The Current State of Apple's MacBooks: A Conversation with Mark Gaman and Rene Richie

Mark Gaman is a well-known tech enthusiast who has been following the latest developments in the world of technology. In this conversation, he shares his thoughts on the current state of Apple's MacBooks.

They really need to do it. It's not something they can push with revenues down. Max Sal SL, they can't push it as a spec bump update anymore like they were able to do four or five years ago and earlier. They need a say this new MacBook Pro is going to have nice new battery life features which Haswell can provide but of course with a computer that has a re display all this quad core processor we both had a lot of fun with our Re it's a piece of crap really well like Peter will say this too, it's the best computer I've ever known but it has certain fundamental flaws like that GPU is just not good enough for that Rena display. Yeah, it kills me; it kills me; it's like putting bad tires on a Mustang GT. I mean come on, you know it just hamstrings you and it's a real Gen 2.

The Scarless Rumors of Apple Pushing Retina MacBooks

I'm curious what do you think of the scarless rumors that Apple is going to push retina MacBooks, uh or push that form factor exclusively and do away with the optical drives and hard drives altogether. Oh yeah, I think it's going to eventually happen. Um, oh sure; I mean eventually the universe there's going to be a heat death of the universe too. But there isn't one thing you take that back look at it this way the iPod Classic was like 2008, 2007, or 2009 and that's like the optical drive MacBook Pro; it's a clunky hard drive filled iPod Classic or the brick without a touch yeah the brick um the non-unibody brick. But um, they uh yeah we'll see. I think Apple tends not to end of life things but to obsolete them and at a certain point the new stuff becomes so popular the old stuff can just disappear right? I think it's a matter of pricing if they can get the retina MacBook Pro pricing down okay look the day that the M retina MacBook Pro can cost the same as an non-r non retina MacBook Pro of today it will happen just like the iPod Touch is not going to be at $249 for 12860 gigabytes until a couple years from now.

The Classic Will Be Gone

I think the classic will be gone if they can do 128 gigabyte touch for $249 but like at the rate if they do 12 gigabyte iPod touch it will be $300-$500. That's what I'm waiting for; I've still got a classic because it's the only thing that's big enough to hold my entire music collection, you know exactly. But in three years pricing will tell us that you know it will happen. Apple's only real enemy is time yeah and margins yeah.

Mark Gaman's Writing and Media

They can follow me on Twitter at MarkGman and I write at nto-maac.com. Rene Richie is also online, and Peter has his own website, Loop, where he writes at imore.com. Seth is currently on vacation, but the show continues with these two hosts, providing insights into Apple's latest products and trends in tech.

New Shows from Rene Richie

I was not podcasting enough, so I just launched or actually kind of more relaunched a new show called iterate for designers. We also had debug for developers; Mark was kind enough to join me for in the past. I wanted to keep that concept even though we're doing more of these style imore shows now. I've got another show called vector, and our first episode has Guy English talking about the new Mac Pro and what all that graphics means for developers and for the next generation of apps and for Apple. We have another episode coming at you next week, so if you haven't seen it yet, you can go to imore.com/vector or just search iTunes for vector and give it a shot.

The Conversation Continues

This article is a collection of insights from tech enthusiasts Mark Gaman and Rene Richie on the current state of Apple's MacBooks. From discussions about upcoming features like Haswell and retina displays to speculations about pricing changes and the eventual discontinuation of older models, these experts provide valuable perspectives on the rapidly evolving world of technology.

As we move forward in this conversation, it becomes clear that both Mark Gaman and Rene Richie are passionate about their work and are committed to providing accurate and engaging information to their audience. Their insights offer a unique look at the Apple ecosystem and its many intricacies, providing listeners with a deeper understanding of what drives these innovative products.

The Future of MacBooks

While we can't predict the future with certainty, it's clear that Mark Gaman and Rene Richie are well-positioned to provide us with guidance as we navigate this rapidly evolving landscape. Their passion for technology shines through in their discussions, and their commitment to accuracy and transparency is a testament to their dedication to their craft.

As we look to the future, one thing becomes clear: the world of Apple's MacBooks is constantly changing, driven by advances in technology and shifting consumer preferences. Mark Gaman and Rene Richie are at the forefront of this change, providing valuable insights into what these products will bring next.

Their conversation offers a glimpse into the complex world of tech and its many twists and turns. While some may see Apple as an iconic brand that operates on autopilot, Mark Gaman and Rene Richie demonstrate that there's still much to be discovered about their products – especially when it comes to their inner workings and how they will continue to evolve in the years ahead.

Ultimately, this conversation serves as a reminder that even in today's rapidly changing world of technology, experts like Mark Gaman and Rene Richie remain essential voices for those seeking insights into the future of Apple's MacBooks.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enhi everyone it is July 25 2013 I'm Renee Richie and today we are going to talk all the Apple iOS and Mac news of the week this is the imore show joining me as always is our uh crusty according to Twitter Mac managing editor how are you Peter Cohen good how are you doing Renee very well I like that you're K crusty I like that you don't take any crap from the news like you fight back you stand there in front of the torent of the news and you say I shall not move you shall not pass exactly it's true I am I am uh gandal yelling at the bog the The Last Hope of Sanity in in Te uh also joining us is the senior editor of N9 to5 Mac one of the absolute best um apple and general technology reporters on the planet one of my my personal favorites Mark Gman how are you Mark great how are you doing thank you for having me no no thank you for being here I always have fun talking to you mark because uh you know you you address the news and you address it well you address it with class but you never like you're always happy about it you're not one of these super cynical you know uh oh everyone's doomed this is why this sucks this week's kind of person in other words in other words you're completely not like me no Rene I think you the same way as as me not as Peter well it's good then Peter sitting between us you know stop us from being too happy yeah yeah so let's dive right into it um I invited you on the show a couple of weeks ago and in between now and then I mean I was going to talk to you about General news and rumors but you laid the smackdown on a lot of the eyewatch stuff you brought together a lot of the general stories that were going along and you got a lot of new information and you sort of painted a really I want to say clear it's hard to say anything Apple hasn't announced as clear but you you you you painted a very compelling picture for what an eyewatch might be yeah thank you um R I wrote an article about how Apple's been hiring uh sensor experts and um Fitness Experts and we also took a look at some of the employees at Apple who are sort of being migrated to an eyewatch team like before the first iPhone came out and this was all revealed in the Apple Samsung trial last year Steve Jobs had Scott forall create like this All-Star team of Apple Engineers to create the first iPhone uh operating system and I guess a similar um thing is going on right now and that's being led we heard from uh with Bob Mansfield who um retired for about a month last year and came back he's um leading that team uh with Kevin Lynch who uh is an apple VP I guess he's next in line to mansfields formerly Adobe right yeah from Adobe he liked to run over iPhones but now he's building them and then um James Foster who's a longtime uh leading engineering director at Apple he's a part of that and what they've done is they've assembled people from like the MacBook team who are really good with battery um work people from uh chip teams like for the watch I mean the chip that they're going to need to make is even smaller than something they put into an iPhone or an iPod um they've been poaching people from companies that specialize in super small microprocessors and most interestingly they've hired um a good number of high ranking people from sensor firms like from it's company called acuan company called cionic company called C8 and they all did was they specialize in sensors that can read um you know some vital signs from within your body right through your skin in a non-invasive way and just imagine being able to do that through a wristwatch and you know I think that would make a lot of sense for Apple to do in a world where there's Nike Fuel bands Jawbone UPS why not jump in with a really integrated experience that just does what the current products do and take them to a whole new level basically what the iPhone and the iPad and the Mac all are known for yeah you know I'm curious to get Peter's take uh tun a minut but there's two kinds of thoughts that immediately come to mind here and one is that it's interesting that Apple's going for this project because they're highly selective in the projects they can do they always say they want to find an industry that they feel is right uh that is you know ready to go mainstream but is lacking The Innovation or the direction or the experience to do it and they want to really be able to contribute but it it also sounds like the approach they're taking is more like an Apple TV model where it's designed to be a specific device for a specific situation but will also incredibly enhance the general value of Apple's ecosystem it's not like a standalone new business like the iPhone but it's something that could grow and Tim Cook and say we're pulling on threads and you know do his his his his happy Jan monster talk but it could really um be a foundation for something for Apple but the other thing that strikes me and maybe I'm cynical a little bit here Mark is that the first generation of Apple things uh this will be to a watch what the iPhone was to the phone so there'll be a clock app but otherwise it's going to be a very you know much a much bigger product but the first generation stuff like the original iPhone the original iPad um the original Apple TV were really cool when they came out but it took them a generation or two to get it right and do you think the same's going to be true with the eyewatch that will get you know uh sort I don't want to call it a beta version but the the first iteration of it and then you know years following it'll become more like what we all imagine I think you know to get the first product out there um I don't know could come out later this year there's been rumors about that and then um or next year or year after but you know either way you know we don't know how long Apple's been working on this like in detail detail but it seems like you know with like anything they do they're going to take their time with this or they have taken their time with it if it's something that's very imminent um and I think you know they're going to get it right to a certain standard on the first go but like you said I think it's going to take a generation or two to really um come into a state of perfection just like you know the App Store on the iPhone was a couple years later and that really changed everything so I think the first product will give a really Clear Vision about where Apple's going with this and year after year they'll keep you know improving the product and and also you were talking about how like you know it's going to have this purpose and then it's going to help them you know it's going to help increase the ecosystem with the iPhone and you know like right now Tim Cook and the Apple leadership team they're going on a real you know strong tangent to you know really really focus on selling more iPhones and if they come out with this extremely cool eyewatch that everyone wants to buy and they slap in exclusive to an iPhone sticker on it which you know could make sense you know like that would make sense because it would work from an iPhone feed information from that that could in turn you know sell more watches and sell more phones so it sounds like a really good idea for Apple for just so many reasons yeah tell me if I'm wrong here Peter but my feeling is that apple is always tries to be just one step ahead of Technology not so far out front that you know the products are no good they become like tablet PC or Windows mobile or whatever the early outliers are but they're one step ahead of technology and they can't quite do everything they want so they produce the product it takes them a couple years to ramp up the technology and then once the tech once the hardware is good enough they start doing the next generation of software and it's almost like that Tick Tock thing but rid over years not just over Cycles well I think where Apple excels is bringing the integrated experience together you know that they the technology that they use often isn't the most amazing technology in the world and they're they're never uh the first on the Block um with with with a new product I mean you know if if if the eyewatch truly is a thing that we're going to get in our hands on the next year I mean there have already been Pebbles there smart watches are already a thing right it's just you know it's it's it's a it's a niche within a niche right now the interesting thing for me with uh an eyewatch product is how apple is going to convince people that they're going to need it what is this eyat going to do for me that um is going to make me want to put it on my WR or wear it at all because I haven't worn a wrist a wristwatch in 10 years you know ever since I started using a laptop I took my wristwatch off and you know once I got a cell phone there was no point in having a a watch anywhere near me because I had another way of telling the time that was always somewhere on my person and I know that a lot of people are in the same boat that I am they've given up wearing watches alt together because they just don't need one so what is it that an eyewatch is going to do that's going to make it a real compelling win for me so far I haven't seen anything in the Smartwatch category that that even remotely interests me it's it's a geek toy but it's not anything useful not the medical stuff I mean blood GL glucose levels and blood pressure and yeah I mean that to a certain degree but that's a very specialized Niche I mean and I speak as a diabetic you know somebody who measures their blood sugar four times a day you know I so I do keep an eye on that stuff but you know I I don't know I mean you know it's it's still kind of you know it's it's not a disruptive technology that's just something incremental that uh might positively affect the lifestyle of millions of people but uh isn't a GameChanger in the same way that an iPad was a game changer or that an iPhone was a game Cher Mark do you have a do you have any thoughts on that because to me I mean apple is doing something else and it's been a little more subtle and I want to get into it more later but iOS has sort of been creeping like it crept onto the Apple TV and then with AirPlay you can start pushing a lot of interface to the Apple TV and you know there's they have IOS coming to the car and there's these Technologies they're talking about like Bluetooth low energy and there's going to be eye beacons so that you know theoretically as you walk through a store or a park or you know a building uh you you can get internal location and to me you know Apple's been good at addressing the mainstream needs like most people didn't have a smartphone until the iPhone most people didn't have a tablet until the iPad I ad so I wonder if it's just that there are still some people for whom an iPad or an iPhone are too much but if they were to have a small wrist thing that they could use to walk through a museum or if they're blind to walk through a park or if you know Siri eventually does come to it or some other form of display comes to it just enough technology to help them experience a modern world but not necessarily a full-on computer right um You kind of mentioned Maps a bit I think Maps is going to be a big big selling point of the eyewatch and of course they're going to need to get their own watch system right and you know besides like the Apple vers Google War like apple doesn't want Google on their platform you know I'm just thinking about this now but you know perhaps they were thinking long term with their mapping software because they think it's going to be a big deal for future devices like a wearable and of course they don't want to build a device all around Google's data like on an iPhone or iPad it's just one or two apps but if Maps is a killer piece of uh functionality on a watch and like you were saying walking around a museum with ey beacons and all that stuff could be really big deal and like earlier this year they bought a company called the Wi-Fi slam and their whole the whole company is based around mapping indoor buildings and such so I think that could be a really big deal for the watch and going back to iOS in the car uh Maps is what I think they have phone they have Maps they have music and then messages can appear on top of those things but map Apple Maps is going to the Mac Peter and it's going to be in the car so it does look like a big you know that there's a big payoff to that investment that they made yeah and I mean you know Maps uh from from what I've seen maps and Maverick is a very cool uh feature especially um some of the functionality in in the way that it works with other um Apple products you know like uh um calendar for example being able to predict how long it's going to take you to get to an appointment so you know it automatically uh pushes out your uh uh uh it gives you a little bit of buffer so um you don't over schedu yourself I mean Renee this is and and mark this is going to be great the next time we're at a trade show and we've got to get you know we we've got to meet vendors or we've got to do whatever else we're going to do right the Chie Peter we got to get to the Chie we've got to get to the Chie quick before before Jim Dow ruple drinks all the Hunkin yeah exactly but you know it's so it's very cool to see apple take an integrative approach to this technology and that again is is is what I was saying before that is Apple strong suit that is what Apple does I think better than any other company uh any other tech company out there you know taking the integrative approach and saying okay how can we get all these different pieces working together in a really coherent way that makes people's lives better exactly yeah and to your point earlier Mark I mean when you go back again to iOS in the car if you look at the picture it's got a little fake home button not fake it's got a virtual home button but it's also got the LTE meter and the battery charge meter and that's again iOS being projected I on your watch could conceivably connect to your phone uh or you know enable tablet and then suddenly that's a connected device it's a location orware device I don't think that you'll be able to fit everything you can fit into an iPhone into a watch in the first iteration but Apple can Outsource a lot of that to the existing devices and then sell more of those existing devices exactly like in uh adding on to your point like iOS 7 has more than just the projection stuff to able to project the UI into another screen like in the car like there's lots and lots of new Bluetooth LE apis uh for instance like the Pebble Smartwatch which is um for those don't know it's a pebble watch it's like a watch $150 that can get text messages and whatnot on iOS 6 but like when you hook it up to iOS 7 I can get tweets emails all sorts of stuff so you know there's a lot of strings in there that can really point to uh Apple's work like because I rarely does Apple ever do anything that won't benefit them in the long run um for example like the new Mac Pro can drive three 4K displays but Apple doesn't make a 4K display and I mean why include and promote that functionality if they're not going to make their own so you know I wouldn't be surprised if there's a retina external Thunderbolt display a couple years on the road or whatnot so that would be nice but I I think also the iOS and the car stuff shows that there's just some businesses that they don't feel that they need to create but that they can take over like the Apple TV now it just takes over the television who cares if it's running Linux or Android on the television they'll take over the display and who cares if there's Q andx or Linux or Android on the car you know or if there's Microsoft whatever on the car they'll just take over the display and they'll own the experience um and with the watch that they're building it themselves I think is telling because it's almost we've always been asking and I think we talked about this before Mark when's Apple going to apply the mac and the iPod strategy to the iPhone because you know there's an iPad Mini now there's no iPhone Mini well there a 4S but I mean there's no there's no real product family for the iPhone there's no bigger iPhone there's no cheaper iPhone um but you start getting if you think of the iPhone more as a mobile device then you have the big iPad the small iPad the iPod touch and the iPhone and there's room for something underneath that for people who want like the shuffle version of the iPhone conceivably right right and you know to your point like I think by the end of next year that issue or issue will be you know will be solved like rumor has it will have a cheaper iPhone this year and a bigger iPhone next year and So within literally within one year they'll have um they'll have the whole family of phones three phones so I tell you what makes me makes me the most excited it's the fact that Bob Mansfield is in charge of this because you know I I don't have very delicate hands I don't have very delicate wrists so knowing that you know the thing is on the job I and you know it's it's got to be something that's going to fit his Boulder sized appendages I'm I'm hopeful that uh it'll be something that fits me proportionally did you just say it's it's multi-touch clobbering time exactly and we have our show title um yeah I want to get into that a little bit mark because you know for years we've been hearing about the lower cost iPhone I think we talked about it at WWDC a couple years ago the Wall Street Journal had rumors about it but Apple's always been reducing the cost of the previous generation iPhone and this week there were rumors that they would might cancel the iPhone 5 when the iPhone 5S comes out and I haven't heard anything specifically about this but I don't find it surprising either because as much as people talk about Emerging Markets with a lower cost iPhone and as much as they talk about Apple wanting to get to a unified screen and unified lightning connector model we saw with Apple's earning results this week that the average selling price of the iPhone is going down because people are buying more iPhone 4S and when the iPhone 5 is not a cheap device to make and you knock a hundred bucks off that you're rooing Apple in the margins and I think that I think that it would behoove them to almost like they did with with the um iPods back in the days have the lower cost multicolor cheaper to make model and the flagship and not sort of tempt people to buy the lower cost ones but make a real division between those products yeah I agree I mean if you look at last fall I mean this is not exactly Apples to Apples comparison but they replaced the uh iPad 3 with the iPad 4 um of course they did that to unify lightning sort of they sell the iPad 2 but I guess kind of like that's IP was a horrible product that that whole chipset was bad such a piece of CP yeah you can say it I mean we all know the truth I'm still stuck with one please don't rub it in I yeah me too yeah mean I I think that Apple was Apple replaced that in six months and a lot of people were like oh they wanted to clear the deck they wanted to that was just a bad iPad they knew it developers knew it no one was having pleasure with that iPad you know what I think is really interesting about one of the um one of the line items in the uh the earnings uh report Renee was the looking at at iPad numbers now uh you know except for the iPhone the iPhone was the one really bright spot for Apple in terms of actual unit sales and and and profit everything else was a little bit off year-over-year it was a little worrisome but one of the really interesting things was um that the the the unit sales of iPads were lower but the profit was way lower the the actual Revenue that they got uh for those iPads was much lower and disproportionately lower to the lower amount of unit sales that they had now my takea away from that correct me if I'm wrong here guys is that that kind of shows that the iPad mini which we know has much smaller margins than the full-sized iPad is probably taking up a lot more um of Apple's overall iPad sales I agree completely I wish they would you know we've been asking for them to break down unit sales numbers for years but you know still not doing it but well they they went the exact opposite way they stopped breaking out laptop versus desktop sales last year so that was kind of like but they never did that for iPods either I mean I for uh Jim mentioned this the other day there was an analyst that every every year would say what's the iPod breakdown and they'd say we're not telling you go okay thanks guys but I mean this is the same thing that happened with the IOD Nano and people were upset why would Apple introduce a lower cost device that would cannibalize their sales but I think Apple reads the market and they understand that they will reach a certain saturation level for people for whom the large iPad is either too expensive or too heavy and the uh iPad mini is significantly lighter like the thinness is not really the issue the lightness is the issue um and the cost and it's just lower priced enough that they would rather that the iPad Mini cannibalize their sales than if Google gets the Nexus 7 right or if Samsung gets the Galaxy Tab you know 5 through 23 right so I guess the question going forward is How can Apple improve the margins on the iPad Mini to you know make more money off of it than they're making now well I think you raised that point Peter I mean you were talking about I I think you know if they go retina and I know they're working on a know they have written a prototype I don't know when it'll be and I believe right now it's still battery life that's their big problem but whenever they nail that that's not going to help them with their margins but you were wondering whether uh services and software were going to start becoming not an equalizer but at least a hedge for Apple absolutely because I mean let's face it Mac revenues continue to drop and if the industry the rest of the industry is any indication that's not going to turn around anytime soon so Apple's got to make up the difference somewhere you know sales uh software and services it seems to be where it's at and those are surprisingly going up like the iTunes number that they announced the other day was huge totally unexpected I think they even said that was that beat their expectations so I think you know right Prof right and they don't even push that they don't even push that as much as the hardware so well for for years Apple was telling us that uh you know that they're not in in in services to make money that you know as far as they're concerned it can be just be a break even proposition for them it's really there to push Hardware Sales they haven't been saying that for the last couple of years yeah and it's not realistic anymore to your point about the margins falling in the M right I mean especially when you know you hear the the numbers that Apple trumpets about you know the the the billions of apps that get downloaded you realize Apple's got a fairly solid profit Center here because they're making 30% off off everything that gets sold d a Ferrari yeah they need to just exploit that more and really really just you know keep pushing the services thing because like Peter was saying got to make a somewhere yeah and apple I mean to their credit a lot of companies and I don't have to name names because we all know them they get to a certain level of hardware and then they just Coast that's just like the hardware they make there's very little in terms of innovation and with the iPhone 5 Apple rebuilt people called it boring but Apple rebuilt that entire phone into an incredibly expensive to manufactur device they could have done something easy and made more margin on it the iPad Mini could have been a much easier higher margin device for them but they push that technology and I have no doubt you know the iPhone 6 will push that and the iPad mini Retina will lower their margins and the iPad 5 as far as I know is going to have the same body and I think Mark reported this too is going to have the same body as the iPhone as the iPad mini and that's going to be more expensive for them to make in lower margins so even though it hurts their traditional business they're willing to do this and as a customer I actually like that yeah I mean like look I kind of look at Tim Cook kind of like maybe as a too faace in months I guess because look he stands up in front of the crowd in these Keynotes and these Earnest calls and he keeps saying you know apple is in the business to make the best products the people love publicly he throws out all these statistics about usage but then you know when you really get down to it he has a job to keep too he has a company to keep afloat he has these internal meetings with like the retail leadership and such that I reported on and every second of those conversations are sell more phones sell more Hardware sell more sell more this sell more that and you know I guess you can say that the the money is a byproduct but you know it's really about sales it's not all about the customer so that's just well he's a logistics I mean he grew up as an operations guy he was Chief Operating Officer we talked about this off air mark that Apple doesn't have a new Chief Operating Officer yeah um and and that's I mean he can Channel Steve Jobs he can give the Steve Jobs Rah technology and liberal art speech but at the end of the day he is a numbers guy and I think we see that even in the decision-making process at Apple where Steve Jobs would you know have a question get a gut reaction tell people and that's what would happen you know unless they could change his mind where Tim Cook weighs these things he looks at metrics he looks at numbers and he is much more of a traditional guy kind of wearing a sixcol bathrobe on top of his his suit yeah and I think for a while you know I remember you know how like apple they shot up their stock literally tripled or doubled and that was like that literally started after Steve Jobs resigned and then passed away a couple months later people I think in invers for a while they felt more secure that Steve Jobs I mean it's very very very unfortunate that Steve Jobs was not around people I believe thought that Apple was a better company because of it Steve Jobs created something amazing that new people can really further and balance out so I guess but in the last few months or so investors been looking for that uh for that craziness the rebel in Apple so I think Apple needs to really to look for a fine balance of how to you know merge Tim Cook's tra with the old traits of Steve Jobs you know I feel like apple is is on a a a uh a tight deadline because it's been three years since the last major disruption you know and it it seems like you know especially for the past year or so we've been uh seeing a lot of Wall Street analysts and investors kind of tapping their watch going okay guys you know what have you done for me lately it was the iPad before that it was the iPhone and before that it was the iPod but um you know we we want something else so I I think Apple's got to come to the table with something uh to get those idiots off their back but does that just feed the idiocy I mean there's a limit to how many so let's like the minute and we all saw this Apple's goingon to make a phone Apple's goingon to make apple Ines a phone Apple's goingon to make a tablet Apple's goingon to make a tablet Apple introduces a tablet Apple's gonna make a TV Apple's gonna make it where's the TV oh Apple's gonna make a watch app the minute they announc that watch I swear Jean moner's gonna ask for the television and the minute there's a television they're going to ask for the car and it just it's like your kids once you let them be the they will never ever give control of the family back yeah yeah there is some truth for that and it's actually a really unique position that you know the Apple rumor and speculation ecosystem is in right now I mean like there's two impending potential Innovations or game changers out of apple over the next few years or so and I think it's going to all be all about striking a balance and releasing them separately you know like you know iPhone then three years later was the iPad what if the watch is next year and then the TV is only three years after that I mean really are they really going to put all their eggs in one basket that's not a good idea they have multiple aluminum baskets Mark no you're right and I'm not suggesting that they need to do it what I am saying is that investors have been expecting them to do it oh I completely agree with you you know and you know as far as I'm concerned most of those guys can just pee up a rope but you know it's at the end of the day uh you know it does affect Apple's valuation on Wall Street and you know I know that Oppenheimer and cook downplay that and you know but but it's got to gnaw at them at some point or another because it makes things very uncomfortable when uh when when it's time to talk to the investors yeah we gave you billions what do you people want from us yeah exactly well I kept saying that Apple's not doomed Wall Street is doomed I want to transition us slightly to talk about you know the competition because right now it's the era of Apple and Google and you know Facebook maybe Amazon maybe but really Apple and Google are pushing ping the agenda right now and Google had another event um yesterday and they announced a new tablet which is pretty much a better version of the last tablet and they announced this chomecast which is a $35 device you plug into the HDMI port of your TV and it's sort of like an Apple TV but not really but it shows me that you know one there's absolutely no product category that Google is not going to try to take over in technology and two that they are such different companies because as much as Apple values devices and tries to commoditize software and services Google is still their rhetoric was this works with any device it works with iOS it works with Android it works with Chrome on the desktop screw you Blackberry screw you Windows phone we don't care about you we're not going to consider you in the statement but for everybody else it doesn't matter what Hardware you have it's our services that are important and Mark I know like you know we have imore and Android Central you have 9o5 mac 9o5 Google how how do you see the interplay of these two companies yeah I agree with you they're two completely different beasts and I think it really starts from the top it really starts at the philosophies that the companies were built on like you said or yeah you said this and they said this on stage yesterday their goal is to get well I don't actually know if they said this on stage yesterday Android on as many devices it's not about making margins in Revenue but Apple's the complete opposite iOS can be on 10 devices but if those devices each cost a trillion dollars that's fine because it's all about the money it's not about the it's not about the usage I mean makes sense if you do the math but um yeah it's just a philosophy thing and I guess that's why Google has no problem of making a play like you said at every potential industry every potential customer but Apple goes at a slow approach because they want to create something with high margins and and you know eventually people are if they come out with a new category every six months people are just going to you know give up on them because you can't just you can't work on so many different products to be successful like the iPhone and iPad and iPod they had lots of spacing in between because so much R&D and whatnot to create those products but if you come out with a new hit thing or potential hit thing every six months you know there's going to be a time where you just burn out well where the fatigue is setting in I think with consumers is at the rate that which with which Google will will kill off services that uh you know it decides that that it doesn't want to sink any more development into and this happens over and over again and I mean it admittedly a lot of it's inside baseball a lot of it is stuff that only computer nerds care about uh but uh you know you you see it you see that philosophy carried over into the Android ecosystem too with uh the the Hideous fragmentation that happens and you know phones that uh you know were state-of-the-art six months ago just getting dropped and no longer supported with with uh new software firmware updates it's it's a problem I wonder if it's also because a lot of us care so deeply about Google service I mean Google killed Google read RSS reader and we were outraged Apple killed Safari reader and mail reader I don't think many people even noticed because just like no one used those Services yeah apple killed exer which you know you some people got upset about but again oh my God Apple killed ping yeah they killed ping I mean I think that Apple and Google both kill things is just that Google kills things that we're still that nerds are still deeply invested in where Apple kills things that nerds kind of make fun of that's true yeah like you know Google's killing some stuff with lots of users I you know I'm curious if this is reported like how many active Google Reader users there were versus the things that Apple get gets rid of it's widely panned and there's no reason to be um so one of the other interesting things that happened this week and Mark you were really quick on reporting this too is that Apple took their developer Center down developer.apple.com not iTunes connect not iTunes Store not Apple Store not Apple IDs but the place that developers go to provision to get certificates to download betas to get documentation and to watch videos was went down what eight days ago and it's still down now yeah yeah it's a it's a real shame I think the hacker should have waited until um Monday night or Tuesday so we could have gotten iOS beta 4 earli oh but they could have done that over software update like Mavericks I don't yeah I'm just kidding though but um mean you're a developer you made uh you was and a couple other apps and you know no the you if you needed to you couldn't go and fix a problem right now right yeah it's a really it's a really big deal for developers and it seems to be taking a long time I no database nerd or anything but you know from people I've talked to this is a lot of work to reconfigure the entire developer site and you know I think Apple's realizing that it's going to be a systematic gradual process and hence they came out with the status board like they did for iCloud about a year ago yeah so people can really track the progress and they also laid out the schedule in terms of the roll out of the features first they're going to focus on provisioning forums videos and documentation and then after that only after that's done they'll get the xcode seeds out the iOS seeds out and I think that processes Smart in its design so developers can as quickly as possible get back to their old rhythm of developing apps and submitting apps and and such um and only after that will they get the new seeds out and to your point about like they were able to OTA Mavericks but they couldn't do it for iOS I don't know that's interesting um or they haven't done it yet maybe they could but they haven't right right two theories about why they didn't do that assuming that they were supposed to or planning on doing it on Monday oh my God Apple delayed an unannounced product but um um so could be because iOS requires udid registering and apple thought it would be too much a pain to you know only let people over otaa get it um another piece of that is you know xcode a lot of times is really tied to new iOS seeds more than than the OS 10 seeds frankly because of the you know just so many more apis to deal with and more people developing for iOS than mac so I think those are you know two reasons why they've done that um but of course there's probably workarounds they can think of like Mavericks yes it was Mavericks usually people really want to uh jump into the release notes from what I understand Apple emailed out the release notes because you can't access them online so there's ways around it and I think it'll be clear in the next week or so when stuff starts going back on line and I hope I mean Peter I think one of the you know Nick covered a lot of this for us and I think he did a he did a great job doing it um there there was just so much uncertainty at first because it was down for several days before Apple said anything and I know some developers were joking around going oh my God I'm going to switch to blackbery 10 development I don't know what I'm doing anymore uh and now you know still become a little bit of anger and now Apple's communicating more they gave a plan for it they put up the board uh but going dark like this especially during the time like apple does one soft for updated a year and they're dark in the middle of it it's I I can't even imagine what must be going on at Apple right now in that situation I can't imagine either I I I can't imagine that anybody in copertino is very happy with the way that this was handled the biggest criticism that I've heard that I really agree with with a lot of that from a lot of developers is why was Apple dark on this for so long they should have been upfront with us sooner as soon as they knew what was going on I can't really disagree with that you know we've lived through this before you know in in in in small and and large cases like the time that uh uh the PlayStation Network got hacked um you know with Sony um a couple of years ago that was a PR disaster for Sony they did go dark uh for a lot longer uh than Apple did and they weren't very upfront with what had happened uh so that was a good lesson for everybody to learn on how not to handle something like this but still uh you know it's it was unfortunate and you know because the iOS ecosystem is so big um and and so many developers are dependent on uh Apple to get their products vetted and to get them into the store and and to help them with development stuff uh having the dev Center just disappear uh like this I mean I has crippled a lot of people and I'm sure you know that that they're wondering how they can ameliorate uh this this kind of stuff in the future you know I'm free bumpers for everybody free bumpers for everyone right exactly yeah coding it wrong yeah you know Apple's going to have to do something I'm just not sure what you know extending out people's deadlines to renew I don't think it's going to be enough I agree I think they should do it like I tweeted that they should just do it for a whole year and I actually you know it this developer outage does not affect me as much or at all like compared to other people but you know just looking at it it was kind of offensive that the first thing on the I on the uh Dev status board is our program renewals back up yeah give me some money come Apple ghost for money developers so it's kind of uh yeah well they have certific I think certificates was one of the first things they going to get provisioning and certificates is gonna be one of the first things that go online I just like you know in the list but oh no absolutely yeah although some apps did manage to get in and get out before the developer Center came down and they did manage to release and we had some big releases this week uh dj2 which I had a chance um to get a demo an advanced Peak at uh from the guys at algorithm and it I have no musical talent I am the guy who is toned deaf and cannot keep a beat but they showed it to me and it looked fantastic I had a chance to play with it for a week uh I actually started using it as a music player because it's just to me this is like the this is skor ISM done right you have like the turn tables and you can see the grooves in the records and you can see where they took the sound waves and they've colored them so you can see different instruments and voices coming in and coming out I don't know if you guys have any musical uh interest at all but I thought it was a really good way to sort of make a really complicated thing really accessible even to completely incompetent people like me yeah I agree I was um play did I cut you off Peter sorry no go ahead oh I was playing with it a bit and I you know I thought it's nice too I don't have any musical talent but um yeah thought it was cool yeah I've got none either but um I I've played with the original DJ enough to uh uh to know how cool it is and I some of the some of theu that you were talking about in uh in your in your look at it Renee really blew my mind like you can actually they they've actually differentiated the groove patterns in the records yeah that's just I mean that's taking ski morphism to a new level but it's usable because people who are who remember vinyl could usually put the needle down where they could you know where they wanted to and now you can also see literally parts of the songs and what also blew my mind is you go to this waveform View and you can divide it up by beats and those beats become buttons so you can just start tapping away and it it goes Dan like you know it plays the song as I can't even explain it because I don't know the terminology but if you for people who are professional DJs use it as a side turntable but you want to throw some kids in the back of the car with some headphones and keep them quiet for Infinity all you need is like some kind of Angry Birds type game thrown in for good measure yeah and you also looked at uh Ember for Mac which I think is little was it called little Snapper reborn yeah it's basically um the the sort of the next generation of little Snapper and people who are familiar with real Mac uh software's uh U if you will uh may remember a a service called Ember uh that they had some time ago and this is sort of this is that that concept reborn with what they were doing with little Snapper little Snapper um is was realmax excellent screen capture uh utility that had really U um uh had a lot of fans out there and what they decided to do with it in this new version is build it into kind of a scrap a digital scrapbooking uh utility instead so you can still take pictures with it you can still take screenshots do screen caps and and you know all the stuff that you used to do but the cataloging features of it are really what makes it exceptional and they've managed to build in connectivity to the web and connectivity to your devices like your iPhone or your iPad so no matter where you're getting images from it's very easy to pull them all in you can tag them you can sort them into different uh cataloges you can build smart cataloges uh that will sort stuff by keyword or by location where you found it from or by rating if you've rated the images and those of us who may may not be reviewing so far unreleased software find this kind of Handy indeed indeed you know it's it's very nice to have a tool that uh consolidates that all in one place because up until I started using Ember that stuff was just in folders and I kind of had to like you know click on the thumbnail and go oh yeah that's you know what I was using it for it's almost like an Evernote for images really you know my photo stream is 90% iOS screenshots right now me too you know what yeah probably the same Mark what software are you using lately is there anything new out there that's interested you um you know look I really don't play a review with much uh new software really I mean you got guys that do that for you are with me but um I don't really I don't really focus on the reviews um I like things best men our best men yeah so I I like things um it's like a to-do list management app it's very overpriced um when you look at the whole Suite but it does the job very well and I I do recommend it if someone wants to make a significant investment into Tod do a software what are you using for Twitter now I know Twitter ific 5 just got updated and it I I prompted me to go white on all my stuff oh right I read that post it was really interesting um the bleach but not I used tweet B on the Mac and on everything because um because of the iCloud sink in terms of where you left off in your timeline um that's the only thing that I really mine never works because like I'll go to my Mac and I'll start reading a tweet and suddenly my screen will scroll to somewhere else and like die I was just reading that thing really yeah like the sync is slow enough that I forget that I need to sync it but so this is my question for you mark because it came up um gon Mayu of the icon Factory wrote this post about how they're trying to do a new version for iOS 7 and if they release it as a new app that only supports iOS 7 what does that mean to customers because theoretically all these apps are going to have to update to look more like iOS 7 or they'll look outdated or just playing wrong and people might switch to new apps that better fit the design language of iOS 7 but at the same time people are already don't want to pay for a new app that's you know a dollar more but it's hugely functional and I ran this on imore and people were saying I'm not paying for a new app and I I don't like they'll pay for coffee they'll pay for hamburgers they'll pay for you know Smurf berries which I always say but do you think developers are going to have a tough time selling people iOS 7 apps look I really really support developers and they deserve all the money in the world but um in terms of a just strictly from a consumer everyday consumer perspective if you look at ios7 and the UI changes I mean this is not the first time Apple has done something uh to a device or an operating system in the history iOS and the iPhone and the iPad that was a major change that developers needed to support or else they become outdated like you said there was going retina there was supporting uh the iPhone 5 display um and I just look at iOS 7 is one of those things did any developers make a whole new app or charge more to support the iPhone 5 display than any of them you know make a whole new app just to you know upload new graphic sizes for the iPad and iPhone right displays no they didn't as far as I know maybe a few did but I look at iOS 7 design changes is very similar to that so I think it would behoove them like if you are a developer and you know it'll be expensive to redesign your app and you know apply blur and Parallax and all these things to sort of wait and bundle it into a feature upgrade because that's a good way to to kind of recoup your costs all at once are you talking about like to like if they were already planning on making a huge feature 2.0 release to charge in just bundle than that yeah yeah I think that could be that's a good idea too but you know I I we'll see we'll see when iOS 7 comes I don't really look at the UI changes as critical as going retino or iPhone 5 display because you know then again these are full screen app devices and it doesn't affect it I you know I have absolutely no negative effect using my iOS 6 UI apps on my iOS 7 iPhone it does not bother me whatsoever but apps that are not optimized for the iPhone 5 display or on a r iPad non ret apps that is bothersome and I think I look at is completely two different things so I I think we'll have to wait to see until everyone gets their hands on iOS 7 um yeah so I think we'll have to wait until the fall any strong feelings on whether those green felt Taps will look out of place oh God the sooner they're gone the better yeah yeah I'm getting so irritated now seeing like the little torn pieces of paper on calendar I just I want it all gone it's making your eyeballs bleed it really is I just want every trace of Scott for's existence wiped from the face see people keep saying Scott Forest this is so I'm gonna be the Scott forest all Defender guy because he gave us carbon he gave us an app store he was a huge proponent of those things but that was not Scott Forest doll's stitched leather airplane uh cushion on fine my friends I think he gets a lot of heat for things that might have occurred several executive levels above him uh ah yes well whatever it is it's gone from Apple now so let's make it not exist anymore I'm gonna take the I'm gonna take the other argument and say that I think it was pretty clear that Scott forall was a big Defender as you were alluding to to the Steve Jobs uh skoric design language and he was in charge of iOS and he was making those decisions to keep the SK orphism around um and so uh they uh you know I think they had to uh get rid of him or to be able to move beyond that I mean he was really a defender of Steve Jobs castle and there needed to be a new guard to you know keep iOS relevant you can't change people around you change the people around you right like I'm not saying that if Apple kept SK morphism for three four more years it would affect sales greatly but you know the operating system really was between us and everyone watching this podcast getting pretty scale stale well but I think if you do Swit because the fundamental change to me is not so much the paint job because I agree with a lot of people that there's a lot of more painting work needed to be done but I think when you look at the particle engine the physics engine and everything they're doing there it would not of it would not have looked as big a leap it was if they kept the same um pixels on the screen uh making the change in design language really emphasizes everything that's important about their new uh Graphics engine and the new way they the developers could theoretically make apps right and you know something I've really been curious about for a while is like you're talking about these major under the hood Chang Parallax motion lures transparencies there's no way in hell this was done in seven months like I'm curious how much was built for the day that fora was fired really I mean it's it's logical there could have been like an underground movement with inside Apple like developing stuff for the day that forall was gone from the compan forget purple we're working on magenta now quiet yeah yeah yeah um so you know we'll see and how much of this stuff could have been forall developed and this new coat of paint is new Parallax parallx could have been there the blurs could have been there but getting rid of the Stitch leather and putting on some Grays and whites and blacks they you know that could have been the new stuff like imagine like I was thinking about you know control center seemed pretty obvious like with or without forall like that was that was probably in the cards for this release the multitasking stuff the all that stuff yeah that's probably all in the cards for this release but you know just imagine a linenbacked control center that would have been disgusting all right on that on that beautiful note Peter what what what's what's good in gaming this week what have you been playing oh my God there's so much good stuff well first of all I think that um our our our friend and colleague Richard Divine would would uh hang me by the toes if I didn't mention rip ti gp2 so goodl looking uh yeah it really is and you know Richard actually knows a thing or two about racing this is actually what he does as his avocation on the weekends um but it's it's a really cool water-based racing game uh for the iPad and the iPhone that looks amazing uh Richard just posted a review of it today so if you haven't already checked it out please check it out um click on our games link at the top of the page and and you'll find it right there uh I'm really excited about Shadow run returns which is a turn-based tactical RPG uh for the Mac now this uh game goes back to the 80s as an actual pen and paper I play I had a shaman a troll Shaman there we go and for the for for the for the uninitiated shadow run is the coolest thing because it a cyberpunk meets magic how awesome is that it's D and D in space well yeah exactly I mean it's like Deus X meets D and D it's just a it's a really cool idea um and uh you know Shadow run last appeared as a video game for I think Xbox 360 and windows and it was a first-person shooter it wasn't a shadow Run game this is a true turn-based tactical RPG uh it is in the spirit of the original game um I I played it on Nintendo am I remembering right I played theint one absolutely yeah it was an SS game I think back back in the day um and uh um you know it's just it's very cool to see now the the really neat thing about this the hair brain schemes the developer uh behind this actually had an enormously successful Kickstarter um uh fundraiser uh to get this project off the ground so uh just got released today it's available on Steam um uh you can uh you can uh uh grab that and uh and have excuse me a lot of fun with it um the another one that I really want to mention is um uh oh uh yeah actually Katan you know if you um are a Settlers of Katan fan um uh it's worth pointing out that uh uh Katana is now available for the Mac it has been available for the iPhone and and iPad for quite some time uh but it's available uh for the Mac now this was a just like Shadow run a board game uh that then became a very high highly successful um uh video game and and now it's it's making the transition to Mac so um you can you can pick it up uh uh from the Mac App Store and it's got stuff like Game Center integration and uh uh Maps editor oh and that's the other really cool thing about Shadow run returns it's got a built-in it's got an editor included with it so you can create your own campaigns you can basically be a dungeon master if you want to and I'm going to throw a shout out there because Georgia actually put down Candy Crush long enough to break into the Australian App Store not really we have an Australian App Store account for just such things and get the new version of Plants versus Zombies and she wrote up a preview and she's been playing it ever since so we'll have more on that um before I let you guys go I wanted to touch because the question we've getting a lot lately is when are we getting the new Haswell Macs we've only gotten the MacBook Air so far where are the Mac Pros where's the Mac Mini uh we know where the Mac Pro is so you know that that's not a question anymore it's not Haswell anyway but uh I know Mark had a little bit on this all I've heard so far is is almost quotee unquote wait for it and I know Peter you had a theory that Haswell chips just aren't available enough yet for Apple to go to market with them well this is what I can tell you indirectly anyway I know that um uh that a lot of people a lot of uh vendors uh who aren't Apple are having trouble getting their hands uh on the MacBook Air so uh the supply of uh macb MacBook airs is not meeting demand and I you know I if you go to if you walk into an Apple store you can buy a MacBook Air pretty easily if you go into a big box retailer like a Best Buy or somebody else who has the muscle um to move a lot of units for Apple uh you can get them but if you are uh like an independent Apple Specialist or if you are um a smaller shop that that does stock and trade in in Mac products but doesn't sell a lot of them they're still very hard to get we're not talking exactly like the iMacs were last year where they just weren't around cuz Apple was having a lot of production problems uh but my sense of it is that uh there there is a restricted U amount of Haswell units out there and my thought and I'm just spitballing here I have no idea whether it's based in truth or not is that uh they're just you know there aren't enough uh Haswell microprocessors for Apple to fill the need right now Mark have any thoughts on hat more has well Max I think I'm I think it's safe to assume we're going to get them and not you know too far well Mac Pro at the end of the year iMac and um MacBook Pro in the coming months Mac Mini you know soon as well let do for how as well um I think about the MacBook Pro they need to strike a nice balance between the battery life benefits because I think the MacBook Pro it's the flagship Mac in addition to the air and it's the computer they really need to it's not something they can push with revenues down Max Sal SL they can't push it as a spec bump update anymore like they were able to do four or five years ago and earlier they need a say this new Macbook Pro is going to have nice new battery life features which Haswell can provide but of course with a computer with a re display all this quad core processor we both had a lot of fun with our re it's a piece of crap really well like Peter will say this too it's the best computer I've ever known but it has certain fundamental flaws like that GPU is just not good enough for that Rena display yeah it kills me it kills me it's like putting bad tires on a Mustang GT I mean come on you know it just hamstrings you and it's a real Gen 2 like they haven't updated the MacBook Pro with like a second generation model yet yeah um and it's been over a year since the first gen came out they had that minor price change and yeah process swap earlier the year but right and February yeah so Mark I'm curious what do you think of of the the scarless rumors that apple is going to push retina MacBooks uh or push that form factor exclusively and do away with the optical drives and hard drives Al together oh yeah I think it's going to eventually happen um oh sure I mean eventually the universe there's going to be a heat death of the universe too but there is not you take that back look at it this way the iPod Classic was it like 2008 2007 or 2009 and that's like the optical drive MacBook Pro it's a clunky hard drive filled iPod Classic or the brick without a touch yeah the brick um the non- unibody brick but um they uh yeah we'll see I think Apple tends not to end of life things but to obsolete them and at a certain point the new stuff becomes so popular the old stuff can just disappear right I think it's a matter of pricing if they can get the retina MacBook Pro pricing down okay look the day that the M retina MacBook Pro can cost the same as an non-r non retina MacBook Pro of today it will happen just like the iPod Touch is not going to be at $249 for 12860 gigabytes until a couple years from now and I think that's why the classic is still around the classic will be gone if they can do 128 gigabyte touch for $249 but like at the rate if they do 12 gigabyte iPod touch it will be 300400 $500 that's what I'm waiting for I've still got a classic because it's the only thing that's big enough to hold my entire music collection you know exactly but in three years pricing will tell us that you know it will happen Apple's only real enemy is time yeah and margins and margins yeah Mark G thank you so much for joining us where can people find out more about you where can they find more of your writing uh they can follow me on Twitter at Mark Gman and I write at nto maac.com and right now Seth I believe is on vacation so you're just changing anything you want willy-nilly right he just not aware at all I actually think he's watching the show so nice yeah uh Peter uh where can people find out more about you uh well at imore of course um and also at the loop at Loop insight.com and you can find me at Rene Richie on Twitter you can find Peter I don't think he said it you're at flar on Twitter right FL on Twitter yeah f l a r g you can find me at Rene Richie you can find me on imore.com you can find more of our shows at Mobil nation.com SL shows I was not podcasting enough so I just launched or actually kind of more relaunched a new show we had iterate for designers we had uh debug for developers I used to do an imore special edition which Mark was kind enough to join me for in the past and I kind of wanted to keep that concept even though we're doing more of these style imore shows now so I've got a new show called vector and the first one had John syracusa talking about the Xbox One and if you know John syracusa from hypercritical that man can talk about Xbox one uh and La the current episode this week's episode has Guy English talking about the new Mac Pro and what all that Graphics means for developers and for the next generation of apps and for Apple uh and we have another episode coming at you next week so if you haven't seen it yet you can go to imore.com vector or just search iTunes for vector and uh give it a shot guys thank you so much that was awesome thank you so much it was great thanks Mark thanks Renee thanks Peter thanks Markhi everyone it is July 25 2013 I'm Renee Richie and today we are going to talk all the Apple iOS and Mac news of the week this is the imore show joining me as always is our uh crusty according to Twitter Mac managing editor how are you Peter Cohen good how are you doing Renee very well I like that you're K crusty I like that you don't take any crap from the news like you fight back you stand there in front of the torent of the news and you say I shall not move you shall not pass exactly it's true I am I am uh gandal yelling at the bog the The Last Hope of Sanity in in Te uh also joining us is the senior editor of N9 to5 Mac one of the absolute best um apple and general technology reporters on the planet one of my my personal favorites Mark Gman how are you Mark great how are you doing thank you for having me no no thank you for being here I always have fun talking to you mark because uh you know you you address the news and you address it well you address it with class but you never like you're always happy about it you're not one of these super cynical you know uh oh everyone's doomed this is why this sucks this week's kind of person in other words in other words you're completely not like me no Rene I think you the same way as as me not as Peter well it's good then Peter sitting between us you know stop us from being too happy yeah yeah so let's dive right into it um I invited you on the show a couple of weeks ago and in between now and then I mean I was going to talk to you about General news and rumors but you laid the smackdown on a lot of the eyewatch stuff you brought together a lot of the general stories that were going along and you got a lot of new information and you sort of painted a really I want to say clear it's hard to say anything Apple hasn't announced as clear but you you you you painted a very compelling picture for what an eyewatch might be yeah thank you um R I wrote an article about how Apple's been hiring uh sensor experts and um Fitness Experts and we also took a look at some of the employees at Apple who are sort of being migrated to an eyewatch team like before the first iPhone came out and this was all revealed in the Apple Samsung trial last year Steve Jobs had Scott forall create like this All-Star team of Apple Engineers to create the first iPhone uh operating system and I guess a similar um thing is going on right now and that's being led we heard from uh with Bob Mansfield who um retired for about a month last year and came back he's um leading that team uh with Kevin Lynch who uh is an apple VP I guess he's next in line to mansfields formerly Adobe right yeah from Adobe he liked to run over iPhones but now he's building them and then um James Foster who's a longtime uh leading engineering director at Apple he's a part of that and what they've done is they've assembled people from like the MacBook team who are really good with battery um work people from uh chip teams like for the watch I mean the chip that they're going to need to make is even smaller than something they put into an iPhone or an iPod um they've been poaching people from companies that specialize in super small microprocessors and most interestingly they've hired um a good number of high ranking people from sensor firms like from it's company called acuan company called cionic company called C8 and they all did was they specialize in sensors that can read um you know some vital signs from within your body right through your skin in a non-invasive way and just imagine being able to do that through a wristwatch and you know I think that would make a lot of sense for Apple to do in a world where there's Nike Fuel bands Jawbone UPS why not jump in with a really integrated experience that just does what the current products do and take them to a whole new level basically what the iPhone and the iPad and the Mac all are known for yeah you know I'm curious to get Peter's take uh tun a minut but there's two kinds of thoughts that immediately come to mind here and one is that it's interesting that Apple's going for this project because they're highly selective in the projects they can do they always say they want to find an industry that they feel is right uh that is you know ready to go mainstream but is lacking The Innovation or the direction or the experience to do it and they want to really be able to contribute but it it also sounds like the approach they're taking is more like an Apple TV model where it's designed to be a specific device for a specific situation but will also incredibly enhance the general value of Apple's ecosystem it's not like a standalone new business like the iPhone but it's something that could grow and Tim Cook and say we're pulling on threads and you know do his his his his happy Jan monster talk but it could really um be a foundation for something for Apple but the other thing that strikes me and maybe I'm cynical a little bit here Mark is that the first generation of Apple things uh this will be to a watch what the iPhone was to the phone so there'll be a clock app but otherwise it's going to be a very you know much a much bigger product but the first generation stuff like the original iPhone the original iPad um the original Apple TV were really cool when they came out but it took them a generation or two to get it right and do you think the same's going to be true with the eyewatch that will get you know uh sort I don't want to call it a beta version but the the first iteration of it and then you know years following it'll become more like what we all imagine I think you know to get the first product out there um I don't know could come out later this year there's been rumors about that and then um or next year or year after but you know either way you know we don't know how long Apple's been working on this like in detail detail but it seems like you know with like anything they do they're going to take their time with this or they have taken their time with it if it's something that's very imminent um and I think you know they're going to get it right to a certain standard on the first go but like you said I think it's going to take a generation or two to really um come into a state of perfection just like you know the App Store on the iPhone was a couple years later and that really changed everything so I think the first product will give a really Clear Vision about where Apple's going with this and year after year they'll keep you know improving the product and and also you were talking about how like you know it's going to have this purpose and then it's going to help them you know it's going to help increase the ecosystem with the iPhone and you know like right now Tim Cook and the Apple leadership team they're going on a real you know strong tangent to you know really really focus on selling more iPhones and if they come out with this extremely cool eyewatch that everyone wants to buy and they slap in exclusive to an iPhone sticker on it which you know could make sense you know like that would make sense because it would work from an iPhone feed information from that that could in turn you know sell more watches and sell more phones so it sounds like a really good idea for Apple for just so many reasons yeah tell me if I'm wrong here Peter but my feeling is that apple is always tries to be just one step ahead of Technology not so far out front that you know the products are no good they become like tablet PC or Windows mobile or whatever the early outliers are but they're one step ahead of technology and they can't quite do everything they want so they produce the product it takes them a couple years to ramp up the technology and then once the tech once the hardware is good enough they start doing the next generation of software and it's almost like that Tick Tock thing but rid over years not just over Cycles well I think where Apple excels is bringing the integrated experience together you know that they the technology that they use often isn't the most amazing technology in the world and they're they're never uh the first on the Block um with with with a new product I mean you know if if if the eyewatch truly is a thing that we're going to get in our hands on the next year I mean there have already been Pebbles there smart watches are already a thing right it's just you know it's it's it's a it's a niche within a niche right now the interesting thing for me with uh an eyewatch product is how apple is going to convince people that they're going to need it what is this eyat going to do for me that um is going to make me want to put it on my WR or wear it at all because I haven't worn a wrist a wristwatch in 10 years you know ever since I started using a laptop I took my wristwatch off and you know once I got a cell phone there was no point in having a a watch anywhere near me because I had another way of telling the time that was always somewhere on my person and I know that a lot of people are in the same boat that I am they've given up wearing watches alt together because they just don't need one so what is it that an eyewatch is going to do that's going to make it a real compelling win for me so far I haven't seen anything in the Smartwatch category that that even remotely interests me it's it's a geek toy but it's not anything useful not the medical stuff I mean blood GL glucose levels and blood pressure and yeah I mean that to a certain degree but that's a very specialized Niche I mean and I speak as a diabetic you know somebody who measures their blood sugar four times a day you know I so I do keep an eye on that stuff but you know I I don't know I mean you know it's it's still kind of you know it's it's not a disruptive technology that's just something incremental that uh might positively affect the lifestyle of millions of people but uh isn't a GameChanger in the same way that an iPad was a game changer or that an iPhone was a game Cher Mark do you have a do you have any thoughts on that because to me I mean apple is doing something else and it's been a little more subtle and I want to get into it more later but iOS has sort of been creeping like it crept onto the Apple TV and then with AirPlay you can start pushing a lot of interface to the Apple TV and you know there's they have IOS coming to the car and there's these Technologies they're talking about like Bluetooth low energy and there's going to be eye beacons so that you know theoretically as you walk through a store or a park or you know a building uh you you can get internal location and to me you know Apple's been good at addressing the mainstream needs like most people didn't have a smartphone until the iPhone most people didn't have a tablet until the iPad I ad so I wonder if it's just that there are still some people for whom an iPad or an iPhone are too much but if they were to have a small wrist thing that they could use to walk through a museum or if they're blind to walk through a park or if you know Siri eventually does come to it or some other form of display comes to it just enough technology to help them experience a modern world but not necessarily a full-on computer right um You kind of mentioned Maps a bit I think Maps is going to be a big big selling point of the eyewatch and of course they're going to need to get their own watch system right and you know besides like the Apple vers Google War like apple doesn't want Google on their platform you know I'm just thinking about this now but you know perhaps they were thinking long term with their mapping software because they think it's going to be a big deal for future devices like a wearable and of course they don't want to build a device all around Google's data like on an iPhone or iPad it's just one or two apps but if Maps is a killer piece of uh functionality on a watch and like you were saying walking around a museum with ey beacons and all that stuff could be really big deal and like earlier this year they bought a company called the Wi-Fi slam and their whole the whole company is based around mapping indoor buildings and such so I think that could be a really big deal for the watch and going back to iOS in the car uh Maps is what I think they have phone they have Maps they have music and then messages can appear on top of those things but map Apple Maps is going to the Mac Peter and it's going to be in the car so it does look like a big you know that there's a big payoff to that investment that they made yeah and I mean you know Maps uh from from what I've seen maps and Maverick is a very cool uh feature especially um some of the functionality in in the way that it works with other um Apple products you know like uh um calendar for example being able to predict how long it's going to take you to get to an appointment so you know it automatically uh pushes out your uh uh uh it gives you a little bit of buffer so um you don't over schedu yourself I mean Renee this is and and mark this is going to be great the next time we're at a trade show and we've got to get you know we we've got to meet vendors or we've got to do whatever else we're going to do right the Chie Peter we got to get to the Chie we've got to get to the Chie quick before before Jim Dow ruple drinks all the Hunkin yeah exactly but you know it's so it's very cool to see apple take an integrative approach to this technology and that again is is is what I was saying before that is Apple strong suit that is what Apple does I think better than any other company uh any other tech company out there you know taking the integrative approach and saying okay how can we get all these different pieces working together in a really coherent way that makes people's lives better exactly yeah and to your point earlier Mark I mean when you go back again to iOS in the car if you look at the picture it's got a little fake home button not fake it's got a virtual home button but it's also got the LTE meter and the battery charge meter and that's again iOS being projected I on your watch could conceivably connect to your phone uh or you know enable tablet and then suddenly that's a connected device it's a location orware device I don't think that you'll be able to fit everything you can fit into an iPhone into a watch in the first iteration but Apple can Outsource a lot of that to the existing devices and then sell more of those existing devices exactly like in uh adding on to your point like iOS 7 has more than just the projection stuff to able to project the UI into another screen like in the car like there's lots and lots of new Bluetooth LE apis uh for instance like the Pebble Smartwatch which is um for those don't know it's a pebble watch it's like a watch $150 that can get text messages and whatnot on iOS 6 but like when you hook it up to iOS 7 I can get tweets emails all sorts of stuff so you know there's a lot of strings in there that can really point to uh Apple's work like because I rarely does Apple ever do anything that won't benefit them in the long run um for example like the new Mac Pro can drive three 4K displays but Apple doesn't make a 4K display and I mean why include and promote that functionality if they're not going to make their own so you know I wouldn't be surprised if there's a retina external Thunderbolt display a couple years on the road or whatnot so that would be nice but I I think also the iOS and the car stuff shows that there's just some businesses that they don't feel that they need to create but that they can take over like the Apple TV now it just takes over the television who cares if it's running Linux or Android on the television they'll take over the display and who cares if there's Q andx or Linux or Android on the car you know or if there's Microsoft whatever on the car they'll just take over the display and they'll own the experience um and with the watch that they're building it themselves I think is telling because it's almost we've always been asking and I think we talked about this before Mark when's Apple going to apply the mac and the iPod strategy to the iPhone because you know there's an iPad Mini now there's no iPhone Mini well there a 4S but I mean there's no there's no real product family for the iPhone there's no bigger iPhone there's no cheaper iPhone um but you start getting if you think of the iPhone more as a mobile device then you have the big iPad the small iPad the iPod touch and the iPhone and there's room for something underneath that for people who want like the shuffle version of the iPhone conceivably right right and you know to your point like I think by the end of next year that issue or issue will be you know will be solved like rumor has it will have a cheaper iPhone this year and a bigger iPhone next year and So within literally within one year they'll have um they'll have the whole family of phones three phones so I tell you what makes me makes me the most excited it's the fact that Bob Mansfield is in charge of this because you know I I don't have very delicate hands I don't have very delicate wrists so knowing that you know the thing is on the job I and you know it's it's got to be something that's going to fit his Boulder sized appendages I'm I'm hopeful that uh it'll be something that fits me proportionally did you just say it's it's multi-touch clobbering time exactly and we have our show title um yeah I want to get into that a little bit mark because you know for years we've been hearing about the lower cost iPhone I think we talked about it at WWDC a couple years ago the Wall Street Journal had rumors about it but Apple's always been reducing the cost of the previous generation iPhone and this week there were rumors that they would might cancel the iPhone 5 when the iPhone 5S comes out and I haven't heard anything specifically about this but I don't find it surprising either because as much as people talk about Emerging Markets with a lower cost iPhone and as much as they talk about Apple wanting to get to a unified screen and unified lightning connector model we saw with Apple's earning results this week that the average selling price of the iPhone is going down because people are buying more iPhone 4S and when the iPhone 5 is not a cheap device to make and you knock a hundred bucks off that you're rooing Apple in the margins and I think that I think that it would behoove them to almost like they did with with the um iPods back in the days have the lower cost multicolor cheaper to make model and the flagship and not sort of tempt people to buy the lower cost ones but make a real division between those products yeah I agree I mean if you look at last fall I mean this is not exactly Apples to Apples comparison but they replaced the uh iPad 3 with the iPad 4 um of course they did that to unify lightning sort of they sell the iPad 2 but I guess kind of like that's IP was a horrible product that that whole chipset was bad such a piece of CP yeah you can say it I mean we all know the truth I'm still stuck with one please don't rub it in I yeah me too yeah mean I I think that Apple was Apple replaced that in six months and a lot of people were like oh they wanted to clear the deck they wanted to that was just a bad iPad they knew it developers knew it no one was having pleasure with that iPad you know what I think is really interesting about one of the um one of the line items in the uh the earnings uh report Renee was the looking at at iPad numbers now uh you know except for the iPhone the iPhone was the one really bright spot for Apple in terms of actual unit sales and and and profit everything else was a little bit off year-over-year it was a little worrisome but one of the really interesting things was um that the the the unit sales of iPads were lower but the profit was way lower the the actual Revenue that they got uh for those iPads was much lower and disproportionately lower to the lower amount of unit sales that they had now my takea away from that correct me if I'm wrong here guys is that that kind of shows that the iPad mini which we know has much smaller margins than the full-sized iPad is probably taking up a lot more um of Apple's overall iPad sales I agree completely I wish they would you know we've been asking for them to break down unit sales numbers for years but you know still not doing it but well they they went the exact opposite way they stopped breaking out laptop versus desktop sales last year so that was kind of like but they never did that for iPods either I mean I for uh Jim mentioned this the other day there was an analyst that every every year would say what's the iPod breakdown and they'd say we're not telling you go okay thanks guys but I mean this is the same thing that happened with the IOD Nano and people were upset why would Apple introduce a lower cost device that would cannibalize their sales but I think Apple reads the market and they understand that they will reach a certain saturation level for people for whom the large iPad is either too expensive or too heavy and the uh iPad mini is significantly lighter like the thinness is not really the issue the lightness is the issue um and the cost and it's just lower priced enough that they would rather that the iPad Mini cannibalize their sales than if Google gets the Nexus 7 right or if Samsung gets the Galaxy Tab you know 5 through 23 right so I guess the question going forward is How can Apple improve the margins on the iPad Mini to you know make more money off of it than they're making now well I think you raised that point Peter I mean you were talking about I I think you know if they go retina and I know they're working on a know they have written a prototype I don't know when it'll be and I believe right now it's still battery life that's their big problem but whenever they nail that that's not going to help them with their margins but you were wondering whether uh services and software were going to start becoming not an equalizer but at least a hedge for Apple absolutely because I mean let's face it Mac revenues continue to drop and if the industry the rest of the industry is any indication that's not going to turn around anytime soon so Apple's got to make up the difference somewhere you know sales uh software and services it seems to be where it's at and those are surprisingly going up like the iTunes number that they announced the other day was huge totally unexpected I think they even said that was that beat their expectations so I think you know right Prof right and they don't even push that they don't even push that as much as the hardware so well for for years Apple was telling us that uh you know that they're not in in in services to make money that you know as far as they're concerned it can be just be a break even proposition for them it's really there to push Hardware Sales they haven't been saying that for the last couple of years yeah and it's not realistic anymore to your point about the margins falling in the M right I mean especially when you know you hear the the numbers that Apple trumpets about you know the the the billions of apps that get downloaded you realize Apple's got a fairly solid profit Center here because they're making 30% off off everything that gets sold d a Ferrari yeah they need to just exploit that more and really really just you know keep pushing the services thing because like Peter was saying got to make a somewhere yeah and apple I mean to their credit a lot of companies and I don't have to name names because we all know them they get to a certain level of hardware and then they just Coast that's just like the hardware they make there's very little in terms of innovation and with the iPhone 5 Apple rebuilt people called it boring but Apple rebuilt that entire phone into an incredibly expensive to manufactur device they could have done something easy and made more margin on it the iPad Mini could have been a much easier higher margin device for them but they push that technology and I have no doubt you know the iPhone 6 will push that and the iPad mini Retina will lower their margins and the iPad 5 as far as I know is going to have the same body and I think Mark reported this too is going to have the same body as the iPhone as the iPad mini and that's going to be more expensive for them to make in lower margins so even though it hurts their traditional business they're willing to do this and as a customer I actually like that yeah I mean like look I kind of look at Tim Cook kind of like maybe as a too faace in months I guess because look he stands up in front of the crowd in these Keynotes and these Earnest calls and he keeps saying you know apple is in the business to make the best products the people love publicly he throws out all these statistics about usage but then you know when you really get down to it he has a job to keep too he has a company to keep afloat he has these internal meetings with like the retail leadership and such that I reported on and every second of those conversations are sell more phones sell more Hardware sell more sell more this sell more that and you know I guess you can say that the the money is a byproduct but you know it's really about sales it's not all about the customer so that's just well he's a logistics I mean he grew up as an operations guy he was Chief Operating Officer we talked about this off air mark that Apple doesn't have a new Chief Operating Officer yeah um and and that's I mean he can Channel Steve Jobs he can give the Steve Jobs Rah technology and liberal art speech but at the end of the day he is a numbers guy and I think we see that even in the decision-making process at Apple where Steve Jobs would you know have a question get a gut reaction tell people and that's what would happen you know unless they could change his mind where Tim Cook weighs these things he looks at metrics he looks at numbers and he is much more of a traditional guy kind of wearing a sixcol bathrobe on top of his his suit yeah and I think for a while you know I remember you know how like apple they shot up their stock literally tripled or doubled and that was like that literally started after Steve Jobs resigned and then passed away a couple months later people I think in invers for a while they felt more secure that Steve Jobs I mean it's very very very unfortunate that Steve Jobs was not around people I believe thought that Apple was a better company because of it Steve Jobs created something amazing that new people can really further and balance out so I guess but in the last few months or so investors been looking for that uh for that craziness the rebel in Apple so I think Apple needs to really to look for a fine balance of how to you know merge Tim Cook's tra with the old traits of Steve Jobs you know I feel like apple is is on a a a uh a tight deadline because it's been three years since the last major disruption you know and it it seems like you know especially for the past year or so we've been uh seeing a lot of Wall Street analysts and investors kind of tapping their watch going okay guys you know what have you done for me lately it was the iPad before that it was the iPhone and before that it was the iPod but um you know we we want something else so I I think Apple's got to come to the table with something uh to get those idiots off their back but does that just feed the idiocy I mean there's a limit to how many so let's like the minute and we all saw this Apple's goingon to make a phone Apple's goingon to make apple Ines a phone Apple's goingon to make a tablet Apple's goingon to make a tablet Apple introduces a tablet Apple's gonna make a TV Apple's gonna make it where's the TV oh Apple's gonna make a watch app the minute they announc that watch I swear Jean moner's gonna ask for the television and the minute there's a television they're going to ask for the car and it just it's like your kids once you let them be the they will never ever give control of the family back yeah yeah there is some truth for that and it's actually a really unique position that you know the Apple rumor and speculation ecosystem is in right now I mean like there's two impending potential Innovations or game changers out of apple over the next few years or so and I think it's going to all be all about striking a balance and releasing them separately you know like you know iPhone then three years later was the iPad what if the watch is next year and then the TV is only three years after that I mean really are they really going to put all their eggs in one basket that's not a good idea they have multiple aluminum baskets Mark no you're right and I'm not suggesting that they need to do it what I am saying is that investors have been expecting them to do it oh I completely agree with you you know and you know as far as I'm concerned most of those guys can just pee up a rope but you know it's at the end of the day uh you know it does affect Apple's valuation on Wall Street and you know I know that Oppenheimer and cook downplay that and you know but but it's got to gnaw at them at some point or another because it makes things very uncomfortable when uh when when it's time to talk to the investors yeah we gave you billions what do you people want from us yeah exactly well I kept saying that Apple's not doomed Wall Street is doomed I want to transition us slightly to talk about you know the competition because right now it's the era of Apple and Google and you know Facebook maybe Amazon maybe but really Apple and Google are pushing ping the agenda right now and Google had another event um yesterday and they announced a new tablet which is pretty much a better version of the last tablet and they announced this chomecast which is a $35 device you plug into the HDMI port of your TV and it's sort of like an Apple TV but not really but it shows me that you know one there's absolutely no product category that Google is not going to try to take over in technology and two that they are such different companies because as much as Apple values devices and tries to commoditize software and services Google is still their rhetoric was this works with any device it works with iOS it works with Android it works with Chrome on the desktop screw you Blackberry screw you Windows phone we don't care about you we're not going to consider you in the statement but for everybody else it doesn't matter what Hardware you have it's our services that are important and Mark I know like you know we have imore and Android Central you have 9o5 mac 9o5 Google how how do you see the interplay of these two companies yeah I agree with you they're two completely different beasts and I think it really starts from the top it really starts at the philosophies that the companies were built on like you said or yeah you said this and they said this on stage yesterday their goal is to get well I don't actually know if they said this on stage yesterday Android on as many devices it's not about making margins in Revenue but Apple's the complete opposite iOS can be on 10 devices but if those devices each cost a trillion dollars that's fine because it's all about the money it's not about the it's not about the usage I mean makes sense if you do the math but um yeah it's just a philosophy thing and I guess that's why Google has no problem of making a play like you said at every potential industry every potential customer but Apple goes at a slow approach because they want to create something with high margins and and you know eventually people are if they come out with a new category every six months people are just going to you know give up on them because you can't just you can't work on so many different products to be successful like the iPhone and iPad and iPod they had lots of spacing in between because so much R&D and whatnot to create those products but if you come out with a new hit thing or potential hit thing every six months you know there's going to be a time where you just burn out well where the fatigue is setting in I think with consumers is at the rate that which with which Google will will kill off services that uh you know it decides that that it doesn't want to sink any more development into and this happens over and over again and I mean it admittedly a lot of it's inside baseball a lot of it is stuff that only computer nerds care about uh but uh you know you you see it you see that philosophy carried over into the Android ecosystem too with uh the the Hideous fragmentation that happens and you know phones that uh you know were state-of-the-art six months ago just getting dropped and no longer supported with with uh new software firmware updates it's it's a problem I wonder if it's also because a lot of us care so deeply about Google service I mean Google killed Google read RSS reader and we were outraged Apple killed Safari reader and mail reader I don't think many people even noticed because just like no one used those Services yeah apple killed exer which you know you some people got upset about but again oh my God Apple killed ping yeah they killed ping I mean I think that Apple and Google both kill things is just that Google kills things that we're still that nerds are still deeply invested in where Apple kills things that nerds kind of make fun of that's true yeah like you know Google's killing some stuff with lots of users I you know I'm curious if this is reported like how many active Google Reader users there were versus the things that Apple get gets rid of it's widely panned and there's no reason to be um so one of the other interesting things that happened this week and Mark you were really quick on reporting this too is that Apple took their developer Center down developer.apple.com not iTunes connect not iTunes Store not Apple Store not Apple IDs but the place that developers go to provision to get certificates to download betas to get documentation and to watch videos was went down what eight days ago and it's still down now yeah yeah it's a it's a real shame I think the hacker should have waited until um Monday night or Tuesday so we could have gotten iOS beta 4 earli oh but they could have done that over software update like Mavericks I don't yeah I'm just kidding though but um mean you're a developer you made uh you was and a couple other apps and you know no the you if you needed to you couldn't go and fix a problem right now right yeah it's a really it's a really big deal for developers and it seems to be taking a long time I no database nerd or anything but you know from people I've talked to this is a lot of work to reconfigure the entire developer site and you know I think Apple's realizing that it's going to be a systematic gradual process and hence they came out with the status board like they did for iCloud about a year ago yeah so people can really track the progress and they also laid out the schedule in terms of the roll out of the features first they're going to focus on provisioning forums videos and documentation and then after that only after that's done they'll get the xcode seeds out the iOS seeds out and I think that processes Smart in its design so developers can as quickly as possible get back to their old rhythm of developing apps and submitting apps and and such um and only after that will they get the new seeds out and to your point about like they were able to OTA Mavericks but they couldn't do it for iOS I don't know that's interesting um or they haven't done it yet maybe they could but they haven't right right two theories about why they didn't do that assuming that they were supposed to or planning on doing it on Monday oh my God Apple delayed an unannounced product but um um so could be because iOS requires udid registering and apple thought it would be too much a pain to you know only let people over otaa get it um another piece of that is you know xcode a lot of times is really tied to new iOS seeds more than than the OS 10 seeds frankly because of the you know just so many more apis to deal with and more people developing for iOS than mac so I think those are you know two reasons why they've done that um but of course there's probably workarounds they can think of like Mavericks yes it was Mavericks usually people really want to uh jump into the release notes from what I understand Apple emailed out the release notes because you can't access them online so there's ways around it and I think it'll be clear in the next week or so when stuff starts going back on line and I hope I mean Peter I think one of the you know Nick covered a lot of this for us and I think he did a he did a great job doing it um there there was just so much uncertainty at first because it was down for several days before Apple said anything and I know some developers were joking around going oh my God I'm going to switch to blackbery 10 development I don't know what I'm doing anymore uh and now you know still become a little bit of anger and now Apple's communicating more they gave a plan for it they put up the board uh but going dark like this especially during the time like apple does one soft for updated a year and they're dark in the middle of it it's I I can't even imagine what must be going on at Apple right now in that situation I can't imagine either I I I can't imagine that anybody in copertino is very happy with the way that this was handled the biggest criticism that I've heard that I really agree with with a lot of that from a lot of developers is why was Apple dark on this for so long they should have been upfront with us sooner as soon as they knew what was going on I can't really disagree with that you know we've lived through this before you know in in in in small and and large cases like the time that uh uh the PlayStation Network got hacked um you know with Sony um a couple of years ago that was a PR disaster for Sony they did go dark uh for a lot longer uh than Apple did and they weren't very upfront with what had happened uh so that was a good lesson for everybody to learn on how not to handle something like this but still uh you know it's it was unfortunate and you know because the iOS ecosystem is so big um and and so many developers are dependent on uh Apple to get their products vetted and to get them into the store and and to help them with development stuff uh having the dev Center just disappear uh like this I mean I has crippled a lot of people and I'm sure you know that that they're wondering how they can ameliorate uh this this kind of stuff in the future you know I'm free bumpers for everybody free bumpers for everyone right exactly yeah coding it wrong yeah you know Apple's going to have to do something I'm just not sure what you know extending out people's deadlines to renew I don't think it's going to be enough I agree I think they should do it like I tweeted that they should just do it for a whole year and I actually you know it this developer outage does not affect me as much or at all like compared to other people but you know just looking at it it was kind of offensive that the first thing on the I on the uh Dev status board is our program renewals back up yeah give me some money come Apple ghost for money developers so it's kind of uh yeah well they have certific I think certificates was one of the first things they going to get provisioning and certificates is gonna be one of the first things that go online I just like you know in the list but oh no absolutely yeah although some apps did manage to get in and get out before the developer Center came down and they did manage to release and we had some big releases this week uh dj2 which I had a chance um to get a demo an advanced Peak at uh from the guys at algorithm and it I have no musical talent I am the guy who is toned deaf and cannot keep a beat but they showed it to me and it looked fantastic I had a chance to play with it for a week uh I actually started using it as a music player because it's just to me this is like the this is skor ISM done right you have like the turn tables and you can see the grooves in the records and you can see where they took the sound waves and they've colored them so you can see different instruments and voices coming in and coming out I don't know if you guys have any musical uh interest at all but I thought it was a really good way to sort of make a really complicated thing really accessible even to completely incompetent people like me yeah I agree I was um play did I cut you off Peter sorry no go ahead oh I was playing with it a bit and I you know I thought it's nice too I don't have any musical talent but um yeah thought it was cool yeah I've got none either but um I I've played with the original DJ enough to uh uh to know how cool it is and I some of the some of theu that you were talking about in uh in your in your look at it Renee really blew my mind like you can actually they they've actually differentiated the groove patterns in the records yeah that's just I mean that's taking ski morphism to a new level but it's usable because people who are who remember vinyl could usually put the needle down where they could you know where they wanted to and now you can also see literally parts of the songs and what also blew my mind is you go to this waveform View and you can divide it up by beats and those beats become buttons so you can just start tapping away and it it goes Dan like you know it plays the song as I can't even explain it because I don't know the terminology but if you for people who are professional DJs use it as a side turntable but you want to throw some kids in the back of the car with some headphones and keep them quiet for Infinity all you need is like some kind of Angry Birds type game thrown in for good measure yeah and you also looked at uh Ember for Mac which I think is little was it called little Snapper reborn yeah it's basically um the the sort of the next generation of little Snapper and people who are familiar with real Mac uh software's uh U if you will uh may remember a a service called Ember uh that they had some time ago and this is sort of this is that that concept reborn with what they were doing with little Snapper little Snapper um is was realmax excellent screen capture uh utility that had really U um uh had a lot of fans out there and what they decided to do with it in this new version is build it into kind of a scrap a digital scrapbooking uh utility instead so you can still take pictures with it you can still take screenshots do screen caps and and you know all the stuff that you used to do but the cataloging features of it are really what makes it exceptional and they've managed to build in connectivity to the web and connectivity to your devices like your iPhone or your iPad so no matter where you're getting images from it's very easy to pull them all in you can tag them you can sort them into different uh cataloges you can build smart cataloges uh that will sort stuff by keyword or by location where you found it from or by rating if you've rated the images and those of us who may may not be reviewing so far unreleased software find this kind of Handy indeed indeed you know it's it's very nice to have a tool that uh consolidates that all in one place because up until I started using Ember that stuff was just in folders and I kind of had to like you know click on the thumbnail and go oh yeah that's you know what I was using it for it's almost like an Evernote for images really you know my photo stream is 90% iOS screenshots right now me too you know what yeah probably the same Mark what software are you using lately is there anything new out there that's interested you um you know look I really don't play a review with much uh new software really I mean you got guys that do that for you are with me but um I don't really I don't really focus on the reviews um I like things best men our best men yeah so I I like things um it's like a to-do list management app it's very overpriced um when you look at the whole Suite but it does the job very well and I I do recommend it if someone wants to make a significant investment into Tod do a software what are you using for Twitter now I know Twitter ific 5 just got updated and it I I prompted me to go white on all my stuff oh right I read that post it was really interesting um the bleach but not I used tweet B on the Mac and on everything because um because of the iCloud sink in terms of where you left off in your timeline um that's the only thing that I really mine never works because like I'll go to my Mac and I'll start reading a tweet and suddenly my screen will scroll to somewhere else and like die I was just reading that thing really yeah like the sync is slow enough that I forget that I need to sync it but so this is my question for you mark because it came up um gon Mayu of the icon Factory wrote this post about how they're trying to do a new version for iOS 7 and if they release it as a new app that only supports iOS 7 what does that mean to customers because theoretically all these apps are going to have to update to look more like iOS 7 or they'll look outdated or just playing wrong and people might switch to new apps that better fit the design language of iOS 7 but at the same time people are already don't want to pay for a new app that's you know a dollar more but it's hugely functional and I ran this on imore and people were saying I'm not paying for a new app and I I don't like they'll pay for coffee they'll pay for hamburgers they'll pay for you know Smurf berries which I always say but do you think developers are going to have a tough time selling people iOS 7 apps look I really really support developers and they deserve all the money in the world but um in terms of a just strictly from a consumer everyday consumer perspective if you look at ios7 and the UI changes I mean this is not the first time Apple has done something uh to a device or an operating system in the history iOS and the iPhone and the iPad that was a major change that developers needed to support or else they become outdated like you said there was going retina there was supporting uh the iPhone 5 display um and I just look at iOS 7 is one of those things did any developers make a whole new app or charge more to support the iPhone 5 display than any of them you know make a whole new app just to you know upload new graphic sizes for the iPad and iPhone right displays no they didn't as far as I know maybe a few did but I look at iOS 7 design changes is very similar to that so I think it would behoove them like if you are a developer and you know it'll be expensive to redesign your app and you know apply blur and Parallax and all these things to sort of wait and bundle it into a feature upgrade because that's a good way to to kind of recoup your costs all at once are you talking about like to like if they were already planning on making a huge feature 2.0 release to charge in just bundle than that yeah yeah I think that could be that's a good idea too but you know I I we'll see we'll see when iOS 7 comes I don't really look at the UI changes as critical as going retino or iPhone 5 display because you know then again these are full screen app devices and it doesn't affect it I you know I have absolutely no negative effect using my iOS 6 UI apps on my iOS 7 iPhone it does not bother me whatsoever but apps that are not optimized for the iPhone 5 display or on a r iPad non ret apps that is bothersome and I think I look at is completely two different things so I I think we'll have to wait to see until everyone gets their hands on iOS 7 um yeah so I think we'll have to wait until the fall any strong feelings on whether those green felt Taps will look out of place oh God the sooner they're gone the better yeah yeah I'm getting so irritated now seeing like the little torn pieces of paper on calendar I just I want it all gone it's making your eyeballs bleed it really is I just want every trace of Scott for's existence wiped from the face see people keep saying Scott Forest this is so I'm gonna be the Scott forest all Defender guy because he gave us carbon he gave us an app store he was a huge proponent of those things but that was not Scott Forest doll's stitched leather airplane uh cushion on fine my friends I think he gets a lot of heat for things that might have occurred several executive levels above him uh ah yes well whatever it is it's gone from Apple now so let's make it not exist anymore I'm gonna take the I'm gonna take the other argument and say that I think it was pretty clear that Scott forall was a big Defender as you were alluding to to the Steve Jobs uh skoric design language and he was in charge of iOS and he was making those decisions to keep the SK orphism around um and so uh they uh you know I think they had to uh get rid of him or to be able to move beyond that I mean he was really a defender of Steve Jobs castle and there needed to be a new guard to you know keep iOS relevant you can't change people around you change the people around you right like I'm not saying that if Apple kept SK morphism for three four more years it would affect sales greatly but you know the operating system really was between us and everyone watching this podcast getting pretty scale stale well but I think if you do Swit because the fundamental change to me is not so much the paint job because I agree with a lot of people that there's a lot of more painting work needed to be done but I think when you look at the particle engine the physics engine and everything they're doing there it would not of it would not have looked as big a leap it was if they kept the same um pixels on the screen uh making the change in design language really emphasizes everything that's important about their new uh Graphics engine and the new way they the developers could theoretically make apps right and you know something I've really been curious about for a while is like you're talking about these major under the hood Chang Parallax motion lures transparencies there's no way in hell this was done in seven months like I'm curious how much was built for the day that fora was fired really I mean it's it's logical there could have been like an underground movement with inside Apple like developing stuff for the day that forall was gone from the compan forget purple we're working on magenta now quiet yeah yeah yeah um so you know we'll see and how much of this stuff could have been forall developed and this new coat of paint is new Parallax parallx could have been there the blurs could have been there but getting rid of the Stitch leather and putting on some Grays and whites and blacks they you know that could have been the new stuff like imagine like I was thinking about you know control center seemed pretty obvious like with or without forall like that was that was probably in the cards for this release the multitasking stuff the all that stuff yeah that's probably all in the cards for this release but you know just imagine a linenbacked control center that would have been disgusting all right on that on that beautiful note Peter what what what's what's good in gaming this week what have you been playing oh my God there's so much good stuff well first of all I think that um our our our friend and colleague Richard Divine would would uh hang me by the toes if I didn't mention rip ti gp2 so goodl looking uh yeah it really is and you know Richard actually knows a thing or two about racing this is actually what he does as his avocation on the weekends um but it's it's a really cool water-based racing game uh for the iPad and the iPhone that looks amazing uh Richard just posted a review of it today so if you haven't already checked it out please check it out um click on our games link at the top of the page and and you'll find it right there uh I'm really excited about Shadow run returns which is a turn-based tactical RPG uh for the Mac now this uh game goes back to the 80s as an actual pen and paper I play I had a shaman a troll Shaman there we go and for the for for the for the uninitiated shadow run is the coolest thing because it a cyberpunk meets magic how awesome is that it's D and D in space well yeah exactly I mean it's like Deus X meets D and D it's just a it's a really cool idea um and uh you know Shadow run last appeared as a video game for I think Xbox 360 and windows and it was a first-person shooter it wasn't a shadow Run game this is a true turn-based tactical RPG uh it is in the spirit of the original game um I I played it on Nintendo am I remembering right I played theint one absolutely yeah it was an SS game I think back back in the day um and uh um you know it's just it's very cool to see now the the really neat thing about this the hair brain schemes the developer uh behind this actually had an enormously successful Kickstarter um uh fundraiser uh to get this project off the ground so uh just got released today it's available on Steam um uh you can uh you can uh uh grab that and uh and have excuse me a lot of fun with it um the another one that I really want to mention is um uh oh uh yeah actually Katan you know if you um are a Settlers of Katan fan um uh it's worth pointing out that uh uh Katana is now available for the Mac it has been available for the iPhone and and iPad for quite some time uh but it's available uh for the Mac now this was a just like Shadow run a board game uh that then became a very high highly successful um uh video game and and now it's it's making the transition to Mac so um you can you can pick it up uh uh from the Mac App Store and it's got stuff like Game Center integration and uh uh Maps editor oh and that's the other really cool thing about Shadow run returns it's got a built-in it's got an editor included with it so you can create your own campaigns you can basically be a dungeon master if you want to and I'm going to throw a shout out there because Georgia actually put down Candy Crush long enough to break into the Australian App Store not really we have an Australian App Store account for just such things and get the new version of Plants versus Zombies and she wrote up a preview and she's been playing it ever since so we'll have more on that um before I let you guys go I wanted to touch because the question we've getting a lot lately is when are we getting the new Haswell Macs we've only gotten the MacBook Air so far where are the Mac Pros where's the Mac Mini uh we know where the Mac Pro is so you know that that's not a question anymore it's not Haswell anyway but uh I know Mark had a little bit on this all I've heard so far is is almost quotee unquote wait for it and I know Peter you had a theory that Haswell chips just aren't available enough yet for Apple to go to market with them well this is what I can tell you indirectly anyway I know that um uh that a lot of people a lot of uh vendors uh who aren't Apple are having trouble getting their hands uh on the MacBook Air so uh the supply of uh macb MacBook airs is not meeting demand and I you know I if you go to if you walk into an Apple store you can buy a MacBook Air pretty easily if you go into a big box retailer like a Best Buy or somebody else who has the muscle um to move a lot of units for Apple uh you can get them but if you are uh like an independent Apple Specialist or if you are um a smaller shop that that does stock and trade in in Mac products but doesn't sell a lot of them they're still very hard to get we're not talking exactly like the iMacs were last year where they just weren't around cuz Apple was having a lot of production problems uh but my sense of it is that uh there there is a restricted U amount of Haswell units out there and my thought and I'm just spitballing here I have no idea whether it's based in truth or not is that uh they're just you know there aren't enough uh Haswell microprocessors for Apple to fill the need right now Mark have any thoughts on hat more has well Max I think I'm I think it's safe to assume we're going to get them and not you know too far well Mac Pro at the end of the year iMac and um MacBook Pro in the coming months Mac Mini you know soon as well let do for how as well um I think about the MacBook Pro they need to strike a nice balance between the battery life benefits because I think the MacBook Pro it's the flagship Mac in addition to the air and it's the computer they really need to it's not something they can push with revenues down Max Sal SL they can't push it as a spec bump update anymore like they were able to do four or five years ago and earlier they need a say this new Macbook Pro is going to have nice new battery life features which Haswell can provide but of course with a computer with a re display all this quad core processor we both had a lot of fun with our re it's a piece of crap really well like Peter will say this too it's the best computer I've ever known but it has certain fundamental flaws like that GPU is just not good enough for that Rena display yeah it kills me it kills me it's like putting bad tires on a Mustang GT I mean come on you know it just hamstrings you and it's a real Gen 2 like they haven't updated the MacBook Pro with like a second generation model yet yeah um and it's been over a year since the first gen came out they had that minor price change and yeah process swap earlier the year but right and February yeah so Mark I'm curious what do you think of of the the scarless rumors that apple is going to push retina MacBooks uh or push that form factor exclusively and do away with the optical drives and hard drives Al together oh yeah I think it's going to eventually happen um oh sure I mean eventually the universe there's going to be a heat death of the universe too but there is not you take that back look at it this way the iPod Classic was it like 2008 2007 or 2009 and that's like the optical drive MacBook Pro it's a clunky hard drive filled iPod Classic or the brick without a touch yeah the brick um the non- unibody brick but um they uh yeah we'll see I think Apple tends not to end of life things but to obsolete them and at a certain point the new stuff becomes so popular the old stuff can just disappear right I think it's a matter of pricing if they can get the retina MacBook Pro pricing down okay look the day that the M retina MacBook Pro can cost the same as an non-r non retina MacBook Pro of today it will happen just like the iPod Touch is not going to be at $249 for 12860 gigabytes until a couple years from now and I think that's why the classic is still around the classic will be gone if they can do 128 gigabyte touch for $249 but like at the rate if they do 12 gigabyte iPod touch it will be 300400 $500 that's what I'm waiting for I've still got a classic because it's the only thing that's big enough to hold my entire music collection you know exactly but in three years pricing will tell us that you know it will happen Apple's only real enemy is time yeah and margins and margins yeah Mark G thank you so much for joining us where can people find out more about you where can they find more of your writing uh they can follow me on Twitter at Mark Gman and I write at nto maac.com and right now Seth I believe is on vacation so you're just changing anything you want willy-nilly right he just not aware at all I actually think he's watching the show so nice yeah uh Peter uh where can people find out more about you uh well at imore of course um and also at the loop at Loop insight.com and you can find me at Rene Richie on Twitter you can find Peter I don't think he said it you're at flar on Twitter right FL on Twitter yeah f l a r g you can find me at Rene Richie you can find me on imore.com you can find more of our shows at Mobil nation.com SL shows I was not podcasting enough so I just launched or actually kind of more relaunched a new show we had iterate for designers we had uh debug for developers I used to do an imore special edition which Mark was kind enough to join me for in the past and I kind of wanted to keep that concept even though we're doing more of these style imore shows now so I've got a new show called vector and the first one had John syracusa talking about the Xbox One and if you know John syracusa from hypercritical that man can talk about Xbox one uh and La the current episode this week's episode has Guy English talking about the new Mac Pro and what all that Graphics means for developers and for the next generation of apps and for Apple uh and we have another episode coming at you next week so if you haven't seen it yet you can go to imore.com vector or just search iTunes for vector and uh give it a shot guys thank you so much that was awesome thank you so much it was great thanks Mark thanks Renee thanks Peter thanks Mark\n"