MacBreak Weekly 422 (Transcript)

Show Tease: Coming up on this episode of MacBreak Weekly, I am filling in for Leo Laporte. I’ve got Jason Snell, Andy Ihnatko, and Rene Ritchie joining me. We’re going to talk about some IOS 8 debacles, retina IMAX coming? All sorts of interesting rumors on the Apple horizon. Lots to talk about. All coming up next!

Netcasts 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 422, recorded Tuesday September 30^th, 2014.

Designed by Aggle

Sarah Lane: This episode of MacBreak weekly is brought to you by Hover.com. Hover is the best way to buy, and manage domain names. It’s simple, honest, and easy to use. For 10% off your first purchase, go to Hover.com and enter the promo code MBW9. And by Squarespace, the all in one platform that makes it fast and easy to create your own professional website or online portfolio. For a free 2 week trial and 10% off, go to squarespace.com and use the offer code: MACBREAK. And by Casper, an online retailer of premium mattresses for a fraction of the price, because everyone deserves a great night’s sleep. Get $50 off any mattress purchase by visiting caspersleep.com/macbreak and enter the promo code: MACBREAK.

Hello everybody! Welcome to MacBreak Weekly, this is episode 422, I am Sarah Lane, filling in for Mr. Leo Laporte, who is on vacation in London this week. In fact, I’ve been breathlessly watching all of his photos coming in from the London Eye and Clearages and he’s eating lots of porridge, and stuff like that. But anyway, thanks everybody for being with us! I am not alone here in the studio. I actually have Jason Snell sitting to my right.

Jason Snell: Hello!

Sarah: Hello Jason, would you say you are spending most of your time writing for sixcolors.com these days?

Jason: I am writing for sixcolors.com, my website, and I am doing a tech podcast called Upgrade, which is on relay FM.

Sarah: You know, before the show, you mentioned to me that is apparently national podcasters day, or podcast day?

Jason: Nobody told us.

Sarah: I had no idea! I feel like this is something that really should be more in my wheel house anyway, doing this for a living.

Jason: Yeah, I didn’t get you a card or anything.

Sarah: I didn’t get you anything either, I’m sorry.

Jason: Oh well, we’ll just agree to do this again next year.

Sarah: Yeah. It’s the thought that counts, right?

Jason: Exactly.

Sarah: Over on my left is Andy Inhatko, Tech columnist for the Chicago Sun times, and one of the hosts of MacBreak weekly. Hey Andy!

Andy Ihnatko: Hello! Gosh to be in London in September! Cruising those white sand beaches!

Sarah: Right, it’s so rainy and cold, you feel it in your bones. Actually I don’t know anything about the weather in London in September.

Andy: Rainy is usually a good guess for any…

Sarah: Isn’t that sort of a…It’s like a year around type of a situation. But it sounds like he’s having a good time.

Andy: Your hat will be well washed by the time you board your plane at virgin America, Virgin Atlantic, that’s fine.

Sarah: Yeah, exactly. Well thanks for being here Andy. And of course, Rene Ritchie, editor at IMore, you are the editor, right? The editor, writer, you pretty much do everything. You’re podcaster as well.

Rene Ritchie: yep, how’s it going Sarah?

Sarah: Thanks for being here Rene. It’s going really well thanks!

Rene: Winter is coming here Sarah, the trees are turning shades of golden red dragons, and smarter creatures than me are leaving for the south.

Sarah: Is that Canadians talk like that usually? It’s very poetic of you.

Rene: Is it? Well it’s very cold so we have a lot of time to think in poetic sentences.

Sarah: To put together something that makes it all sound very beautiful. Well thanks everybody for allowing me to be part of MacBreak Weekly. I always loved this show because I sort of live and breathe everything that Apple makes anyway. So it’s always a good time when I get to be a part of the team. And it’s nice to see Jason in person! That doesn’t happen very often.

Jason: No, we usually are on skype or something.

Sarah: yeah, internet friends.

Jason: It’s nice to be here. Or Twitter.

Sarah: Yeah, a few pipes and screens between us. Alright, so this is not going to be hard to fill a couple of hours because we have so much material to start with. I guess we can start with these 9 to 5 MAC story that Apple is changing things up a little bit with future versions of IOS 8. Of course, IOS 8 came out what two weeks ago now? Almost two weeks ago, it was two Wednesdays ago. And then we had a little bit of the IOS 8.1 debacle, which was quickly fixed by Apple. I think, I don’t think anyone is having too many problems anymore with the version that actually does not brick touch ID, and your cellular service, which is something in general people with IPhone would like. But we might be rolling out on a little bit of a different schedule for future versions of IOS. That would be 8.1, 8.2, and 8.3, in staggered rollouts through 2015. Does that surprise everybody? At this point I feel like nothing that Apple does surprises me anymore because it’s kind of a different company that is doing things differently.

Rene: It’s a return to form. In the early days of IOS you always go the .1 version when the IPod touches came out in the fall, and then you’d get a .2 and a .3. It was only… I forget, it was IOS 5, or 6 that they slowed down the point versions then, so this is more of a return to the original programming I think.

Jason: Yeah, you’ve got to wonder if there’s, is this attached to hardware, or is this a different change of philosophy. If it’s attached to hardware, you set up 8.1 for the new iPad that were presumably going to get 8.2 with the connectivity with the Apple watch. But I like the idea that maybe this is Apple shifting to a little bit different cadence for their OS updates. I think what we’ve seen and maybe 801 was an example of it, maybe not, is that I think apple has gotten really great at rolling their hardware out, and the software maybe has been struggling with their old processes to keep up with it. And I kind of like this idea of biting OS updates off in smaller chunks, and rolling them out over time, rather than dropping everything once a year.

Andy: Yeah, and also, we’ve all seen so many examples of Apple really chasing their own tails on this treadmill of having to make the release by September of the new iPhones. Or trying to make some arbitrary deadline. It’d be nice if they simply said we’re going to have the .1 releases when they’re ready, and if we don’t have to push it out the door on an arbitrary schedule we’re going to be able to do that. And also I think it points to how many different services Apple is rolling out over the years. They’re really broadening out to services and markets that they haven’t really spent much time messing around with. And so if they have to wait for, to tag something to a hardware release, or an annual release schedule, they’re not going to be able to rollout things like an expansion of the payment system, or take advantage of new entertainment features that might be in the new apple TV, and that sort of stuff.

Sarah: Yeah, you make a good point Jason. The IPad situation, which makes sense that you might want to tie future versions of IOS 8 rollouts with, obviously, products that can be updated. But then again, we know that the Apple watch is not going to be running IOS.

Jason: Right, but it has to talk to the phone.

Sarah: Sure, yeah, some modified version it has to be compatible in some way, but we’ve got all these product categories, the Apple watch, I guess we could talk about that. Nobody exactly knows when that is happening. There’s a story that I read on MAC rumors that said Apple will be lucky to ship the Apple watch even by valentine’s day. I don’t know what the significance of Valentine’s Day would be.

Andy: So lucky.

Jason: its code that it’s actually going to be the luck of the Irish and it’s going to ship on St. Patrick ’s Day, Secret apple code.

Sarah: That would be really cool. A green apple watch. I guess, besides the fact that I suppose you are buying and giving gifts that are valentine’s day related, I’m not exactly sure what the February significance would be, besides the fact that that’s just..

Rene: I’m going to find somebody to buy me a rose gold watch really fast then.

Andy: it could be just as easy as whoever wrote that comment, really, really swung and missed on the last gift they did for their significant other on Valentine’s day, and now the only thing they can think about is what they have to get ready for valentine’s day, so if they can pick out a date for late winter, early spring, it’s going to be that.

Sarah: I guess we have to assume that Apple really, really wanted to be able to not just introduce the Apple watch at their iPhone event earlier this month, but have it ready to ship for the holidays.

Jason: I don’t think so.

Andy: I don’ think so either.

Jason: This is Apples pattern. These brand new Apple products end up being supply constrained because they’re really hard to build. So Apples pattern has been to generally release them after the holidays are over so that they can sell them, you know, as many as they can make, and by the next holiday season they’re be up to full speed on it. And I think that’s the approach here is that, the rumors were all out there, they wanted to get the announcement out the door before they have to go through regularity things, and control that, and now everybody is going to be talking about it for all this time, and then sometime next year they’ll ship it, and it’ll probably trickle out. I think they would not be able to fulfil need if they had made it available for the holidays.

Andy: Two thoughts I had on that was. One of the reasons I was thinking Apple was going to do something simpler like a fitness band was because they certainly would love to take advantage of the holiday season. I’ve seen no indication they’re ready to ship something as complicated as what they actually showed. So I was figuring how about something simple that they have the capacity to make, that they could make at a good price point that people would absolutely want to get as gifts. But the second thing is that the more information, excuse me, the more I think about it, the more I think that there are a lot of signs that the apple watch is still in its early stages. We’re not looking at something that is finished, finished, finished, and now they just need to get the regulartary approval, and now they just need to get the partner’s in line, and the developers in line. I think that it’s earlier than we might think, and that…But the stuff that Apple showed off at the even a few weeks ago is what they showed that was actually functioning and working. As opposed to the stuff they’re still scrambling to get actually finished and approved.

Jason: I tapped on something, we were all there. They put the phone, or the watch on our wrist, and then they had another one that was functional. The one on our wrist was just running a demo. And I remember, I tapped on one of the icons on the screen, and the guy looked like he was going to freak out. And he was like no, no! You’re not supposed to tap on it! Only we’re supposed to tap on it! And it was clearly like things they had in the script.

Andy: Like ….showing off his guitar collection. No, no… Don’t look at it!

Jason: Don’t even look at it. And it reminded me of the original iPhone where I tapped on some of the icons on the original icons the day they announced it, and it was screen shots. And it was like this App will go here later, and that’s where we are.

Sarah: So what does it matter if you tap on anything, if it’s just a demo anyway?

Jason: Well I think with this is that there are things that are going to crash the phone, or they don’t want to show. And that there are things that are working that they wanted to show, and having us to touch the device was not part of the script. So I felt really bad for the guy, because I mean, I was like looking around to see if his minder was going to come and sweep in and take him away. But it’s not ready, it’s totally not ready.

Andy; I had the exact same experience. You could see the invisible force field that the demonstrators were erecting between you and the watch, that if you made a sudden move towards something or if you did something they weren’t really planning  for you to do, you could just see the Eeek, okay, that’s fine. And that happened like twice with a couple of different demonstrators I was working with. I knew that this was not a place to stress test anything, or see if anything was working, because the nature of the even, they weren’t showing off the finished object, so I don’t think it would have been appropriate, but you could tell they were like oh god, this guy has hairy wrists, it over heats and explodes when put on a hairy wrist, get him to shave, abort, abort.

Jason: I wasn’t trying to crash it or anything, I was just trying to see, those icons looked really small, and I wanted to see if I could tap it and it worked, the thing I tapped on opened, and then the guy was, then he turned pale, and ran away.

Rene: Now you know why engineers disconnect interface before handing those things over for demos.

Jason: But Andy’s larger point totally remains, which is, this is a product that is going to take some time before its ready. They’re not just stalling because of production line, they’re fixing. This is why they didn’t mention the battery life other than to say at the end of the day you can charge it, because I think they don’t know the battery life because the software is not done.

Rene: I think that goes back to Jason’s earlier point too, because we just had IOS 8.1 seeded to developers yesterday and it’s got hooks buried in for the  Apple pay system, so that’ll come out. It’ll enable Apple pay, it’ll have touch ID on the IPads that it’ll enable as well. And then as we move through the year, it’ll have the version that enables the watch, and that maybe works with the new Apple TV. And then they might have a version later in the year as we start setting up for IOS 9, but it really is a, what’s the best way to put it? It’s a marathon composed of sprints. They literally sprint towards release day every September, and then they have very little time, because they’re already working on IOS 9, they’re going back and fixing IOS 8 bugs. It’s a grueling cycle, and I think breaking it up like this, especially with the watch coming at them, and you have to imagine it took a lot of people off their projects to move to the watch projects and they have to fill both that team up and the previous teams up, that it’s going to be a good juggling act come this spring.

Sarah: Somebody in our chatroom a couple minutes ago that makes a good point, and I think is going to really mirror what a lot of other consumers think. When the first IPhone was released it was expensive, it was different, but it was something that, hey you need a phone, so this might just be a new, exciting, expensive version of the phone you already had. And it’s a brave new world and it worked out really well for Apple. The watch thing, a lot of us are still kind of scratching our heads about, well I certainly don’t need one, because I already have a phone that tells me what time it is. So then it turns into something where it’s like, is it comfortable, does it look cool? Base price is 350 dollars, and we’re all sort of agreeing that you know the first version of this watch might not be perfect, as much as the iPhone wasn’t as well. But it’s that product category that’s elective rather than oh I need this.

Rene: The interesting this is when you can never see the future in advance. It always looks misty and foggy, but when you get it. Apple doesn’t really make these different devices, they package them that way, but they make increasingly small computers that connect you with a bunch of things. And a watch now is a luxury. We have a phone, not because we really need a phone, but because we need to stay connected, and whether Apple can move enough connectivity to the watch, and enough control, enough authentication, enough logging to the watch to make it better in certain situations than the phone is. That’ll be the real story. We can tell time on our phone, but is it the best way to tell the time? They can make a really good argument that’ it’s more convenient to do these things on something small on your wrist, then a lot of people who, you know, sure watch people probably have their Rolexes and their panories or whatever, but there may be  a lot of people who say I can leave my phone in my pocket. I can get a bigger phone and leave it in my purse. I can maybe eschew a phone and just have a tablet. And they’ll be a whole bunch of new use cases that I think we’ll only figure out over the next year.

Andy: Yeah, when I wrote my piece from the night after the event, that was my lead paragraph that I don’t think that Apple has ever made a product like this before, where there is no preceding successful product that they could then put their own exclamation point at the end of that sentence. Maybe even go all the way back to the apple 2 plus, because there weren’t really home computers before. There wasn’t an example of a successful home computer and then they built one with the Macintosh. There were already desktop computers, not something as good to the GUI. Even the IPOD we’ve got the deskman, we’ve got the Walkman, portable music players. So people are, were already seeded with all that information about here’s the sort of roll in your life, this is going to play. I can’t remember the…even the IPad I think, didn’t have that place where we know you don’t, you’ve never owned something like this, you don’t know somebody who owns something like this right now, but we’re going to convince you that this is something that you want and need. Which I think is an unusual place for Apple to be.

Sarah: Well, how about the rumors, speaking of rumors because there are always lots of rumors surrounding Apple products, that we’re going to see a new MAC Mini update when we possibly get the new IPad announcement, which is obviously not official yet. But October 21^st seems to be the going date for everybody, if that indeed was going to happen. The new mac mini hasn’t been refreshed in what? Two years? Almost two years.

Rene: a year and a half.

Jason: Forever, Sarah, forever.

Sarah: I didn’t think after 1.5 years is basically forever. I agree with you. I’ve never had a MAC mini myself. I know that there are mac mini loyalists, a lot of them like to use it for their media management connected to televisions.

Jason: Podcasting.

Sarah: Yeah, exactly. A few friends of mine got Mac Minis in their kitchen with little monitors.

Jason: wow.

Sarah: Yeah, it seems to be the computer that if you’ve got one, you think oh yeah! This is really, really helpful, but again it’s not necessarily the computer that I’ve ever needed.

Jason: Well I have two in my house, so I am definitely a mac mini fan, it’s sad that it hasn’t been updated. It’s definitely not for everyone but its’ actually, if you don’t want to buy an IMAC, if you don’t want to get an IMAC with a screen and the whole thing, if you just want the computer to attach to an external display.

Sarah: Yeah.

Jason: Your choices are MAC mini or MacPro, or buy a laptop. I mean, there is a place for it. I’ve got one behind my TV, it is attached to a bunch of storage and it’s where I put all my music and movies and stuff. And then the old one of that is in my son’s room, and he uses it to play Minecraft. And they’re great. In fact, I want to buy one because I have a MacBook air, that I use attached to a monitor at my desk and I actually realized that a Mac Mini, a nice MacMini, would have more power and I actually would like to put one there. So I’m looking forward to anything to update it.

Andy: Yeah, it’s a really important product because we’ve all been, we’ve just been discussing about it for 30 seconds to a minute, and we’ve talked about at least five different unique use cases for it. People who want to use it just as a media server, people who want to spare a computer in a certain room or another. People, who almost all the time when you go into someone’s server room, you will see these racks and racks of blade servers, but there’s always one Mac Mini, I find, somewhere in that stack because that’s what the admin wants to use to administrate all that hardware. I’m using for podcasting right now. It’s also the cheapest point of entry into MAC OS given that so many people will have something that they can plug a VGA cable into, and you can get… god if trash day is Tuesday morning, Monday night at 10 PM you can have as many mice and keyboards as you want. So there’s no less expensive way to get into MAC than MAC Mini so it’d be disappointing if Apple were going to give up on it, and that’s the exact reason I don’t think they are giving up on it.

Sarah: How do you think Apple feels about, Jason, as you described, it’s great for media management, music, movies that sort of thing. It kind of competes with Apple TV itself.

Jason: It does, and it’s not for everybody but this is like, a Mac Mini seems to be a product with a whole bunch of little niche uses. So this is why it hasn’t been updated in two years. It’s not a high priority for Apple. But I think it’s nice to have around, and you know, Apple kept the IPod classic around for ages, when it was sort of like very few uses were left for it. And the MAC mini has a lot of uses but, you know, not every product that Apple makes has to be a super mainstream product, and I think that’s the way mac Mini is. It fills in, it gives them flexibility in the MAC product line, rather than just saying okay, you’ve got to buy a laptop, IMAC, or a MacPro, It gives them another product, it’s the lowest price mac. There are lots of reasons why keeping it around is great. But you know, I wouldn’t ever argue that it should be Apples focus, and it clearly isn’t Apples focus, that’s why it hasn’t been updated since 2012? I think?

Sarah: Yeah. Alright, well then the next question becomes, okay, so what does get refreshed exactly? If we don’t have Intel broad well processors that are available…

Rene: Or do we?

Sarah: Or do we? Yeah, last I heard this is not happening until 2015 because they’ve been delayed for a variety of reasons but you figure there’s really no point in being like New Mac Minis with Haswell processors that aren’t impressive to anybody anymore, for a few months.

Rene: The retina MacBook air, as far as I understood, at least the recent version was always built on broad well, and it was always broad well delays that was keeping it from Market. And the original MacBook air, in other things Apple has been good at getting chip sets as fast as intel can make them, often ahead of any other manufactures, and if they could do that again with a retina MacBook air, that would be terrific. If Intel is really delaying them, and it goes into 2015, then that’s really sad, because they have a lot of rumors of 4K or 5K IMacs, or retina IMacs as well. And a lot of that hinges on all the technology that has to go to support that many pixels that…on a MacBook air, at that small size, the battery life on an IMac just driving all those pixels. And people complain that Apple is too controlling, but it’s often the parts of the chain that they don’t control that ends up causing a little bit of dissatisfaction.

Jason: If ever there was a MAC that Apple would release that would about to be eclipsed, Intel processor family, it’s the MAC Mini. So it wouldn’t shock me, it would be kind of sad, but it wouldn’t shock me if they said, yeah, well we updated the Mac mini here it is and it was just using haswell. Wouldn’t shock me, it’d be said.

Andy: What if they accompanied it by a hundred dollar price drop, would that soften the blow a little bit?

Jason: Yeah, I mean, I don’t know what Apple is thinking for this product, right? I mean, when it first came out it was $499, which was amazing. And then the next year they sort of stepped away and said no, $599, let’s try that. But there’s room in there. It would be interesting to see. I think Apple knows exactly who’s using this product, I think, and what they’re using it for. And they may just decide and look, you know, this is, it’s going to be better than the existing chips that are in there because it’s two years old and have this.

Rene: It never went Haswell. It’s an interesting thing, Broadwell has a lot of advantages for a retina MacBook air. What their advantages are for a MAC mini it’s harder to determine.

Sarah: Well, I think in a few minutes we should probably start talking about bendy phones, because I know you’re all ready to do that. But first let’s take a quick break to thank Hover.com for sponsoring this episode of MacBreak Weekly. If you’ve got a great idea for, you know a website, or a blog, or whatever you need a domain. Well okay, where do you go? You want something catchy, you want a good memorable name, and you want it to represent you in some way, that’s what Hover is so good for. It gives you exactly what you need to get your domain, get it secured, and get on with whatever creative project you want to attach to it. You need that perfect domain. So right now is a great time to start a new project, because Hover recently lowered prices on over two hundred domain extensions, including many top level domains. They also reduced the price for new .com domain names, now $12.99. Plus who is privacy is included for free on every domain that supports it. People love Hover, geeks lover Hover, developers love Hover, designers, programmers. People love Hover because they know that they have good tools and they have good support. You don’t have to be some sort of a tech expert to get a domain, it’s very, very easy to use hover. Search a few keywords, hover will show you the best available options. Maybe you’ve got an idea for a domain, let’s see if it’s available. Maybe it isn’t, maybe it is! But maybe it isn’t and maybe there’s something similar that Hover could suggest to you and you go, okay, alright. What are you doing Chad? You looking for my name? Sarahlane.com isn’t available because I own it! But hey, we’ve got some other stuff. Sarahlane.biz! I’m missing out! Sarahlane.today! That’s kind of fun. Sarahlane.global. Sarah Lane.pro and the list goes on, obviously. That would be really weird domain for you to have, but it would be kind of fine for me to have. Hover also offers valet transfer service. You might be using another domain registrar, and lots of people are, you switch over to Hover and it’s a painless process for free Hover takes care of the entire process for you and lets you know when your domains are nice and settled in, in your hover account. They also transfer all your DNS settings, I have sometimes been in DNS hell here or there, because you make one little wrong move and then it’s very confusing. Hover does all that for you no matter how many domain names you have, it’s no additional cost. Best customer service support, no wait, not hold, no transfer phone service, and hover also offers volume discounts. That means that they give you a discount on your domain renewals, which starts at 10 domains, and then goes up in value from there. So they, kind of throw you a bone if you’re actually managing a larger amount of domains. And some of us are! Visit hover today to register your domain name and little extra, 10% off your first purchase! Hover.com, that’s hover.com, and use the promo code: MBW9. That stands for MacBreak Weekly 9. Promo code: MBW9, and thanks so much to Hover for their support of MacBreak Weekly! I’m Sarah Lane, filling in for Leo Laporte here on MacBreak Weekly, this week Leo is off in London, but I am joined by, in person Jason Snell. Of course, to my Left Andy Ihnatko and then of course, Rene Ritchie sitting in Americas hat up there. You guys must get so sick of saying things like that!

Rene: No, you took Justin Bieber off our hands, we’re good.

Sarah: There you go. There you go. He almost fits better in the US. Which is…what does that say about all of us. So I mentioned before the break, and thanks all of you gentlemen for joining me today. Before the break I said we should probably talk about the whole bendy phone crisis. Which apparently is a lot less of a crisis than perhaps Samsung would have us believe. Rene, your phone does not look bendy.

Rene: I have had this in my non hipster jeans for going on 14 days, I’ve sat down with it, I’ve run around with it, I’ve done everything I can humanly do with it. It is still straight.

Sarah: This is a 6 or a 6 plus?

Rene: This is a 6 plus, I have a 6 in my other pocket, and that is also straight.

Sarah: Now when you say pockets and you say sitting, you’re talking about front pockets or back pockets or?

Rene: front pockets, I am not an animal.

Sarah: Well, see I don’t know! I don’t. I have a 6 plus here, which if anybody watches my show Ifive, you know that I have a lot of buyer’s remorse. Even though it was Leo’s money, I still…

Rene: You have Leos buyer’s remorse.

Sarah: I still have remorse, because it’s too large for me, but I wouldn’t dream of even trying to put in in a pocket because I don’t have pockets that fit phones in general. Maybe a blackberry pearl would fit in one of my front pockets, but we’re not really doing that anymore. Alright, Jason.

Jason: I’ve got the 6 here.

Sarah: You’ve got the 6 which is so significantly smaller than the 6 plus that it’s unbelievable. But is it fitting comfortably in your pocket?

Jason: Oh yeah, I haven’t noticed a difference, but it’s not the 6 plus.

Sarah: True.

Jason: I’m use to the 5S in my pocket so it’s not that different.

Sarah: Does everybody carry phones in their pockets?

Rene: If you have pockets

Andy: Yeah.

Sarah: I mean, I’ve got pockets, I’ve just never thought to shove a phone in it.

Jason: So ben Thompson who does stretechory, he lives in Taiwan and I mentioned this on TWIT actually a couple weeks ago, he says that we know that large phones are very bit in Asia. That’s the market where the galaxy notes have had the most success. And when I was talking to Apple about the 6 plus, they definitely said there were certain regions that really love huge phones, and Asia is the biggest one. And what Ben Thompson said is, people who have these big phones generally do not put them in their pockets. They have a bag and it lives in the bag and then they take it out and use it, and then they put it back in the bag. And you know, this also, obviously some cultural stuff at work here, but I think that’s an interesting thing that we, here in the US especially, being used to these smaller phones because they sell better here. I think are used to putting them in our pockets, and big phones maybe not work in pockets so well. I don’t know.

Andy: Also, we’re Americans, we’ve got big pants for our big butts so we’ve got pockets that can hold that kind of stuff.

Rene: Exactly.

Andy: But I’ve found, I’ve been carrying around both of them about pretty much daily. No bendy problems yet, that doesn’t mean that I absolutely discount the experiences that some people have been having. The thing that I’ve been finding a little bit disappointing about some of the commentary that every time so and so says yeah, I was carrying it in a pocket and it bent after a couple of days, the immediate response is oh it’s just stupid people doing stupid things with their phones, because they’re idiots. Let’s wait…I don’t think it’s an epidemic problem, or else we’d be seeing a lot more reports of it than this. But let’s wait a few weeks until we see what happens. I do think you have to make a deliberate choice for the 6 plus, you really shouldn’t just get it because it’s bigger and fancier. Because, even I, I’m in the habit of carrying the phone in my shirt pocket because it’s easily accessible, and I spent a really wonderful day on Sunday walking around with both these phones, just 8 miles, covering most of Boston just taking pictures. And I had to make sure that I did not keep my 6 plus in my shirt pocket because I was, had kind of a little bit shallow and boy, you just put about 17 degrees of flex in my waist and that thing is almost certainly going to be tumbling out, because it’s so top heavy off of this pocket. So I mean, you’re right Sarah, it’s going to be way too big for a lot of people, and it’s a shame that some people might have just gone for their gut instinct for the larger phone, when the IPhone 6 is plenty big. It’s almost a...I almost consider it a perfect size if you don’t have a fancy for a smaller sized phone. Enough screen real estate to make an...enough extra screen real estate to make it worthwhile but small enough you can really conceal it pretty well.

Sarah: Yeah, I thought that the whole let’s get the six plus, even though it’s ridiculous because I’m a pretty small person, and I certainly don’t have big hands, would be just a sort of a fun experiment, especially because as you guys were mentioning, there are certain markets where the larger phablet type sized phone’s, I don’t know if phablet is a bad word on this show or not, but you know what I mean, do sell well. People like them, there are different accessories for carrying these phones, maybe it’s not so dependent on being in your pocket. My phone was never in my pocket to begin with, so that part doesn’t really bother me. I’ve got some sort of hand bag or shoulder bag or something usually with me, but, it’s, it’s so comically large that it’s, I’m going to get used to it. I have gotten used to it over the last ten days, but it’s not getting any easier, I can never use it with one hand!

Rene: It’s not as enjoyable as you’d hoped.

Andy: Can I ask you, have you been… You were primarily an IOS user to begin with? You weren’t using Android phones?

Sarah: Never.

Andy: Okay.

Sarah: That’s part of the issue.

Andy: That’s part of it. If it’s still too big, it’s still too big. I think that the reason why 6 plus could be really, really jarring for people who are moving up from an IPhone 5 is because they haven’t had the chance, like me, to transition through, where this, if I’d move straight to this from an IPhone 4, this would have looked freaking huge, whereas this looks just a little on the large size, but it’s not huge. And so to go form this to a phablet size phone, a 5.5 inch screen. The iPhone plus still is pretty big even for me, but it doesn’t seem quite so shocking. But you’re right, I was taking lots and lots of pictures, that was the whole point of my taking that walk on Sunday, and even for me it was wow, there’s so many times where especially when you’re just taking a casual shot, I’ve got a drink in my hand, I’m walking through quinsy market, now I really have to put that drink down because whereas, you’ve got a shot at one handing a camera like this. The 6 plus, that thing is going to go right on to those cobble stones and break into smithereens if you even try it. So I think a case is absolutely important for the iPhone 6 plus for everybody. I actually, I usually am anti case. I just like to feel the phone the way that it is and it’s thinner that way, and for the first time I think, I’m a hazard! I’m a walking hazard because it’s all about juggling now, can I reach my thumb over, whoa! That’s the end of the phone! I’ve also noticed and this is probably, it says something about the fact that I take too many walks at night, and I live in a somewhat dangerous neighborhood of San Francisco, but I find that I feel very conspicuous.

Rene: Yes.

Sarah: When I’ve got my phone out and I’m doing something, not that the iPhone 5S which was my last iPhone was invisible by any means, but you could almost kind of, tuck it into your… You know if you just sort of thing I’ve got to hide it for a second, or dip it into a pocket for a minute. This doesn’t go anywhere. I feel like I’m sort of like, Rob me!

Rene: You’re holding a bill board! It’s not a walking typer Sarah.

Sarah: Take my phone! My expensive phone!

Andy: Well with a big battery it’s going to hurt a lot more when you throw it at someone’s face and that’s an upside.

Sarah: There you go, it’s a weakness and a weapon.

Rene: Go back to the bending thing for a second, because a lot of people have made fun of it. There’s a YouTube culture versus Apple culture war going on about it. It’s a little silly to me because it shows that people have trouble holding that two truths can exist at the same time. Back with antenna gate, there was obviously a problem if you were in a low signal area and you touched a certain part of the phone, you could detune the signal. You didn’t have to touch that part of the phone, and once you understood the physics behind it, you were fine. But it took a little bit of education and type and Apple adapted to it with the Verizon IPhone 4 and 4s, and this is similar. You have a very thin piece of aluminum, and it’s very thin because Apple realized that, it’s not think for thin sake, and a lot of people wanted it to be thicker. It’s thin because it makes it lighter, and the same with the IPad two and IPad air. Bigger things when they’re lighter are easier for human beings to use to hold up for long periods of time.

Andy: Not necessarily.

Rene: But when you have this sort of relationship here with the phone, there’s the volume buttons and there’s a bulge right before the volume buttons with a titanium and steel reinforcement stuff, so if you apply pressure to that cut out area where the volume is and the bolt meat, you can buckle the structure, that’s something you can understand, pay attention to, be careful with it. If its’ something you think you’ll do, put a case on, It’s not the same as people bending phones for jokes on YouTube, which is horrible. Or going into stores and bending it, but it’s something that exists because of physics. Because you have an object that has certain structural areas, and again, for me, you understand what the problem is, or understand what the physics are and then take good care of the stuff that you bought.

Andy: I think that it was maybe…not an analogy that I 100% agree with because Antenna gate was a real problem. I experienced that day one, I literally had it out of the packaging that it had come in twenty minutes earlier, fired it up, had a SIM card in it and I was watching wow, I had four bars before, why is there now one bar?

Rene: What I meant is some people deny it. Some people deny it was an issue, and it was an issue.

Andy: Exactly. I won’t even call it bend gate, but the issue that some people are having with bending, I agree it seems to be very, quite isolated, it doesn’t seem to be an epidemic, I don’t believe it’s a design fault, but the only complicity, if that’s even an appropriate word that Apple has is that I think there are going to be a lot of people who are like Sarah are having their first really, really big phone, after years and years of having what are now a small phone but smartphone standards, and they’re only guilty of doing what, with their phones the things that they always do with their phones, which is to take really good care of them and try to prevent them from getting damaged. Unbeknown to them, well a larger phone has different rules now, and there are added risks that your smaller phone did not have. So I hope this will die down. I was very, first amused, and then kind of saddened by the fact that after about six or seven hours of walking around the city using my iPhone 6 plus, and now they’re still new enough and rare enough that hey! Is that the new iphone6? And two or three times I got asked, is it bending on you? And I said no, it’s not bending on me! It’s perfectly fine! It’s not made out of clay.

Rene: The IPhone 5s bent as well and it never got as much media attention. But you ask anybody who ever did any repairs at all, and you ask apple genius and they would tell you that anywhere around the volume area some people managed to bend the phone.

Sarah: Yeah, actually Anthony Nielsen who is one of our editors, I made a joke about bending iPhone 6’s and he pulled out his iPhone 5S and said look! I mean, Its not bent in half but you can see a small little ridge from I guess sitting on it for the last year or so. Apple says only nine people actually have complained about this. I don’t know exactly where you get that official number but it must be a certain way that somebody sent in a complaint to apple support. But consumer reports of course, got on the band wagon and did some testing. Is the Iphone6 plus for example, any weaker than other competitors in that class of smartphone? Consumer report says the IPhone 6 plus, the more robust of the new iPhone’s in our testing, started to deform when we reached 90 pounds of force, and came apart with 110 lbs. of force. With those numbers it slightly outperformed the HTC one, which is largely regarded as a sturdy solid phone. As well as the smaller iPhone 6, yet underperformed some other smartphones. And goes on to mention the LGG3, the Samsung galaxy Note 3. Now what we’re talking about, you know, 90 lbs. of force, you’re not talking about gingerly like, oh sorry! My phone was in my back pocket.

Rene: When round butts hit flat phones Sarah.

Sarah: Yeah, this is I mean, that’s not happening very often!.

Andy: Exactly.

Sarah: It just can’t be.

Andy: For 10 million phone’s sold, of which we don’t know how many are 6 pluses, but I’m betting it’s more than 9, that’s a low number for Apple to even report, so I’m not worried.

Sarah: Yeah, it’s almost like saying, my phone fell in the toilet because it was in my back pocket, because it was so small I forgot it was there. Thanks for nothing Apple.

Jason: Well like Andy said, I think it’s worth, I love that Andy is counseling patience here, because over time, and with more of these out there, we’ll find out whether there is, was there a manufacturing flaw, is this just a weakness in every model, is this common or not, and my guess is that if some phones do have this problem, Apple will probably have a policy and they’re replace them and they’ll, you know, they’ll do something. But right now it seems like such a small case, that unless you’re really trying to get attention, you’re not very likely to see a problem here! And then we’ll just have to see how it goes. But I do think it’s fair to say that in a few months we’ll have a much better idea. The internet doesn’t want to wait a few months for anything, but we will have a better idea whether this is a serious problem or just another kind of oddball thing that happens when a new iPhone comes out.

Rene: Every year Jason, there’s something.

Jason: There’s always something.

Sarah: There’s always something.

Andy: Like my grandma! Grandma!

Sarah: We mentioned earlier in the show that there was a small window of IOS 8.0.1. I think what was pulled about an hour and a half after being pushed out because…

Jason: Yeah, 80 minutes, yep.

Sarah: It was 80 minutes!

Jason: I counted.

Sarah: Good work! I had not installed the update, so I was unaffected and I got to just sort of sit back with some popcorn and watch Twitter have a meltdown and then regroup. So that’s always, it’s always fun to be an outsider in those situations, and think I’m so glad I wasn’t one of the first.

Jason: I was one of the first, absolutely. But that’s sort of our jobs, right? To try this stuff. So I did it and I think Rene and I had a whole back and forth on Twitter as we both updated and said, yep, cell service is gone, touch id is gone, and everybody else who had installed it started chiming in and then it turned out very quickly that it was just the 6’s that seemed to be effected. 5s didn’t seem to be effected. And, Rene, didn’t we also figure out that it was also only if you did it over the air?

Rene: Yeah, the binary was fine. It was only the bit differential file for the on device. Which is a crazy problem to have.

Jason: yeah, yeah.  So that stunk, it was interesting to watch how Apple rolls back a mistake like this. Because they haven’t really done this very often, if ever.

Sarah: Sure.

Jason: If I can remember. The first thing they did, and this is actually very clever. The first thing they did was stop signing the update, and what that means is at the end after they download it, is your device, with any of these Apple updates, your device checks with the software to see if the signature matches, to basically, so it can’t be vulnerable to an attack where a fake software update is sent to you that can take over your phone. And they will often turn off signing for older versions of the operating system, so you can’t roll back. So what they did is they turned off signing for this, so people would download the update, some of them In the process of downloading the update, and then it would say some weird error, like you’re not on the internet. I got one that said device is not authorized. It was weird, but what it was really doing was saying, I’m not going to install this. So they did that first, and then about ten minutes later, if you were on an 8.0 device and you checked for software update it said, you’ve got the latest version! So they eventually rolled it all the way back, and then I think later the next day they pushed out 8.0.2. So it was an interesting process of like how long does it take Apple to stop the flow of a software update. And it was, I think pretty impressive that it only took them about 80 minutes to shut it completely down.

Sarah: But not that I can imagine just a lot of confusion from people who need cellular service.

Rene: Apple said there were 40,000 people effected out of 10 million iPhone 6’s and 6pluses, which is by no means trivial. And there were some people who said I never use touch id and never make phone calls so I didn’t even notice. I managed to downgrade to IOS 8.0.0 and then reinstall it, then downgrade, and then actually install the binary for IOS 8.0.1 and that worked fine.

Andy: It was really, I agree Jason, It was so impressive, I was away at meetings that afternoon and it was out and then pulled by the time I was aware of it and was ready to start downloading it. My backup theory is that maybe this is more genius Apple marketing where they’re trying to do now, limited edition releases like Mondo gallery prints, where it’s only available if you download it for the next 80 minutes and only 40,000 people will get it. So if you have the 8.0.1 release, put that in a Ziploc bag phone and then put it on eBay because it’s going to be worth something someday.

Rene: I up dated already.

Sarah: I guess I could see someone saying, oh I didn’t have to make a phone call in those couple of hours so what’s it really matter? But the touch id?

Jason: That’s what I noticed when I rebooted.

Andy: This in itself is a big deal because if you needed to make a phone call in that hour, oh boy! If your dad has just had a stroke that’s a bad scene.

Sarah: Definitely.

Rene: And you had to roll back, you had to go to ITunes and download the IOS 8 install and run the update in place using iTunes on the computer to fix it during that one day period. Which is also non trivial for people who aren’t very comfortable or who don’t even remember the days before ICloud when you had to do that all the time to upgrade.

Jason: Yeah.

Andy: We’ll do the next one on DVD or CD.

Rene: I’ll mail you a thumb drive.

Andy: 40 floppy’s, get your MAC se.

Sarah: Are their people who prefer to not use touch ID when given the option? I mean, it’s one of the best things ever invented as far as I’m concerned, but I also hate typing in my password every time I want to install an app for example.

Jason: I heard a lot of people right after the 5S came out say that they were turning it off. And the software, you know, they made some software tweaks to make it work better, but it works so great now, I never have a problem unless I’ve been doing the dishes or something and my hands are wet.

Sarah: Exactly, sometimes at the gym if I’m sweaty enough, it’s like oh this is not working.

Jason: Yeah, but otherwise it just works. And with IOS 8 now you can unlock all sorts of other stuff too, which makes it that much more valuable, like unlocking one password with my thumbprint is so great.

Rene: We had a big discussion about this on vector yesterday because Jesse Char of formerly of Apple, formally of Pacific Helm said that her fingerprints never read with it. For some reason it just never works.

Andy: She’s a replicate.

Rene: She might be.

Andy: She has a quaranti logo in the middle of the fingertip that’s throwing it off I’m guessing.

Rene: She said that she never uses it because for her it’s a form of identification, and right now, with a passcode someone else can use your passcode, can use your phone, send something, but if she ever sends someone a nasty text, it’s now got her fingerprints. It proves she was the one who sent it. So for her it’s entirely a culpability argument.

Jason: Interesting.

Sarah: Weird, weird fingerprint issues. I don’t know, I love touch id.

Jason: I love touch ID too, because I put a hard password on my phone then instead of a 4 digit code, because I never want to enter a long password every single time I want to unlock, but now that I’ve got touch ID, I only have to do that when I reboot, so that’s great.

Sarah: And even then, I would say, that doesn’t happen that often, sometimes I run out of batteries because I’m not paying attention, or something. But even then it’s like..grr, yeah that’s right, my phone restarted now I have to type in my password.

Rene: There is a legal issue though. Because I believe in American law still you can be compelled to use your fingerprint but not compelled to use a passcode so to give up a passcode so some people for legal reasons won’t enable a touch ID.

Andy: And that’s an interesting point, because I actually read the justification behind that, because your passcode is information that you know that you cannot be compelled to say, but the fingerprint is just a physical thing and you don’t have to actually tell anybody what it is. And so that’s the legal position that on the basis that they can’t compel you to unlock something with a fingerprint but not a passcode. The law is amusing as hell, is it not?

Rene: It really is.

Sarah: Amusing for sure. Has anybody played around with any of the apps that have been updated to support the health kit? This is all in the last week or so, this was enabled by 8.0.1 and then enabled again by 8.0.2.

Sarah: Right, exactly. I feel like I’m seeing press releases, breathless press releases about the fitness app will now talk to the health app and keep all your data in one place. I don’t know, maybe it says something about the fact that I’m not very fitness oriented, but I have yet to find it to be a killer service for me yet. But you know, these are early days too.

Jason: I don’t know, I haven’t seen anything yet. None of the apps that I use have updated to support the health app yet. So I was just checking and there’s nothing in there.

Sarah: Nothing in there, huh?

Jason: But I think at some point apple said this was going to happen about a month after release when they had this kind of mess up that prevented a lot of stuff from working. And then they released it from 8.0.1 and then I wonder if the developers are all like, come on Apple! I’m still working on it! I don’t know! It’s going to take time, like a lot of these things.

Andy: Absolutely. I feel the same about IOS 8, where I don’t think the iPhone 6 and 6 plus have been officially released for, until December or January when, not only developers have a chance to update their stuff to work with these phones, but also they themselves have had time with these new phones, these new technologies that as users they can decide, oh I thought that academically back in august I’d want my app to behave this way, but it actually makes more sense for it to interact like this. So it’s going to be pretty exciting come January I think.

Sarah: Yeah, I’m excited to use apps that can somehow take advantage of at least keeping health data in one place. But…

Rene: Health Kit is still kind of rough. Like when you install an app that uses health kit, Apples got really, really good privacy protection. So you can choose send and receive for every single function of that app, but that’s leading to these page long toggle sheets that you just get presented with like a wall of permissions when you first start, and the developers have found bugs in some of the things, and they’ve been having trouble addressing them. If you have multiple devices you have to set up, like are you going to let your jawbone up communicate your steps, are you going to let the chip in your phone do it? Are you going to let them know about each other? It seems like this is a technology that is sort of coalescing and it’ll take a few months before we have really good health kit apps. But you also really know how to use it and Apple really understands what developers, and we’re doing so they can make it all work better for us.

Andy: And this also goes far beyond just fitness and mobility. If you drill down into that menu structure and see all of the fine grain health data that this can collect, and manage, and organize for you. If you’ve ever been the caretaker for someone who is critically ill, you know that you really, there is information that you need to track on an hourly and a daily basis, and only by collecting that data over a period of days and weeks, and sometimes even months, do you figure out…like if you’re taking care of someone who is an insulin dependent diabetic, this is a problem I was having when I was taking care of my mom. Where it took a couple weeks to figure out how to manage her sugar perfectly so if she gets a snack at exactly this time of the night she won’t have a problem. I want to make sure I do another check at this time of the day, and that was the sort of stuff that only happened because I kept an old PowerBook on the table that did nothing except this sort of data that I was inputting. And so when you look at this sort of data that could be not just collected by the fact that you’re walking around, but also if you imagined part of a house that has different health devices inside it that can now communicate with this and feed this information saying, while the individual was moving from these times of the day to this other time of the day, here is what their blood chemistry was like, here is what their oxygen take was like. That’s going to be the really wonderful and beneficial part of this is going to be when you just simply take a phone out of your pocket, glance at this graph and you see correlations that you did not see before only by the fact that this data has one localized place to land, and a really cool user interface to present itself. So certainly the features that everyone is going to be looking at and be most familiar with is how many steps did I walk, how many calories did I consume, what was my heart rate if I have a heart rate monitor. But there’s going to be a small percentage of users out there that are going to get the greatest benefit of all because those are the people who really needed health kit.

Sarah: Yeah, I think probably the day to day, how many calories should I burn, you know the novelty of that is going to wear off for a lot of people, even if you have got good intentions. Kind of like going on a diet, most of the time you end up losing interest and it’s not actually data that’s going to work that well for you, because your behavior is, you know, you can’t just change them over night because you’ve got some tools.

Andy: Even that is cool too, because as you can…I do take constitutionals two to four times a week. It’s not like I spend all my time in the house getting all my exercise from the wrists downward, but it’s only, I tried a health band for a while, at some point you misplace where the charger is, because you came home from a trip so it takes you two days to find it, and then after two days you’ve kind of got out of the habit of keeping this thing on your wrist at all times. Whereas the phone is something you always have on you, you always have with you, so it can really do a good job of monitoring your activity and like I was saying earlier, once you have all this incidental data being collected, where you weren’t even really interested in this as a project of using data to improve my health, but you accidently or just out of bored curiosity because your bus is late or you finished your last kindle book, you can look at your data and it can show you, oh here are days that I just don’t seem to leave the house. I don’t seem to do a lot of activity, and here are days I seem to be very, very active, I need to be more active on these days. I’ll tell you one quick story about, I was doing maintenance of my google account, which is something that you should do often. Google collects a lot of information, but a good thing about the way they do it is that it’s all one page, here’s all the information we’ve got on you. You can take a look at the data yourself, if you don’t want us to collect this data, not only can you stop us from doing that you, but can also delete the data that’s there. I was only looking at my movement data, tracking where I happen to go with my phone, I realized that okay, so you left the house on Sunday, good. You didn’t leave the house Monday, or Tuesday. You left the house briefly to go to the store one mile away on Wednesday, didn’t leave the house Thursday, left the…okay, you know Andy, maybe you should just like put shoes on more often over the course of.. I know you are a freelancer, but this indicates something that if you correct this in your forties, your doctor will not be suggesting surgery in your fifties, maybe.

Sarah: Yeah, never thought about that. They know! They know a lot about your…how good of a sitter we are, as in sitting on the couch, bending our phone’s.

Andy: It takes energy to get off the couch, we should get credit for that. That barometer should say okay, congratulations, you sent form 18 inches off the ground to 43 inches of the ground.

Sarah: Yeah. That’s a lot of momentum. Exactly.

Rene: When you stand up.

Sarah: Yeah, it’s a reverse squat, that’s hard!

Andy: Exactly! I’m just pacing myself, that’s all.

Sarah: There you go. Let’s take another quick break, we want to thank SquareSpace for sponsoring this episode of MacBreak Weekly. Squarespace.com if you don’t use it, I’ve been using SquareSpace for years. It’s an all in one platform, whether you want to, you know, once you’ve got your Hover domain it’s like well now what do you want to do with it? That’s where SquareSpace actually comes in really well. All in one platform makes it really easy and fun actually to create a professional website, or online portfolio or some kind. If you even just go to squarespace.com you can look through templates as they have as a jumping off point. I’m not a designer, I wish I was, I’m just not. I never know where to start, I don’t really feel like I understand color palettes and I’m not really design inclined. Squarespace has some really beautiful templates that you can just use to get started. Go ahead and start building your website, maybe you’re pulling in data from somewhere else. But it is a really nice starting point. Really impressive, I’ve even had fun just kind of switching around templates to see how all of my information looks different depending on which template I’ve used. Once you’re up and running the designs are beautiful and of course they’re completely customizable. You’re not stuck with some template that you think oh this is really great, but I don’t really like the placement of this one column. All of that stuff is customizable. And it’s easy to use. Squarespace has live chat and email support 24 hours a day, seven days a week. But in many cases this is all very intuitive. It’s really designed for people who don’t know that much about putting together a professional website. If you do, you’re going to love it already. But if you don’t, you’re not going to feel like you’re lost, or that you’re over your head. And then of course, for those times that you might need a little bit of help, you do have that support from SquareSpace as well. Ecommerce is supported, all subscription plan levels now have the ability to accept donations. Hey, if you’re running a nonprofit, maybe you’re looking to pull in some cash for a wedding registry, or some sort of a fund drive. Maybe you’re raising money for the football team at the elementary school, whatever it might be, that’s a really nice offering from SquareSpace as well. Plans start at just 8 dollars a month, that’s really inexpensive considering they do everything for you. Includes a free domain, if you sign up for a year, and its mobile ready. I’m really not actually tinkering around with SquareSpace on my desktop all that often anymore, but they sure have a nice iPad app. It’s great, you know, you go in and see who’s been visiting my blog, look at some stats, you can manage comments from the mobile offerings as well. And anybody who likes good code, code at SquareSpace is really nice. Everything under the hood is lovely. Again, hosting is included, and you can actually start a free two week trial without even needing your credit card. You’re not on the hook for anything, you just start building your website, two weeks completely free, try out some templates, see what you like. And when you decide to sign up for a plan at SquareSpace, use the offer code MACBREAK, that’s MACBREAK, and you get 10% off. And it also gives you opportunity to show your support for MacBreak Weekly, and TWiT. As a special promotion for our MacBreak Weekly audience, SquareSpace is giving away a full year of its most premium level service, which is valued more than 288 dollars to a randomly selected audience member, just tweet ‘better web sites for all’, with #squarespace MacBreak to be considered. If you currently have a SquareSpace site, then post your site URL too, and we might talk about it on a future episode. Again, two week trial, no credit card needed, start building your website with SquareSpace. I guarantee you’re going to like it. The folks at SquareSpace have been very good to us over the years and we’ve always really liked working with them. So thanks Squarespace for their support of MacBreak Weekly, a better web awaits you! And it starts with your new Squarespace website! So FBI director, James Comi said last week, I think It was last Thursday that he was pretty concerned with some steps that companies like Apple, I think, the following day Google came out and said, yeah, we’re going to make sure that data is encrypted so that, in a new way, so that when the NSA comes knocking on our door we can say, well we have zero access to any of that data so as an Apple consumer, customer, I can then feel a little bit more free to express myself, if for some reason I was worried about that sort of thing. Comi told reporters at a press conference about this subject, “I’m a huge believer in the rule of law, but I also believe that no one in this country is beyond the law. What concerns me about this is companies marketing something expressly to allow people to place themselves beyond the law. Okay. I believe that I can understand what Director Comi is getting at here. Clearly he works for the FBI, so he has a vested interest in wanting as much information as possible. And let’s just say that, hey, they’re, you know, if you think about the bureau, what they’re trying to do is keep the good people safe from the bad people.

Rene: Well I’m sure the head of the Chinese FBI and the head of Russian FBI wants the same access. The head of the Congolese FBI. America is where Apple is located but it’s not by any means the only country in the world.

Sarah: Sure.

Rene: I am happy that, you know, if the FBI probably doesn’t want other security agencies to have access to the information and we live in a world where unfortunately if you left one person in, you let everybody any. So I’m much happier if all of them have to go knocking on personal doors and not some big server anymore.