. Sample episode, to get an idea of what IT Pro TV does. They have lots of Apple stuff now. This is something they’ve been adding. Integration basics for 10.9 management basics. Apple-certified support professionals, technical coordinator. So if you’re a Mac fan, you can absolutely get your Mac certs. Windows, Linux, OS 10, you see there’s the comp-tia stuff including security plus MCSA, MCSE, Cisco. These are the new ISE squared to the new security search. And they’ve got a really great new trainer doing the security stuff. Really enjoying that. Office. Certified ethical hacker, yes! I want that cert! Certified ethical hacker, that’s coming up in the first quarter of next year. Project management, VM-Ware. Citrix, Zen Server, Microsoft Typer, V-Servers. This is a really wonderful resource. If you’re an IT professional and you want to polish your skills, if you are looking to get certs to get a job, visit itpro.tv/macbreak. It’s very affordable, $570 a year, $57 a month. But we have a special offer because they understand that they stole everything that we do. There they go. They haven’t yet started to fezzes, I’m glad to see. No, they actually asked. They were very nice. And I said gosh that’s a great idea. I hope you do do this. And we’re very pleased that from day one, they’ve been a part of our family and we’ve been a part of theirs. They have a special offer for MacBreak viewers. MACBREAK30 is the special offer code. You’ll get 30% off for the lifetime of your account, not just month or yearly, but forever. That makes it less than $40 a month or $399 for an entire year. That’s less than buying the materials; oh look at this! You get the measure-up practice exams, too. When you get your subscription, you can actually take the exams as you take the courses and see how you’re doing so you know what you need to polish up. They divide the courses into actual chapters and questions on the exam. So you can really focus your study. There’s a no-hassle, easy cancellation policy when you do get your cert. Although I think a lot of people just keep it because it’s a great way to stay up on new technologies. IT Pro TV, itpro.tv/macbreak. Use the offer code MACBREAK30, you’ll save 30% off for the life of your account. I really can go on and on. They have a virtualization lab so if you’ve got any HTML5 browser on any operating system, you can go in there and set up Windows servers, and set up clients, and break it. I break it every time I use it. And then you just log out and start over and it’s all fresh. Itpro.tv/macbreak. We thank them so much for their support of MacBreak Weekly. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised but Apple has confirmed the reported cult of Mac. That the NFC chip in the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus will not do things like pair to speakers. Will not let you integrate NFC tags into your apps. Will not work with things like this; this is an NFC ring that I will use to unlock my Moto X. But it won’t work with an iPhone 6. They’re locking it down so it’s just for Apple Pay. In fact, since Apple Pay comes out next month, it won’t really do anything when you get your iPhone 6 this week. What do you think guys?

Andy: What a weird story. A lot of the stuff that they say it won’t do is stuff that Apple would have to enable anyway. Like Bluetooth’s trusted object or NFC trusted object; all of those features would still be dependent entirely on Apple. So it’s not really a lock-down. And the other features, some the NFC does well…

Leo: Well wait a minute though. They don’t turn it on is the same as they prevent it?

Andy: Absolutely. So the thing is Touch ID came out last year and it was constrained only to the two tasks that Apple gave it. Part of the reason for that is that Apple basically sprints to their release deadline every year just to get the functionality that they ship. And Touch ID is an example; my understanding is that they didn’t have a way to secure the Yes-No token so they couldn’t prevent developers from spoofing those tokens if a malicious developer made an app. So it took them an extra few months to build it all into Keychain. And now Keychain handles that and the yes-no tokens are safe. And my guess is that NFC, they had time to build it into Apple Pay and to get all of the partners on board. But they haven’t had time to build that in API, and to Apple’s credit, they take their APIs very seriously. They use them themselves, they make sure they’re rock solid. Then they support them for a really long time. They don’t tend to deprecate them too quickly. So my guess is that this is Apple’s way of testing NFC and they’re testing it on themselves. And when they’re happy with it, they’ll build it out and probably it will be seen next year. The same way we got Touch ID API this year. We may get an NFC API next year.

Leo: Actually you make a good point. They did show the Apple watch unlocking a hotel room door. And they said with this, it will be supported in the Starwood group of hotels.

Andy: Although they didn’t say that was NFC. It might as well have been NFC but they didn’t explicitly say that.

Alex: They may make an argument that because the Apple Pay is so important to them. They don’t want to do anything that would open it up at all.

Leo: That’s reasonable.

Alex: From a security perspective, they’re saying here’s the deal. Here’s what we think you use NFC for. We want to make it totally locked-down and totally secure. And we never want to have to deal with other people possibly using NFC because it’s so integral to the real market that they see for NFC.

Andy: And also Apple can make the argument that name us something you want to use NFC for. And then they’ll say well we’ve got a better solution for it that doesn’t require it to tap a ring against something else.

Leo: Yea, it’s reasonable for Apple to be prudent. And if you’ve chosen the Apple team, then you’re used to this.

Rene: Go team Apple!

Leo: I want to point out by the way that we really try not to be on a team here at TWiT. And it’s not always easy.

Andy: We’d be picked last anyway.

Alex: We want them to be on our team. We don’t want to fight over them. We want them to fight for us.

Leo: I’m on team user and one of the advantages we have is we can try all this stuff. And we hope to give you a fair unbiased look at all of it through all of our shows. As long as people tune into MacBreak and say Leo you’re insufficiently worshipful of Apple. And I don’t consider that to be our job. But I do have to say on the NFC front, that it’s great that NFC is supported by other phones in its entirety. I also understand, look at if you’re on team Apple you’re used to this, Apple Pay not till October. The rest of continuity, not till October. Photos, right, when is that coming out? Isn’t that next year?

Rene: For the Mac next year.

Leo: Is it going to be on iOS 8 right away?

Rene: I’ve heard conflicting things about it. It was in the betas. Now it’s specifically labeled beta outside of the beta. So we’ll see.

Leo: I think some of it could be argued that Apple has constrained resources and just can’t; and by the way it’s not a lack of money. Or a lack of office space. The constrained resources is brilliant programmers.

Alex: Who like to work in Cupertino.

Leo: I think Apple would open an office in any city in the world if that’s where they needed to go to get the people who would write this stuff. I think that that is truly a constrained resource and they want to do it right. So I think that when you choose team Apple, that’s what you choose. You choose to not necessarily be on the cutting edge. But you choose to be refined. Which makes it all the more upsetting when Apple fails to be refined. And that happens from time to time. Right? Because you chose team Apple because you wanted it to work. I’ll give you an example. Peter Cohen says I am full of it. But this U2 thing, it seems to me to be a fiasco.

Andy: It’s really not the story they wanted to come out of that.

Leo: I love the posting people put up of U2 in 2007, says people are stealing our albums. We are not giving these away. And then eight years later they have to put out an app to show you how to get the free YouTube album off of your iPhone and iPad.

Andy: Can you imagine the conversation as they’re planning this out. Okay, we’re go, we’re going to do this. Before we pull the trigger on this, is there any way whatsoever, we can imagine anybody being upset about getting a free album. Okay, you know I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask okay let’s go ahead with this. And now, the people are so desperate to find something to say that’s… Apple did not think of this.

Leo: I will defend these people. I think what Apple did was wrong. So Apple gave away the album. Normally when they give away free stuff, you go to iTunes, you click the button, and click yes I want that free thing. They did not do that with U2. They put it on my iCloud, boom. And if I have my phone or iPad set up to auto-download any new purchases, I have a U2 album I didn’t choose on my iPhone or iPad. And I have no good way to get what I had, they’ve had to fix that. But there is no good way to delete music without having to attach it to your; so that’s absolutely wrong. They pushed that album to people.

Andy: Does this qualify for the word fiasco? Does this qualify for the word nightmare?

Leo: It qualifies for the word spam.

Andy: Also this pressing for this Amazon’s music services does this, Google’s music service does this.

Leo: What are you talking about? No, it does not. I have never… if I want a free album on Amazon, I have to click it and buy it and then it comes to my phone. It does not appear on my phone automatically.

Alex: My Nexus 7 came with Transformers, the movie.

Leo: Well that’s comparable to that; that’s spam!

Andy: I’m not saying first of all, that has happened at least on the early days where they had free giveaways. And now there’s stuff in my library that I didn’t download. Which is not offensive, it’s just okay now a piece of music I don’t like might turn up on shuffle play unless I get rid of it. I certainly agree that they could have thought another step ahead and said given that Apple has never done this before, and also…

Leo: Why didn’t they do it the same way they give away free…

Andy: And also they’re not the company to associate with something I did not ask for has suddenly appeared in my library.

Leo: Apple gives away free music every week. They know how to do it. And they decided intentionally not to do it this way.

Andy: I bet that must have had something to do with U2 getting paid for each copy and it doesn’t count unless people are…

Leo: Also so U2 can say hey two million people downloaded our new album.

Rene: I’m not sure, I haven’t seen it yet. I’ve been looking for whether that’s going to be recorded in the billboard charts.

Leo: I bet you it is.

Rene: Right because it should be a tracked item of how many people downloaded it on iTunes. So I think that thing is, I don’t know if this one actually worked. But I think if the music industry should pay really close attention to what Apple just did there. Because whether this one worked or not, this is a shot across the bow. This is a we will roll you into the ground if we feel like it. If we can distribute an album to 500M people and pay whatever they paid U2; they could pay a lot of bands $1M, $5M, $10M for the album. It’s nothing to Apple to do that, and they could really position iTunes. There’s all kinds of anti-trust questions and everything else. This is the stuff that I’ve been talking about for at least a little bit. When it comes to movies and when it comes to music, Apple has a huge distribution pipe that they’re just barely utilizing. This is the first time I’ve seen them show what a fully operational battle station can look like.

Leo: And now they need to understand that that is considered by many users spam. And Apple had to, I think embarrassing, that Apple had to publish a page with a button that say here’s how you get rid of that.

Alex: Leo, is it spam? I think it might be deeper than that. We’re starting to understand what it is to have digital content and digital possessions and digital territory, and that there are some people for whom that was an invasion. The same way Amazon pulled 1984 out of people’s Kindle’s libraries. Apple pushed U2 into.

Leo: That’s an invasion.

Alex: Yea, it happens in a millions ways. You get preinstalled apps on your phones. The iBooks came with Winnie the Pooh thing. My Nexus came with Transformers.

Leo: That’s different.

Alex: Yea it is different.

Leo: I used my bandwidth to download onto my phone.

Alex: Absolutely. And that’s what I like about this discussion. There is an argument that we pay more attention to this stuff than we do to incredibly important social issues that exist beyond our digital domain. But I think our devices are very personal to us. There’s stuff going on about ownership when you pass away. What happens to your digital library? And all of this is making that issue tangible. We have licenses to songs and companies can push and pull them from our devices. And we need to figure that out.

Leo: I have to say I would feel less upset about this if this was the mechanism. But it is not how Apple has distributed free music in the past. They have a very good mechanism for doing that. And they elected, and I cannot think of any other thing to say, but intentionally not to do it. It also underscores the issue with Apple devices of how hard it is to remove content from your device.

Alex: Although I think it’s easier with iOS 8, you can swipe.

Leo: Yea, it will be and that’s a huge improvement.

Alex: I also wonder how much of this is U2. If it had been a more modern hotter band.

Leo: Absolutely. By the way, I love U2 and I have all their albums.

Rene: Also, it’s a less-controversial band to test this. If you’re testing an idea, if they had done Arcade Fire, some people would have been really excited. But my parents would be much more like why is this on my phone. So I think U2 is a more known entity if you’re going to test the system like this, using someone with that popularity and that broad spectrum. Obviously there are people that are upset. I’m going to bet that it’s less than half a percent.

Leo: And I should point out, everybody’s like well Leo you didn’t have to have auto-download turn on. I didn’t and it didn’t download on my phone. But many did. We don’t know how many of those two million downloads were automatic and unintentional. And it’s a natural thing to have auto-download turned on. The thing is if I buy an album on the iTunes store, I want it to appear on my phone. You have every right and expectation that that would be only if I buy an album. And Apple to use that to spam people’s phones is wrong. Period.

Andy: Okay but can we have perspective here. We have Google’s fiasco is…

Leo: What does it matter?!

Andy: I’m saying that…

Leo: Does it make it not wrong because Google did something?!

Andy: Does it qualify as a fiasco? Does this qualify as someone should get fired for this? Does it qualify as late-night comedians need to make this the lead-off monologue joke for four nights about this? No. I just wish there was a little more perspective about this. I’m shocked that this is anything more than okay that was stupid. That was hand-fisted the way they did that. I’m just shocked we’re using the word fiasco when it comes to this.

Leo: I don’t know if it’s a fiasco. I think it’s embarrassing for Apple to have to make a page to say how to remove something from your phone that they put there.

Andy: In the keynote, I expected the way they would deliver this is the next time I open the iTunes app on any device, oh by the way here’s a free album. Click on this and you’ll get that free album. I agree with you 100%.

Leo: Andy, it’s death by 1000 cuts. No it’s not a big deal by itself. But it’s Apple Hubris and I think it’s an example of kind of a widespread mindset at the Apple campus. And that bothers me.

Andy: What people realize is that sometimes there’s a fine line between Hubris and Schottenfreude. That’s all I’m saying.

Leo: And that’s our show title ladies and gentlemen. You’re mixing Greek and German but I don’t care.

Andy: Leo and I are going to be musicals. I’m hubris, He’s Schottenfreude! We’ve got something for you…

Leo: Look, did I raise this on any other show on this network? No. But it is an issue on MacBreak Weekly because it’s a strange thing to do.

Andy: Agreed.

Leo: There were apologists and Peter Cohen on iMore he’s one of them. Oh come on, no it’s not a come on.

Alex: No, he’s not an apologist. He’s a grumpy SOB.

Leo: I love Peter. I hope he knows I love him.

Andy: He understood he just couldn’t believe given all the other stuff we could be yelling at each other about, that that was at the top of people’s lists.

Leo: People say that. I know there are horrible things happening in the world today. And we could make all our shows about ISIS. But we are in fact not. And there are topics that each show covers.

Rene: I mentioned this previously Leo. Canada is a very relaxed country and when all this stuff happened, we didn’t say anything. But when we got the iPhone 3G and data was still $200 for 100 MB we took to the streets. We didn’t take to the streets for war, for financial meetings, for health care. We took to the streets for data for our iPhone. We have a very interesting barometer for things that are interesting to us.

Leo: And there are people in town saying hey it was a gift. Yes, you could say that if you’re a spammer as well. Hey, I sent you a gift email.

Alex: Santa Clause came down the chimney and put it under my tree. It’s a gift!

Leo: Well I believe in Santa Clause, that’s true. I have yet to see, I tried to TiVo it but it didn’t record. Tim Cook’s Charlie Rose interview. I understand it is now up for free viewing.

Alex: It’s good.

Leo: Yea, tell us about it. I didn’t see it. What did he say?

Alex: A lot of it was talking points. But it came off very sincerely. Some people have said it was unscripted and I could’ve believed that. Because he’s absolutely adept enough at talking on interviews and how to do that. He was very Mia Culpa about maps. He said it was a mistake and shouldn’t have launched the way it did.

Leo: There’s a thing I’m surprised we’re still talking about.

Alex: Well no because Charlie Rose asked him. And Tim Cook said when you run as fast as Apple does, sometimes you fall down and sometimes you fall on your face. And you have to get yourself up and do everything you can to make it right. He was very candid about that. He spoke about how you could still take every product Apple makes, put it on a table, and it still generates hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue for them. And it puts them in a unique position to choose the categories that they want to enter. Overall, I was impressed with the way he conducted himself.

Leo: Part two is on tonight on Bloomberg TV and some PBS stations.

Rene: I thought one of the interesting things he said between the lines was, and I can’t remember exactly the wording, but it was basically what Apple wants to continue to do is make great hardware that works. It’s kind of an open-ended statement. I think that when we look at the home kit and a lot of other things and Apple Pay, these are really setting up for an awful lot of opportunities for a lot of people. But also for Apple when it comes to hardware development.

Leo: He put lie to the rumor that Apple is in the market for path. He says no, Bing was enough. We’re not doing social networking. And I think that’s wise. Apple has enough trouble with networking period. I think it would be silly for them to have an Apple, although…

Alex: Well it’s arguable what he said. He said Apple’s not making a social network. And you could arguable take features from Path and include them in messages without having to turn it into a social network.

Leo: Messages is in a way a social network. I’ll tell you one of the things, I have an iPhone on order of course. Both versions of the 6 and will have them on Friday. But one of the things that makes me nervous, and you can reassure me here about using the iPhone is messages. Apple does not foster going back and forth between Android. Once you start using Messages, isn’t that going to be an issue for me?

Alex: It depends how you use it. It will assign you to Apple servers and if you don’t unassign yourself then people who are also on iOS will be sending you things to your Apple address.

Leo: That I won’t see if I’m not on my Apple.

Alex: Yea, so you’ll have to go turn that off.

Leo: Is there a way to turn that off? I thought you had to call Apple Support.

Andy: In the prefs for that account, here are all the different ways any user can contact you. Their phone numbers or email address. You just have to go in and check off everything except for that one phone number that’s attached to that one SIM card.

Leo: Every time I use Messages, I get messages on all my Apple devices. You’ve just signed up another email and it’s like 80 emails now. I feel like there’s some force.

Alex: The one thing that scares me is all this stuff is instant now. When I was doing messages back in the old days, you wrote something and inserted something and hit send. Thanks to all these sticker apps, you just touch something and it goes. And iOS is like that now; you do the sound thing, you move your thumb up and it sends. You tap location and it sends. And I get scared because I think I’m just horribly embarrassed.

Leo: Everybody does that. The stickers on Facebook Messenger; you don’t have to say okay now send a sticker. You just choose it and boom, someone has your stupid sticker.

Alex: It terrifies you.

Andy: I honestly think that if anybody makes a messaging app that is literally called Mommy and Daddy Message, meaning that if you’re over the age of 30, it will be just like SMS. It will verify things for you. Because honestly Messages on Mac OS and even on iOS has always been like the coleslaw that you get in a diner. It’s always there; it’s never very good, and there’s no way to solve the problems that it presents. If Apple simply said we’re not going to reinvent Messaging, we’re going to give you an SMS app. And we’re also going to give you a chat app. And it will be two separate apps. One will work well for what you want it to do. The other will work well and predictively for what you want it to do. I’m with Rene, the number of times I’ve used beta software or something and I typed a message and said wait a minute, is this about to send it or is this not to send. And I’ve actually hit, okay how about if I hold down the command key and hit Q, just to make sure the next thing I do does not send just some random text to some place I don’t. I’ve been using Messaging for decades; I should not be this confused.

Leo: Exactly, you’re scared!

Alex: There’s only a handful of people I use iMessages with anymore. There’s a couple of holdouts in my company and my wife.

Leo: You’re a Google Hangouts guy, right? The newly empowered Hangouts; is that your choice for messaging?

Alex: Yea, 99% of my chatting with everyone is with Hangouts because I’m on any desktop that I’m logged in to. And it all shows up there. So right back into the conversation if I need to cut and paste something.

Leo: That’s my only nervousness. I think it’s easy to go back and forth between Android and iOS except for that.

Rene: If you use Google Services, it’s really easy.

Leo: You can tell it’s been a while since I used an iPhone. Guys, is it going to be alright?

Alex: Leo, take our hand.

Rene: We’ve been here before. We know the way out.

Leo: Well I count on you guys, exactly. Cook also said iCloud wasn’t hacked. He called it a phishing expedition. That’s reiterating Apple’s press release of that week. He said he didn’t see it coming that he would become CEO. He said he knew that it was in the long-term plan. I don’t know how you don’t know this. Doesn’t Jobs at some point; he’s not in good shape. He’s dying. Go to Tim Cook and you know kiss the ring. I would like you to be next king.

Rene: He knew, just not then. Not that day.

Andy: I think that he was holding out hope that okay Steve is certainly not going to be getting a lot better. But he’s not going to be getting worse in the immediate future.

Leo: There was an interim where Steve stepped down and let Tim run the company. There always was the fact that he would come back. He did come back and then he died. So Tim knew he would be running the company; but he didn’t expect him to die.

Rene: He thought that Jobs would be chairman for a long time after he became CEO. He said he always bounced back in the past and he thought he would bounce back again.

Leo: Also, I love this tidbit. Jobs’ office is untouched. That must be something, huh. Has anybody ever been up there?

Rene: Never.

Andy: I think it would be weird to break it down. You kind of feel like you just want to seal it off. I know it seems like a little bit of a… but I think that it would be odd to take his office out of Apple.

Leo: Although, will they shut down one infinite loop when they open the big space ship campus?

Rene: I think that even the big space ship campus won’t hold everybody.

Leo: So they’re going to keep one infinite loop?

Rene: I’m pretty sure.

Leo: Jeff says when I die, they’re going to do the same for my studio. Will you leave this here just in case I come back at any moment?

Andy: Leo, the qualification there, it’s like asbestos, it’s better to seal and contain then trying to remove.

Leo: Just put some Visqueen over the door and tape it down real good.

Andy: Turn left, that’s the ring. It’s worked for 23 years.

Alex: It’s worth pointing out that iOS 8, the GM release also closes all those back doors that Jonathan blogged about this last week. So the file relays and the packets…

Leo: I think that’s interesting. All the things that Jonathan Zidarski had talked about in his speech at Hope. All of them have been fixed. Because he had those questions for Apple at the end of his talk. Sounds like Apple responded.

Alex: They didn’t remove the services they just made them impossible to get to by anybody.

Leo: That’s what you want. Now is it still going to be the case that once I authenticate with a computer that that phone is authenticated? Because that was one of the issues.

Alex: I believe so but now having that token doesn’t really get you anything. All the stuff you could get to previously is totally secured.

Leo: Nice job. I think it’s generally the belief despite this iCloud fishing scheme. It’s generally felt by most people that Apple is more secure. That this trusted security token and all of that is better than anything else out there.

Alex: I don’t know if it’s that they’re more secure but they made a big point at the watch event to say that their business model doesn’t involve our personal data. For example with Apple Pay, they don’t care what you’re buying, how much it costs, or who the merchant is. You’re not giving the merchant the number. Some companies find that data incredible valuable. A lot of companies find that marketing information incredibly valuable. Apple makes their money on the devices. So they have the luxury of saying we don’t care about that and including that as a differentiator in their message.

Andy: I think the big differentiator for them though is that this is one area in which really controlling the whole thing is the only way you can put payments on a phone. And I would absolutely trust it completely. Because it is locked up very tight. The path is very close, they’ve guarded. It is true that I would trust Apple more than most companies but it is interesting that this isn’t part of the ongoing messaging of Apple. Remember that we want to sell you new hardware, we want to sell you services. We are not in the position that having that information benefits us in any way. Which is an important differentiation. Sometimes, I’ve again been playing with the Android stuff and the Moto watch with the notifications from Google Now. And sometimes it’s kind of okay to give information to a service if they can turn that into wonderful experiences. But I think Apple is very good to make sure that this is, as we get into a world in which the differences between what Apple does and what Google does become more of an apples and oranges sort of thing. As opposed to an apple versus to newer fresher, better-more tasting, more nutritious apple, I think Apple is going to make these points about how philosophically we are different than this other company. It’s not just features or hardware, it’s not just what we’re doing this year. Philosophically, this is what we’re about.

Leo: I think that’s a smart way to position themselves. He does say in this interview that Google is Apple’s top competition.

Andy: I think that was said with a lot of respect, too. There was no hatred in that. It was, no we are Popeye and Pluto. We are equally matched and could basically keep fighting until the heat death of the universe because we are the two most powerful in the space that we operate in.

Alex: And the fascinating thing to me, and John Brewer pointed this out to me, Google is so many people’s big competitor now. Because they’re in Apple’s business, Microsoft’s business, Amazon’s business; it’s hard to imagine any tech company that Google isn’t directly competing against.

Leo: And it goes back a little bit to the pre-Steve Jobs thermonuclear war hero. Where Eric Schmidt from Google was on Apple’s board and there was this great collegial competition. As a user, that’s what I want to see. I think the competition is very healthy. But it can’t be lawsuits and invective. It has to be on the ground innovation. Who’s going to make the better product? Let’s see. Let’s do it.

Rene: I think that all of that of course was collegial before Google released upon.

Leo: No, and that’s when Jobs went thermonuclear. But that’s fine. Look, Google’s going to do things that are right there in Apple’s backyard.

Rene: I don’t think we’d have a 5.5 inch phone or a lot of the features that are on the iPhone if Android didn’t exist. I think we all benefit a great deal from this.

Andy: I’m also really cheered to see this at the highest level referred to as a competitor. As opposed to no they only got to where they were because they have us to copy from and steal from. And that’s a very good way to talk yourselves into being lazy and saying they’re not very smart, they’re not innovative. They’re not coming up with great stuff. They’re just copying us. We don’t have to challenge ourselves at all. So yea, this is such a great time to be into technology. This is such a great time to be in the market for great stuff. Because we have two organizations that really want to out-dazzle each other and really move things forward. It’s a wonderful time.

Leo: That’s exactly the right attitude. I agree with you 100%. He said it made a phone.

Alex: And a tablet.

Andy: They made a phone-shaped object. Ben Heck also made a phone if you were watching his video series.

Leo: Yea. Tonight on the show, we’ll say quote our business is not based on having information about you. You are not our product. Our products are these and this watch, and Macs, and so forth. And so we run a very different company. I think everyone has to ask how do companies make their money. Follow the money. I’ve said this for years. And if they’re making money mainly by collecting gobs of personal data, I think you have a right to be worried. I might disagree with that but I think you should understand that. You should really understand what’s happening with that data and the companies should be transparent. And I agree with him 100%.

Andy: I agree in broad strokes. I’ve always believed that monitoring Google is about the transaction between yourself and the company. Here are the services they can provide to you and here’s how great those services can be if you let them see part of your life. You have to decide but also realize that they’re profile of you is what funds all that free stuff they’re giving you. If you’re okay with that, great. If you’re not okay with that, that’s fine too.

Alex: I’ve heard that people inside Google had this same sort of argument about personal data that we do. Which is reassuring. But people at different points in their life find different things valuable. And you pay with money if you can afford money. If you want free software then you pay with time. Because it takes a while to compile it and build it yourself. If you don’t have either of those things, you can pay with attention. Or you can pay with data. But you just choosing what you find as value and you’re giving it to somebody in exchange for a good or service.  So it’s entirely your choice.

Leo: A good or service, did you say that?

Alex: Some phones are subsidized because you’re willing to share data with them. There’s all sorts of ways in which you’re paying for things.

Leo: I make that very clear in my mind. And I make that very clear transaction, I’m giving Google a lot of information because I value Google Now and having the watch tell me it’s five minutes to work but there’s traffic.

Alex: And some people just want to save $10 on email. And they’re absolutely happy to have Gmail save them that money.

Leo: Yes, absolutely.

Rene: I think there’s also a lot of us that just don’t think we’re that interesting. I’m not that worried about them; I just don’t do that many interesting things.

Leo: There is a difference, and we’ve talked about this at ad nauseam so I won’t belabor it. But there is a difference between taking that information and selling ads against it. Versus taking that information and giving it to an insurance company or the Federal government. Those are lines that we don’t want them to cross. And I think Tim is exactly right. The companies absolutely need to be transparent about what data they collect and what they do with the data.

Andy: Absolutely. That’s why again, this isn’t the Google defense show. But it’s surprising that when you find that there’s a piece of shock and it’s horrifying that Google’s collecting on you, actually there is panel where you can go and say stop collecting that information.

Leo: Oh, okay.

Andy: And there’s a button underneath it, delete all the information you’ve collected about me so far.

Leo: Okay.

Andy: It’s not always the case and it’s not always satisfactory. But it’s good to know that they’re not like Facebook and they’re like, don’t use us. Don’t see the photos from your niece’s college graduation party.

Alex: Well I turned off web history and that turned off Google Now, which I was sad about.

Leo: I know. You’re not going to get some of those tools. That’s the price you pay. We’re going to take a break. We haven’t talked about the watch at all. I almost said it, but I didn’t. The A-Apple watch at all. I want to talk about the Apple watch.

Rene: And Leo, we’ve got some great questions maybe after the break.

Leo: Oh let me tell people about that because we haven’t mentioned that. If you go to twit.to/mbw420. That’ this episode, 420. The question engine is working and you can go there and ask a question or more importantly go there and vote questions up. Because pretty much all the questions have been asked probably by now. But it’s a question of picking the ones that you want us to answer. We’ll answer the most up-voted questions in a little bit. Thank you, Alex Lindsay for providing that question engine. Again, twit.to/mbw420. Our show today brought to you by our good buddies at squarespace.com. We use Square Space for our TWiT blog. Oh somebody’s calling me, so I apologize. My wrist is buzzing. Or is that your heartbeat, Alex Lindsay? You’re sending it to me from your… now everything’s ringing. Our show is brought to you by Square Space, better websites for all at the best place to make your website. One of the things, you’ll see right there, look on iPhone, your website looks great. But it also looks great on an iPad. It also looks great on a 27-inch iMac. That’s because all Square Space sites are automatically mobile-responsive. That means that you don’t have a different site for mobile. You have one site that fits every possible screen size. And that is beautiful! And it’s just a simple example of how Square Space makes it easy for you to create a website. It’s web-hosting so they host your site. By the way, the best hosting I’ve ever seen. Never goes down; always robust, always reliable. Tied to the best content management system, the best software. And that tight integration means they can give you stuff no one else can. Plus they’ve got great developers and they’re constantly improving their technology. This is hard to do; it doesn’t take long before a web system like this could look outdated. And a lot of them do. There are other places you can go to get web hosting and software and so forth. They don’t keep it up to date, they don’t have the best engineers. They don’t have things like mobile-responsive design, ecommerce on every single template. The templates are constantly being improved. Beautiful code if you ever look at the code. You don’t need to know CSS or JavaScript of course. But if you do they have a developer platform. That means the sky is the limit. You start by going to, this is something else that no one else offers. Absolutely free two-week trial, no credit card required. Just visit squarespace.com, click the get started button. Choose one of these gorgeous templates. It doesn’t really matter which one you choose so don’t agonize over it. Just pick one. You can import content from your existing site including all the images, all the links still work and everything. And then change the template. Change it again. Change it again, mess with it. Update it, put in widgets. All that stuff is there for you and the content is never tied to the template or the design. So you can always move around. That’s really a nice thing. This is just modern, state of the art. Need some support, don’t worry. They’ve got the best support in the business right from their own offices. They don’t outsource their support. They also have great support website for you to take webinars, view videos, and get all the information you need. Square Space really is doing it right. They know how to do it. They know what you want. And they’re offering it. By the way, it starts at $8 a month. Wow. For all of this, including ecommerce. And, if you register for a year, you get the domain name for free. So that’s good. Squarespace.com. I want you to try it right now with the offer code; actually you don’t need an offer code to try it but if you decide to buy, use the offer code MACBREAK. You get 10% off your new account. Squarespace dot com, better websites for all. We love them. Another company we have been with almost since the beginning. This was always my vision for TWiT, is that we would have partners that we work with that are; I know that perhaps a lot of you that watch all of our shows have seen these ads and they know, you know all the stuff I’m telling you. But I love the idea of growing with a partner. And I feel that, for you guys, that’s the right way to do this. So, watch. Now I have to say, when I was watching the event, and you guys were, as well, you were there, I got excited, I’m always excited by new shiny things. But some of that has worn off, over time. And I’m a little concerned that this watch A: does not live up to the promise Apple has of taking an existing category and reinventing it so that it suddenly makes sense. I don’t feel that they did that. And B: refining a product. It looks more like almost Shovel Wear. They put in so many odd features, like the heartbeat, the drawing, the animated emojis; I had to kind of ask myself, “Have they made this better, or just different?” I would love to hear what all of you think. You guys, Rene and Andy, touched it.

Andy: We even tasted it, well, I can’t speak for Rene.

Leo: Did you lick it? As you know, and this is true, by the way, when the iPad came out, a lot of people who didn’t touch it didn’t get it. But those of us who did said, “Oh, you know, there is something here.”

Andy: And we should also remember that this is several months away from being released, just like the iPhone was released this way, excused me, was announced that way, the iPad was announced that way. I do think that Apple’s announcement was a little disconcertingly vague. But the same was kind of true with the iPad where they kind of knew what they were showing off, but they knew that not until developers were writing apps for it, that they really could emphatically say, “This is what the iPad is and what it’s about.” That said, I left the iPad and iPhone announcements feeling really revved up and excited about this thing and the iWatch, I’m more of a cooler, calmer sort of reaction of it looks very interesting, but let’s wait for them to tell us more of the story. There is a lot that is very, very weird. I thought that, I had to write this, I ended up writing six thousand words about the iWatch, I did two different articles last week; and one of the concerns is that here you have a device, it’s a watch, and it’s a small, small screen, and it’s probably not designed to be something we spend a lot of time that we walk around actually focusing on, and yet it has, how many different controls does it have? It has a tap, it has a press, it has a scrolling wheel, it has another clickie wheel, and that’s to say nothing about on screen gestures. They chose to show to show us the application launcher, which is this immense constellation of dots that is so dense you have to scroll in and roll around to tap what you want. I’m coming to absolutely no conclusions whatsoever, but it did leave me with a lot of questions as to, does Apple think this is a device that is going to be an immersive experience where here is another screen you’re your attention but it’s in a much more convenient location; or is it going to be something more like Android Wear, where the idea seems to be no, the idea of this device is to make sure you spend less time looking at screens, not more. I’m sure Rene has a lot to say so I’ll just wind up by saying the signature thing that really left me confused on the ride up from Cupertino up to San Francisco to my hotel is that jeez, they showed us navigating through photos, iClub photos on this watch, which is, here you see this essentially smudge of color that you scroll in, you zoom in and it turns into a patchwork of all your photos organized by time and place and I’m thinking, “Okay that’s nice but this requires an iPhone.” My iPhone is definitely in my pocket while I’m zooming through photoland; I can’t think of a single situation in which I would want to select a photo from my watch. The only thing I could barely come up with is, what if you wanted to message somebody a photo, but then I was thinking well, “No, for that I would still probably take my phone out of my pocket, given that its-“ We didn’t get a chance to try out the actual interaction of this hardware. It seemed as though it would be easier to pick out a photo and SMS it from my phone than it would from the watch. So I’m left just not skeptical, and not with a negative impression, but thinking, “Okay, I now know what it looks like, now I know what some of the features are, I’m going to have to wait several months before I can have a real opinion on it.”

Leo: Ben Climber, who is a watch blogger, was invited to the event and he wrote about it on his watch blog called Hoodinky, which is great. And he said things I agree with which is Apple absolutely nailed the bracelet, that this was very clever, it’s easy to change the bracelet. One of the bands is something that I just really love, which is this link band. What is the name of that?

Rene: Milanese.

Leo: Milanese. I love a Milanese band, you don’t see them anymore, I would buy the watch just because of the band.

Andy: My grandfather’s retirement watch had a band like that.

Leo: Exactly.

Alex: The great thing is that everyone is going to get to say, “One of these bands is the one that I love.” There are so many options.

Leo: But I feel like the watch, they completely stumbled on. And you’re right, Andy. We’ll know when we get it. It’s not going to be cheap, so it’s not going to be something that I’m going to be happy about buying.

Andy: Three fifty is the; I’m sorry, go ahead.

Rene: No, I was just making a dumb joke; I said you’re going to get a day and a night watch.

Leo: Well you can get a day and a night bracelet, which is good.

Andy: And they are easy to swap out so that’s where all the fashion stuff is going. That’s why I think that part of this design is really, really smart, because it’s impossible to come up with one watch design that everyone is going to like. So they came up with a rather bland design for the three hundred and fifty dollar part of it, but for the fashion part of it you can have a band for workday, you can have a band you swap into for going out at night, another band you wear for a three day week end elsewhere, and you can easily swap them out. I thought that was very, very smart.

Leo: I’m really disliking the watch part, but I’m going to buy the Milanese band.

Rene: There’s a lot to unpack here. Some people think it’s complicated for an Apple product, but you get two choices of size, just like the phones, you get three choices of finishes, just like with the phones, and you get a bunch of choices of bands, just like you do with the cases. So I mean, in terms of an Apple product, it is more fashionable, but it’s not really more complicated. I understand a lot of what Andy is saying, like there was not that moment, like when the iPad was introduced and Steve Jobs stood there and he said, “This is a Mac Book and this is an iPhone, and we have to prove to you that the tablet deserves to be in between it.” It does some things better than the Mac Book and some things better than the phone. And we didn’t have that moment, we didn’t have that statement from Tim Cook saying, “This is the raison d’être for the watch.” We got a list of features. Some of them I was absolutely expecting. Some of them made so much sense, like the logging for health and fitness, the notifications and the glanceable widgets, the authentications and things for Apple Payment, which is super clever, because it uses sensors to maintain contact with skin, and if it breaks it then you have to re-authenticate. There is a lot of things that they just do in there. The communications thing was a big wild card for me, it’s got a dedicated; double tapping it send a payment, single tapping brings up your contacts. And that to me was the wild card. That was the only thing where ever for an Apple product launch I thought maybe they did too much. Usually it’s like they did too little, I’m sure they will get to more of it in the next version. That was too much, but it’s interesting. It’s interesting all of the things you can do. Yes, the emoji look like Yahoo circa nineteen eighty, and the heartbeat thing, you’re probably not going to use that with too many people, because it would be awkward.

Andy: It’s cute.

Leo:  I don’t even want to use it with my girlfriend. I have said, and this is a bit of a joke, it’s somewhat sincere, that this is a watch designed for Japanese schoolgirls.

Andy: Rich Japanese schoolgirls, if the minimum buy in is three hundred and fifty dollars. And remember, that’s the minimum, that’s the cheapest watch.

Leo: And maybe the nugget of truth in that is that this is aimed at a younger generation that has a different idea of what a watch is; in other words, no idea.

Rene: For the price, though, you read the (?) Blog, and I met him there, John Gruber and I had the opportunity to speak with him for a few minutes. Fascinating, really smart guy. This is incredibly valuable for the price. Apple is not surcharging here. I believe he said you just can’t get watches of that quality at this price.

Leo: No, that’s true.

Rene: And it will be interesting to see because there is a solid gold, eighteen karat and rose gold watch. And Rolexes can cost tens of thousands of dollars, even for a stainless steel, let alone gold. So it will be interesting to see what the price point is. But I don’t think anyone, and I don’t think anyone was saying this, but this is expensive in terms of consumer electronics, but it’s not expensive in terms of watches. The huge difference is though, is that you can buy a Rolex and a hundred years from now, it’s still going to be a great Rolex.

Leo: They made that point: this is going to be out of date in two years.

Rene: It’s great value for the money, but the longevity of it; we don’t know if they are going to make a new one every year like the iPhones, or every two to four years like Apple TV, there is a ton of questions.

Leo: Would you; both of you, I presume, put it on your wrist. To the person looking at the photograph, it looks like a metal pillow. It looks big. And it isn’t physically big, it’s light and it’s not much bigger than an actual watch. It just feels like; did it feel clunky on your wrist?

Andy: It didn’t feel clunky on mine; the stainless steel one is heavier than you would expect it to be, because I think in your mind you’re thinking digital watch and not stainless steel watch. But when I compared it to real Omega watches that I’ve had experience with, it’s definitely within that band width. It is thick for a watch; I just think it’s definitely within the band width of what you could reasonably expect a watch to be in terms of size. It will be thick, it will be a little bit heavier, it will be a little bit larger than the forty two millimeter size anyway, than you might expect. I mean, here is my previous Apple watch, which I wasn’t able to find until; I wanted to wear this at the event.

Leo: it’s Dog Cow

Andy: It’s Claris. And you see a lot of people are used to wearing smaller watches like this and when that’s the case, you get a larger Smart Watch like this and it’s freaking huge.

Leo: But I feel like the Moto Three Sixty style wise is great.

Andy: Yeah exactly I think the more I wear this…

Leo: It’s considerably lacking in features but the style is great.

Andy: Yeah this is the ultimate blank slate, not try to impress; it’s very minimalist. And so I think that the Apple watch might get a little more attention, maybe than this, but really only because it’s square, not because it’s so big. It really does; I’ve always been the guy who, because I write so much about phones, I like to see what other people are using and how they are using it, so I’m the person who, like I’m reading my book on the subway but I’m glancing to see, okay are you using a Samsung? It’s not an S5 it’s an S4; oh gosh, she’s using it in landscape mode, that’s interesting. Now I’m actually, especially on the flight over to San Francisco and back again, I was really paying attention to the watches on people’s wrists. And I saw women’s watches that are even bigger than this, I saw men’s watches that were gigantic, I saw some that were tiny. I think their saving grace is going to be that there are such a variety of wristwatches out there that you can have a watch that looks a little bit weird and it won’t really take much attention.

Leo: And it doesn’t feel weird to you?

Andy: It doesn’t feel weird. Again, the stainless steel one, the forty two millimeter, is rather heavy, but then again, if that’s what you are used to, it’s within the band width that you would expect on this watch.

Leo: How about navigating with that stem? That seems very non-Apple to me. I mean, that’s a very strange choice.

Rene: It’s very click wheel, Leo. So the basic thing with that is it’s still a multi touch display, it has the new force touch, but they didn’t think the pinch sort of gestures or multi touch, multi finger gestures were good with the small screen, or that it would obscure the screen too much. They went back to the click wheel idea where you move the control off of it, almost the way a Mac works, where the control is disintermediate from the screen, and you can use that to sort of do the brute force navigation and then multi touch it. But then I forgot to mention something earlier that I wanted to sort of conclude with: to me, the case to be made for this watch is convenience. And they did hit on the features, but I don’t think they sort of wrapped it together. For example, my sister already, she leaves her phone in her office when she does rounds at the hospital, and just has her watch with her because that is the paging system. My mom already wants to get it because her phone is in her purse, and I assume when you have a bigger phone it’s going to stay in the purse much longer, and she thinks she misses calls and messages. But on her wrist, she won’t do that. Tim Cook mentioned controlling his Apple TV with it. There’s Home Kit coming, so you will be able to control all sorts of accessories and appliances. So the idea that this could be a much more readily available instrument than your phone, and certainly your tablet, is the big selling point for this. I just don’t think they made it as plain as they had with iPhones or iPads.

Andy: Did you catch Tim saying, “I am also controlling music on my computer, on iTunes,” which I think is the only oblique mention of controlling stuff actually on your desktop.

Rene: Oh yeah, to be clear, you can run with this, you can leave your phone home and run with this. It has local music; it doesn’t have GPS, but it does a lot of things locally; it does payments locally, so you don’t have to be bound to your phone.

Alex: Well I think also, how it interacts with the entire hone is going to be very interesting, with the home kit. So you’re not going to have to have your phone, you walk into your house and then there is a lot of interaction that is possible there, that could be very, very interesting.

Andy: I’m just worried that the; of the list of things I’m a little bit concerned about, or the questions that I really want to have settled next year is did they actually over design it? Again, there are so many controls on this. I was also a little bit concerned when they were talking about it. Here’s why the click wheel is such a good idea: because it allows you to navigate the interface without locking the screen. And again, I’m thinking, “But again, this is a watch that I’m not really going to be staring at for ten minutes at a time, is it okay to simply put a simple control on the face and I tap that control to make it do the thing that I want it to do? Or do you really envision me standing there on the side of the road just like this for five or ten minutes, engrossed in this task that I’m supposed to be doing?” Maybe Rene had a different experience, but I was watching the demonstrator operate it and there were times when he was going like this and that and then this and then this and then that and then this. So again, I really am looking forward to my first hands on experience just because I would much rather have fewer controls on a touch screen, but that is the only thing I ever have to deal with, than okay, this is the squirrelly thing, this is the tapping thing, oh no, this is a tap and press thing, oh no, now I have to tap this one; wait, do I have to double tap that or press and hold that? I’m not used to seeing that much stuff on an Apple device, particularly something that small.

Leo: And a lot of it is dictated by the variety of the things you can do with the watch. I almost feel they tried to put too much into it.

Andy: Well, we’ll see.

Leo: Of course, everything I am saying is predicated in the notion we don’t have it yet, and won’t have it for a few months. But I’m concerned, and I don’t feel like looking at it as Apple has somehow magically solved the watch issue.

Alex: Well I think that the watch, it’s an important vertical that they have to get into. They have a market for it, and they are going to sell a lot of them no matter what, because people are going to experiment with it, they are already Apple users and they definitely have to play with the wearable market. I think a lot of people who are wearing Nike Wristbands and would prefer to just have it all in one. So I think the biometrics was key to making sure that it really solved a couple of problems as to why people are wearing multiple wristbands. So I think that takes some of that out for some people, but I think it also allows them to start to see what is going to work in the market. But I think the advantage that Apple has by going slowly is they get to think about it a lot. But the disadvantage is they have a low iteration rate, and so I think it’s important for them to wait for a certain period of time, but all these other manufacturers are getting real data about how users use the product. And I think Apple had to put something out there, and just start to see. If people don’t like it, there will be another version in another year, and it will look different based on that. Where the new six is is light years different than the original iPhone.

Andy: Someone on Twitter mentioned something that I wish I were clever enough to have spotted immediately: that it’s interesting that the icons are not on a grid they are in sort of in a honeycomb configuration. And one of the reasons for that must be that with round icons you get more of them per unit, but someone also pointed out that gee, that would also fit better on a round display in the future, if they decided to do that. I don’t know if that means anything but that would be true, wouldn’t it?

Leo: That is one of the things, I don’t know if we have learned this that Apple didn’t learn, was that the demand in Android Wear was for the round watch, not for the square watch. And I think when we were doing the event, you were of course in the event but we were talking, and during our live telecast, that was the first thing that came to mind is: it’s not round. We thought Apple would go round.

Andy: It’s so hard to; I think the three sixty does a good job of it, but none the less, if you are trying to do something that has a little bit more ambitious of a user interface, you lose a lot by losing those corners. Now suddenly all of your buttons really have to be round. You really can’t, it doesn’t fit into this scroll up scroll down, select sort of motif they have there, so I can certainly understand it. I think it works well with the three sixty, but it really does take a certain knack to design it nice that way.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: I will say that the fitness stuff; I think that was really the only thing they showed start to finish and no wonder, because boy is that impressive. I would love to have this on my wrist because it’s like I got an MPG meter on my car a few years ago and it absolutely immediately changed the way I drive because now I have a score for how carefully I drive now. And as I’m watching these demonstrations, these poor, poor incredibly good looking, incredibly fit people who have to be on treadmills all afternoon long to demonstrate how well these watches work. I can see how that would get me motivated to try to get out of the chair a little bit more, to exercise more, because it turns it into a very simple Nintendo like, here are three circles, you want all these circles to be complete by the end of the day, and here is how far you are on this circle, you’re doing great on this circle, but you want this circle. Go to it.

Leo: Go Andy, go. We haven’t even talked about the phones.

Rene: Phones? There are phones?

Leo: Four million sold in the first twenty four hours, that’s a record for Apple, right?

Andy: Yeah.

Leo: Boy, I tell you, I was up at midnight on Friday, and Apple Store was not.

Alex: I know a lot of people were complaining about that, but I have to say, when I grow up, I want a company that shuts down all of the phone companies in my own giant website. That is what you want for product launching. Not for what you want, but not a bad problem.

Leo: I do feel like Apple should have opened the store at midnight. Whether it was working or not, it wasn’t even open. They said it was going to be open at midnight, they should have opened it.

Rene: If you got a direct link, it worked; it brought you to the front page.

Leo: Oh it did?

Rene: Yeah, so I got mine reserved almost immediately, because I knew the link.

Leo: You’re so smart!

Rene: I Tweeted it, I didn’t hog it for myself, I shared it.

Leo: So, that’s interesting. So maybe it was a failure of the servers, due to the onslaught of people. It wasn’t…

Rene: I had to reload several times to get to the

Leo: I thought they just didn’t bother opening it for a couple hours. Like oh, you now.

Rene: We’re going to get some lunch,

Leo: We’ll get to it. So it’s not that it wasn’t open; it was open. It was just jammed. I went to all the US carriers, bought one on Sprint for my mom, I was able to; you know Sprint was up and down, but I was able to get at least through the process, bought one for myself from Verizon, which seemed to have pretty snappy servers the whole time. AT&T, up and down; T-Mobile didn’t open for a day.

Alex: The problem with T-Mobile; I decided to move to T-Mobile.

Leo: Everyone unlocked T-Mobile, that’s the way to go.

Rene: Well, and for me I think it was WiFi calling, you know I decided to; well that and I have just had it with AT&T, I just couldn’t take it any longer. Even though I had the free, grandfathered version of everything, they just slow you down anyway, once you get a lot of them anyway, and it isn’t worth it. And now no matter how much I ask AT&T to turn my phone off when I’m overseas, they don’t.

Leo: T-Mobile free unlimited overseas calling, texting, and data, although it’s 2G data.

Rene: All the iPhone sixes in the demo area were running T-Mobile.

Leo: Interesting. I think for me, that’s the way I’m going to use it.

Andy: Actually, the two most; oh, go ahead. Just a quick post script to that: they all also had the Beats app on them.

Alex: Yes.

Rene: Yes.

Leo: Really?

Rene: John Leger had an open bar, so. 

Leo: Is that true, that all the iPhone sixes will have Beats?

Andy: No, what I’m saying is all the demo phones had already had the Beats app installed.

Leo: We’ll know, we will find out; Friday. I probably will do an unboxing, depending on when it arrives. The one I was able to get from Verizon is a four point seven. It looks like the four point seven did not sell as well as the five and a half inch

Rene: No, the five and a half inches were constrained.

Leo: There were fewer of them.

Rene: Yeah.

Leo: Okay.

Rene: And also, I think a lot of people just assumed the most expensive iPhone was the best one, they had to have that…

Leo: Nine hundred and fifty bucks, I don’t care…

Rene: I don’t know how many people; Apple people are funny because you know we work in the business so we’ve all tried Galaxy Notes, and we’ve all tried Galaxy Megas and HTC Giant Heads, and I forgot what the other one was called, HTC Mac, whatever they were, We’ve tried these big phones, we know what they feel like, we know what they mean, but I think a lot of people who have only bought iPhones, they don’t really understand how big a phone, like how big a big phone is, and they just bought it because it looked like the new flagship. And it will be interesting to see the reaction to it when it arrives, because the iPhone six doesn’t feel that much bigger, because it’s thin and its round and its light; the iPhone six plus is a bigger phone.

Leo: Yeah. It is as big as my One Plus One, because Burke made up the iBurke Six and Six Plus, and, this was the thing to do at RS Technic put out a PDF template, so you could; and I know a lot of people were carrying around, on Thursday, both sizes, just to see which one they could live with. The four point seven is already bigger than the existing iPhone but the five…

Rene: I have a Nexus seven in my pocket, I’m not afraid.

Leo: I’m not afraid, either, this is exactly the same; the iPhone Six Plus is exactly the same as the One Plus One, right? Or the Galaxy Note?

Andy: I have the Note Two, which is almost exactly the same size.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: It’s a little bit wider and a little bit shorter.

Leo: So I know I could live with that.

Alex: It’s interesting that the feature set wasn’t the same, either. I mean, for me, I have the Plus, but for me the most important feature on the phone is the camera.

Leo: Oh. Yes.

Alex: And so the optical image stabilization is exactly why I bought the Six Plus. I probably would have bought the smaller one if all the features were identical, but a different size, I probably would have got the smaller one; what?

Rene: The battery life is way longer on the Six Plus, too.

Leo: Which will be good.

Alex: By the way, the most popular questions that we have on the question engine is about the iPhone six. Aaron Maylor asks, “What are your thoughts on Apple going with sixteen sixty four or one twenty eight and dropping the thirty two, in the memory on the iPhone Six?” That’s our most popular question people want to know. You either get the smallest one, that’s cheap, or you’re going to go for something bigger.

Leo: It’s pretty obvious they wanted to have a starting price that looked low, so they made a sixteen, but they don’t expect anybody to buy a sixteen. The real question is why is there a sixteen, not why is there a not a thirty two.

Rene: There is always three marketing tries, right?

Leo: Right. That’s the real question; and I agree a thirty two, for a lot of us, would be exactly right. I have a sixty four.

Andy: I think it really is the difference between economy, business class and first class, where there has to be; I’m not sure it’s going to be as unpopular as people might think it is. There are just going to be people who are on a budget, they have 199 dollars to spend, and they are grateful that this phone is as cheap as they can possibly get it. Once you get a step over that, there are people who don’t necessarily have to be on a real budget, so why not buy something that has a real step up, four times as much memory as opposed to just the extra sixteen; and then there is first class, which is money is really no object, I’m willing to spend as much on an iPad as I would on this phone, and that’s where the one twenty eight comes in, really.

Alex: I really couldn’t believe; I went to T-Mobile, since I’m locked, and I just paid the full price up front, and I was like, nine hundred and forty nine dollars for a phone, it’s the same as a computer! It is a computer, but I was just like, wow.

Leo: I have to interrupt you because we  are out of time, I have to do a couple of quick question engines, and then we’re going to do your picks, but there is no way we can get this done is seven minutes, so let’s do a couple of quick question engines.

Alex: Here we go, speed round. This one is from Jim M and he says, “Rene and Andy, how heavy did the iPhone Six feel? Does the thinness made up for some of the huge size and weight?” And he is from, Jim is from San Diego.

Andy: It feels pretty light, but the round edges I think really what makes it feel light that not. I did not feel the Six Plus was obnoxiously heavy. I had them both in hands, and I did not feel as if the Six Plus was super, super, super heavy, compared, no.

Alex: Next question is from Mike Wren, he said, “What are your favorite iOS optimized apps that will be released day one?”

Rene: There is an embargo on most of them.

Andy: Yeah, I was about to say, the apps we’re not allowed to talk about.

Leo: Interesting. So there is stuff we haven’t even seen? And I guess one of the things Tim Cook said…

Andy: How about the Swift keyboard, which I can talk about.

Leo: Swiftkey is awesome.

Andy: The first time you use the certain keyboard, you’re just sliding from one place to another, oh boy, that is the fastest way to type, it blows away tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, you will love it.

Leo; And I hope Last Pass does extensions as well, because I would like to be able to fill, auto fill in stuff. I think they said they would. Next!

Alex: You want another one, Leo?

Leo: Yeah, one more.

Alex: One more, last question is from Eric Diquara in Nashville. He said, “Will we finally see an update to the Apple TV this fall?”

Rene: This spring, next spring.

Leo: You might as well say the top questions will always be Mac Mini, Apple TV, and will we see an event in October?

Rene: I think if the Mac stuff is ready we will.

Leo: Not the iPad stuff, the Mac stuff?

Rene: The iPads are a touch idea, they are going to be nice new iPads, but the iPad’s Talk Six, it’s the Talk cycle for the iPad so it’s not going to be as big as deal as it was last year with the iPad Mini and…

Leo: Why even do an event there?

Rene: Well the new Macs are there, then you could do the iPad and Mini Macs.

Leo: The Macs are Broadwell? It’s the new Intel chip set?

Rene: Yeah.

 Andy: The new Mac Mini.

Leo: It’s not even whether they are ready; it’s whether their Intel is ready.

Andy: I don’t even want to get into any of that at this point.

Leo: Or Apple TV.

Andy: Apple TV I don’t think is going to be this year. The new Mac Mini, I’m ready to just get a press release tomorrow saying they have updated it, I’m ready for a big event in October, I’m ready to wait until twenty fifteen, I absolutely don’t know, it makes, they have to update it soon. I have no idea when it’s coming.

Leo: I’m going to have to throw in a Leo question to the question engine. Tim Cook said to Charlie Rose, “There is stuff we have not announced, there is stuff no one has even rumored.” Gentlemen, what do you think?

Alex: Absolutely true.

Leo: No, no! Not yes or no! What is it?

Rene: He said it really well; there are things they are never going to release. Like, they have had television sets in the lab for years and they have chosen not to release them because they don’t think that’s a good; well maybe not never, but they don’t think it’s a good product yet. The iPad was not released, then the iPhone was, then the iPad was released. Almost anything you could think of, that Apple could do, they have tried. Again, they make decisions based on the product.

Leo: How do we feel about the bump? You know what I am talking about? The camera bump?

Alex: I wish it were bigger, with a bigger chip.

Leo: You want a bigger bump?

Alex: I want a big bump; I want a big chip in there.  I don’t know if you saw, Panasonic has released a, basically a one inch sensor.

Leo: Isn’t that wild, on the Android device? Isn’t that wild? And man, that phone has a bump.

Andy: It’s got a baby bump.

Alex: If Apple would give us a version of that, I would be the first in line.

Leo: Okay. I asked the wrong person, obviously.

Alex: Sorry.

Leo: Of course Alex wants a bump. Do you think people will; it’s not that big a bump…

Andy: You have to be a really turbo design wonk to complain about that.

Rene: Just like the iPod Touch from two years ago.

Leo: What? It had a bump? I didn’t even notice.

Rene: Yep, it did. Cameras do not like being thinner.

Andy: You could ask yourself, why not make it just a little bit thicker, and just incorporate it, but who cares?

Leo: Who cares? Our show today brought to you by our good buddies, the good folks at Lynda dot com. Lynda Wyman is a long time friend, she used to come on the screensavers all the time to talk about her books on web development. She has been teaching people how to use computers better for more than a decade. And she has the best site for this: L-Y-N-D-A dot com. It’s an easy and affordable way to help you learn, you can instantly stream thousands of courses created by experts in the field. Great trainers, too, beautifully produced. We’re not talking those cheesy YouTube videos, this stuff is nice. They include searchable text transcripts, so you can find exactly the part of the training you want, playlists, even certificates of course completion, that you can publish to your Linkedin if you like. Whether you are a beginner or advanced, Lynda dot com has courses for all experience levels, and you can learn on the go with iPhone and iPad and the Android app. and its twenty five bucks a month for everything; over a hundred thousand video tutorials in every area. Just go to L-Y-N-D-A dot com and browse the library, you’ll be amazed and pleased at the stuff that is in here. New courses all the time; here is a code clinic on Ruby, Python, PHP, Rapid Prototyping for Product Design, Up and Running with Slide Share, Share Point Desire Twenty Thirteen, Project Based Learning, Stemmed to Steam; ah, here’s one: First Look at the Swift Programming Language, now this one I might want to do, this looks really interesting. And you can watch it now for free, if you got to L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash macbreak. Seven days free. Their whole thing, everything. If you get the premium plan, by the way, you can download the courses to your iPhone, iPad and Android and watch them on the plane or offline anywhere. Plus, download project files and practice along with the instructor. They have courses on (unintelligible), productivity pointers, iWork for the iPad, Office for the iPad, Songwriting and Logic Pro; but I’m going to do the Swift one. This looks really good; I’m really pleased to see this. There is no better way to learn than Lynda dot com, L-Y-N-D-A dot com slash macbreak, got here for a free seven day trial of Lynda dot com. Alright, everybody, it’s time for your picks of the week. We are going to start with Mister Andy Ihnatko.

Andy: Okay, just let me show off one of the other features of Crane Cam three thousand; I have been sort of interested in…

Alex: I’m blown away.

Leo: You have every right to be blown away.

Andy: I have been super interested in folding Bluetooth keyboards ever since I knew that there was going to be an iPhone Six coming. So I have ordered one of these. This just arrived today, this is the iWorks folding Bluetooth keyboard. Here we see the footprint, basically, of the iPhone Six, I was looking for something in the Six Plus, something that was roughly exactly that same size, and it comes in this little slide off case right here, that doubles as a stand. So you put that right about there, unfold it like this, and then drop your iPhone Six right there. And it’s not optimal because it has this gap in the middle, but I was actually writing a bit with it this morning, because it arrived kind of around ten or eleven. And you can actually get a good, fast type on it; the nice thing about it is that it has a multiple operating system; it will work Widows, Android, or iOS. But the nice thing about it is that it has a really nice spacebar here, so as you’re sort of getting used to the split keyboard, you can at least keep your thumbs right where they need to be.  It’s not like this other one that I had in storage that I was pulling out, this is made by Verbatim, it’s available on Amazon, and it’s much bigger, which is nice. But the thing is that spacebar is not quite as big. So it’s nice because you can really take a risk, take a flutter, take a risk on it, because this is only thirty, thirty five bucks, it’s made out of metal, it’s well done, it has this really nice little carrying case with it, so you won’t dent the metal as you’re carrying this around. And like I said, I was looking for something that is almost exactly the same size as the iPhone Six, so I can basically have this as a sandwich; and so I will continue to look because lord knows that back in the days of Palm, there were some really amazing double folding keyboards out there. But for now, this is my pick, if you want, if you’ve got an iPhone Six Plus coming, and you’re looking for that alluring idea of, I want to be able to travel maybe for the day, or an overnight, with just writing and working on my iPhone Six Plus, and not take an iPad with me, this might be the nicest, easily available solution that’s out there.

Leo: Very nice.

Andy: iWorks Folding Bluetooth Keyboard.

Leo: Live from the Crane Cam Three Thousand, the future of video podcasting. Thank you very much. I-W-A-R-K-Zed.

Andy: Exactly.

Leo: Rene Ritchie; while Andy is adjusting the Crane Cam Three Thousand, the future of video podcasting…

Andy: Feels like adjusting a gyroscope. All I wanted was a crane shot!

Leo: Rene Ritchie has his picks of the day.

Rene: So I’m copping out a little bit here because as I was going through all the choices, I realized that all the really exciting stuff is coming tomorrow. Some of it is slipping out today, like I got an update for some language apps that are already installing widgets so you can find some iOS updates today but the flood of them is going to come tomorrow. And almost every major app that you can imagine is going to have a new version available for you and they are going to do widgets, they are going to do keyboards, Andy already mentioned Swift Key, there’s going to be (unintelligible), there’s going to be all sorts of fantastic apps. One Password has shown off there; it’s hard for me to keep straight which ones are in analysis and which ones aren’t, so I don’t want to make any mistakes but, my pick of the week is going to the App Store, tomorrow, once you have iOS eight installed, and just updating everything and then enjoying all the sharing extensions, the action extensions, the widgets, everything that iOS eight is going to give you with those because it is really going to be like having a whole new phone.

Leo: Very cool. Well we’ll, you know, we’re going to be back next week.

Rene: I’m going to have to pick from those, Leo, it’s going to be really hard.

Leo: Well I’ll have, I hope; did everybody get an iPhone ordered in time?

Rene: Yup.

Alex: I’m going to have to wait for a while.

Leo: Uh oh.

Alex: I ordered it, but I was late.

Leo: Somebody said it’s not until Thanksgiving now, if you ordered a Six Plus.

Alex: I don’t have to wait that long. I think only three or four weeks.

Leo: That’s depressing.

Rene: American Thanksgiving.

Leo: American Thanksgiving, not even Canadian Thanksgiving, American Thanksgiving.

Rene: Because I was thinking October, that’s not too bad; ohh.

Leo: No, November, late November; my birthday. Alex Lindsay, your pick of the week.

Alex: Sow we have this issue a lot, where we are working in one place in the world, and we need something to be edited in another place in the world. And so a lot of times the way we manage that is; and it needs to be done overnight, it needs to be done really quickly. So we will compress this down to H2 sixty four, and then we’ll put it in Dropbox, and then someone else will pull it down on the other side, and then the issue is reconverting it back to Apple Pro Rez or DNX, depending on who is grabbing it. And so the question is, how do you do get at it? And a lot of people just use compressor to do that. We have found; I’ve been testing this new piece of software called Edit Ready, it’s by Divergent Media. And Edit Ready is an application; all it does is just convert your media back to something that you can edit easily with. And so while all these applications; we’ll talk about this, and this is something that; Divergent sent it to me to test it; I have used a lot of their other software. And it took me a little while, I’ve had it for a while, I was like, oh, I don’t know, I don’t really need this and everything else, but there are two things that have happened. Number one is being able to pass that back and forth and send it over to someone, have them reconvert it to Apple (unintelligible) and throw it into the rest of the pipeline, as well as there are some files that I can’t get Quick Time on a Mac to open.  I don’t know why, they are MP4s that are written by it appears to be the Adobe Compression Suite, for some reason they will not open. They open up and you see just a while screen on Mac and Quick Time Ten and also Quick Time Seven, which we still use. We can’t get them to pen and we find that Edit Ready is a great way to convert that. So if that ever becomes a problem for you; saved our bacon last week. But anyway, Edit Ready, it’s not very expensive, I can’t remember how much.

Leo: Sounds like something we need, doesn’t it, Chad? Because we get files in all kinds of formats.

Chad: All the time.

Leo: Fifty bucks, that’s it.

Chad: And when you just mentioned having some sort of video file you can’t play; I record on a PC, I need to give files to someone else; all the time that happens.

Leo: Let’s order it.

Alex: So anything you record on Quick Time it will convert back to Apple Pro Rez. So it’s not like this big…

Leo: We are moving away from Pro Rez, obviously, because we are moving to Premier Pro, but it supports  Premier Pro format, too.

Alex: So anyway, it’s a great little app, a great utility.

Leo: What is the format for Premier Pro? I imagine it can reprogram anything.

Chad: Anything.

Leo: Maybe we don’t need this. It feels like we do need this.

Chad: Finally in Final Cut Pro Seven, we need something like Edit Ready.

Leo: And that’s why we use the sound device as a recorder, because we are recording Pro Rez on that. But I believe the sound devices we bought will record also to Adobe format we can use.

Alex: well I think Adobe on Mac, if you are using a Mac, still. You’re going to go to PCs?

Leo: Yeah we already bought them. In a couple of weeks we are going to be completely converted to Premier Pro on monster PCs. I know I shouldn’t even be doing Mac Break Weekly anymore, here I am with an Android phone, and our editors use PCs.

Rene: You are the perfect person to do it, Leo.

Leo: I love my Macs. And I can’t wait to get the iPhone.

Alex: I have one company that is Premier only, and another company that is Final Cut Ten only, so it just depends on what you are doing.

Leo: I couldn’t bring myself to buy all those cute little Mac Pros for all my; because we were stuck on the old Mac Pros and we needed new computers, so, saved us about sixty thousand dollars. There’s that. I was going to talk about these NFC rings, I was all excited, the iPhone has NFC, you can use these NFC rings to do absolutely nothing with it. This was a Kickstarter project, the idea was really cool, the idea is you put an NFC chip in a ring, I’ve got one; this is the one I like the best because it looks like an NFC chip in there.  These range in price around fifty bucks, and when I get my Moto X, I’ll be able to unlock my Moto X just by swiping it over the ring which is really cool. You can do all sorts of things, you can use it to unlock your door, if you have a Bluetooth, rather, and NFC door lock, that kind of thing. But it won’t be any good for you iPhone users, so.

Andy: In a drawer.

Leo: Stick it in a drawer, a lot of them; NFC ring dot com. I was so excited. I’ll be able to unlock my iPhone; well I ordered the new Moto X this morning so it will work with that.

Rene: It will be like ten rings of the Mandarin, one for each song.

Leo: You know, you can. I can put one on each hand, on each finger, I got ten rings.

Rene: And you got ten phones.

Leo: And I do have that many phones, so this is going to work nice. And I’ll just have to use a pass code for my iPhone.

Andy: You look like you’re ready to screw over Pete Best. It’s so sad that your fingerprints got burned off in that fire; you can’t use that fingerprint sensor on the iPhone.

Leo: Actually, you’re right. I don’t need an NFC ring; I have a fingerprint, that’s right. No, that’s a good point.

Andy: You don’t need a finger ring, you have a finger.

Leo: That’s right; you gave a very good point. Our show is over, ladies and gentlemen. I thank you for being here for Mac Break Weekly, we do it every Tuesday morning, eleven AM Pacific, two PM Eastern Time, eighteen hundred UTC on TWiT dot TV, it’s nice if you could be here live. You could also join us in the studio, we have a very nice crew, six people watching the show and yawning, it’s great. It’s alright, it’s almost over now. If you want to be here, tickets at TWiT dot TV, we’ll put a chair out for you, um, what else? You can also get the On Demand audio and video after the fact everywhere that podcasts are stored, including iTunes, of course. There are some wonderful TWiT apps and podcast apps for all platforms; you can use those as well. We thank you for joining us. Thank you Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun Times, back to work you go. Did you file your Moto X review?

Andy: It’s going to go up probably tomorrow, I am filing it today. Unfortunately I got distracted by three different iPhone and iPad things.

Leo: Crane Cam Three Thousand.

Andy: The future of podcasts.

Leo: Thank you Alex Lindsey, for joining us for the first time from your new offices in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania.

Alex: It’s a pleasure, and if people want to see our latest experiment with all kinds of interactive events, go to bitly slash FCP vug, V-U-G, so F-C-P-V-U-G Three, or third final cut virtual user group, and we built another table.

Leo: I’m really loving these tables, you know I go next door every day, and there is something else.

Alex: We’ve got six wack ‘em tablets now. They are huge, it is like John Madden on steroids, you know anyway, if you want to see what we’re doing there, just check out bitly slash F-C-P-V-U-G.

Leo: F-C-P-B? As in boy?

Alex: V as in Victor.

Leo: V as in Victor.

Alex: Virtual user group.

Leo: Virtual user group. And the number three.

Alex: Yup.

Leo: Okay, I have to type that in correctly. F-C-P-V-U-G, and the number three. And there it is; oh this is cool, and there’s the table.

Alex: And we have decided we’re going to change it again, so the next one will be a different table.

Leo: Can we have the old ones, as you go through those?

Alex: Yeah, you can have the old one.

Leo: I feel like there is some good plywood in there.

Alex: It’s a really nice table, Keith built it, it’s a really, really nice table, it’s just that we need five instead of six because of the different camera angles. If you click on the little buttons on the side, by the way, it will take you right to that question.

Leo: Oh that’s neat, so you can go right to a question, oh, that’s’ really-this is nice.

Andy: You can’t fight in here, this is the war room!

Leo: It does look like that! Very Strange Love-ian. And thank you so much, Rene Ritchie, imore dot com, please tell Peter Cohen that I’m not hurt.

Rene: He’s a big boy, he can take it.

Leo: I love Peter, he’s great, he was a great acquisition for iMore dot com.

Rene: I don’t know if you heard, but we already called Serenity to join us at the end of the month.

Leo: Damn it! I’ve been trying to hire her for months! She said no again and again; is she moving to Montreal though?

Rene: No, she’s in Boston where all the cool people are.

Leo: Actually, I guess, was she a part of the Mac World layout?

Rene: No she, sorry Andy.

Andy: No she actually put in her notice a week before.

Leo: And we didn’t mention it on this show, great tragedy, Mac World Magazine, which started with Mac in nineteen eighty four, is no longer going to publish a print edition, they will stay online, at Macworld dot com, and continue to put content out there, but as a result of the loss of the print edition, almost everybody working at Macworld has left or lost their job. Jason Snell left, Serenity left, and so there is a lot of people on the market today who are good Mac journalists and I really need to get on the horn with them. Well I’m glad you got Serenity. We can work something out. You don’t mind if she does podcasts, right?

Rene: No, well, it’s Serenity’s game, she makes her own decisions.

Leo: It’s her game.

Andy: You know I’m sure if you and Ray wanted to get into a bidding war for her services, right here live-

Leo: No, actually, this is a chance for imore to snap up some really good people, some of the best Mac journalists in the world and it’s a tragedy, but you know, print magazine; and by the way, I’m not so happy because New York Times blames CNET and TWiT for the demise of Mac World.

Rene: How dare you, Leo.

 Leo: The point they made, which was Jermaine, was it’s hard for a monthly print publication to keep up, when you have CNET, TWiT, and all these other people doing, filing regularly.

Andy: But kudos to Jason Snell and the rest of team, because they very quickly realized we really have to be a web magazine that also publishes print. They weren’t doing just doing incidental stuff so that’s why losing so much of the print team is such a big loss to the brand. So I’m very, very sad to see this happen.

Leo: Yeah. And we have talked to Jason, of course, we’re going to see a lot more of Jason on our network because he just lives down the road a few; he has his own podcast network.

Rene: He wrote a wonderful piece, Chris Green wrote a wonderful piece, there is some really good stuff out there.

Leo: It is a sad moment; we should have a moment of silence for Mac Break. Okay, that’s it. I read-you got Mac World free, like a first edition you got free with your Mac. And that’s the first Mac World I got was with my new Mac, and I’ll never forget them and they really were a very important part of the Mac scene for so long, as was Mac User Magazine, which threw in the towel a while ago.

Alex: That was the thing, I learned what was coming up next, I waited for everyone.

Leo: Yeah, loved those Mac magazines. Thank you for joining us for this edition of Mac Break Weekly, You’ve got to get back to work, now because you know what? Break time is over!