"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to a very special episode of Apple Insider podcast 139 I'm your host Victor marks and joining me is Daniel aroner hey how's it going amazing how are you well I'm having one of those days where everything is just like upside down and backwards and requires three more things to fix that have dependencies on other processes no they they're conspiring against you are they yeah Computing and everything else just one of those all right but so tell me about what you have that no one else has had yet well we went to the hand on area and handled everything but um we're currently working with uh reviews for the iPhone 8 and 8 plus and I don't have an an iPhone 10 yet I was handling one last night some friends that have access to things so right so the the iPhone 8 and 8 plus a lot of people immediately started looking down on that and and being sort of uh condescendingly saying that it was the fastest they'd ever seen an iPhone go Obsolete and I'm not sure I agree with that opinion how do you feel about that well Apple's doing something apple has a cycle of products that uh have typically you know even back in the days of I um iPods there was this sort of joke of they've come out with a new thing and now there's something new like Saturday live it had kind of mocked that idea several times of now there's a new iPad or a new iPod that you have to buy and now there's a new one and you open it up and there's a smaller one inside of it kind of thing um and with that kind of cycle of excitement when you try to do two at once there's a contention of well which is the exciting one and Apple's several times had uh good better best models in with Max and they've started doing that with iPads they now have two iPad lines um but this is the first time they've ever done that in a in a major way with iPhone with the 67 or 66s and 7 they had the regular and the plus which are different differentiated mostly by size there wasn't a lot of exclusive features I think the larger one had o on the camera and um more memory but there there weren't there wasn't a dramatic difference in what they were offering in terms of technology so the tin is new and that it's it's offering this huge jump to a new premium tier and that has caused a lot of people to look at the eight and say oh this isn't this doesn't look as different when in reality it shares a lot of the same technology it has the same processor has uh almost identical cameras that are a a pretty big jump from the seven line and a variety of other features that are kind of um enabled by the fast processor in terms of software uh so but because it lacks the the thing that people have been putting a lot of attention on and by people I mean reviewers a lot of reviewers have been really pushing attention on the fact that the the case hasn't changed and they've been saying this for now every year since the six came out because Apple came up with a you know device form factor that didn't need to immediately change and I wrote an article about this just recently talking about you know who's going to buy the eight who's at four and kind of targeting the fact that people are reviewing with the sense that case really matters a lot the case has to change every year to keep people excited and sort of refuting that notion with facts I mean it's like that's actually not true because if it were Apple would be losing sales to all these companies you know China is full of companies that are constantly coming up with new things and this is not a a new thing that's just with the iPhone um this has always been the case I gave the example of blackberries Rim was one of the most U popular and you know they were so addictive people called them crack berries but they didn't really change and you know across 10 years it was kind of the same form factor the technology kept improving but it was kind of the same thing for more than a decade and during that same period of time there were companies like for example I gave the example of Microsoft's um Windows mobile they were changing all the time it was very it was very similar to Android today where you have all these different companies just desperately trying to stand out and look different and do quirky things and experimenting with all kinds of different form factors and none of it caught on and none of it was really appealing to customers in a way that sustained itself and it wasn't just Microsoft or their business model because they did a similar thing with Xbox across 15 years Xbox has really changed three times in a significant sort of redesign of what it is and so when you look at it from that perspective we shouldn't expect the the case of the iPhone to change every year or that it needs to but what Apple's doing is saying here's a case that's going along for a while in this design and in the past it has actually changed every couple years and that was the original kind of thing behind the S uh cycle they had the 3G and then they called it the 3Gs it was the same thing but it was improved more and then the four came out and it was totally new and then the 4S sort of uh built new technology on top of that same design and same thing with the five and the 5S and six and 6s and with the seven it was like oh wow they're not arbitrarily changing the body it's like well they didn't need to and it's it's weird how there's like two uh messages that are going on at the same time on one hand you have people saying oh the iPhone needs needs to change it's boring it has has needs a a different case design and at the same time you have the most popular Android models that are selling the most are the ones that are designed to look exactly like Apple's iPhone so does it need to change or why is everyone copying it you know it's kind of mutually exclusive idea I'm going to just give another example with Samsung Samsung has been selling a kind of dual Flagship every year where they had the the um standard Galaxy S that increments every year and then they were selling the note was more like a bigger screen phone and then they started creating two um Galaxy S's one that was um The Edge which was kind of a more expensive version with a edge display that only lasted for what a year or two and now they went to kind of copying what Apple's doing with a slightly bigger phone they call the plus um but at no point did ever anyone ever criticize Samsung and say oh they have they have the fanciest phone with a new design so the old one is not something you want to buy nobody was out there writing stories you can't buy the old one but you know for Apple that's that's become an established narrative and everybody and their reviews almost everybody there were some reviews that were actually quite good but the majority of these reviews focused on the fact that the design isn't changed and tried to make that into a you know they called it a big problem for the the eight where if it was a problem then people wouldn't be buying um iPhone is the most popular phone and has been for the last several years of not changing so clearly case design is not what's causing people to buy a new phone every year it's the technology in terms of what it can do for them how responsive it is which is a the best uh Benchmark of how fast it is and features like the camera it's extremely popular and then there's other features that are Rel to the platform with iMessages and things like that certainly apps that have people interested in iOS exclusively they're not even going to look at Alternatives regardless of what features they offer how much the case changes what should a person who's weighing whether to get an iPhone 7 or an iPhone 8 or the iPhone 10 consider because those are three different very different price points and different capabilities but there's there's sort of P pull between people who think that last year's phone is good enough versus getting the the middle of the options there or laying out all the cash and getting the very best one what's what's the decision process that person should go through true well I don't think it's really changed over previous years I mean we've always had kind of a buy the latest model buy last year's model for $100 less kind of cycle or you can buy an even older model or you can buy a refurbished model kind of depends on how much you want to spend um a lot of people think about and talk about especially in reviews the price of the hardware and actually if you you know especially in North America for example um you're paying more for data service than you are for the phone even if you buy an iPhone 10 you know it's $1,000 that sounds like wow that's that's a very expensive phone and yeah it's more expensive than we've had before but that's something like $83 a month and that boils down to about $2 a day so in terms of kind of uh if you have the ability to afford a cup of coffee every day then you're spending $1,000 a year on coffee and a lot of us need coffee um but actually a lot of us have developed a need also to have you know the best phone there is and when you pull it out of your pocket and it makes you happy that's you know to me that's probably worth more than a cup of coffee but you know there are people that don't have money up front to pay for some of the stuff and you know that it certainly makes sense that especially you know if you have four kids you can't you can't buy them all coffee um so it it's it's totally a personal decision on how much you think it's worth but I tell people to think about the terms of the cost of what you're paying for in terms of how much you use it and what you get out of it not buy features that you think um you know that that are being marketed to you but decide what do you want what what is important to you and for some people um just having a a phone for connectivity is important um but for increasingly for most of us u in the in the world being able to access apps and being able to use the best camera that's possible there are people who you know whether you're taking pictures of your friends or whether you have children that you're recording their lives the phone that you have has a huge impact on the kind of photos that you can capture and how good they're going to be and so that's playing a bigger and bigger um role in people's decision to buy more premium devices it wasn't too long ago that that you know you bought a Palm Pilot phone or whatever um whatever your carrier gave you and it the the camera wasn't really good enough to take pictures with I mean you could sort of capture things in a utilitarian fashion but modern iPhones have tremendous cameras that rival a full expensive Standalone camera and when you combine that with uh the ability to Run apps and play games I mean you have a multi-purpose device that's covering a lot of bases that we used to buy separately whether it's you know a music player or a phone and a camera and you know for a lot increasingly for a lot of people it's like a computer so this year there's been a whole bunch of noise made about the fact that Apple has a apple selling a computer that cost $1,000 you know there was a time not too long ago when the news was that Apple has a computer that costs less than $1,000 isn't that incredible so good point it's it's really I don't think you can create a formula for people to decide this is this is how you should decide what to pay for it's a very much a subjective decision but I love paying for technology because that's one of the things that makes me the happiest to use every day I mean you use it so much it's it's very similar to cars there's a lot of people that pay more for a car than maybe they should afford you know if you are going to judge them but what's the alternative it's not one of the most expensive things you pay for so I mean it really comes down to what you can afford obviously but also you know it it's not it's not the kind of thing that is more expensive than most people can afford right and and one of the complaints that I saw said that you know anything above anything above $200 is a luxury and I scratched my head and thought well now wait a minute the iPhone SE costs more than that does that make all iPhones luxury items and I think what that that kind of complaint misses is that for a subset of of iPhone users a subset of all smartphone users the phone is their only form of connectivity to the internet and that for some of them they may not even use the browser as the portal to the internet which it traditionally has been that it's the apps and voice interface that are using the internet as a service right asking Siri questions and getting answers back about whether forecasts and events of the day kind of thing is more useful and and more pertinent for that user than a browser and that if if that's their only access to the connected world then it's not a luxury item right and it's kind of a personal luxury I mean that that's it's continuation of iPods I mean iPods were you know relatively expensive music players compared to you could always buy something cheaper than an iPod but well I would say that music players are definitely a luxury item m music players are a luxury item m music enriches lives yes music is entertaining music is is a both a distraction and and something that we focus on but the internet and its resources have become a a critical part of life to the point where some Services uh even even Services you regularly need like government services are either only available or best available through the internet um sure I think this is so the phone it makes sense to have the the phone that works best for you for that right it's I I would not necessarily a luxury item it's it's the the iPod is more of a luxury item than the phone does that make sense I mean it's becoming more of a necessity but um you know the distinguishing line between what is luxury and what is essential has changed and shifted as time goes on I mean our our world keeps getting more and more luxurious really but there are things that we now take advant or you know take for granted you know television was originally a luxury and then it got to the point where people it was kind of a common thing and if if you know you check into a motel room and there's not a a TV you'd think wow this is strange and you know today I don't even notice a TV in the room if I'm in a place I don't ever turn it on because I have more than a television in my pocket that's going to show me what I want to watch not what you know a dozen channels are wanting me to see so the definition of what is luxury and what is needed is you know changes over time but what we're seeing with iPhones in particular I mean iPhone Apple's leading that uh and other pH you know there are other phones you can buy um but Apple sort of defined what a smartphone should be what it delivers and they're constantly adding on to that so instead of just being a camera it's a video camera and now it does Panos and now it does slow motion and time lapse stuff and a couple years ago they invented this idea of live photos that it's not just a photo it has this animated context to it that you know you can access and they're building upon that in iOS 11 so now you instead of just having a photo that comes to life you have a photo that can be in a loop or you know a boomerang like bounce or blurred into a photo that's kind of capturing time over a period of time but in a photo not a time lapse so and then also with all this augmented reality and being able to capture especially with the iPhone 8 plus and the upcoming 10 the idea that you're not just taking a photo of capturing light but you're actually creating a depth map where you have either two lenses on the plus and the 10 on the back that are calculating how far different things in that picture are from you so that you can do things like change the lighting or blur out the background or and create a an entirely different sense of what that photo is going to be how how's that worked for you in practice you you've got the phones in your hands so how what have you found using that well I've been using uh the portrait mode in on the 7 plus all year I really like it there are things that doesn't get right and those Apple's continually updating that uh there's been some improve M over the course of iOS 10 but iOS 11 does a much better job of figuring out how to apply like the bouquet blurring out of the background how to determine where the edge is there are still things that doesn't quite get right so it's it's like any other kind of form of Photography where you take a picture and you know there's a flaw here or you have to make sure that there's not a intensely bright light because it's going to blow blow out your photo things like that so it it requires kind of working around its limitations but the new lighting effects um I haven't we haven't published any photos yet but it does allow you to do a lot of things that lighting is quite difficult there are people who that's their job is to do Studio lighting and for you know a regular person being able to take a photo and come back with a a very dramatic lighting that not only takes out the background but lights the the the surface of their face in a way that's correct Apple's kind of doing a machine learning thing where they took all these pictures and analyzed how professional lighting benefits a picture and then appli that electronically in in the way that the camera is able to analyze the subject that you're pointing your camera at and give you similar um effects so that's a really smart way of improving a camera that's not just you know hey the pixels are a little bit bigger or I mean the pixels are deeper and smaller and the sensor bigger kind of thing here's a Computing answer to making photos better so that you're taking the photo but you're also have tools to improve things on a level that's kind of Beyond you know people say oh the lighting the the portrait lighting features you can do that in apps well that's not actually true that's kind of like saying the the uh face ID oh you can do that with an app that's what Samsung did you know they just point a camera at somebody and say oh yeah that's you'll let you in that's not the same thing if you're not doing depth if you're not looking at an analy if you're not if the camera doesn't have the capability in Hardware to either take copies of a photo taken from slightly different angles and compare them together to create a depth map which is what the 7even plus and the the 10 rear camera do or the the front-facing sensor on the tin actually projects a matrix of invisible dots on the subject and does an even more detailed scan of what's there without that depth data you can't do these kind of effects the portrait lighting effects because you know Instagram you can do Instagram filters that just kind of broadly change things across the photo or maybe lighten the middle of the photo or block out the the outsides those effects are powerful and they're great for improving your pictures but if you have other data and third party developers like Instagram will be able to take advantage of that depth data that the iPhone 8 plus and the 10 capture if you have the ability to uh uh work with depth data you can do all kinds of things with a photo that you can't just do with a a filter and Snapchat another example of that of doing it in real time and live I was going to ask you about that so what's your Snapchat experience I worked with Snapchat and I mean I used it at the event um it's pretty incredible I mean everybody else saw the pictures too but you the ability to not just add sort of a superficial um graphics on top of your picture but actually mapping it to your face in real time that's right so the the Snapchat filters that you usually see are ones where they're they're images that happen to be sort of stuck on top of the surface of your face they don't map to your face they're just images overlaid over the top of a photo right right and there's transparency and it and it does you know it can um interact with it can recognize your face for example it knows where to Overlay those things and that's something that's not new to Snapchat that's something that Apple was doing you know back in the days of um photo booth where you could have like the the bird the circle of birds going around your forehead like a cartoon or things like that where the the software is recognizing where your face is so it knows how to draw you know the glasses on your face or something like that or that's still not a trivial thing it's interesting to do it's not something that is you know something we take for granted but app keeps changing and building upon that so in um in iOS you have a whole API for working with identifying things in you know using machine learning or basically machine uh Vision so the camera is understanding what's there so you can identify not just a face but you can actually identify that's where their eyes are this is with cheekbones and the the Contour of their chin those kind of things where you can do not only just apply an effect to it but also track a person in a video or there's a whole ton of things you can do with that kind of information and depth is another example of that and so a lot of these things are actually taking advantage of multiple different Technologies together to do you know a whole new level of things yeah and what sets Apple apart with iOS in terms of U being able to advance Technologies like that instead of Android because there was this whole message for for many years the beginning of Android saying we have all these different manufacturers that are all trying new things and things are going to happen faster well what we actually have witnessed over the last decade is that Apple being able to say hey this is how we want to roll out of technology and rolling it you know putting a lot of thought into it first and then rolling it out and then building upon the most successful ideas has developed technology much better than having a whole bunch of different companies say hey we're using Android on a low level but we're going in different directions just for example dual cameras there's been a dozen different companies putting out cameras with um dual cameras on the back but their implementation of it was different and it didn't really catch on and there's not one way to do that in Android land so for example part of the problem that that Vic gutra laid out earlier this year was that when you do something like that in Android land you can either then make your own camera application or if you want to participate in everything else that Android does then you you have to talk to Google and get what it is that you're doing into back into the camera app that means everyone else can take advantage of it which has the effect of lengthening out the timeline to get something implemented into people's hands and can in the way dilute your what what makes your implementation unique because you've just given it to everyone else too right this is part of what Android 8 is trying to resolve is is some of that balkanization by the way they've restructured it so that you can do these things without having to go back to Google and ask permission necessarily for all of it but this is the advantage that Apple has is because they own the whole stack from top to bottom they don't have to ask anyone else's permission they know exactly which devices they're going to support and how many devices are out in the wild that are still in use that will be supported on day one they have a much easier path to go on it from that just a specific example of that is that like I was saying about dual cameras there's LG that their dual camera is one of them is a wide angle lens so you get a wider shot and there's some to that but uh other companies their idea a couple different Chinese companies their idea of two cameras is one is is you know kind of modeling it after the ey where you have rods and cones that are one is capturing color data and one is capturing sharp uh monochromatic data uh that's that's what is right and honor a couple different companies and there's other companies that are doing other things HC had a an idea of doing it more like what Apple's doing in terms of having two cameras that are using depth to to do um effects but they a lower resolution camera that just didn't look as good um so you have all these different things that people are trying however you know several years later they've had a head start of a couple years of doing that several years maybe um there's now not an installed base of any of them so they were all attempts now at this point Google can't leverage any of this installed base of Hardware to build for example AR kit on top of that where Apple has been apple has a uh pace and goal of what they're trying to accomplish so they're rolling out Hardware and then over time they're using the abilities that they've rolled out to uh kind of snowball Technologies so you have the dual cameras of the 7 plus now you can use that not only for the portrait bouquet but you can also use it for um other depth applications and there's a huge installed base of them and you can build upon that to do other things and then on top of the fact that you already have u a gyroscope and motion controls and the cameras are all very similar I mean they're they're it's much easier to calibrate you can can drop something like AR kit that allows you to build very complex applications that require very precise calculations of when the when the phone moves and the camera sees this then it should recalculate a scene so that it looks smooth and perfect to the user that's extremely hard to do an Android land because everybody has different hardware and it's all calibrated differently and a lot of it can't even be calibrated yeah absolutely it's it's very difficult for there to be let's say consistent experience when the the hardware is so different and what its capabilities are are so different and that's partly why you end up shoehorned into each different Android developers experience they've designed you know they you get their modifications to the launcher screen their modifications to the camera application that are pre-loaded and if you want to have the experience that that should be canonical Android it's difficult to get right say some of that's supposed to be changing with Android 8 but it's still not there and that's a problem not only just across Android between you know HC and LG and Chinese companies but between companies themselves I mean half of Android is built by Samsung but within Samsung there are different brands that are achieving totally different things I mean they have their brand that's trying to be like apple especially the the Galaxy in terms of selling more premium Hardware but the majority of their phones are not like that the majority of phones are just cheap devices that they're selling that are sort of um carrier friendly good enough is what Samsung called them internally and even among the uh top Galaxy phones what they call a Galaxy you know S7 doesn't necessarily mean the same thing there's a whole bunch of different phones with different gpus and different uh modems and you know significantly different Hardware they're all called the same brand so it's the fractionalization of what it means to be an Android phone is just like a fractal there's no way to do this even am you know even uh Samsung can't do that okay I want to break for a moment I'm going to tell our readers about something very important and then we'll be right back Casper is a sleep brand that's created an outrageously comfortable mattress sold directly to Consumers better still Casper's award-winning sleep surface 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mattress it's it's hard to describe how different it is it's it's supportive it's not exactly firm it's got sort of the Comfort layer on top like I've mentioned but even if you find that you get one and you don't like it again you have 100 nights to try it out and if you don't love it they pick it up and they refriend you everything get $50 towards any mattress purchase by visiting casper.com inssider and using the code Insider terms and conditions May apply now Dan we were talking a lot about Android and iOS 11 and iPhone 8 and 8 plus uh we would be remiss if we didn't mention some of the things that have happened in the news this past week there have been a number of reviews about Apple watch specifically the LTE equipped model and some problems that people are encountering when it tries to stay assoc iated to a Wi-Fi based station as opposed to switching over to LTE have you read anything about that or seen anything about that as we talk about it yeah there were a series of reviews that some of them didn't see this problem at all and um most notably I believe it was the Wall Street Journal and The Verge commented on it and not only pointed it out as a problem but said it was a reason not to buy the watch and that idea has been picked up by a lot of sites saying oh LT doesn't work and you should hold off and buying the watch so it's kind of turning into a bate situation the reality is what's actually happening is when you connect to certain Wi-Fi hotspots uh there are kind of free open spots for example like Starbucks or you know sometimes the city or an airport will have a a site that you log into and there's no password on the network but how it works is you connect to the network and then it pulls up a web page and it's called a it's a captive setup to where captive portal yeah so you you go to apple.com and instead of taking you to apple.com it takes you to Welcome to the airport please click this button to say you're not you know using our Network to be a terrorist and then you have to click okay and so there's like this thing that you have to go through that's one example another example is you go to a hotel and you associate with you know your the Marriott and you have to go in and put in a username and password that they give you or you have to put in a code or you have to do something to make it work so those kind of networks are obviously not going to work on Apple watch but how Apple has set up uh how networking works it has this kind of magical way of any networks that you set up that that are known networks on your phone that you can just automatically connect to it will sync over to all your other devices so that this work so these kind of networks are a problem on Apple watch because there's not really a mechanism for making that work especially on its own if it if there's not a phone around if you have can I restate it just a second yeah so what's happening the way this the way this works in my understanding is that um when you are on one of these networks that is a captive portal network uh you type in a web address you could type in Google you could type in apple you could type in whatever and the captive portal their router captures that request and redirects it to their page that allows you to click that you accept the terms or put in your hotel room number or whatever the requirements are and when you accept those terms then it goes ahead and and redirects you and what they're doing is the way Apple does this is pretty tricky what it's very cool actually what they do is when you try and connect to a Wi-Fi network and first load the page if you can success get to a website that's hosted on apple.com servers um the response will be success and they don't show you the captive portal thing you just get to keep going to the internet if you can't reach that page at apple.com then they go ahead and show you the web View and show you the captive portal page which is how Apple does this the point that you're you're getting it is very cool too which is that Apple has decided it's very convenient if all of your Apple devices that have your same iCloud ID signed in know the same Wi-Fi so that if you're on one device and you close it and pick up another it will also join the same Wi-Fi network you don't have to re-enter the credentials and thats for the watch in certain circumstances works works great for iPad works great for iPhones works great for Mac laptops works less well for the watch when it's a captive portal that requires you to re agree to the terms because the watch has no way of displaying those terms and in addition to what we're talking about with captive portal there's another um I don't know if it's considered the same thing but there's another little twist on it for example if you have Comcast or number of different carriers they give you access to a bunch of Wi-Fi networks and if you set that up on your computer it will also work on your phone so that if you happen to be around the corner from you know a Comcast hotspot it'll just automatically jump on and the way Comcast handles it specifically uh limits you to a number of different devices so that you can't just like give out your credentials to everybody and everybody can just use their Network um so you have to do this little setup that you know creates a it involves a um it involves you're essentially reauthorizing which devices are yours right well it's not only that it actually installs a certificate on your device okay to be able to access it and that allows it to just log in automatically it's basically a password in the form of a file um so those kind of things are going to work on a few phones you know if you have a phone and a iPod and a laptop it works pretty well across that but one of the issues is that's not going to on the watch and the other issue is um you're going to run into a problem that I've run into where you're on a network like a free City Network or one of these Comcast hotspots and you actually do have Wi-Fi but it actually doesn't work I mean it doesn't work to get to the internet MH and that's that can happen in a lot of places I mean you can have you know go to a motel a lot of times you can get on their Wi-Fi but it doesn't actually work so when you have stuff like that configured it's not as obvious on the watch what the problem is it's kind of it can be kind of puzzling on a computer right but this kind of explains why there were some reviewers that didn't have this problem at all versus reviewers that worked for the Wall Street Journal or The Verge who live in New York City and are very likely using services that have captive portals or or uh as you say a Comcast style uh shared Wi-Fi right where they must run into this all the time because obviously the watch tried to associate with things that it had no way of getting through on so this is like a little bit of a complex situation it's not the user's fault and it is something that Apple could um I mean that they say that they're trying to figure out how to work around this um but it's not a situation of the watch not working correctly in terms of Hardware it's a situation of Apple there's a you know a niche problem that if you don't understand what's happening it's appears that it's not connecting to LTD networks and so how they' reported it is that it's not doesn't connect to LTD networks correctly which is not really true and it's kind of it's not entirely true yeah cuz the issue is that your configuration is messed up there's a lot of ways you can mess up your own configuration it makes you oh the computer's not working it's like no it's because you set router wrong no but they didn't set up you know the reviewers didn't set up a router wrong I'm not saying did I'm saying that you can create a situation that makes it appear to where the problem is here when actually the problem is over here yes so it is it is something that Apple has to address they have to make the user interface more obvious and that's one of the things they've been working on for example what you were talking about the webbased logins of of these captive networks if you go to an app there's a number of times when you can be on a network that's trying to log you in and if you don't immediately get the web view to where you can go to a thing you can be it it can say that you're connected to a network and you can be in an app saying why isn't it not refreshing my information well it's because you're not actually on the internet you're on a Wi-Fi network but that Wi-Fi network is still trying to authenticate you in a way that's not a username and password on the Wi-Fi network it's on a different level so this is a problem that's confusing on it's not just the watch it's applies to other situations and that's why Apple has created this sort of captive mechanism for getting on I believe now one of the problems is that there's no way to distinguish um at least for the user to say hey this is a network that I want to connect to on my iPhone but I don't want it to connect try to connect to my watch for example there's no way to differentiate and in fact it's not even clear on iOS how you set the order of which networks you want to connect to in what order so in some cases your your house has access to multiple networks you you may have your neighbor's Comcast as a thing that you could log into you know on on the shared network but you'd rather be on your own because it's going to be faster yeah you want to be able to prioritize which network your thing connects to and so there needs to be a little bit more sophistication in terms of how you do that but that's these are kind of like complex problems to solve and it might not work for everybody so creating something that just immediately works out of the bin for a mobile device like Apple watch that's Mobile on a different level and the fact that it's not like a phone that can just be on the mobile network all the time you don't want your watch just constantly on the mobile network because that's you know it has a battery that's the size you know know tiny so you want to be as efficient as possible I I see a possible solution for Apple to solve this I I do see a way that it could be solved that makes sense and and the answer is that just as when you first join the network on a on an iPhone and they test to see if you can receive this page at Apple or if you get redirected and if you get redirected then they show the captive portal page what they could do is on the watch check to see if they can reach the same URL and get the success success result and if they can't get the success result instead of you know blowing up and not being able to display a captive portal page at that point simply just disassociate from that Wi-Fi network so you can have that Wi-Fi network in your iOS device and in your laptop but your phone will your your watch will reject it because it can't get to the success page right and I would I would like that to happen for a number of things it's like if a network isn't working either try to reconnect there's a number of times where I'm roaming on T-Mobile and I don't know if it's problem specifically with T-Mobile or what but I will travel far enough to where all of a sudden my phone says it has LTE and good service but I can't go anywhere and if I turn it on and off again it reestablishes a connection I don't know if it's just a failure in being able to hand off the data service or if it's a problem in iOS or what it is but that's something that the operating system should say hey this isn't working I'm going to you know turn it off and turn it back on again classic troubleshooting technique and the same thing like what you're saying with Wi-Fi networks if you're connected to a Wi-Fi network and it's not giving you a route to the internet that's a pretty easy problem to solve you just say can I get out I can't well let's turn it off and can I get out now oh I'll use LTE so I mean that that's something that already Works to an extent and the handoff between Wi-Fi and LTE on mobile devices like the iPhone is pretty impressive however there are new things on the watch and it's not that it doesn't work it's that you know there's a configuration that needs to be sorted out so it is kind of irritating to to read these articles saying oh Apple doesn't have watch that works on mobile networks correctly and it's like well it's a little bit more Nuance than that and you're telling a story that's confusing people with misinformation and if we're really clear right all of this is going to get sorted out fairly rapidly we can predict there's going to be a software update that will Rectify this problem relatively quickly right we just posted an article on how to weed out your Wi-Fi your bad Wi-Fi networks to work on your phone it's on Apple Insider excellent we we'll put that in the show notes so everyone can go check it out so we we've talked talked a little bit about the the iPhone we've talked a little bit about the watch what about using iOS 11 you you you've been using it not just on your your iPhone 7 but also on the 8 and 8 plus that you've got there so what are the most striking changes the things that you're taking advantage of and the things that you've noticed about iOS 11 one of the subtlest things is when you turn on your phone instead of the the screen just coming on or I think previously it sort of came on slowly it actually comes on from black it goes from black kind of rep Paints the image I mean that's not like a cool thing if I was 11 but I just noticed there's a lot of little tweaks and animations and things that Apple has put in that kind of blur they're not obviously software I mean some some things Apple's always kind of used animations to make things feel smoother and more kind of natural and organic um you know the original Macintosh when you open an application it would do this very simple sort of wire framing of a rectangle just to give you a sense of oh that's what's happening is it's it's expanding and now you have a window open and um so there's a lot of cues of how things are happening or you know an application that kind of scales down to go back to an icon uh those kind of animations create a feel that uh is somewhat unique to Apple and if you look at Android devices you don't have that you have this kind of like brittle sort of jumping between things and Windows mobile is kind of the same same way you know you when you flipped your orientation instead of the screen sort of animating so it's like oh yeah it's flipping over you have this sort of glink and then it glink back in another way it's very computery and PC looking that um is not nice yeah so that's one of the things that I've been kind of noticing with iOS 11 that's you know unique apart from the obvious new things do you have any special features that you like you know I one of the things that I interacted with all the time in iOS 9 and 10 were Control Center and I I used them for a lot of things do not disturb uh setting up up home and homekit controls and also turning on and off Wi-Fi Bluetooth airplane mode and there's something about iOS 11 that has changed these things for me a little bit they pretty radically changed Control Center and there's some things that are easier to do and there some things that are like who Moved My Cheese kind of thing yeah so with the turning on and off of bluetoth Wi-Fi and and now cellular control in control center when you tap on those formerly in iOS 10 and before they would actually disable them the same as if you'd gone to settings and turned Wi-Fi off and turned Bluetooth off and now they don't have that behavior now you have to go to settings if you want them absolutely off here what they do is they disassociate you from whatever you're repaired with right and there's there's a good reason for that is because a lot of people don't realize a lot of people don't realize that the magic that they're seeing with what Apple BR is continuity where you do like app handoff and airdrop and things like that don't realize that those are in the background using Bluetooth to discover things and then using Wi-Fi to send data so there's a number of reasons why you'd want to say hey I don't want to connect to my devices anymore I want to like unplug everything but you don't realize that when you're doing that you're also turning off essential technology for a lot of things that are happening so if you're actually wanting to turn them off you go into settings and say turn these things off but when you go to control center and you say turning off Wi-Fi it means I don't want to connect to this network but I don't want to lose my wireless connectivity with things that are around me me so when I you know go up to my Mac I can still see the document that I'm working on or the email is still ready to go there and so it it doesn't shut off um enabling Technologies but it it control center what it's showing you is you're not turning off a um it's not like airplane mode where you're saying hey I need to turn off all my wireless because wireless networks may be interfering with things around me it's I want to disassociate with the wireless network that I'm on because I want it to use LTE like on your phone for example but doing that doesn't mean that you want to lose the connectivity of um airdrop and other features like that so it's really making it simpler for users that don't understand what's all that's happening in the background but they want something to happen yeah but it seems like it's a much more nuanced thing to try and explain now where where in the past it was very simply an onoff toggle so that's that's one of the things that I've always been a nuanced idea yeah and so the the way the changes they've made there it accomplishes something that a user doesn't have to understand everything that's going on to realize if they do that they're achieving what they want to do in control center but they're not losing functionality that they didn't realize is essential to what they've turned off got it thank you for that I appreciate it the uh one of the things that I'm happy about is the idea of shared iCloud storage among family members that's handy I haven't looked into exactly how that's implemented but that has been something that people have been asking for it for a while well and and Apple's cloud storage offerings have always been compared to the obvious Dropbox offerings and and Google's Drive offerings and the uh ability to have a a family account and shared family storage makes sense from the standpoint of you know if you have four devices in your house for example and or or even six because people have iPads in addition to phones and you want to have them all backed up buying individual storage for each one was kind of a mess to manage yeah so being able to to go ahead and purchase for all of it makes a lot more sense um and it's one of these things that I've intended to set up in the past few days and I have yet to do it but I'm going to today it's people about set up is shared for example sharing pictures between people like a husband and wife or a family you're taking pictures and you want to share things there's kind of a complexity of there's something things want to share and there's some things that you don't want to share you don't want to have like all your kids pictures just dumped into your photo album and there's other things that maybe you're taking a picture of you're going to get someone a present or something and you don't want them to know um so how do you how do you share things like that and so having a shared pool of data where you actually have an individual account and you're explicitly sharing things U seems to make a lot more sense to me what Google demonstrated at IO this last summer was this idea that if you take pictures on your phone they're just automatically shared with people people who are in them which seems like a terrible idea because there's a lot of times when I post a photo that Facebook or whatever algorithm thinks that somebody in the picture is somebody else or um you might have a picture of somebody that you don't want them to see because it's not a good picture so this automatic sharing thing when they show that off yeah it's like you don't need to share everything uh you shouldn't want a machine sharing things for you um so it it does seem like Google has incredible technical capabilities that they don't filter through any sort of human filter of really you know just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should do it yeah so just just as the public service announcement for our listeners to share your iCloud storage plan if you go to settings and you tap at the top of the page and then Family Sharing and then tap iCloud storage a banner will pop up letting you invite family members to share your storage if a family member already has a storage plan they'll be given a choice to join your shared plan if they're on the free tier they'll just be automatically added and that's really all you have to do the the 200 gig plan costs $3 a month the 2 terabyte plan costs $10 a month and so for for basically just these few bucks a month you really end up with a lot of storage that should cover the backup for most of your devices and especially if everyone's using iCloud photo library as well it's a good thing and I I'm glad that it's that easy to do it so it's it's not hard it's settings it's uh it's it's just that few steps what device are you going to purchase I mean we you've got the iPhone 8 and the 8 plus in your hand what personally is Dan G to be walking around with I'm gonna get an iPhone 10 I mean everybody everybody who loves everybody who's anybody is getting an iPhone 10 not it's not that you're just anybody but it's like if you appreciate technology yeah this is like such an obvious leave um but I have circumstances you know I don't I don't have a bunch of kids that I have to buy iPhones for so um I have it's kind of like a obvious thing for me I mean yeah of course I've I've always been on a bleeding edge just because that's part of my job that to write about stuff and understand what's going on but yeah I mean it is uh very much a jump and what we're seeing this year is Apple is really expanding the range of iPhones because they've never sold a cheaper iPhone they they lowered the price again of the SE and now they're selling four generations of phones in addition to the se you know typically it was they were selling three and then I think there was one year where they only sold two like this year and last year's I I it's not right in my brain right now but um this is the broadest range of phones so people have been talking a lot about oh the ,000 phone it's like well Apple's been selling a phone that's been $950 for several Generations now the the high-end plus it's not really incredible that Apple's selling ,000 phone what's incredible is that Apple's now selling a $1,000 phone $700 phone a $6 you know $550 phone and you know down to whatever the lowest one is now that's an incredible range of options so people can kind of decide for themselves where they want to buy a phone but what we've always seen in the past is the best phone that Apple's had is what majority of its customers buy which is kind of incredible that's not the case for anybody any other company on Earth certainly not Samsung you know Sam Samsung say 80 million phones a quarter or something but a very small number of those are um you know a small percentage of those are its best phones where Apple you know Apple's always came up with you know like the 5c and and the SE and other phones that are kind of budget oriented that's not blowing up the majority or the volume of its sales those are actually kind of you know almost Niche products for people who want to spend less the majority of people buying iPhones are always buying the newest model and that's changing a little bit the last three years you know Apple's you could say the plus is the best model because it's the most expensive but there's a lot of people that just don't want that big of a phone it's hard to carry it's it has a nice screen but it's hard to carry uh so I think the tin is going to appeal to a lot of people that like the idea of a really nice screen that's larger but is not much different in size than the the standard iPhone 8 um and price is less of an issue because people are already paying a lot of money for data service you know at least in the United States right how things will translate into other countries in different regions I mean Europe is has a different idea of what people value and also the data service isn't um is priced a lot differently and in emerging countries it's even more different and you know in Asia there's different you know there's China Asia and there's um Japan and right now the mix that people buy is different in each of those markets and then like within China there's totally different markets there's the markets for affluent people live in cities who there are tons of people that are rich and live in cities or you know have money to spin that that's Apple's market and then there's a huge Market outside of that that uh can immediately afford you know even a $600 phone and especially when you apply taxes and other you know things it it's quite expensive for somebody who's making less than a comparable you know like Western salary so a lot of the talk about how Apple's slipping and falling and you know their market shares going down is really they're looking at a big Market outside of iPhones that are not buying an iPhone pric device but Apple's really held on to the the the market for phones uh premium priced phones of like 80% of that in China which is kind of incredible because there's a lot of competition there's a lot of Chinese companies that are trying to build high-end phones as well but they're just not able to compute against Apple's branding and product and apple has a really strong ecosystem so be interesting to see how that works out and then also you know what happens next year that's kind of a CA for speculation do does iPhone 10 become a separate line from the standard iPhone or do we just sort of I believe what's going to happen is we're going to you know just incrementally become iPhone iPhone 10 is a new platform of how iPhone looks and works well I I I agree that the Notch and the face ID are are pretty much the standard going forward the the only reason that IID expect to see uh Touch ID for example would be on the SE or or on the seven if it gets sold for one more year in the same way that the 6s has been sold for one more year right you know any any new product is going to be a product that has the notch that has face ID that has these things that we call the the things that make a 10 a 10 um the product nameing gets a little weird for me though because we've got the eight and the 10 so next year we get the nine and the 10.1 or or how's that work it's going to be weird to me yeah I mean it kind of doesn't matter because product names are sort of arbitrary and people get upset remember when the MacBook first came out people were like no it's not a Macbook it's a power book for the rest of my life and you know now we're used to calling it a Macbook it doesn't really matter they call it it's the same do you know it's the product that matters um but yeah it is kind of mentioning to speculate how things are going to work out but if you look at for example how Touch ID rolled out there were phones that you know devices that came out you know the five the 5c was of discontinued but um there were you know Touch ID took a while to roll out to everything else you know certainly iPads uh kind of incrementally became a thing and you know most recently it came to the Mac um how how quick quickly Apple will roll out its technology for iPhone 10 on other devices there's applications where you can put that on a computer you know MacIntosh and iMac have a sensor array in there to do those kind of effects however there's something really powerful about the fact that iPhone sells in such huge quantities it's hundreds of millions of devices in a year every year consistently and that allows you to do things you can't do on a platform like the Mac that sells 20 million and you know different form factors how do you account for the difference between how a person uses a desktop iMac and a laptop yeah even if they were relying on the exact same part as used in the iPhone it it still would have costs on fitting that part into the device right changing the screen frame changing the uh the the overlay glass around the whole thing it's it would have a KnockOn effect that would have a cost that you wouldn't necessarily Ru on and Macs just don't have the same economy of scale that's Vol same thing you see in uh in the App Store it the Mac App Store is good for what it does but the there's certainly not the same volume of sales that's driving the kind of Rapid um business that you see in the iOS store well has own problems yeah I mean that's a frustration for developers but I mean part of the problems part of the reason those problems aren't being so solved as rapidly is because there's just not as much activity there to address it and one of the interesting things about having an engine like the iPhone that's just driving development technology is that there's a lot of spillover so people complain about how the Mac hasn't adopted all these Technologies as rapidly as iPhone but the fact that it is getting them it would never have been able to get those things on its own but the fact that there's so much development going on for iOS means the the developer tools that are also used for Max are also progressing on this rapid level and you're getting things like Swift and you're getting you know compiler uh advances and things like that that are really being paid for by the iPhone in a large respect another company the size of Apple couldn't you know the size of the Macintosh couldn't maintain a platform like the Macintosh without having a product like iPhone and you know look at Microsoft that's part of their problem is they're trying to sell computers that are sort of like a Mac they're selling them in much lower qu quantities than either the Macintosh or iPad much lower they just can't iterate as fast and they can't develop it as fast and they can't invest as much technology in this applicad because Apple's not only making so much more money on his macintoshes but it's also you know making money on the side in terms of iPhones that reuse a lot of the same technology if you're a cloud services company you can't just do that when we were leading up to the release of these devices we had a lot of rumors that showed uh the dock that was on iOS 11 and iPad rendered on images of the iPhone 8 and 10 and one of the things that came up among some friends and that we're talking was that iOS 11 for iPad makes iOS 11 on iPhone feel like the iPhone is the older technology because it lacks the dock and because things like drag and drop aren't nearly as as let's say um you know they're they're more like first scissons on the iPad where the iPhone feels like a second cousin kind of thing well uh Apple developed iPads and iPhones separately from the beginning and that's how they positioned it when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad he didn't say hey here's a big iPhone he said here is the iPhone and here is our desktop computers and we think there's a space in the Middle where we can develop a product that's different from both that's better at some things and has a reason to exist and everyone sort of blew that off and Google's approach was to say hey we have an operating system that scales infinitely from you know a tiny device to a huge you know almost a computer uh and that has failed Android tablets have never been really strong uh platform and basically they run stretched out iPhone apps or stretched out Android Phone Apps and that's hurt its adoption as well because what's the point of it it's just like kind of stretched out and it's enabled things for example it enabled Samsung to make big iPhone or big um tablet phones that are sort of huge screen you just scale everything up but it's had the the impact of um erasing any capacity for Android to really become a strong tablet platform and it's they've introduce things that sort of don't work on a tablet or don't work on a phone and what Apple's doing with iOS 11 is they're putting a lot of a lot of new emphasis on iPad and saying hey we're solving a lot of things that you kind of need to make iPad a more sophisticated device and taking advantage of it screen even better to do complicated things and you know to do multiple drag and drop kind of operations and work between applications in a way that's distinct from a complex window system like the Mac which is much more complicated and requires um a different way of thinking about things but is also not really something you can scale down effectively to an iPhone so you don't really want an iPhone to work like a scaled down iPad because you don't have as much real estate to work with some of the features there there may be some more blending in the future but I think there's there's really boundaries that say if your screen is you know this big if it's an iPad size and I think that's part of the reason why they got rid of the iPad Mini because it's it's it's making kind of a clear sort of fire break between this is what a iPad is and the kind of size you need to be able to work with it you know significantly with multi handed gestures you can't do that if you scale it down too far it's just like what Steve J said you know you can't file your fingers down there's a scale to what we work on that if you're doing things that are tablet oriented that have to be a big enough screen and what we've seen with the iPad Pro is that Apple said yeah you can actually have a bigger screen if you look at the iPad Pro by itself the 12-in one it looks like an enormous iPad and it's like wow this is just too big but when you start using it especially when you start using it with a pencil you realize wow this is just a perfect screen for doing a lot of things that would previously require a whole desktop computer setup but a lot of those things don't scale down to having something that fits in your pocket and that's that's really the the conjecture here is that there are people that believe that they do and of course they believe that as as an unproven kind of thing they they it's their hypothesis I can kind of see both ways of it once you get used to doing drag and drop once you get used to doing these kinds of things you kind of want for them to be there on the iPhone and it doesn't work the same way that can seem frustrating but uh inure but remember there was also kind of a strong parallel in that a lot of people who are familiar with the desktop computer were saying oh when is Apple bringing overlapping windows and a desktop full of floating icons and finally getting an iPad that begins to work like a computer that begins to work like the the what we think a computer should be able to do yeah but if you had just made the iPad like the Mac it could not have uh changed it could not have optimized in the way that it has and also be much slower because a window environment takes much more um processing capacity because you have to do a lot of things you're you're doing a lot of things that are wasting processor power that if you're on a computer doesn't matter because you have a huge huge fast chip and a big battery but if you have a super slim tablet you have less computing power to start with and as you start adding computing power and we seen how the the A10 and the a11 just turned into just incredible powerhouses of that rivaling laptops at this point now you can start doing more complicated things but if you started off with that you would have had a really slow computer and that's what Microsoft really showed was if you have a tablet that is actually a PC without a keyboard basically it's either going to be too thick and heavy because it's really a computer it's not a tablet or it's going to be super slow or it's going to pretend to be a PC but when you actually do PC things on it they not work because it's not really a PC so Apple's approach which was very different and you know people are saying oh you know I don't believe this I believe that it's been a few years now and we have pretty good proof of what worked and what didn't and apple has a very strong platform for tablet Computing that's differentiated from its platform for handheld uh phone devices and from its platform for computing on a conventional Macintosh type environment Microsoft doesn't have any of those things Microsoft is struggling to sell laptop hybrid computers and every other PC maker is also like barely making any money struggling with these kind of things where the screen comes off or whatever you know appeals to like a niche group of people does not appeal to a huge mainstream it does not allow people to do unique things that they weren't able to do before and a level that you know is really changing technology it's pretty clearly answered Apple got this right so I mean at this point it's like we're not really arguing we're we're Looking Backward and saying see that that was correct you know Apple's approach was correct because it worked yeah I I I want to thank you for your giving us all this time and and I appreciate it so I I don't want to draw things out very long very much longer is there something that you'd like to leave with this as a parting thought uh what is a parting thought let's see um trying to think of something brilliant to say um I think we've had a period of time where people were saying oh man this technolog is getting boring it's not boring right now there's so much going on there's so much excitement happening in in the world and we're seeing Apple's really hitting it stride um there there's been this kind of media narrative that oh Apple can't innovate anymore it doesn't know what to do and you know they're not changing their case fast enough anyone who's saying that apple is not innovating fast enough is it's kind of hard to take them seriously at this point I mean it's like come on do you not understand what technology is there are companies that are coming out and and doing flashy things that are you know employ a lot of impressive technology and research and development and and stuff but we're not seeing a lot of examples of things that are really successfully uh taking hold of the market I mean one example is you know Samsung's Edge phone there there's quite a lot of technology that goes into taking a screen and bending around the corner so that you can touch it on the side and you can have it upside down and look at you know the side lights up but that wasn't it was gimmick and it's kind of obviously a gimmick in the fact that Samsung doesn't make that anymore you know they did it for a couple years and it's like okay we're done doing this gimmick we're going to move to something else that kind of gimmickry gets a lot of attention from the media and gets you know excited reviews and people are standing up clapping but it's gimmick it's not real and there's some things that Apple do that are also kind of gimmicky but overall the pace of technology that Apple's doing a lot of things that appeared to be sort of gimmickry in the past are now clearly like wow that's foundational you know Touch ID there were a lot of people that said oh fingerprint reader that's that's been done before you know mic Microsoft's licenses were putting fingerprints on their fingerprint readers on their phone and you know gave up after a year because it didn't really work out Apple established that as being so essential that when they came out with a new technology that's even better with face ID that people are saying oh you can't take this fingerprint away from me you know I desperately needed it's part of how I work now so it's really it's really good I try to always have kind of a historical context of are what people saying right now does it fit into the continuity of what we know to be true from previous events or are they saying something that contradicts everything we actually know I think that's something that's always kind of fueled how I look at things and it's a it's a functional way to look at things does this fit into everything else that I know perfect where can people find you on the internet I Tweet stuff out at Apple um no at Daniel Aaron ER is my middle name and of course I'm an apple Insider and I've been writing about a lot of these new technologies um wrote about face ID and what it means kind of what I just talked about and also some of the new technologies we writing about depth uh cameras and what that means so there's a lot of interesting Technologies AR kit all this stuff is coming out Apple Insider we also have of course our YouTube stuff and our app on the App Store and of course this podcast on Apple podcast and we would appreciate it very much if you've enjoyed this if you've enjoyed talking and listening about this with us please give us feedback please uh tweet either Daniel Daniel Aaron or me at V marks and uh feel free to let us know feel free to leave good reviews about both the Apple Insider app and the Apple Insider podcast we do appreciate it and we will be back next week with moreyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to a very special episode of Apple Insider podcast 139 I'm your host Victor marks and joining me is Daniel aroner hey how's it going amazing how are you well I'm having one of those days where everything is just like upside down and backwards and requires three more things to fix that have dependencies on other processes no they they're conspiring against you are they yeah Computing and everything else just one of those all right but so tell me about what you have that no one else has had yet well we went to the hand on area and handled everything but um we're currently working with uh reviews for the iPhone 8 and 8 plus and I don't have an an iPhone 10 yet I was handling one last night some friends that have access to things so right so the the iPhone 8 and 8 plus a lot of people immediately started looking down on that and and being sort of uh condescendingly saying that it was the fastest they'd ever seen an iPhone go Obsolete and I'm not sure I agree with that opinion how do you feel about that well Apple's doing something apple has a cycle of products that uh have typically you know even back in the days of I um iPods there was this sort of joke of they've come out with a new thing and now there's something new like Saturday live it had kind of mocked that idea several times of now there's a new iPad or a new iPod that you have to buy and now there's a new one and you open it up and there's a smaller one inside of it kind of thing um and with that kind of cycle of excitement when you try to do two at once there's a contention of well which is the exciting one and Apple's several times had uh good better best models in with Max and they've started doing that with iPads they now have two iPad lines um but this is the first time they've ever done that in a in a major way with iPhone with the 67 or 66s and 7 they had the regular and the plus which are different differentiated mostly by size there wasn't a lot of exclusive features I think the larger one had o on the camera and um more memory but there there weren't there wasn't a dramatic difference in what they were offering in terms of technology so the tin is new and that it's it's offering this huge jump to a new premium tier and that has caused a lot of people to look at the eight and say oh this isn't this doesn't look as different when in reality it shares a lot of the same technology it has the same processor has uh almost identical cameras that are a a pretty big jump from the seven line and a variety of other features that are kind of um enabled by the fast processor in terms of software uh so but because it lacks the the thing that people have been putting a lot of attention on and by people I mean reviewers a lot of reviewers have been really pushing attention on the fact that the the case hasn't changed and they've been saying this for now every year since the six came out because Apple came up with a you know device form factor that didn't need to immediately change and I wrote an article about this just recently talking about you know who's going to buy the eight who's at four and kind of targeting the fact that people are reviewing with the sense that case really matters a lot the case has to change every year to keep people excited and sort of refuting that notion with facts I mean it's like that's actually not true because if it were Apple would be losing sales to all these companies you know China is full of companies that are constantly coming up with new things and this is not a a new thing that's just with the iPhone um this has always been the case I gave the example of blackberries Rim was one of the most U popular and you know they were so addictive people called them crack berries but they didn't really change and you know across 10 years it was kind of the same form factor the technology kept improving but it was kind of the same thing for more than a decade and during that same period of time there were companies like for example I gave the example of Microsoft's um Windows mobile they were changing all the time it was very it was very similar to Android today where you have all these different companies just desperately trying to stand out and look different and do quirky things and experimenting with all kinds of different form factors and none of it caught on and none of it was really appealing to customers in a way that sustained itself and it wasn't just Microsoft or their business model because they did a similar thing with Xbox across 15 years Xbox has really changed three times in a significant sort of redesign of what it is and so when you look at it from that perspective we shouldn't expect the the case of the iPhone to change every year or that it needs to but what Apple's doing is saying here's a case that's going along for a while in this design and in the past it has actually changed every couple years and that was the original kind of thing behind the S uh cycle they had the 3G and then they called it the 3Gs it was the same thing but it was improved more and then the four came out and it was totally new and then the 4S sort of uh built new technology on top of that same design and same thing with the five and the 5S and six and 6s and with the seven it was like oh wow they're not arbitrarily changing the body it's like well they didn't need to and it's it's weird how there's like two uh messages that are going on at the same time on one hand you have people saying oh the iPhone needs needs to change it's boring it has has needs a a different case design and at the same time you have the most popular Android models that are selling the most are the ones that are designed to look exactly like Apple's iPhone so does it need to change or why is everyone copying it you know it's kind of mutually exclusive idea I'm going to just give another example with Samsung Samsung has been selling a kind of dual Flagship every year where they had the the um standard Galaxy S that increments every year and then they were selling the note was more like a bigger screen phone and then they started creating two um Galaxy S's one that was um The Edge which was kind of a more expensive version with a edge display that only lasted for what a year or two and now they went to kind of copying what Apple's doing with a slightly bigger phone they call the plus um but at no point did ever anyone ever criticize Samsung and say oh they have they have the fanciest phone with a new design so the old one is not something you want to buy nobody was out there writing stories you can't buy the old one but you know for Apple that's that's become an established narrative and everybody and their reviews almost everybody there were some reviews that were actually quite good but the majority of these reviews focused on the fact that the design isn't changed and tried to make that into a you know they called it a big problem for the the eight where if it was a problem then people wouldn't be buying um iPhone is the most popular phone and has been for the last several years of not changing so clearly case design is not what's causing people to buy a new phone every year it's the technology in terms of what it can do for them how responsive it is which is a the best uh Benchmark of how fast it is and features like the camera it's extremely popular and then there's other features that are Rel to the platform with iMessages and things like that certainly apps that have people interested in iOS exclusively they're not even going to look at Alternatives regardless of what features they offer how much the case changes what should a person who's weighing whether to get an iPhone 7 or an iPhone 8 or the iPhone 10 consider because those are three different very different price points and different capabilities but there's there's sort of P pull between people who think that last year's phone is good enough versus getting the the middle of the options there or laying out all the cash and getting the very best one what's what's the decision process that person should go through true well I don't think it's really changed over previous years I mean we've always had kind of a buy the latest model buy last year's model for $100 less kind of cycle or you can buy an even older model or you can buy a refurbished model kind of depends on how much you want to spend um a lot of people think about and talk about especially in reviews the price of the hardware and actually if you you know especially in North America for example um you're paying more for data service than you are for the phone even if you buy an iPhone 10 you know it's $1,000 that sounds like wow that's that's a very expensive phone and yeah it's more expensive than we've had before but that's something like $83 a month and that boils down to about $2 a day so in terms of kind of uh if you have the ability to afford a cup of coffee every day then you're spending $1,000 a year on coffee and a lot of us need coffee um but actually a lot of us have developed a need also to have you know the best phone there is and when you pull it out of your pocket and it makes you happy that's you know to me that's probably worth more than a cup of coffee but you know there are people that don't have money up front to pay for some of the stuff and you know that it certainly makes sense that especially you know if you have four kids you can't you can't buy them all coffee um so it it's it's totally a personal decision on how much you think it's worth but I tell people to think about the terms of the cost of what you're paying for in terms of how much you use it and what you get out of it not buy features that you think um you know that that are being marketed to you but decide what do you want what what is important to you and for some people um just having a a phone for connectivity is important um but for increasingly for most of us u in the in the world being able to access apps and being able to use the best camera that's possible there are people who you know whether you're taking pictures of your friends or whether you have children that you're recording their lives the phone that you have has a huge impact on the kind of photos that you can capture and how good they're going to be and so that's playing a bigger and bigger um role in people's decision to buy more premium devices it wasn't too long ago that that you know you bought a Palm Pilot phone or whatever um whatever your carrier gave you and it the the camera wasn't really good enough to take pictures with I mean you could sort of capture things in a utilitarian fashion but modern iPhones have tremendous cameras that rival a full expensive Standalone camera and when you combine that with uh the ability to Run apps and play games I mean you have a multi-purpose device that's covering a lot of bases that we used to buy separately whether it's you know a music player or a phone and a camera and you know for a lot increasingly for a lot of people it's like a computer so this year there's been a whole bunch of noise made about the fact that Apple has a apple selling a computer that cost $1,000 you know there was a time not too long ago when the news was that Apple has a computer that costs less than $1,000 isn't that incredible so good point it's it's really I don't think you can create a formula for people to decide this is this is how you should decide what to pay for it's a very much a subjective decision but I love paying for technology because that's one of the things that makes me the happiest to use every day I mean you use it so much it's it's very similar to cars there's a lot of people that pay more for a car than maybe they should afford you know if you are going to judge them but what's the alternative it's not one of the most expensive things you pay for so I mean it really comes down to what you can afford obviously but also you know it it's not it's not the kind of thing that is more expensive than most people can afford right and and one of the complaints that I saw said that you know anything above anything above $200 is a luxury and I scratched my head and thought well now wait a minute the iPhone SE costs more than that does that make all iPhones luxury items and I think what that that kind of complaint misses is that for a subset of of iPhone users a subset of all smartphone users the phone is their only form of connectivity to the internet and that for some of them they may not even use the browser as the portal to the internet which it traditionally has been that it's the apps and voice interface that are using the internet as a service right asking Siri questions and getting answers back about whether forecasts and events of the day kind of thing is more useful and and more pertinent for that user than a browser and that if if that's their only access to the connected world then it's not a luxury item right and it's kind of a personal luxury I mean that that's it's continuation of iPods I mean iPods were you know relatively expensive music players compared to you could always buy something cheaper than an iPod but well I would say that music players are definitely a luxury item m music players are a luxury item m music enriches lives yes music is entertaining music is is a both a distraction and and something that we focus on but the internet and its resources have become a a critical part of life to the point where some Services uh even even Services you regularly need like government services are either only available or best available through the internet um sure I think this is so the phone it makes sense to have the the phone that works best for you for that right it's I I would not necessarily a luxury item it's it's the the iPod is more of a luxury item than the phone does that make sense I mean it's becoming more of a necessity but um you know the distinguishing line between what is luxury and what is essential has changed and shifted as time goes on I mean our our world keeps getting more and more luxurious really but there are things that we now take advant or you know take for granted you know television was originally a luxury and then it got to the point where people it was kind of a common thing and if if you know you check into a motel room and there's not a a TV you'd think wow this is strange and you know today I don't even notice a TV in the room if I'm in a place I don't ever turn it on because I have more than a television in my pocket that's going to show me what I want to watch not what you know a dozen channels are wanting me to see so the definition of what is luxury and what is needed is you know changes over time but what we're seeing with iPhones in particular I mean iPhone Apple's leading that uh and other pH you know there are other phones you can buy um but Apple sort of defined what a smartphone should be what it delivers and they're constantly adding on to that so instead of just being a camera it's a video camera and now it does Panos and now it does slow motion and time lapse stuff and a couple years ago they invented this idea of live photos that it's not just a photo it has this animated context to it that you know you can access and they're building upon that in iOS 11 so now you instead of just having a photo that comes to life you have a photo that can be in a loop or you know a boomerang like bounce or blurred into a photo that's kind of capturing time over a period of time but in a photo not a time lapse so and then also with all this augmented reality and being able to capture especially with the iPhone 8 plus and the upcoming 10 the idea that you're not just taking a photo of capturing light but you're actually creating a depth map where you have either two lenses on the plus and the 10 on the back that are calculating how far different things in that picture are from you so that you can do things like change the lighting or blur out the background or and create a an entirely different sense of what that photo is going to be how how's that worked for you in practice you you've got the phones in your hands so how what have you found using that well I've been using uh the portrait mode in on the 7 plus all year I really like it there are things that doesn't get right and those Apple's continually updating that uh there's been some improve M over the course of iOS 10 but iOS 11 does a much better job of figuring out how to apply like the bouquet blurring out of the background how to determine where the edge is there are still things that doesn't quite get right so it's it's like any other kind of form of Photography where you take a picture and you know there's a flaw here or you have to make sure that there's not a intensely bright light because it's going to blow blow out your photo things like that so it it requires kind of working around its limitations but the new lighting effects um I haven't we haven't published any photos yet but it does allow you to do a lot of things that lighting is quite difficult there are people who that's their job is to do Studio lighting and for you know a regular person being able to take a photo and come back with a a very dramatic lighting that not only takes out the background but lights the the the surface of their face in a way that's correct Apple's kind of doing a machine learning thing where they took all these pictures and analyzed how professional lighting benefits a picture and then appli that electronically in in the way that the camera is able to analyze the subject that you're pointing your camera at and give you similar um effects so that's a really smart way of improving a camera that's not just you know hey the pixels are a little bit bigger or I mean the pixels are deeper and smaller and the sensor bigger kind of thing here's a Computing answer to making photos better so that you're taking the photo but you're also have tools to improve things on a level that's kind of Beyond you know people say oh the lighting the the portrait lighting features you can do that in apps well that's not actually true that's kind of like saying the the uh face ID oh you can do that with an app that's what Samsung did you know they just point a camera at somebody and say oh yeah that's you'll let you in that's not the same thing if you're not doing depth if you're not looking at an analy if you're not if the camera doesn't have the capability in Hardware to either take copies of a photo taken from slightly different angles and compare them together to create a depth map which is what the 7even plus and the the 10 rear camera do or the the front-facing sensor on the tin actually projects a matrix of invisible dots on the subject and does an even more detailed scan of what's there without that depth data you can't do these kind of effects the portrait lighting effects because you know Instagram you can do Instagram filters that just kind of broadly change things across the photo or maybe lighten the middle of the photo or block out the the outsides those effects are powerful and they're great for improving your pictures but if you have other data and third party developers like Instagram will be able to take advantage of that depth data that the iPhone 8 plus and the 10 capture if you have the ability to uh uh work with depth data you can do all kinds of things with a photo that you can't just do with a a filter and Snapchat another example of that of doing it in real time and live I was going to ask you about that so what's your Snapchat experience I worked with Snapchat and I mean I used it at the event um it's pretty incredible I mean everybody else saw the pictures too but you the ability to not just add sort of a superficial um graphics on top of your picture but actually mapping it to your face in real time that's right so the the Snapchat filters that you usually see are ones where they're they're images that happen to be sort of stuck on top of the surface of your face they don't map to your face they're just images overlaid over the top of a photo right right and there's transparency and it and it does you know it can um interact with it can recognize your face for example it knows where to Overlay those things and that's something that's not new to Snapchat that's something that Apple was doing you know back in the days of um photo booth where you could have like the the bird the circle of birds going around your forehead like a cartoon or things like that where the the software is recognizing where your face is so it knows how to draw you know the glasses on your face or something like that or that's still not a trivial thing it's interesting to do it's not something that is you know something we take for granted but app keeps changing and building upon that so in um in iOS you have a whole API for working with identifying things in you know using machine learning or basically machine uh Vision so the camera is understanding what's there so you can identify not just a face but you can actually identify that's where their eyes are this is with cheekbones and the the Contour of their chin those kind of things where you can do not only just apply an effect to it but also track a person in a video or there's a whole ton of things you can do with that kind of information and depth is another example of that and so a lot of these things are actually taking advantage of multiple different Technologies together to do you know a whole new level of things yeah and what sets Apple apart with iOS in terms of U being able to advance Technologies like that instead of Android because there was this whole message for for many years the beginning of Android saying we have all these different manufacturers that are all trying new things and things are going to happen faster well what we actually have witnessed over the last decade is that Apple being able to say hey this is how we want to roll out of technology and rolling it you know putting a lot of thought into it first and then rolling it out and then building upon the most successful ideas has developed technology much better than having a whole bunch of different companies say hey we're using Android on a low level but we're going in different directions just for example dual cameras there's been a dozen different companies putting out cameras with um dual cameras on the back but their implementation of it was different and it didn't really catch on and there's not one way to do that in Android land so for example part of the problem that that Vic gutra laid out earlier this year was that when you do something like that in Android land you can either then make your own camera application or if you want to participate in everything else that Android does then you you have to talk to Google and get what it is that you're doing into back into the camera app that means everyone else can take advantage of it which has the effect of lengthening out the timeline to get something implemented into people's hands and can in the way dilute your what what makes your implementation unique because you've just given it to everyone else too right this is part of what Android 8 is trying to resolve is is some of that balkanization by the way they've restructured it so that you can do these things without having to go back to Google and ask permission necessarily for all of it but this is the advantage that Apple has is because they own the whole stack from top to bottom they don't have to ask anyone else's permission they know exactly which devices they're going to support and how many devices are out in the wild that are still in use that will be supported on day one they have a much easier path to go on it from that just a specific example of that is that like I was saying about dual cameras there's LG that their dual camera is one of them is a wide angle lens so you get a wider shot and there's some to that but uh other companies their idea a couple different Chinese companies their idea of two cameras is one is is you know kind of modeling it after the ey where you have rods and cones that are one is capturing color data and one is capturing sharp uh monochromatic data uh that's that's what is right and honor a couple different companies and there's other companies that are doing other things HC had a an idea of doing it more like what Apple's doing in terms of having two cameras that are using depth to to do um effects but they a lower resolution camera that just didn't look as good um so you have all these different things that people are trying however you know several years later they've had a head start of a couple years of doing that several years maybe um there's now not an installed base of any of them so they were all attempts now at this point Google can't leverage any of this installed base of Hardware to build for example AR kit on top of that where Apple has been apple has a uh pace and goal of what they're trying to accomplish so they're rolling out Hardware and then over time they're using the abilities that they've rolled out to uh kind of snowball Technologies so you have the dual cameras of the 7 plus now you can use that not only for the portrait bouquet but you can also use it for um other depth applications and there's a huge installed base of them and you can build upon that to do other things and then on top of the fact that you already have u a gyroscope and motion controls and the cameras are all very similar I mean they're they're it's much easier to calibrate you can can drop something like AR kit that allows you to build very complex applications that require very precise calculations of when the when the phone moves and the camera sees this then it should recalculate a scene so that it looks smooth and perfect to the user that's extremely hard to do an Android land because everybody has different hardware and it's all calibrated differently and a lot of it can't even be calibrated yeah absolutely it's it's very difficult for there to be let's say consistent experience when the the hardware is so different and what its capabilities are are so different and that's partly why you end up shoehorned into each different Android developers experience they've designed you know they you get their modifications to the launcher screen their modifications to the camera application that are pre-loaded and if you want to have the experience that that should be canonical Android it's difficult to get right say some of that's supposed to be changing with Android 8 but it's still not there and that's a problem not only just across Android between you know HC and LG and Chinese companies but between companies themselves I mean half of Android is built by Samsung but within Samsung there are different brands that are achieving totally different things I mean they have their brand that's trying to be like apple especially the the Galaxy in terms of selling more premium Hardware but the majority of their phones are not like that the majority of phones are just cheap devices that they're selling that are sort of um carrier friendly good enough is what Samsung called them internally and even among the uh top Galaxy phones what they call a Galaxy you know S7 doesn't necessarily mean the same thing there's a whole bunch of different phones with different gpus and different uh modems and you know significantly different Hardware they're all called the same brand so it's the fractionalization of what it means to be an Android phone is just like a fractal there's no way to do this even am you know even uh Samsung can't do that okay I want to break for a moment I'm going to tell our readers about something very important and then we'll be right back Casper is a sleep brand that's created an outrageously comfortable mattress sold directly to Consumers better still Casper's award-winning sleep surface combines supportive memory foams and a springy comfort layer for just the right level of sink and bounce it's it's important to know that buying a Casper mattress is easy you order online it's delivered to 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don't like it again you have 100 nights to try it out and if you don't love it they pick it up and they refriend you everything get $50 towards any mattress purchase by visiting casper.com inssider and using the code Insider terms and conditions May apply now Dan we were talking a lot about Android and iOS 11 and iPhone 8 and 8 plus uh we would be remiss if we didn't mention some of the things that have happened in the news this past week there have been a number of reviews about Apple watch specifically the LTE equipped model and some problems that people are encountering when it tries to stay assoc iated to a Wi-Fi based station as opposed to switching over to LTE have you read anything about that or seen anything about that as we talk about it yeah there were a series of reviews that some of them didn't see this problem at all and um most notably I believe it was the Wall Street Journal and The Verge commented on it and not only pointed it out as a problem but said it was a reason not to buy the watch and that idea has been picked up by a lot of sites saying oh LT doesn't work and you should hold off and buying the watch so it's kind of turning into a bate situation the reality is what's actually happening is when you connect to certain Wi-Fi hotspots uh there are kind of free open spots for example like Starbucks or you know sometimes the city or an airport will have a a site that you log into and there's no password on the network but how it works is you connect to the network and then it pulls up a web page and it's called a it's a captive setup to where captive portal yeah so you you go to apple.com and instead of taking you to apple.com it takes you to Welcome to the airport please click this button to say you're not you know using our Network to be a terrorist and then you have to click okay and so there's like this thing that you have to go through that's one example another example is you go to a hotel and you associate with you know your the Marriott and you have to go in and put in a username and password that they give you or you have to put in a code or you have to do something to make it work so those kind of networks are obviously not going to work on Apple watch but how Apple has set up uh how networking works it has this kind of magical way of any networks that you set up that that are known networks on your phone that you can just automatically connect to it will sync over to all your other devices so that this work so these kind of networks are a problem on Apple watch because there's not really a mechanism for making that work especially on its own if it if there's not a phone around if you have can I restate it just a second yeah so what's happening the way this the way this works in my understanding is that um when you are on one of these networks that is a captive portal network uh you type in a web address you could type in Google you could type in apple you could type in whatever and the captive portal their router captures that request and redirects it to their page that allows you to click that you accept the terms or put in your hotel room number or whatever the requirements are and when you accept those terms then it goes ahead and and redirects you and what they're doing is the way Apple does this is pretty tricky what it's very cool actually what they do is when you try and connect to a Wi-Fi network and first load the page if you can success get to a website that's hosted on apple.com servers um the response will be success and they don't show you the captive portal thing you just get to keep going to the internet if you can't reach that page at apple.com then they go ahead and show you the web View and show you the captive portal page which is how Apple does this the point that you're you're getting it is very cool too which is that Apple has decided it's very convenient if all of your Apple devices that have your same iCloud ID signed in know the same Wi-Fi so that if you're on one device and you close it and pick up another it will also join the same Wi-Fi network you don't have to re-enter the credentials and thats for the watch in certain circumstances works works great for iPad works great for iPhones works great for Mac laptops works less well for the watch when it's a captive portal that requires you to re agree to the terms because the watch has no way of displaying those terms and in addition to what we're talking about with captive portal there's another um I don't know if it's considered the same thing but there's another little twist on it for example if you have Comcast or number of different carriers they give you access to a bunch of Wi-Fi networks and if you set that up on your computer it will also work on your phone so that if you happen to be around the corner from you know a Comcast hotspot it'll just automatically jump on and the way Comcast handles it specifically uh limits you to a number of different devices so that you can't just like give out your credentials to everybody and everybody can just use their Network um so you have to do this little setup that you know creates a it involves a um it involves you're essentially reauthorizing which devices are yours right well it's not only that it actually installs a certificate on your device okay to be able to access it and that allows it to just log in automatically it's basically a password in the form of a file um so those kind of things are going to work on a few phones you know if you have a phone and a iPod and a laptop it works pretty well across that but one of the issues is that's not going to on the watch and the other issue is um you're going to run into a problem that I've run into where you're on a network like a free City Network or one of these Comcast hotspots and you actually do have Wi-Fi but it actually doesn't work I mean it doesn't work to get to the internet MH and that's that can happen in a lot of places I mean you can have you know go to a motel a lot of times you can get on their Wi-Fi but it doesn't actually work so when you have stuff like that configured it's not as obvious on the watch what the problem is it's kind of it can be kind of puzzling on a computer right but this kind of explains why there were some reviewers that didn't have this problem at all versus reviewers that worked for the Wall Street Journal or The Verge who live in New York City and are very likely using services that have captive portals or or uh as you say a Comcast style uh shared Wi-Fi right where they must run into this all the time because obviously the watch tried to associate with things that it had no way of getting through on so this is like a little bit of a complex situation it's not the user's fault and it is something that Apple could um I mean that they say that they're trying to figure out how to work around this um but it's not a situation of the watch not working correctly in terms of Hardware it's a situation of Apple there's a you know a niche problem that if you don't understand what's happening it's appears that it's not connecting to LTD networks and so how they' reported it is that it's not doesn't connect to LTD networks correctly which is not really true and it's kind of it's not entirely true yeah cuz the issue is that your configuration is messed up there's a lot of ways you can mess up your own configuration it makes you oh the computer's not working it's like no it's because you set router wrong no but they didn't set up you know the reviewers didn't set up a router wrong I'm not saying did I'm saying that you can create a situation that makes it appear to where the problem is here when actually the problem is over here yes so it is it is something that Apple has to address they have to make the user interface more obvious and that's one of the things they've been working on for example what you were talking about the webbased logins of of these captive networks if you go to an app there's a number of times when you can be on a network that's trying to log you in and if you don't immediately get the web view to where you can go to a thing you can be it it can say that you're connected to a network and you can be in an app saying why isn't it not refreshing my information well it's because you're not actually on the internet you're on a Wi-Fi network but that Wi-Fi network is still trying to authenticate you in a way that's not a username and password on the Wi-Fi network it's on a different level so this is a problem that's confusing on it's not just the watch it's applies to other situations and that's why Apple has created this sort of captive mechanism for getting on I believe now one of the problems is that there's no way to distinguish um at least for the user to say hey this is a network that I want to connect to on my iPhone but I don't want it to connect try to connect to my watch for example there's no way to differentiate and in fact it's not even clear on iOS how you set the order of which networks you want to connect to in what order so in some cases your your house has access to multiple networks you you may have your neighbor's Comcast as a thing that you could log into you know on on the shared network but you'd rather be on your own because it's going to be faster yeah you want to be able to prioritize which network your thing connects to and so there needs to be a little bit more sophistication in terms of how you do that but that's these are kind of like complex problems to solve and it might not work for everybody so creating something that just immediately works out of the bin for a mobile device like Apple watch that's Mobile on a different level and the fact that it's not like a phone that can just be on the mobile network all the time you don't want your watch just constantly on the mobile network because that's you know it has a battery that's the size you know know tiny so you want to be as efficient as possible I I see a possible solution for Apple to solve this I I do see a way that it could be solved that makes sense and and the answer is that just as when you first join the network on a on an iPhone and they test to see if you can receive this page at Apple or if you get redirected and if you get redirected then they show the captive portal page what they could do is on the watch check to see if they can reach the same URL and get the success success result and if they can't get the success result instead of you know blowing up and not being able to display a captive portal page at that point simply just disassociate from that Wi-Fi network so you can have that Wi-Fi network in your iOS device and in your laptop but your phone will your your watch will reject it because it can't get to the success page right and I would I would like that to happen for a number of things it's like if a network isn't working either try to reconnect there's a number of times where I'm roaming on T-Mobile and I don't know if it's problem specifically with T-Mobile or what but I will travel far enough to where all of a sudden my phone says it has LTE and good service but I can't go anywhere and if I turn it on and off again it reestablishes a connection I don't know if it's just a failure in being able to hand off the data service or if it's a problem in iOS or what it is but that's something that the operating system should say hey this isn't working I'm going to you know turn it off and turn it back on again classic troubleshooting technique and the same thing like what you're saying with Wi-Fi networks if you're connected to a Wi-Fi network and it's not giving you a route to the internet that's a pretty easy problem to solve you just say can I get out I can't well let's turn it off and can I get out now oh I'll use LTE so I mean that that's something that already Works to an extent and the handoff between Wi-Fi and LTE on mobile devices like the iPhone is pretty impressive however there are new things on the watch and it's not that it doesn't work it's that you know there's a configuration that needs to be sorted out so it is kind of irritating to to read these articles saying oh Apple doesn't have watch that works on mobile networks correctly and it's like well it's a little bit more Nuance than that and you're telling a story that's confusing people with misinformation and if we're really clear right all of this is going to get sorted out fairly rapidly we can predict there's going to be a software update that will Rectify this problem relatively quickly right we just posted an article on how to weed out your Wi-Fi your bad Wi-Fi networks to work on your phone it's on Apple Insider excellent we we'll put that in the show notes so everyone can go check it out so we we've talked talked a little bit about the the iPhone we've talked a little bit about the watch what about using iOS 11 you you you've been using it not just on your your iPhone 7 but also on the 8 and 8 plus that you've got there so what are the most striking changes the things that you're taking advantage of and the things that you've noticed about iOS 11 one of the subtlest things is when you turn on your phone instead of the the screen just coming on or I think previously it sort of came on slowly it actually comes on from black it goes from black kind of rep Paints the image I mean that's not like a cool thing if I was 11 but I just noticed there's a lot of little tweaks and animations and things that Apple has put in that kind of blur they're not obviously software I mean some some things Apple's always kind of used animations to make things feel smoother and more kind of natural and organic um you know the original Macintosh when you open an application it would do this very simple sort of wire framing of a rectangle just to give you a sense of oh that's what's happening is it's it's expanding and now you have a window open and um so there's a lot of cues of how things are happening or you know an application that kind of scales down to go back to an icon uh those kind of animations create a feel that uh is somewhat unique to Apple and if you look at Android devices you don't have that you have this kind of like brittle sort of jumping between things and Windows mobile is kind of the same same way you know you when you flipped your orientation instead of the screen sort of animating so it's like oh yeah it's flipping over you have this sort of glink and then it glink back in another way it's very computery and PC looking that um is not nice yeah so that's one of the things that I've been kind of noticing with iOS 11 that's you know unique apart from the obvious new things do you have any special features that you like you know I one of the things that I interacted with all the time in iOS 9 and 10 were Control Center and I I used them for a lot of things do not disturb uh setting up up home and homekit controls and also turning on and off Wi-Fi Bluetooth airplane mode and there's something about iOS 11 that has changed these things for me a little bit they pretty radically changed Control Center and there's some things that are easier to do and there some things that are like who Moved My Cheese kind of thing yeah so with the turning on and off of bluetoth Wi-Fi and and now cellular control in control center when you tap on those formerly in iOS 10 and before they would actually disable them the same as if you'd gone to settings and turned Wi-Fi off and turned Bluetooth off and now they don't have that behavior now you have to go to settings if you want them absolutely off here what they do is they disassociate you from whatever you're repaired with right and there's there's a good reason for that is because a lot of people don't realize a lot of people don't realize that the magic that they're seeing with what Apple BR is continuity where you do like app handoff and airdrop and things like that don't realize that those are in the background using Bluetooth to discover things and then using Wi-Fi to send data so there's a number of reasons why you'd want to say hey I don't want to connect to my devices anymore I want to like unplug everything but you don't realize that when you're doing that you're also turning off essential technology for a lot of things that are happening so if you're actually wanting to turn them off you go into settings and say turn these things off but when you go to control center and you say turning off Wi-Fi it means I don't want to connect to this network but I don't want to lose my wireless connectivity with things that are around me me so when I you know go up to my Mac I can still see the document that I'm working on or the email is still ready to go there and so it it doesn't shut off um enabling Technologies but it it control center what it's showing you is you're not turning off a um it's not like airplane mode where you're saying hey I need to turn off all my wireless because wireless networks may be interfering with things around me it's I want to disassociate with the wireless network that I'm on because I want it to use LTE like on your phone for example but doing that doesn't mean that you want to lose the connectivity of um airdrop and other features like that so it's really making it simpler for users that don't understand what's all that's happening in the background but they want something to happen yeah but it seems like it's a much more nuanced thing to try and explain now where where in the past it was very simply an onoff toggle so that's that's one of the things that I've always been a nuanced idea yeah and so the the way the changes they've made there it accomplishes something that a user doesn't have to understand everything that's going on to realize if they do that they're achieving what they want to do in control center but they're not losing functionality that they didn't realize is essential to what they've turned off got it thank you for that I appreciate it the uh one of the things that I'm happy about is the idea of shared iCloud storage among family members that's handy I haven't looked into exactly how that's implemented but that has been something that people have been asking for it for a while well and and Apple's cloud storage offerings have always been compared to the obvious Dropbox offerings and and Google's Drive offerings and the uh ability to have a a family account and shared family storage makes sense from the standpoint of you know if you have four devices in your house for example and or or even six because people have iPads in addition to phones and you want to have them all backed up buying individual storage for each one was kind of a mess to manage yeah so being able to to go ahead and purchase for all of it makes a lot more sense um and it's one of these things that I've intended to set up in the past few days and I have yet to do it but I'm going to today it's people about set up is shared for example sharing pictures between people like a husband and wife or a family you're taking pictures and you want to share things there's kind of a complexity of there's something things want to share and there's some things that you don't want to share you don't want to have like all your kids pictures just dumped into your photo album and there's other things that maybe you're taking a picture of you're going to get someone a present or something and you don't want them to know um so how do you how do you share things like that and so having a shared pool of data where you actually have an individual account and you're explicitly sharing things U seems to make a lot more sense to me what Google demonstrated at IO this last summer was this idea that if you take pictures on your phone they're just automatically shared with people people who are in them which seems like a terrible idea because there's a lot of times when I post a photo that Facebook or whatever algorithm thinks that somebody in the picture is somebody else or um you might have a picture of somebody that you don't want them to see because it's not a good picture so this automatic sharing thing when they show that off yeah it's like you don't need to share everything uh you shouldn't want a machine sharing things for you um so it it does seem like Google has incredible technical capabilities that they don't filter through any sort of human filter of really you know just because you can do something doesn't mean that you should do it yeah so just just as the public service announcement for our listeners to share your iCloud storage plan if you go to settings and you tap at the top of the page and then Family Sharing and then tap iCloud storage a banner will pop up letting you invite family members to share your storage if a family member already has a storage plan they'll be given a choice to join your shared plan if they're on the free tier they'll just be automatically added and that's really all you have to do the the 200 gig plan costs $3 a month the 2 terabyte plan costs $10 a month and so for for basically just these few bucks a month you really end up with a lot of storage that should cover the backup for most of your devices and especially if everyone's using iCloud photo library as well it's a good thing and I I'm glad that it's that easy to do it so it's it's not hard it's settings it's uh it's it's just that few steps what device are you going to purchase I mean we you've got the iPhone 8 and the 8 plus in your hand what personally is Dan G to be walking around with I'm gonna get an iPhone 10 I mean everybody everybody who loves everybody who's anybody is getting an iPhone 10 not it's not that you're just anybody but it's like if you appreciate technology yeah this is like such an obvious leave um but I have circumstances you know I don't I don't have a bunch of kids that I have to buy iPhones for so um I have it's kind of like a obvious thing for me I mean yeah of course I've I've always been on a bleeding edge just because that's part of my job that to write about stuff and understand what's going on but yeah I mean it is uh very much a jump and what we're seeing this year is Apple is really expanding the range of iPhones because they've never sold a cheaper iPhone they they lowered the price again of the SE and now they're selling four generations of phones in addition to the se you know typically it was they were selling three and then I think there was one year where they only sold two like this year and last year's I I it's not right in my brain right now but um this is the broadest range of phones so people have been talking a lot about oh the ,000 phone it's like well Apple's been selling a phone that's been $950 for several Generations now the the high-end plus it's not really incredible that Apple's selling ,000 phone what's incredible is that Apple's now selling a $1,000 phone $700 phone a $6 you know $550 phone and you know down to whatever the lowest one is now that's an incredible range of options so people can kind of decide for themselves where they want to buy a phone but what we've always seen in the past is the best phone that Apple's had is what majority of its customers buy which is kind of incredible that's not the case for anybody any other company on Earth certainly not Samsung you know Sam Samsung say 80 million phones a quarter or something but a very small number of those are um you know a small percentage of those are its best phones where Apple you know Apple's always came up with you know like the 5c and and the SE and other phones that are kind of budget oriented that's not blowing up the majority or the volume of its sales those are actually kind of you know almost Niche products for people who want to spend less the majority of people buying iPhones are always buying the newest model and that's changing a little bit the last three years you know Apple's you could say the plus is the best model because it's the most expensive but there's a lot of people that just don't want that big of a phone it's hard to carry it's it has a nice screen but it's hard to carry uh so I think the tin is going to appeal to a lot of people that like the idea of a really nice screen that's larger but is not much different in size than the the standard iPhone 8 um and price is less of an issue because people are already paying a lot of money for data service you know at least in the United States right how things will translate into other countries in different regions I mean Europe is has a different idea of what people value and also the data service isn't um is priced a lot differently and in emerging countries it's even more different and you know in Asia there's different you know there's China Asia and there's um Japan and right now the mix that people buy is different in each of those markets and then like within China there's totally different markets there's the markets for affluent people live in cities who there are tons of people that are rich and live in cities or you know have money to spin that that's Apple's market and then there's a huge Market outside of that that uh can immediately afford you know even a $600 phone and especially when you apply taxes and other you know things it it's quite expensive for somebody who's making less than a comparable you know like Western salary so a lot of the talk about how Apple's slipping and falling and you know their market shares going down is really they're looking at a big Market outside of iPhones that are not buying an iPhone pric device but Apple's really held on to the the the market for phones uh premium priced phones of like 80% of that in China which is kind of incredible because there's a lot of competition there's a lot of Chinese companies that are trying to build high-end phones as well but they're just not able to compute against Apple's branding and product and apple has a really strong ecosystem so be interesting to see how that works out and then also you know what happens next year that's kind of a CA for speculation do does iPhone 10 become a separate line from the standard iPhone or do we just sort of I believe what's going to happen is we're going to you know just incrementally become iPhone iPhone 10 is a new platform of how iPhone looks and works well I I I agree that the Notch and the face ID are are pretty much the standard going forward the the only reason that IID expect to see uh Touch ID for example would be on the SE or or on the seven if it gets sold for one more year in the same way that the 6s has been sold for one more year right you know any any new product is going to be a product that has the notch that has face ID that has these things that we call the the things that make a 10 a 10 um the product nameing gets a little weird for me though because we've got the eight and the 10 so next year we get the nine and the 10.1 or or how's that work it's going to be weird to me yeah I mean it kind of doesn't matter because product names are sort of arbitrary and people get upset remember when the MacBook first came out people were like no it's not a Macbook it's a power book for the rest of my life and you know now we're used to calling it a Macbook it doesn't really matter they call it it's the same do you know it's the product that matters um but yeah it is kind of mentioning to speculate how things are going to work out but if you look at for example how Touch ID rolled out there were phones that you know devices that came out you know the five the 5c was of discontinued but um there were you know Touch ID took a while to roll out to everything else you know certainly iPads uh kind of incrementally became a thing and you know most recently it came to the Mac um how how quick quickly Apple will roll out its technology for iPhone 10 on other devices there's applications where you can put that on a computer you know MacIntosh and iMac have a sensor array in there to do those kind of effects however there's something really powerful about the fact that iPhone sells in such huge quantities it's hundreds of millions of devices in a year every year consistently and that allows you to do things you can't do on a platform like the Mac that sells 20 million and you know different form factors how do you account for the difference between how a person uses a desktop iMac and a laptop yeah even if they were relying on the exact same part as used in the iPhone it it still would have costs on fitting that part into the device right changing the screen frame changing the uh the the overlay glass around the whole thing it's it would have a KnockOn effect that would have a cost that you wouldn't necessarily Ru on and Macs just don't have the same economy of scale that's Vol same thing you see in uh in the App Store it the Mac App Store is good for what it does but the there's certainly not the same volume of sales that's driving the kind of Rapid um business that you see in the iOS store well has own problems yeah I mean that's a frustration for developers but I mean part of the problems part of the reason those problems aren't being so solved as rapidly is because there's just not as much activity there to address it and one of the interesting things about having an engine like the iPhone that's just driving development technology is that there's a lot of spillover so people complain about how the Mac hasn't adopted all these Technologies as rapidly as iPhone but the fact that it is getting them it would never have been able to get those things on its own but the fact that there's so much development going on for iOS means the the developer tools that are also used for Max are also progressing on this rapid level and you're getting things like Swift and you're getting you know compiler uh advances and things like that that are really being paid for by the iPhone in a large respect another company the size of Apple couldn't you know the size of the Macintosh couldn't maintain a platform like the Macintosh without having a product like iPhone and you know look at Microsoft that's part of their problem is they're trying to sell computers that are sort of like a Mac they're selling them in much lower qu quantities than either the Macintosh or iPad much lower they just can't iterate as fast and they can't develop it as fast and they can't invest as much technology in this applicad because Apple's not only making so much more money on his macintoshes but it's also you know making money on the side in terms of iPhones that reuse a lot of the same technology if you're a cloud services company you can't just do that when we were leading up to the release of these devices we had a lot of rumors that showed uh the dock that was on iOS 11 and iPad rendered on images of the iPhone 8 and 10 and one of the things that came up among some friends and that we're talking was that iOS 11 for iPad makes iOS 11 on iPhone feel like the iPhone is the older technology because it lacks the dock and because things like drag and drop aren't nearly as as let's say um you know they're they're more like first scissons on the iPad where the iPhone feels like a second cousin kind of thing well uh Apple developed iPads and iPhones separately from the beginning and that's how they positioned it when Steve Jobs introduced the iPad he didn't say hey here's a big iPhone he said here is the iPhone and here is our desktop computers and we think there's a space in the Middle where we can develop a product that's different from both that's better at some things and has a reason to exist and everyone sort of blew that off and Google's approach was to say hey we have an operating system that scales infinitely from you know a tiny device to a huge you know almost a computer uh and that has failed Android tablets have never been really strong uh platform and basically they run stretched out iPhone apps or stretched out Android Phone Apps and that's hurt its adoption as well because what's the point of it it's just like kind of stretched out and it's enabled things for example it enabled Samsung to make big iPhone or big um tablet phones that are sort of huge screen you just scale everything up but it's had the the impact of um erasing any capacity for Android to really become a strong tablet platform and it's they've introduce things that sort of don't work on a tablet or don't work on a phone and what Apple's doing with iOS 11 is they're putting a lot of a lot of new emphasis on iPad and saying hey we're solving a lot of things that you kind of need to make iPad a more sophisticated device and taking advantage of it screen even better to do complicated things and you know to do multiple drag and drop kind of operations and work between applications in a way that's distinct from a complex window system like the Mac which is much more complicated and requires um a different way of thinking about things but is also not really something you can scale down effectively to an iPhone so you don't really want an iPhone to work like a scaled down iPad because you don't have as much real estate to work with some of the features there there may be some more blending in the future but I think there's there's really boundaries that say if your screen is you know this big if it's an iPad size and I think that's part of the reason why they got rid of the iPad Mini because it's it's it's making kind of a clear sort of fire break between this is what a iPad is and the kind of size you need to be able to work with it you know significantly with multi handed gestures you can't do that if you scale it down too far it's just like what Steve J said you know you can't file your fingers down there's a scale to what we work on that if you're doing things that are tablet oriented that have to be a big enough screen and what we've seen with the iPad Pro is that Apple said yeah you can actually have a bigger screen if you look at the iPad Pro by itself the 12-in one it looks like an enormous iPad and it's like wow this is just too big but when you start using it especially when you start using it with a pencil you realize wow this is just a perfect screen for doing a lot of things that would previously require a whole desktop computer setup but a lot of those things don't scale down to having something that fits in your pocket and that's that's really the the conjecture here is that there are people that believe that they do and of course they believe that as as an unproven kind of thing they they it's their hypothesis I can kind of see both ways of it once you get used to doing drag and drop once you get used to doing these kinds of things you kind of want for them to be there on the iPhone and it doesn't work the same way that can seem frustrating but uh inure but remember there was also kind of a strong parallel in that a lot of people who are familiar with the desktop computer were saying oh when is Apple bringing overlapping windows and a desktop full of floating icons and finally getting an iPad that begins to work like a computer that begins to work like the the what we think a computer should be able to do yeah but if you had just made the iPad like the Mac it could not have uh changed it could not have optimized in the way that it has and also be much slower because a window environment takes much more um processing capacity because you have to do a lot of things you're you're doing a lot of things that are wasting processor power that if you're on a computer doesn't matter because you have a huge huge fast chip and a big battery but if you have a super slim tablet you have less computing power to start with and as you start adding computing power and we seen how the the A10 and the a11 just turned into just incredible powerhouses of that rivaling laptops at this point now you can start doing more complicated things but if you started off with that you would have had a really slow computer and that's what Microsoft really showed was if you have a tablet that is actually a PC without a keyboard basically it's either going to be too thick and heavy because it's really a computer it's not a tablet or it's going to be super slow or it's going to pretend to be a PC but when you actually do PC things on it they not work because it's not really a PC so Apple's approach which was very different and you know people are saying oh you know I don't believe this I believe that it's been a few years now and we have pretty good proof of what worked and what didn't and apple has a very strong platform for tablet Computing that's differentiated from its platform for handheld uh phone devices and from its platform for computing on a conventional Macintosh type environment Microsoft doesn't have any of those things Microsoft is struggling to sell laptop hybrid computers and every other PC maker is also like barely making any money struggling with these kind of things where the screen comes off or whatever you know appeals to like a niche group of people does not appeal to a huge mainstream it does not allow people to do unique things that they weren't able to do before and a level that you know is really changing technology it's pretty clearly answered Apple got this right so I mean at this point it's like we're not really arguing we're we're Looking Backward and saying see that that was correct you know Apple's approach was correct because it worked yeah I I I want to thank you for your giving us all this time and and I appreciate it so I I don't want to draw things out very long very much longer is there something that you'd like to leave with this as a parting thought uh what is a parting thought let's see um trying to think of something brilliant to say um I think we've had a period of time where people were saying oh man this technolog is getting boring it's not boring right now there's so much going on there's so much excitement happening in in the world and we're seeing Apple's really hitting it stride um there there's been this kind of media narrative that oh Apple can't innovate anymore it doesn't know what to do and you know they're not changing their case fast enough anyone who's saying that apple is not innovating fast enough is it's kind of hard to take them seriously at this point I mean it's like come on do you not understand what technology is there are companies that are coming out and and doing flashy things that are you know employ a lot of impressive technology and research and development and and stuff but we're not seeing a lot of examples of things that are really successfully uh taking hold of the market I mean one example is you know Samsung's Edge phone there there's quite a lot of technology that goes into taking a screen and bending around the corner so that you can touch it on the side and you can have it upside down and look at you know the side lights up but that wasn't it was gimmick and it's kind of obviously a gimmick in the fact that Samsung doesn't make that anymore you know they did it for a couple years and it's like okay we're done doing this gimmick we're going to move to something else that kind of gimmickry gets a lot of attention from the media and gets you know excited reviews and people are standing up clapping but it's gimmick it's not real and there's some things that Apple do that are also kind of gimmicky but overall the pace of technology that Apple's doing a lot of things that appeared to be sort of gimmickry in the past are now clearly like wow that's foundational you know Touch ID there were a lot of people that said oh fingerprint reader that's that's been done before you know mic Microsoft's licenses were putting fingerprints on their fingerprint readers on their phone and you know gave up after a year because it didn't really work out Apple established that as being so essential that when they came out with a new technology that's even better with face ID that people are saying oh you can't take this fingerprint away from me you know I desperately needed it's part of how I work now so it's really it's really good I try to always have kind of a historical context of are what people saying right now does it fit into the continuity of what we know to be true from previous events or are they saying something that contradicts everything we actually know I think that's something that's always kind of fueled how I look at things and it's a it's a functional way to look at things does this fit into everything else that I know perfect where can people find you on the internet I Tweet stuff out at Apple um no at Daniel Aaron ER is my middle name and of course I'm an apple Insider and I've been writing about a lot of these new technologies um wrote about face ID and what it means kind of what I just talked about and also some of the new technologies we writing about depth uh cameras and what that means so there's a lot of interesting Technologies AR kit all this stuff is coming out Apple Insider we also have of course our YouTube stuff and our app on the App Store and of course this podcast on Apple podcast and we would appreciate it very much if you've enjoyed this if you've enjoyed talking and listening about this with us please give us feedback please uh tweet either Daniel Daniel Aaron or me at V marks and uh feel free to let us know feel free to leave good reviews about both the Apple Insider app and the Apple Insider podcast we do appreciate it and we will be back next week with more\n"