(techno music) - Hello and welcome to episode one of Upgrade, a show that looks at how technology shapes us over time and drives us into the future. This is episode one. Today is September 16th, 2014. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Igloo, an internet you'll actually like, and text expander from Smile, type more with less effort. My name is Mike Curly, and I have the pleasure of introducing your host, Mr. Jason Snell. - Hi, Mike, and hello to everybody out there. It's great to be here. - It's great to have you on Relay FM, Jason. - It's, yeah, well, I've been on Relay FM several times, but this is episode one of Upgrade, which is exciting because I was just a guest in other people's houses before, and this is the home we share, Mike. - I know, it's very nice, it's very cozy in here. So, I mean, should we talk a little bit about Upgrade before we like get into the main topic? - I think we should. I mean, it is episode one, and it is, yeah, we should talk about it at least a little bit before we talk about the stuff that's going on and the new iPhones, which are, which I have, and I can talk about now, which is exciting. So, we've been, like, basically this show is, the way that I look at it is with you, we have someone who has a vast amount of experience. - Right, that means I'm old. - For a man of your young age. - Oh, okay, well done, well played. - And, you know, you are a man of great insight as well, and, you know, now that you are a free agent, it would be a travesty if you did not have a place every week where you could wax lyrical about what's happening in the technology industry. And one of the things that I wanted us to focus on was not just Apple. I mean, we're talking about Apple today, but I think that your sort of knowledge, it goes across different types of companies. So, across, like, to Google and Microsoft, and to maybe other different software and hardware vendors and stuff like that, because I think that there's definitely more than just the Apple news cycle. And I think it would be really interesting for us to take a look at how things are changing over the time, look at how things are going to change into the future, but across the entire industry, rather than just one company or one type of thing. - Yeah, I agree. I mean, when we were talking about companies, I kept mentioning Amazon, too, which I'm fascinated by, I'm a big Amazon. I mean, other than Apple, I think my number two company that I, whose services and products I consume, it's probably Amazon, and then Google below that. And there's a lot going on that's interesting. I, obviously, as somebody who has written about primarily Apple stuff and related for the last 20 years, since I was a baby. I, obviously, Apple is near and dear to my heart, and what's that saying? If you cut me, I bleed six colors, you know? That is true. But, you know, I always take a skeptical view toward Apple, and I'm always taking an open view toward the other stuff that's going on. And I think it's worth talking about that, and you can view that through a perspective of people as Apple product users, and as a perspective of people who are not, and how it affects Apple, and how it affects the rest of technology. We're all using the web, web publishing, and the evolution of the web continues, and Amazon is, like I said, a fascinating company, too. So we have lots to talk about. And then, if we wanna, you know, horn in on Casey Liz's territory, we'll talk about feels a little bit, too. So we could do that. We could do anything as possible. It's episode one. There's a blank canvas before us, Mike. - Nothing's holding us back anymore. - That's right. And I mean, you mentioned it. One of the, I love podcasting people who know me, may know that I have been doing a podcast called The Incompable for about four years now, that I started in my spare time, mostly because I thought podcasting was really cool, and I wanted to do more of it, and I also wanted to do something that wasn't in the auspices of my employer, something that I could make and control, and have it be exactly what I wanted it to be. And it has been that and continues to be that, and now has a bunch of spin-offs. And at Macworld, you know, I could have forced things and said, look, I decree that the Macworld podcast will be my podcast, and it will only be me, and I will, you know, I could do that. But the fact is Macworld had a fantastic collection of people who wrote for it. And I wanted them to all have a chance. And so since, you know, our feeling was that everybody worked there. Their technology parts of their brain were really being taken up by their employer. That limited my outlet in terms of tech podcasts. I guessed it on a lot of them, but I didn't feel like I could do one, and I didn't really want to start another one inside IDG. So having left IDG last week, I, you know, when I knew that was happening, I, you know, we started talking about it, 'cause I definitely do want to do podcasts about technology. And rather than put them at the Incompable, which is really about pop culture, I decided I didn't want to muddy those waters with technology. I really love what you guys have been doing with Relay. And so here we are. So here we go. - I mean, I feel like right now people are just clamoring to hear what we're about to talk about. So we should probably, we should probably give it to them. - I think you're probably right. - So as we stand today, my order is in, and I'll talk about what phone I've ordered. But you are, you are one of the lucky chosen few, and you have N or multiple iPhones in your position right now. - I do, I have, so I was one of the people that was fortunate enough to be given advanced access to the iPhone 6, which comes after they announce it, but before they release it. And I got on and off that list over the years, but I got on at this time, which was kind of awkward as I was exiting Macworld. And so we sort of agreed that I would do a one last review for Macworld of the new model. So I have both, I have the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus. I've had them since last week. My review should be, if it's not up now, shortly, on Macworld and maybe some other places too. But, and then I'm talking about it with you here. But yeah, so I've been able to play with them for the last little while, and that's been fun. - Before we talk about the products, I think something that interests so many people that are outside of this chosen few, of which there are many people that would like to be in it. I've always been very curious about what happens after the event is over. So the event's over, you get led into this ominous cube this time, which is maybe a little bit different. We won't tell what the cube is for. - From the ground level, it wasn't ominous at all. It looked like a really big Apple store. And it was just, it was exactly what we all thought was gonna be, what we who go to these events, not the, like, criminologists thought it was gonna be, which is a spaceship that was combined with some sort of surgery practice that would implant things in your head. It's a hands-on area. And at Yerba Buena, where they often do these events, but that's a much smaller venue, there is another building across the way from the main theater that was always set up as the hands-on area. But it was very small. And so even with the smaller theater, there'd be a long wait. There was actually, strangely enough, still a long wait to get into this thing. It wasn't that huge. But it was, you know, they had a big area with eye watches or Apple watches, sorry, on little stands. And then they had areas where they had iPhones laid out on the, on the tables. And Apple employees next to each station to show you and make, you know, how they work and also make sure that you didn't steal them. And then also some eye watches or Apple watches. God, I've gotta stop saying that. - So hot to not say it. - I know, I know Apple watches, just watches. It could be you, it could be me. And they had those with people too. And that was funny because they had, the Apple employee would have one that they would put on your wrist and it was running in a demo loop. So it wasn't actually functional in any way. It would show you things and it would vibrate. So you could get the feel of like the weight of it. And you could see what the screen looked like and you could feel what the haptic stuff felt like, but you couldn't actually use it. And then separately, while you had it on your wrist, and then they would demo on their wrist a very limited set, basically a script of what they could show you with the Apple watch. So that was what that Q was. - It's clearly not ready. - No, it's just like the original iPhone. When I, when I, and Mac world Expo back in 2007, I mean, I was one of the people who got brought in to see that thing. They brought in, I don't know, 20 or 30 members of the press to touch the iPhone and use it. And there wasn't even a script. They're like, here, have this. And I remember it was like warm and that display was, which it wasn't even retina, but it was so high resolution compared to what we were used to. And it was such a weird feeling to do it. But also I remember from that, that I tapped on like the, the Contacts app. And what came up was obviously a fairly low resolution, compressed JPEG of a screenshot of what the Contacts app might look like. And I thought, okay. - I'll just back away from this one. Touch any of the app, any of the 11 apps that are here, or whatever many of there were. And you found that like four of them actually were there. And the rest of them were sort of representations 'cause they just weren't working right yet. And the Apple Watch felt like that. It's not done. It's, we usually see Apple products when they're already being manufactured and they're gonna be shipping. And the iWatch, Apple Watch, I'm just gonna keep saying it. Apple Watch, Apple Watch, Apple Watch. It is, I'll say it'll appear. It's months away, it's months away. The software isn't done. People are talking sort of conspiratorially about the battery life. And all Apple will say is, at the end of the day, you will charge it. Which implies it will still be functional at the end of the day. But you know what, they don't know. I'm sure they are trying very hard to shoot for a goal, but they don't know what that battery life is really gonna be. Because the software's not done, the hardware might not be done. So we're a long way off there. And it's not ready, you get one chance when you're launching a product category to pre-announce it. And all the other times you're gonna kill your sales of the other product, so you have to wait. But you can pre-announce and build interest one time, the first time. And that's what they did with the Apple Watch. So yeah, it's totally not ready. It's funny how not ready it was. In fact, I tapped on one. And the guy was like, oh, you're not supposed to tap on that. (laughs) I tapped on one of the apps and it opened and it kind of looked weird. And he's like, no button, button, get us out of there. 'Cause I think I got off the script a little bit. They didn't want us touching it, but you know. - You just reached in anyway. - Well, I wanted to see about the tap targets 'cause I was worried that the tap targets are so small that if you wanna launch an app, are you really gonna be able to get it? And it did a good job. I mean, it launched the app and then the app was kind of funny, but it worked pretty much like you would expect. I mean, I didn't miss it and launch another app, but by doing this, I launched an app that wasn't supposed to launch apparently. - So does everybody that gets invited to the event get to go into the press area and see the devices? - I think so. I mean, most of the people there are press or they're VIPs and they all get to be allowed in and then there are Apple employees that probably don't because the Apple employees are, you know, some Apple employees were there to see the unveiling of it, but you know, there was a fire marshal there. It's a very limited space. They were letting people in as people left because they were at full capacity. So the press is all allowed to go and we all have our little colored badges that indicate that we're press and then the Apple employees I think are, if they're supposed to be there, they can walk right in and if they're not supposed to be there, then they're told to go away, go home, go back to work. - They probably show it to them on another day or something if they, you know. - Probably so. - So then how do you know if you're going to be given one of these units? Do they come and find you? Like, how does that process work for as much as you're able to say, yeah. - Yeah. I don't know if it's secret or not. It's, I mean, John Gruber famously wrote about one of these and it works like that. You get a heads up in advance from Apple PR saying, like, hang around or we'll meet you over here or here's a time come over here. And it can vary based on what they're doing. Are they just handing you a product to walk away with? Are they setting you up for a briefing? So, you know, there's a, there's a heads up, a high sign, a little secret handshake that says stick around and when you don't get that, then you're like, oh, okay. I guess I'm not, I guess I'm leaving with nothing. But I've been there. - You just kind of like drag your feet around a little bit and like look at people and be like, me, do you want me today? - But generally, traditionally, certainly in the Katie Cotton era of Apple PR, they wanted you to really keep it on the down low. Like, don't mention this to anybody else and don't just be, you know, fly casual. Come over here and we'll take you back into this other area where you'll wait for your briefing. Don't show off that you got a briefing and I gotta go, I got my secret product briefing, right? They always sort of frowned on that. That said, I did, as I was leaving the hands-on area, I ran into a writer of some note who was carrying an Apple logo, you know, Apple store bag with a couple of boxes in it. And I thought, well, those are your review, you said it was pretty funny. It was like, not quite a secret. But then again, you know, what was that person gonna do? Were they gonna hide it in a bag somewhere and deny all knowledge? - It does seem strange to me to give you an Apple store bag because like, I know people are getting the phones that day and everyone in the world knows where the event is. Like, so if you see somebody walking away with an Apple bag of a couple of boxes in it, you know what's in the book and everybody knows it. I think Apple is not really as concerned about that. They don't want people kind of like flaunting their access. But ultimately what Apple really doesn't want is public displays of the new devices. So, you know, if that person had gone over to a TV crew and said, let me show you this new thing, they would be in trouble. But it's not quite, it seems to me not as severe as it used to be. It used to be really like, you can't admit that this thing exists. You can't admit that you've been using it. You can't show it to anybody. And now it's a little bit different. Now it seems to be more like no public exhibitions. But if I'm reading the rules right, you know, I'm within my rights to use it and even for people to see it. But I can't, you know, write about it publicly. I can't go on somebody's TV show and show it. Anything like that. It's meant to be kind of, you know, people can nod and say, oh, there's Jason. He's got the new iPhone. If they ask to look at it, I probably, I might shake my head and say, I can't really. Or I might show it to them briefly, but it's a private conversation and then I walk away. But you got to, you know, the idea is, you've got this for some extra time so that you can work on your review and have it and take your time with it. You know, don't turn this into a media opportunity for you to be the first one to break, you know, the personal demo of this new device. So, you know, it's the rules are shifting, I think, because Apple PR's approach may be shifting. But generally, it's kind of common sense. So, let's talk about the devices. So, how have you been using them? Have you been just distributing your time between both? Because this is different, right? Having two phones to look at at once. Yeah, it is different. I mean, I've done that before when I reviewed the iPads, when there's iPad Air and an iPad Mini, right? I end up with two and I think, okay, well, here we go, right? You got to do a little bit of both. This is, so it's a little different. I put my SIM card from my 5S in the six. And they come with sample, you know, temporary SIM cards. So, they've got cell access anyway. So, I put that in my six review unit so that I could get my phone number on it and I could actually use it. You know, I set up, put in passwords and stuff on that. On the bigger one, I, you know, I can't have them both be my phone. So, that one was still using the demo SIM, you know, the two week life, one month life SIM card. And yeah, and so I've used that some, but I probably used the smaller one more just because I feel like it's a better match for how I use my current iPhone. And I wanted to see that experience where the other one seems a little further away from my current frame of reference. So, yeah, I try to use both of them. You know, I brought them with me to Portland for XOXO this past weekend and tried to use them there and on the train. And just, you know, get a sense of what it's like to live with these things in your pocket. And, 'cause that's the most important thing is to pull it out of your pocket and use it and see what's different and how it feels different. - But you had some attention to XO. - Yeah, yeah, I mean, you try to, like I said, fly casual. You're just like, don't, you're not trying to walk around and you're going, "Hey, anybody want to see the iPhone 6?" You don't want to do that. You don't want people taking pictures of you with it. You just, you don't want to do that. - How big are these fonts? Like, I know people have shown, you know, print enough PDFs, I've seen people carving them out of wood to making them on 3D printers, but you actually have the thing that you use and you've been using it. So, you know, it may be a certain size, but you know from use how big it feels when you're tapping buttons and turning the volume up and down, is there a way that you can try and describe compared to the 5S, what the 6 and the 6 Plus feel like to use from how big they are? - Yeah, it's, I'm still, you know, I'm still trying to process it. It's, the 6 doesn't feel as shocking as you might think. It's, part of that is the curved edges. It's got a much more curved feel like the iPads a little bit. I mean, it really is sort of like taking on this other design language that's been coming back with Apple devices. The iPod Touch has a very curvy edge. The iPads have a curvy edge. And the iPhone, since iPhone 4, has had the straight edge, you know, 90 degree. It's got the metal ring around it. And these don't. And so when you hold it in your hand, the smaller one especially, it actually doesn't feel that much bigger because it's thinner and because it's curved on the edges. And so I was expecting it to feel more kind of like dramatically oversized and you get used to that pretty quickly. So in that sense, I don't think it's a big deal. In another sense though, I think once you start using it, you realize that it is bigger because every now and then I try to reach my finger or my thumb to a far away point and it doesn't go like it used to. And I realize some of my body language has to change because it is bigger. And when you're trying to reach for something far away on the other side of the screen is when you really notice it. - Compared to the plus? - Well, the plus, there's no comparison. I mean, I can hold it in my hand and it feels fine. But it is huge. I mean, it's huge. I have tried to have an open mind to it. The big screen is nice. It's like half an iPad, and I have an iPad mini and it's not an iPad mini, but it is pushing upward toward an iPad mini from an iPhone. It's still an iPhone, but it is really big. Typing in landscape on the iPhone 6 Plus, I actually felt like I was stretching my thumbs to reach the letters in the center of the screen for thumb typing. It actually felt like I'm used to sort of having my thumbs not stick straight. I could do it, but I didn't feel it was kind of a long way. I was surprised. I'm like, wow, this is a really large, really wide held in that orientation, really wide keyboard that I'm typing on now. And I thumb type on my iPad mini too. So it's not like I'm not used to stretching my thumbs, but it struck me that this is a large device. It really is that you're going to notice how large it is. I think iPhone 5 users will get used to the 6 pretty quickly. After a few days, your frame of reference will change a little bit and I think it'll probably be fine. The 6 Plus is just a different beast. It's totally different. - In the keynote, Vusula mentioned about the devices being curved. Did he mean, I haven't seen anybody really clarify this. Did he mean the screens are curved or just the edges? - No, just the edges, just it's instead of having that chamfered edge, we all learned that word and now it's useless 'cause it's not there anymore. Instead of having that chamfered edge where you've got the sort of 90 degree angle and then there's the little edge part that's at the 45 degree angle that's all shiny. Instead, it just, there are glasses on the front and then there's a curved metal back plate. So it curves around to the back. And as a result, when you hold it in your hand, you don't feel those 90 degree angles as much. Instead, what you get is this sort of smooth curve. So I actually think it's got a more pleasant hand feel. Is that a thing? More pleasant feel when you hold it in your hand. I don't know, is it like mouth feel, except it's hand feel and suddenly we're cooking. And it also reminds me of the original iPhone. I think this is the, that had a curvy side thing and this has got the same thing. So it's, it reminds me of that. Another thing that struck me about it is that the, this is the first time on the iPhone that the camera has stuck out. Yeah, that seemed like a really, I'm surprised to have not seen more criticism of this because Apple didn't mention it, I wonder why. Yeah. This is something that you see lots of criticism that people levy towards Android phones. Like it has some, like a lens or something that sticks out of the back. Because so my, the way that I've had devices like this, I've used devices like this. And then when you lay it down on a desk and you press it, it rocks. I assume that the iPhone does that. It, it does a little bit depending on where you press. If you press right at the top, it's gonna rock a little bit more. As you get further down, it's, it's, it's really stable. It, it, the, the camera lens pushes out. It doesn't push out very far. It pushes just at the lens. There's not like a big bulge. But it is definitely a departure because it's not, it's not a completely flat back. Now I, I never use my iPhone while it's laying on a flat surface. I don't, I don't do that. It's in my hand. But if you do, you'll, you might notice a little bit of rocking, it's true. It's not, it's not as severe as if the whole back was curved like on the, the iPhone 3G. But it is, it is real because it is sticking out. It doesn't stick out very far either. But I think this is one of those cases where Apple just, they wanted the product to be thin. They are obsessed with the product being as thin as possible and it is thinner than any previous iPhone. But the laws of physics require that you have some space for the optics in a camera. And they know how important having a good camera is. And they've, you know, spent a lot of time in the, in the event talking about how great this new camera is. And those two things fight against each other. And so they finally decided to just kind of hold their breath and have it stick out and just deal with it. - Did they need to shave those millimeters off? Do you think? - I don't know. I mean, I don't know about the way they, I mean, the way it feels good. And I wonder if it was thicker, would, would it feel as comfortable in my hand if it was thicker and would it, it weigh more? Because presumably if they made it thicker, they'd, they'd more, add more battery or something like that to it. - Yeah. - Which wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing, by the way. But they, they have a lot of variables that they're solving for. They're solving for battery life and they're solving for lightness and they're solving for thinness. And they're also solving for camera quality. And you make some tough choices and you know, they, they seem to be comfortable with their battery life that they, that they have on iPhones, which a lot of people aren't, but Apple seems to be comfortable with it. And they, they wanted to be thin and they sacrifice that completely flat back to also have a camera be good. - Let's talk about the retina HD screens. Does retina HD mean anything or is it just the marking term? Like, can you see a difference in these screens and how they look like the color reproduction, things like that? - I, you know, I wear glasses. I can't see much of a difference. We're talking about resolutions that are so high that they are the retina, whole idea of the retina thing is that it's beyond our ability to perceive. I mean, if you, if you zoom in or you have great vision and can look really closely, you could probably tell some difference. I think, I mean, it's a marketing term. In fact, I think it's sort of a redundant marketing term, right? I mean, I already, retina was already HD, I think, but although this is, although this is capable of, you know, 1080, beyond 1080, but you know, it's, I don't know, they just wanted a marketing term that it's better than retina. And so rather than say better than retina, they say retina HD, it's, what they're doing that's interesting is that they're technically what they're doing is very much what happened with the Retina MacBook Pro, which is-- - This is your prediction by the way. - Yes, I nailed it. - Yeah, completely. - Well, this seems to be, so Apple at some point decided, high resolution screens don't need to be pixel perfect. Apple was a one-to-one pixel perfect company for a long time. And when the Retina MacBook Pro came out, and I remember we actually, at WWDC, we got one at Macworld and we did a party that day, or the next day, and Marco Arment took the Retina MacBook Pro and like was doing all this crazy stuff to it, like during the party. And one of the things we found out is that if you take a screenshot on the Retina MacBook Pro, it's larger than the physical resolution of the screen. It's like, what is happening? And the answer is how is this possible? Apple decided that the scaling in the GPU is so powerful. And the screens are so high resolution that you're actually better off rendering your display at a larger resolution and then just scaling it to fit the screen. And back, anybody who was trained in the days of lower resolution flat panels, the idea that you would do anything but one-to-one, it's like you get a fuzzy screen, because then it has to anti-aliased everything on the screen and everything looks bad, everything looks fuzzy. But what Apple found out when they were building the Retina MacBook Pro is that above a certain DPI, you can't tell that it's scaled because the anti-aliasing, the pixels that are fuzzy because they're actually between pixels are so small as to be imperceptible to the human eye. And when you step back, it looks fine. And that was the premise of the Retina MacBook Pro. That's what that machine does. And that's why you can change the size of what goes on the screen to a whole, there's like a slider. In the iPhone 6, that's what they're doing. Certainly on the 6 Plus, I'm not sure whether they're doing it on the regular 6, but on the 6 Plus for sure. That's what they're doing is they're scaling it at a large resolution and then scaling it down. So they're drawing it big, scaling it down. You can't tell really, but this is, it's gonna make difference for developers because the rules have changed, have really changed, they're not one to one anymore. But for users, you're not gonna be able to tell. And it actually enables them to do some other interesting things, like there's essentially a large print mode, and I forget what it's called in the iPhone 6 Plus where you can make it, you can make just everything bigger. So you can opt to either have more information on this giant screen or just have it be like a regular iPhone screen big. Like all the words are big, all the icons are big. And that's all because now they're sort of free scaling it. They're happy to scale the screen to any number of ways you might do it. And so that's an interesting approach. So they're very much kind of like they've gone off the, there's one X and then there was like there's two X, but it's all pixel perfect. There's just four pixels there instead of one. Now we are living in a scaled display world for the iPhone. And so yeah, it's gonna be different. But the screens, the Retina HD, which is where we started with this, are so high resolution that it lets them get away with it. - Do you see any difference between the two? I mean, obviously the Plus has like a million more pixels. Can you see any of those million? Like when you put those phones next to each other, can you see that there is a more dense screen on the Plus than there is on the six? - I can't, but like I said, I wear glasses. I think what you see is that they're more pixels because the thing is huge. - Yeah. - In terms, I mean, if I hold them right up to my face, this is what I'm doing right now. I mean, I can't see the pixels on the smaller one. So I certainly can't see them on the bigger one. But this is the, so the question is, why would you add pixel density when you can't see it? And this is the answer. The answer is you do it so that you can scale the screen in different ways and nobody knows that you're scaling it because it's so high resolution. In fact, this is the other place where they're scaling is when you're running an app that hasn't been modified to support the new screen sizes. This is what happens is it just gets scaled. And you can kind of tell that it's scaled if it's a bitmap resource. It's a graphic or something versus text. But it looks pretty good. And the reason it looks good is that high resolution screen is so high resolution that a lot of the artifacts that you would notice for scaling are too small to see. And it all just kind of comes out in the wash. So I guess that's the rationale for having a super high res or let's say, Retina HD screen is for scaling stuff and not because you're actually seeing those pixels. Because from, you know, if you've got even normal eyesight, you'd take a look and you can't see the dots. You still can't see the dots. So that's not any different. Should we stop and talk about something as Casey would say, something cool? - Of course we should. Thank you so much for doing that. - It's episode one. We gotta, you know, we're learning here, but we do have sponsors. I don't want to forget our wonderful sponsors. - This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Igloo, the internet that you'll actually like. 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This is fantastic if you maybe work in a large company, you wanna try something out or maybe you work in a small company and just wanna be more connected to your team, Igloo can help you. Thank you so much to Igloo for supporting upgrade and all the relay event. - Good job, that's first sponsor out of the way, well done. - Thank you. Ding. - I actually have a bow, but I'm going with that one instead. - Okay. - We have the A8. - Yes. - As opposed to the A7. - It's one more, another A. - It's one bigger. - Yup. - Is there any perceptible difference between the models? - Oh, perceptible, why do you have to say perceptible? Testable, yeah, testable, they are different. The, it's actually exactly what we saw last year with the iPad Air and the iPad Mini Retina where at the event we all thought, oh, they're essentially the same specs. It isn't like an older chip or anything in the Mini, they're the same. And then when it came time to test them, we realized, well, they're the same except that the A7 running in the Mini was running at a lower clock speed. Probably to save on battery. This is the case now too. The iPhone 6 Plus is running at like 1.4 gigahertz and the 6 is running at 1.2 gigahertz. So the 6 Plus is faster a bit than the 6 because it's running at a higher clock speed. So it's perceptible, I don't know. I mean, it's really hard to tell. They are, they're really similar. They're really close. They're both faster than the 5S but not, I would say not hugely so. I'm sure there are ways where we're going to notice. But this is actually, there was a really interesting chart at the event last week where they showed the incredible march of processor performance from the original iPhone. And what we all noticed watching it was that used to be a chart that just kept accelerating and it didn't accelerate this time. - No, it kind of seemed to-- - The curve started to bend the other way. Well, the A7 was so much faster than the A6. It was like twice as fast. It was dramatically faster. And it's hard to keep that up. - 32 to 64, right? That was the main reason for the IS. - Yeah, yeah. Well, there's some other stuff too. But I mean, it was a huge leap for them. And this time, the AA doesn't make a huge leap. As far as we can tell, it is just faster. It is, I mean, they said it's like 20% faster. It is faster than the A7. But it looks to me like the performance gains that they've been able to eek out as they've been growing the AA processor line are slowing down now. That they continue to, it's not like the processors are slower. The processors are still faster but they're only whatever 20 or 30% faster instead of twice as fast. And so yeah, that's a sign of something that Apple, maybe just that Apple couldn't keep up those speed increases because they were really crazy for a while. I think that team was eking out every possible last bit of performance. What I thought was interesting is that they compared themselves with the competition and talked about how they can run at those faster rates for longer. And that is a way when you're comparing it to other devices that it can win. But, you know, and it is totally faster than the iPhone 5S with the A7. There's no doubt about it. But it's only, you know, it's only whatever, only 20% faster. It's just, it's good. But it's also interesting to note that it's not like they doubled it again. The last time was a huge leap and this is a more incremental push forward. - You can't keep doubling it. Like, eventually, it becomes too powerful. - Probably not every year. And yeah, yeah, well, that's the other thing is that they might be able to make it more powerful, but they also have to balance it with the fact that they've got a battery. And battery technology doesn't necessarily evolve as fast as chip technology does. And they, power management is a huge part of what they're designing here. Because some of this is using less power or ramping up to those high speeds more efficiently so that they don't kill the battery. Because if you kill the battery, it doesn't matter how fast you go. So it's a tough balancing act. This is some serious science. But it is faster. They are continuing their march. It's just, it looks like maybe it's gonna go at a little bit of a slower pace now because they've made up so much ground over the last few years. I mean, it is dramatic how much faster these devices have been than the ones four years ago even. But now it looks like it'll be a little bit, a little bit shorter march, a little bit slower march than before. On the graphic side, by the way, that's an interesting case where, these screens have a lot of pixels. And so you would actually expect that they would be, it would be hard for them to keep up with a smaller display. And that actually is not the case. These devices are, the graphics abilities on these is pretty impressive because they're able to eke out really great benchmark scores with, I don't know if there's some scaling going on or if it's at full resolution or what, but the graphics power in these things is amazing. They have definitely cranked up the graphics power. And that's something that's hard to pick up because they have a bigger screen. It's not like a Mac where you can plug it into the same screen and run all the tests. They have a bigger screen. So they have more pixels to draw or scale or whatever. And every time you make a bigger screen, you have to improve the graphics performance or it's gonna slow down because it has to draw all those extra pixels. And Apple's not kidding when they said that the graphics performance is up because it is. I ran some tests and it's a, yeah, they put in the horsepower to draw these, on these giant displays and scale and all of those things. And the result for a regular person is, they still work like an iPhone. They don't feel slower. They probably feel faster if you really paid attention. - Is that any indication that there's more RAM in these devices? - How much RAM, I think not. I mean, I need to do some more investigating there. But when I ran Geekbench on them all, they all reported basically a gig. - All right, 'cause I think that's what the 5S had. - So I, and yeah, when I ran that number on the six, the six plus and the 5S, they all gave me essentially the same response. So I think, I think not. I could be wrong 'cause one of the challenges of using benchmark apps when a product isn't out yet is there may be bugs. 'Cause the benchmark people need to look at the new product and find ways that they can make sure it's testing things appropriately where I have to sort of do some tests on my own. But yeah, they seem to have the same amount of memory as the 5S does. - Like you didn't notice that you could have more Safari tabs open or there wasn't anything really noticeable that you've seen that would suggest this. - I didn't try to open a billion Safari tabs, which I probably should do, but it seemed to be pretty much the same. - Can we talk about the interface additions a little bit? - Sure. - So there's obviously there is a few more of these on the plus. And I'm personally really interested in the keyboard. - Yes, keyboard is one of the big changes with these models that they're picking up some features that are, it turns out our iOS 8 features that we didn't know about because there wasn't a device that could use them and now here they are. - So is it just the plus that has these additional keyboard features? - No, no, in fact, so on both of these when you're in portrait mode, what you get is a keyboard. It is the keyboard you would expect. However, one of the nice things about it, I'm opening them on both of them right now, one of the nice things about it is that the keyboard is bigger, like the keys are bigger in portrait mode. So even though it's just the same old keyboard, the keys are larger and having more room to hit those keys, it really does help on the plus especially. That is a pretty big keyboard. It's not quite iPad size, but you've got more room to hit those letters and not hit the one next to them. But it's the familiar keyboard. And obviously in iOS 8, you're gonna be able to swap that out for a different keyboard. But in landscape is where the situation totally changes. They are taking advantage of the extra width on these displays to add extra keys on the sides. So basically the six gets an extra column of keys on either side of the keyboard. And the six plus gets two extra columns of keys on either side of the keyboard. So with the default keyboard, and again, you can switch it out for something else. So on the six, what happens is the microphone, an undo button, a comma, and emojis are on the left side. I imagine that for other people who don't speak an emoji, that would be the international button. I speak an emoji. And on the right side, you get a back and previous cursor button and a period. And then also the expand and hide keyboard button is over there. - So that back and previous, that moves the cursor 'cause they didn't mention it in the keynote and I have been dying to know. - Yeah, that's the, it moves the cursor back and forth. - Moves the cursor. Yep. So little cursor action, just one, one, you know, it's literally moves the cursor back or forward for editing purposes. Now on the plus, it gets even crazier. On the plus, you get a, there's a cut copy and paste button. So there's each, there are three buttons. There's little scissors, a little sort of like box with an A with another one behind it. And a bottle of paste, I guess. It's kind of funny, kind of literal, but you got to do something. So there are those. So you can literally, you know, select some text, copy, move somewhere else, press paste. And it does all of that. There's a bold button, which will bulge your text like you think. Somebody at Apple hates italics 'cause there is not an italics button. Undo microphone emoji. And then on the right side, you've got left and right. And now it's got exclamation point, question mark, period and comma over there. So it's trying, obviously, I mean, they've been thinking about what common uses are when you're in the keyboard mode. And these are the things that they think are most common to float to the top level. And you can still, you know, flick over to symbols and numbers and things like that. But they brought a lot of this stuff up to the top. So yeah, there's a lot there on the plus, but even on the regular six, you've got, you know, undo, period, comma, and some cursor movement happening. - You mentioned earlier about the hurting to kind of use, to fun type on the six plus, right? - It doesn't hurt, but you can feel that you're reaching further and that it's further out of sort of what you're used to when you're typing. A lot, my thumbs are lazy. They don't like to travel far. So two questions, is it still too small to kind of do any hump and peck typing? Like if you put it down on a table, is the keys there too small to do that kind of typing with? - I don't know how you type. I wouldn't, my iPad method for typing with two hands would not work on these. It's too small for that. I think, yeah, I think thumb typing or holding it in one hand and poking with the other finger on the other hand are probably better input methods. But who knows, I think you could, I think you'd need to not use your thumbs 'cause that's what always, what I wanna do with the iPad keyboard is space with my thumb and there's just no room on this. You just hit whatever is below the phone. So you can't, it's just, it's a little too compact 'cause it still needs to show the upper part of the screen so you can see the content. So it's wide, but it's not super tall, it's just wide. - And is it possible to get a split keyboard? - That is a great question. I don't think so. I'm actually trying that right now. - Try pinching apart. So the way that you can do this on the iPad, I didn't know if you just put like two fingers in the middle of the keyboard and just pull it apart, it will split on the iPad. Doesn't work. That's interesting to me that they have not done that. - Nice try. Well, this is the thing is they made some very interesting choices about how iPad-y, especially the pluses and how iPhone-y it is. And every time I think it's going to behave like an iPad, it basically doesn't. It has a layout that is sort of like, it reminisces on the iPad in the sense that you can, you can have a column on the left for your mail and show the mail on the right, which we've only seen on the iPad up to now. But below that, it's still not the iPad. And there are lots of other changes that don't, they're, it's an iPhone. It reminds you like, no, this is an iPhone. I'm not going to let you do these crazy iPad things that you think the iPad should do. 'Cause I'm not an iPad, I'm an iPhone. So it's funny. It's just enough to make you start thinking, oh, this is like the iPad. And then you realize, nope, it's not. - So let's talk about that then, 'cause I'm super interested in this. So they showed on stage some of the Apple apps taking advantage of the additional screen real estate and showing some more iPad-like assets. Is this just on the plus or is this on both? So like showing messages with the split pane view and things like that. - That is, so apparently there's a concept in the UI now that's something like a large-sized display for phones. And it's like responsive design on the web where below a certain size it uses A and above it, it uses B and the plus is above it in landscape. And the six is not. And so almost nothing, there's a whole class of features that only exist on the plus. So in the notes or settings or mail app on the plus, if you put the phone on its side, you will get that extra column on the left. That doesn't happen on the phone. The regular iPhone 6 doesn't happen. It's just like your iPhone today. It doesn't, so the break point is in there somewhere between the little, I keep saying it's a little phone and it's not because it's bigger than the iPhone now because it's smaller than the two. And the larger of the two has all of this. So not only does it do things like putting the column there, it's got a landscape springboard, the home screen, which no iPhone has had before. And what's even wackier about that is that because this is a 16 by nine device instead of a four by three device like the iPads, the dock rotates. The dock is on the right side of your screen with the items in the dock stacked. It's crazy. So that's very, and the animation for that is actually really funny, just on the plus, where when you rotate it, it's like the dock goes away and then has, obviously, it's run behind your phone and it goes all the way back to the other side and then it pops in on the other side. It's very strange. - Hey, buddy. - Yeah, here I am. - What, did something happen? I'm right here. - So yeah, so a lot of these tricks are only on the plus. The plus is a weird new device that is between what we think of as an iPhone today and the iPad, but it's not either. It's following some rules that are in between. And for developers, especially, that's gonna be a challenge 'cause they're gonna need to think, you know, what is my, and Apple provided the tools for them to do this, but they've gotta think, what am I gonna do in these different device sizes? What do I want the behavior to be? And I think Apple has obviously given them some guidance by making some decisions on its apps, but it'll be interesting to see how other developers use it 'cause it's not, you know, it's like a really, really tiny iPad and sometimes that will be good enough. And other times you'll be like, you know, it's too cramped and you should just use your iPhone layout because it's just, there's too much stuff on that screen. Even though it's a big screen, it's not the size of an iPad. - So I'm gonna assume, but I wanna ask the question anyway to make sure that current universal apps do not show you this iPad view. I'm assuming that they have to be, like iOS 8 developed with the new sort of layout stuff. - Yeah, iPad apps are iPad apps and so they don't run on an iPhone. They don't run on an iPhone. If it's an iPad-only app, that's not the point. This is an iPhone. And so it will run in iPhone mode, if it's a universal app and if it hasn't been updated, they will scale it up. And like I said before, and the scaling up looks okay, they don't letterbox it or anything. These are all 16 by nine devices, even the 5S, right? And the 5. So they will all just scale until they get updated to support the larger screen sizes. And, you know, that's it. And for iPad app developers, they're gonna have to make the decision, do I wanna make an iPhone version? I don't think they have the ability to make a version that only runs on the plus. I think they have to commit to doing an iPhone version of their app and then decide what shows up in these various places. So it's gonna be a challenge for people who really segregated the iPhone and the iPad. If they've got both versions, they can just make their iPhone version maybe inherit some of the features. If they've only done iPad, but they wanna be on the iPhone 6 Plus, they're gonna need to do an iPhone version of their app because that's how they're gonna get it. So it's funny. It's the biggest wrinkle in being an iOS user and especially for developers since the iPad came out because this is a totally different class of device that's in between the other two. - So my concern is that, excuse me, my concern is that there's going to be an issue with this. I feel like many developers will choose the six as I think many people, I think in our little bubble will choose the six and not the six plus. So my concern would be that there won't be enough dedicated development to take advantage of that screen size. Like in the way that, especially since iOS 7, it seems really that iPad development has slowed down. - Right. - My concern is that there won't be enough like advantage taken of this larger display. Do you, I mean, I know it's so early, but do you have any sort of feel for that? - You know, I think obviously good developers, developers who really care about this stuff, they're gonna buy one of these just because they're going to want to have it for reference. And yes, you can also develop in the simulator, the simulator will simulate this device and you can see, this is how it looks on this device versus this other device. But in reality, let's be honest, the thing that you carry around with you in your pocket every day is going to be the most influential device. It's going to be, if you're a developer, it's going to be the most influential device. So you might even have a six plus around, but the six is the one that's in your pocket all the time. It can't, even the most conscientious developer has to fight against the idea that it's an afterthought because it's not their daily use. That said, I do think a lot of developers are going to say, oh, this is great, I can take these decisions that I made for my iPad layouts and apply them. And in addition to that, I also will do, you know, all the other things you need to do to make, to support these other sizes and have some scalable layouts instead of pixel perfect layouts. You know, they probably want to do that anyway, right? Because they don't want to have a scaled up iPhone app on the six, and if they're doing that and they've got some previous iPad work, they could probably put it together. But that is an extra direction to go. And depending on how well this sells, they might not choose to do it, especially, I mean, you talk about the context that you live in. I mean, it's not just the phone in your pocket, it's the country that you live in. And I live in the United States of America, by the way, Mike. - Yee-haw. - No comment. Okay. (laughing) Actually, I'm sorry, I live in the state of California, Mike. It's where our own, it's our US out of California. Anyway, yeah. So like, this phone's going to sell really well in Asia. Large, the Galaxy Note has shown, and it's ilk, has shown that in Asia, there's a huge market for giant phones. Not so much in the West, but in Asia, there's a huge market for giant phones. And there are a few reasons for that. I actually talked to some people at Apple about this, and they acknowledged that this is true. And there's some reasons some people in Asia are single device people. They don't have a computer, they don't have a tablet, they have a phone. And if the phone is their only computing device, they want it to be big, because they want to do everything on it, and having a bigger device is better than having a little tiny device, if it's your only device. And there was also, it also was a status symbol in a lot of Asian countries and cultures, apparently, this is what I hear, you know, bigger is better. This is probably also true in Texas, I don't know. But the idea like, my phone is the big phone, right? I got the big, look at me, I got the hugest phone. And you know, other cultures are like, whoa, I'm just going to get a tablet if I want that. I don't want a huge phone. So my point is, developers who are serving those markets where this device is going to sell really well, those are the ones who are going to need to pay the most attention to it. So you may see, you know, apps that sell really well in Asia going crazy over this and taking full advantage of it, and apps that really sell best in the United States and Europe, not, we'll have to see. But that might be something interesting to watch, where the really Asia savvy apps rush in to support the iPhone 6 Plus, because I think it will, you know, I imagine it will follow the pattern of phone sales up to now, which is that in areas where big phones are popular, this will be popular. - Purely anecdotal. In the UK, where you don't see someone with an iPhone, they tend to have a large Samsung phone, like a note or one of the new S5s, which is approaching that sort of five-inch size. - Well, it makes sense, right? I mean, that's an option that Apple doesn't offer. So if you want a big phone, you need to buy a giant Samsung phone. - And also, I see, especially the note, far more in use by women than men. - I've heard, I've heard, I mean, everybody's got, everybody's dead, right? But that scenario is a scenario that sort of makes sense. I've heard some women say, look, I want a small phone because I, you know, I want to hold it in my hand and I have small hands and I can't hold that giant phone in my hands. But I've also heard women say, look, I don't have pockets. I carry it in my bag. I'm fine using it too handed when I pull it out of my purse or whatever. So why would I not want a big phone? Because, you know, so I can see both scenarios, right? I mean, some women want it to be a small phone that they can have in their pockets or they can have with them and hold it in one hand. And that's how they work. That's how they use the device. And other women are freed by the fact that they've got a bag already so they don't have to worry about the size of the phone. And the way they use their device is conducive to having it be very large. So there are a few different use cases here. But, you know, both of them make sense to me. It totally makes sense that if you don't have to worry about having something gigantic in your pocket because you have small pockets or no pockets, then, you know, why not? - So I want to talk about reachability. Just one, I want to get your idea on the name. But we'll come to that in a moment. But first off, I just want to take a quick moment to thank our second sponsor for this week's episode. (laughing) - Yeah, we're rolling. It's our friends @smile and I want to talk about text expander today. So you should know about text expander. But if you don't, let me tell you about it. If you ever type the same sentences, you've got some phrases, words, little things that you'll type in on a regular basis, you need to have text expander in your life. And that allows you to save time and effort by expanding like short abbreviations that you've set into frequently used text or even pictures. There's some forms that you can fill in and it gives you little drop ups. Pop ups, oh, I want to put this in here, this in here, this in here. It's incredible, I'll tell you a little bit about some of those things in a moment. Whether it's something as simple as an email signature, or maybe you have several paragraphs of a standard response, you can have these fantastic snippets set up to activate them. And this allows you to use text expander so you avoid having to type the same thing over and over and over again. Maybe you frequently fill in some forms of the same information. Or you can make this super simple by creating a fill in snippet. So in just a couple of keystrokes, you can have a form filled in in seconds that may have taken you minutes before. So let's say, for example, that you fill in some sort of shipping information frequently. You could type something in like S-S-S-H-I-P and it was good to do the fill in the whole form for you. It's fantastic. You can sync all of your snippets via Dropbox and you can use them on multiple devices with text expander touch on iOS. This means that all of your snippets are going to stay in sync on all of your devices. Texas, you can access your text expander snippets inside Smiles, iOS app, text expander touch. Or you can enable it in the over 60 plus applications in the iOS app store that have integrated snippets in them. This includes some fantastic apps and some of my favorites like Omni Outliner 2, Day 1, Fantastico 2, Drafts, Lomp Center Pro, editorial and so many more. And text expander touch on iOS is about to get a lot more powerful. Text expander touch three, which is going to be launching with iOS 8, adds a custom keyboard so that you can expand your abbreviations inside of any application. So this gives you the power of text expander anywhere where the developers have implemented it into their apps or not. Text expander is one of the first apps I install on all of my devices. It's just part of what makes my Mac work properly. If I don't have text expander or I've quit text expander randomly, I think something is broken. I am totally lost about it. Relying on text expander to help me save time has become a huge part of how I get work done. Even simple things like writing out the show names. Instead of typing upgrade, I type UUP, and it just fills it in. And you get into these like just patterns. And I'm so excited about the text expander keyboard because I very frequently on my iPhone will type things in. And I haven't set up all of the snippets that I have in text expander in the iOS one. So being able to just flick off that a keyboard and just have all of my snippets and it's going to be awesome. You can learn more about text expander at smilesoftware.com/upgrade. And text expander touch is available on the app store. Thank you so much for the support of this show. - Well done. - Reachability. - Reachability. - Why did they click this? - You got reachability, Micah, I wish I did. So it works by double tapping the home button, right? Like tapping, not clicking or pressing. Right, so the home button, you know, it's touch ID which means it can tell when you're touching it. So it's like a little like a trackpad where you don't have to depress it for it to know that you're touching it. And therefore they've turned that into a gesture where if you, on either phone, if you double tap on the home button, everything slides down like toward your thumb basically. So on the, in the springboard it slides the, it's funny, it's just scrolls the apps down. They just all kind of slide down. The whole screen doesn't come down, just the apps slide down. But in most apps what happens is it's like somebody took your screen and just like pulled like a, like a, like a roll up window shade. They just kind of pull it, pull it down toward your thumb halfway. And the idea there is then you can touch something that's on the top part of the screen. And, and when it registers that touch then it all slides back up and it goes on its merry way. - How quickly does this animation occur? Like does it, like all the way go down is it like have some animation where the phone, like it brings everything down to you, like a shade or something. - Well yeah, it slides down. It doesn't, it doesn't like pop down. It slides down. It's pretty fast, but it's definitely an animation. And then what's left above it is sort of this void. It's not, it's not black. I think maybe it is it, but it's a, it's a mysterious void. It's not your backdrop. It's not your lock screen thing. I think it's a, just a mysterious void. - It surprised me to see that, because that black background seems to go against some of the work they set out with iOS 7, like the layers. - Yeah. - It feels like there should be at least, I mean, it probably doesn't look great, which is pretty well, I didn't do it, but like the transparent layer of your home screen back there. You know? - Right, right. There's the logic question of what, what is, what's behind there? And they've decided to just keep it simple and have it be nothing. Nothing's behind there. But you're right, if we can see translucency, perhaps the home screen should be back. They're all grayed out, you know, all blurred out. Like we're watching it through a layer of glass. - Well, like when you go into multitasking, the way it looks there, you know, you see, you see your background sort of blurred out, like behind the frosted glass look. I just expected it to look like that as opposed to just a black emptiness. - I have one very specific question. When you're in an application and you tap the status bar, sometimes in most good apps, it will jump to the top of the content. Does this work with reachability? - Oh man, that's a great question. - You know, you can like up and tweet bot that or something. - That's why I like, that's why I like you so much is that you ask these great questions. - Well, that was actually something that Federico asked on Connected so I'm just pulling that question in. So it does work, it brings it to the top and then I assume it snaps back up. - Yeah, actually, let me see. I think it doesn't snap back. It generally, when you interact with this, it snaps back up, no. In fact, well, it snaps back up after a moment's pause. So I wonder, I think maybe it's waiting to see if you want to do something else at the top. Yes, indeed. - So that's good. - That's the right interaction. - And if after a second or so, you do new interaction, it just slides the whole thing back up. But yeah, you have to, I think get it right. I think if it's down a little bit too much, I think it won't work. But this is one of the funny things about the reachability is it does, if you tap in the black void, it goes away. But if you tap right at the top, it does like you tap the menu bar. And yes, you can do full interaction anywhere on that screen, that portion of the screen that's there. Using reachability and while you're interacting, it seems to keep the reachability mode, except when it doesn't. And this is one of the things that actually, I think they're gonna need to work out over time, is sometimes I tap something and right away, reachability is over. And other times, it waits to see if I want to do more and then it finishes and slides everything back up. And I cannot figure out why it does one and not the other. - That is true. - I suspect it's just the software is inconsistent about that. 'Cause really, when I press a back button, it should stay in reachability mode and let me keep on, press it a couple more times and do whatever, and it doesn't seem to do that. It seems sometimes it's like, okay, you press something, I'm done. Right away instead of, do you want to scroll now? Do you want to press this button again? So it's a brand new feature, right? And it hasn't gone through the broad developer beta testing that the rest of iOS 8 has. So it's a clever way to approach this but it's not entirely consistent, I think. - Yeah, I think I called it something strange. Like I kind of coined this really weird phrase which some people found peculiar. - An elegant solution to an elegant problem? - Huh. - So I think, you know, really you usually say like an elegant solution to an impractical problem or something like that. But to me, it just feels like it's a nice way of doing something that is otherwise really awkward. Like it doesn't feel like there is no perfect thing here but what they've done is create something that gets over what is an actual problem with these display sizes, but it's not perfect. I talked to a group about this a little bit on the talk show when I was on with him right before the event and we were both kind of scratching our heads like, how do you, it's exactly how you described it. This is a problem because human hands, unless you're Craig Hockenberry, human hands cannot reach across this giant phone. They can't, unless you are a basketball player unless you are somebody with enormous hands, it's just, it's too far. You've got to, if you want to use it one handed, which oftentimes we do. People not, you're not always, but a lot of people use iPhones with one hand a lot of times. And so how do you solve that? And do you have like a virtual finger or, I mean, there's, and so yeah, reachability is weird, but it's interesting to think about, you know, it's either that or you create gestures or you just make sure that there's nothing tabable at the top of the screen. And one of the things I like about iOS 7 is that they added that swipe back gesture. If you swipe from the left side of the screen, it just goes back. You don't need to tap the back button. And it's a gesture. So not everybody even knows that it's there, but once you learn it, it's really convenient. - Yeah. - And, you know, so I think that's good. You don't have to use reachability to get back to the previous screen. But yeah, I think you nailed it. It is not a particularly great solution, but it's better than not having one and saying like literally, sorry, you're gonna need to use your other hand for this one. I mean, that's a group where we're talking about like, maybe they scale it down, 'cause that was the Brian Chen in The New York Times had this story about this feature essentially, but it was kind of vague. It was like, does everything scale down? They could do that. We know that they can scale the UI really well. That would be the other way to go is to literally just shrink everything down. And they probably tested that and decided that that was maybe problematic or favored left-handers over right-handers, although with a gyroscope, you could probably tell what way the phone was tilting and where the thumb was gonna come from. I don't know. So yeah, it's, I don't know if I'm gonna use it. I mean, every now and then I think like, oh yeah, reachability. And Apple seems to think, the people who I talk to at Apple seem to think that this is something you just get used to, that it becomes second nature, like that swipe backward, that you tap a couple of times and tap it and go on with your life and it's like, it's the, to put it in Futurama terms, it's the thing, thing, the longener. It's the, this makes my finger longer. That's a stupid invention, but in this case, having it is better than not having it. I don't know. Did you watch Futurama? Yeah. I do. Do you remember the thing, the longener? No, I don't remember. Okay. It's one of a, like the smelloscope, it was one of Professor Farnsworth's lesser inventions. Kind of pointless to have, it makes your finger longer, but that's totally what's happening here is you got to do something, right? Yeah. People use phones one handed and the thing is too huge. Even the six, regular six is kind of too big and that's why it's on that phone too. Even the five and the five S are a little bit large if you've got small hands. So. Do you have any specific opinions about the camera? Cause I like this sort of thing, like for me, the camera, the camera features are fantastic, but most of the time I don't use them or I can't really tell. Right. Do you, do you have any feeling on it? My feeling is that they're better and Apple's not kidding. Apple knows that that's an important feature, that they're better, the optical stabilization and the bigger one is a great idea. You know, the cameras have come so far. I wonder how far they can go without some serious changes to the hardware, we're already seeing it with the camera sticking out a little bit. At some point the size of the camera is gonna be the issue and I start to wonder if the next phase for Apple is going to be some mechanics to like literally pop the camera out when you're taking a picture and then draw it back in. Because at some point that's gonna be the problem is that they literally, they need more depth than the phone has. And we're already there, but it could get worse. But they, you know, I like that Apple really puts an effort into cameras. I no longer reluctantly take a picture with my iPhone camera, even with the 5S, I don't avoid it because I know how good the pictures are gonna look. And they might not look as great as an SLR, but it isn't worth it to go get the SLR because the phone is great. So yeah, I mean, every time they do this, the cameras are better. And the, what I've really been impressed by is the way that they've handled focusing. I'd say even more for video than for stills. They've made a big deal in the event of these focus pixels and the idea that they're able to, through the hardware working with the software, very Apple, do something that generally was available on things like SLRs before, which is use the focus of the light to determine where the focus point of the image should be. And that's great because focusing better and faster is good. What really is impressed me, especially with the samples they showed at the keynote is the ability to move through a bunch of focus areas and have it feel natural. And some of that is using that technology and some of that is the software. A lot of video focus is instantaneous. It's like, we can go from A to B, so we just jump there. And as somebody who's used to watching TV and movies, they don't do that. They move physically, even if there's no physical focus ring, they move from one focus point to another. And what impressed me about the video samples, especially at the event, is they actually have, I mean, they're demos, right? But they're very impressive demos that somebody puts something close to the camera and pulls it away and the focus follows them and it doesn't wait and then snap back. It actually follows them. And that's impressive because video focusing, it's actually one of the reasons why I am always reluctant to use my iPhone 5 to shoot videos, especially like that I'm gonna show professionally, is because the focusing is crappy. - Battery life, please tell me that we have good battery life on these devices. - So one of the problems with testing a new iPhone is that battery testing takes forever and you can't use the phone when you're doing it, essentially, 'cause it's gotta run. So I don't have quantified lab-based battery life answers for this. Apple's claims, which I think, you know, one of the things I said on "Gruber Show" also was the idea that Apple solves for a certain battery life. There's a certain amount of battery life that Apple thinks is appropriate for an iPhone and with the six, they did that again. I mean, it's, they're claiming slightly better battery life than the 5S, but they're not claiming dramatically battery life. Apple seems to think that's how much, however much that is, that's how much battery life a phone should have. And if you're somebody who runs out of battery all the time on your iPhone, that's frustrating. Apple's just decided that most people, for most people it's enough and that for the people it's not enough, they can get a case or they can have a little backup battery ready to plug into the charger when they need to, which is what I do. I mostly don't need it. And when I do I have a little Kensington battery with a USB port and I just plug my iPhone charger into it and in about 20 minutes it sucks all the power out of the battery and the phone's back at charge. And that's what I use when I'm traveling and things like that. So obviously Apple has decided that's what they wanna do and I know that frustrates some people but they think that's okay. And as far as I can tell, the six, you know that's the truth of the six is it's got battery life like an iPhone because Apple makes them all roughly have the same battery life. The amount of power they consume changes, the amounts of battery capacity change, but in the end Apple does the math to get them to work, to meet that goal of essentially 10 or 11 hours of usage time. And then the plus is a bigger battery and even though it uses more power because it's got a bigger screen, it's got a bigger enough battery that Apple seemed confident in giving it a few more hours of time. So it'll last longer. It's not like you're, you know, it's not a Razer Max or a Droid Max or whatever it is, those with two Xs, those giant Android phones with huge batteries. It's not that but it's got more life than the smaller device because they're able to lay that much more battery in there. So it'll last a little bit longer but people who are dreaming of Apple making a 25 hour life phone, I don't think it's gonna happen for a long time unless it's a huge breakthrough in either low power chips or amazing battery technology 'cause Apple is not willing to make the size trade off to load a giant battery in there. And they think better that you make the trade off by sticking a case on it or that you, you know, do what I do, which is just carry an emergency battery to charge it up when you need it. - I'm just gonna keep waiting for those graphene batteries, right? - Oh yeah, it's like fusion power. Fusion power and amazing battery technology are always just, you know, 30 years away. They never get any closer. - Right, this is kind of a random question and this is served just because it's something that I care about but I don't know if a lot of people do. You buy actually. The speaker quality, like the loud speaker. I use it sometimes to listen to podcasts. I have a jam box but sometimes in a pinch I will listen to it. I will listen to like Total Party Kill. - Whilst I'm cooking pasta on Thursdays, right? And I... - It's a very common thing. People cook pasta while listening to people playing Dungeons & Dragons. - It happens to be quite a lot actually which is kind of peculiar. - Well, I was listening to John Syracuse's hypercritical podcast while I mowed the lawn. And now I mowed the lawn and I feel the absence of hypercritical. Whatever podcast I listen to, it's just not the same. That was our special time. - And he ruined it. - Mowed the lawn together me and John and Dan. We mowed the lawn together. I did most of the work. They did most of the talking. And it's funny. I mean, that's one of the things I love about podcasting is you kind of fit it into your life in certain ways. And I don't know about the speaker quality of these things. I need to test that more. I think it's better. I think that the plus has a nice loud speaker. I know Apple talked about that at one point of that this is a fairly good... I mean, it's never gonna be the same as having a big speaker, but that they've got a little more room in the plus, especially. But I gotta say, I'm not ready to make a call or a judgment on that quite yet. I need to spend some time annoying people with loud sounds on my phones first before I do. - My last question. - I'll get back to you. - Yeah, please do. - Fortunately, we have episode two for follow-up. I've never done a podcast where I've been able to do follow-up before, so. - We're gonna do so much follow-up. You won't even... - Oh man. - You won't even be able to contain yourself, Jason. This would be all follow-up. - Where do people go to leave us feedback, by the way, since we're talking about follow-up? - Oh, so there's a few different places, actually. You can know where we have our show notes, which is relay.fm/upgrade/1, and you can click the little button and send us an email, which reminds me I need to ask if you want to receive that email. (laughs) - And also... - I do. - Excellent. - I volunteer as one of those hosts who will receive it in email, yes. - Oh, that's sick. - I love getting follow-up. - We can't do follow-up on the incomparable because the panel changes all the time, so I'll have like no John Syracuse on, and all the follow-up will be, what did John Syracuse say? Why did he say that? And he's not there to defend himself, and this is exciting 'cause we can actually, like week to week, answer people's questions. It's not like I don't love the feedback, it's just that on my other shows... - Doesn't fit. - I can't do anything with it, so... - Like you're not gonna do the doctor who follow-up and the guardians of the galaxy episode, like it doesn't make sense. - Exactly, it doesn't make any sense, and the people who talked about the one thing aren't there for the other thing, but we'll be here for episode two, so it's fine. - Also Twitter is a great place. Jason is @jsnel, J-S-N-E-W-L, and I'm Mike, I-M-Y-K-E. Someone needs to make us a fantasy song that speaks those names. - That's nice, I do love on analog how you always describe Casey's Twitter account using the song from-- - I kind of help it, I guess. - I cannot help it. - So, yes, please send in your follow-up feedback questions we would love to receive them. So my last question for you is, which phone are you gonna buy? I feel like I know the answer, but which phone are you gonna buy? - The six. - Yeah. And yeah, the six. I toyed with the idea of the six plus because I am an iPad mini user. I have an iPad mini with Retina, and I love it, and I have an 11-inch MacBook Air, so I like small things, and so this is the question of, do I want the smallest phone then, or do I want a phone so big that I don't even need the iPad mini anymore? I can get an even smaller iPad. And the six plus is not a smaller iPad. It is a bigger iPhone. It is compared to my mini. I would prefer, in all those scenarios where I have to choose between using my phone or my iPad, the six plus doesn't change the equation. Still, if I'm in that scenario, I want to use my iPad. So I can see if you literally only have one device, it makes sense. But I have an iPad and I really like it, and it doesn't fill that need for me. So the six makes more sense to me. The six feels a lot like the five, although I'll be at a little bit bigger. And yeah, it's the next iPhone. It's a nice jump in a bunch of different areas. We haven't talked about things like Apple Pay, which doesn't exist yet, 'cause it's coming in October, they say. I have a whole foods very near my house. I'm looking forward to going over there with nothing but my phone and paying for something, just because I can, but I can't yet. - We have time to talk about those things. I mean, and I can reiterate why Apple chose the wrong country to put Apple Pay in, but they saved that for another day. - Or perhaps the right country, but that is a great topic for a future episode. And we have those now because this is a podcast that we share together. - It's lovely. - Right. I'm going for the plus, by the way. So-- - Really? - Yeah, so I have a few reasons. So-- - Uh-huh. - I am a very, very heavy iPhone user, very heavy, and we've spoken about this before. I use my iPhone constantly throughout the day, and it lives in a Mophie juice pack. Like, is it the juice pack? One of the Mophie cases, I keep it in the Mophie case all the time, I will, sometimes during the day, I will charge my phone by plugging it in at work, but then most likely throughout the day, I've also run down the battery of the Mophie case, as well as that. I use my phone very, very heavily. There is an argument that I should clean my phone, like, restore my phone. It's an ongoing thing. I'm thinking about doing it for the plus, and just starting fresh. I'm seriously thinking about it, just try and give it the best start in life. But both of these phones are too big to live in a phone battery case. They're both too big. - For-- - Yeah. - I measure-- - I was gonna say, for now, you know there will be, but they'll make it even more huge. - They'll make them, but both of them will be too large at that point, because it will, it changes the dimensions in every angle, and I think if you made the phone fatter and bigger, both of them would be unusable, I think. I mean, I measured out my iPhone 5S with the Mophie case on it, and it basically comes in just slightly under the six with the case on it. So, well, a lot thicker, like twice the thickness. So, you know, I'd be thinking it's a battery life, so I want to have the best battery life possible. So, take number one, the plus. And I have one of those Mophie packs with like the little brick things, and I'll just see if I can keep that in my bag and just try and work through life like a regular human. I'm really, really interested in the bigger screen for additional content. They both have bigger screens, but I'm also really interested about the kind of pseudo iPad. Like, layout, I think that's super cool, and I'm very, very excited about that, because I am also an iPad Mini owner, and maybe I won't need an iPad Mini anymore. And I don't know, I'll see how that goes over time. I don't like the larger iPads, so it would either be iPad Mini and iPhone Plus, which kind of seems to have done it anyway, or just iPhone Plus. That kind of my main things, to be honest. - Yeah, I think, I mean, it depends on how you want to use these different devices. If you are out and about, and using your iPhone all the time, then it sort of makes sense. Although, again, that size is going to need to work for you. That's a challenge, and it's not going to be like double the battery life. It's just going to be a little bit larger battery life. Is that the scenario? I mean, the other, I'm not to be Dr. iOS diagnosing guy, but would having a Mini with a data plan work for you, or are you just moving around and have the phone in your pocket is the important part? - Phone in my pocket is the important part. Because I've had data on my desk. - How big are your pockets? - Let's find out. I mean, to buy it, I have to be very deep. I can tell you that. 'Cause I'm buying off contract. - Right, oh man. - I'd been preparing for this though, I'd been preparing. So, my feeling is, I'm going with the six plus, but I have two weeks to decide. So, if after a week, I cannot cope, I will return it and get a six. But I feel like I need to, I want to try it. I'm interested in it. I would like to be able to use the larger device for a bunch of reasons. I think I could live a bit. I have relatively big hands. I have my fingers, this is a very strange fact about me. For my hand size, my fingers are over average. There you go. A doctor told me that once and it's true, I have very long fingers. - So you have normal hands, but long fingers? - Yeah. - Or large hands with even larger fingers. - I'm going to say maybe the last time. - I'm glad we've gotten this all out in episode one. I'm glad we, we know. So you've got large hands and even longer fingers. - Uh-huh, I'm like, so. - All right. - I have long fingers too, I have long fingers too. I don't think my hands are large, but my fingers are large. - So. - I chose a long too. (laughing) - It doesn't help. - It depends on many phones you want to use. (laughing) - Interesting. - So let's see, I mean, that's going to be the interesting follow-up, I think, for episode two is "Can Mike cope with a six plus?" I'm hoping that it will arrive in time for the next episode. So we'll see. I mean, I'm very interested in it. And I also, there's also a part of me, Jason, that, and I seem to have assumed this role with Connected as well, is to be to the different one. And there's this part of me that's being drawn to, this is the phone that not many other people are going to get. And I feel like that there should be some opinions about it. And boy, do I have opinions. - You could be that guy. - Yeah, I'd be that guy. - You could be that guy. That's like, in every podcast, they'll be like, well, of course, I'm not like Mike Hurley, I just got the six, and you'll become famous as that guy who got the big phone. - The only guy. - Could be. I'll go from being the British guy to the guy who has the plus. But yeah, we'll say the very popular in Asia and with Mike Hurley. - Mm-hmm, good demographics. - So we'll say, I mean, it's exciting, right? Two phones is very exciting. Like, the fact that we knew it kind of diminishes from it a bit, but two phones is very exciting to me, I think. - So let me blow your mind here. - Please. - Because it's four phones, 'cause they're still selling the 5C and the 5S. And here's the question, maybe I won't blow your mind, but here's what I wonder for next year, which is, I wonder if that smaller phone size will stick around? I wonder if next year they do something to update the five, or they create a new six or whatever that is a mini that's essentially what we think of now is the iPhone. I wonder if Apple really wants to give up that traditional iPhone size. This year it's easy. This year they can just keep the 5S around and lower the price, keep the 5C, which I think is actually done despite everybody kind of rolling their eyes at it. My daughter told me today she sees the 5C everywhere. It's not for super tech nerds. I think it's for kids and regular people who want a new phone. So now that's free with contract in the US. So this year's kind of a gimme for them, but next year, that's my question is, do they abandon at some point the smaller phone size, or do they keep it? And just make it another so that you have three. Right now we've got two new ones and then the old ones are still around, but that would be my question. Something I'm interested to see is perhaps in a year or two, the iPhone line will be three and it will be small, medium and large. Right now it's medium and large and then last year's great one is the small. I don't know. - Yeah, what happens to that? - We'll see. - Does the small phone eventually fall off the end or do they just keep one around forever? - Or do you, do they just keep upgrading the specs and still call it the 5S? Or do at some point do they call it iPhone Mini or iPhone 6 Mini or something like that and change its look and change its internals, but keep it at a small one? Or are they just completely out of that market? - The tail will be in the numbers. The tail is in the numbers. - Right. - We have no idea right now if these phones are gonna sell. - No, I mean, what we know is that there is a market for larger phones because Android has exploited it that the only real major segment of the high end phone market, which is where Apple plays, that isn't controlled by Apple is the large screen size because they don't have a phone there and they've left their competition to have that space. What we don't know is if the people who currently have an iPhone will go to that exercise or not and how many of them? How many of them will the 6 be good enough? Not too big versus people being repelled by it. I think most people will just go to the 6 and be fine, but it's gonna be interesting to see if they feel that there's a market for a smaller phone because I think there is. I think some people don't really want a big phone just for their lives and who's to say that Apple, I mean, now that we have two brand new iPhones, why couldn't they just do three? They're selling four models now in three sizes. They could keep doing that if there's a market for the smaller and presumably cheaper device. I don't know. - My mom would never use a phone bigger than her iPhone 5C. She just would not and she will upgrade her phone every couple of years, so when it comes to that point, she will not want to use one of those bigger phones. So then what do they do? There are lots of my mums in the world, you know? And I'm sure that Apple doesn't want to stop serving that market, but I don't think we're gonna know the answer to that question for a couple of years yet. - Right. - Because we need to see what happens when the 5S moves that far down the line. - Right, if they eliminate all of those phones because in the next year or two, those phones will still be available, right? So, you know, if you don't want the larger phone, you'll just get the 5C or the 5S and so it will take some time. Although, I am sure that Apple is doing some serious product research on this thing because, you know, and they probably know the answer already to whether this is really gonna be a consumer need or not. But that's what I keep wondering is, I think maybe it is. Maybe they, maybe this is a three product line and, you know, this year, the only new ones are the two bigger ones, but at some point, is it a three product line, small, medium, large, or are those old phones just kicked to the curb and it's old news and everybody's got a big phone now and, you know, eat it old man, right? I mean, that could be, but I don't know. I don't know. - It is great to see the 4S fall off that line up though. - Yeah, yeah, that's good. - That stuck around for a year longer than it needed to. - Yeah, and the 5 is a really good model, so the 5C for free with contract in the US is that's a pretty good deal 'cause that's actually a pretty good phone. Even now, I would say that's a pretty darn good phone. - I love the way that one looks. - Yeah, yeah, it looks neat and, like I said, my daughter would love one. I think she's gonna get my old 5 instead. No color, just black, but-- - By our fancy case. - But I won't feel bad about it, exactly. She can color it up with a case. - So there's still so much to talk about over the next couple of weeks that came out of this event because, you know, we have months worth of things happening because we've got the watch and all that sort of stuff, so there's still a lot more to unpack, but I think for today, for the phones, we are done. Jason, thank you for sharing your thoughts on these. It's been fascinating. And if I may say a great start to upgrade. - I think it went really well and I hope people will keep listening. We'll be back next week with episode two. How about that? - Sounds fantastic. Until then, as we said before, our show notes are relay.fm/upgrade/one. And that's it, that's about it for this week. Thank you very much. - Bye, everybody. - Goodbye. (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music) (upbeat music)
Jason and Myke dive into what everyone wants to hear about--the new iPhones! Jason has been using the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus for the last week, and he's got a full report.
