The Perils of Investing in Apple Devices: A Cautionary Tale

As I sat in front of my computer, staring at the sleek design of my Apple Watch Series 4, I couldn't help but feel a sense of unease. My friend had recently recommended that I invest $500 in the device, touting its fast and responsive hardware as a must-have for any fitness enthusiast. But I was hesitant, remembering the numerous online forums where people had shared their struggles with the watch's compatibility issues.

I decided to Google the issue and what I found was reassuring. There were many threads on Reddit where people claimed that the watch fit perfectly under their glove, and that it was a great investment for anyone looking to upgrade their fitness tracking experience. But as I read through the comments, I couldn't shake off the feeling that something wasn't quite right.

"I feel like the watch should be its own platform," I thought to myself, recalling my previous conversations with tech enthusiasts about the importance of having a standalone device. "It shouldn't need to be set up with a phone or connected to an iPad on its own." These were the kind of thoughts that kept me up at night, and I couldn't help but wonder if Apple had lost sight of what made their products so innovative in the first place.

As I delved deeper into my research, I stumbled upon another issue that bothered me - the cost. The cellular version of the watch had gone up by $70 this year, making it a whopping $500. Not to mention the fact that Apple used to let users mix and match bands with their watches, but now they only offer two options: the Sport Loop or the regular Sport band.

"I wish they had more choice when it came to the bands," I thought, remembering the countless times I had wished for more flexibility in my device customization. It was a minor complaint, perhaps, but one that stuck in my mind nonetheless. And yet, despite these issues, I couldn't deny the watch's impressive features. The health tracking, the Bluetooth connection, and even the cellular connectivity all seemed to be top-notch.

But what really got under my skin was Apple's stance on their platform. Why couldn't I sync my health data from my watch to my Mac? Why did it have to be tied to my iPhone? It was a question that had been bugging me for months, and one that I couldn't seem to get an answer to.

"I think the future of the Mac is playing nice with the iPhone," I thought, trying to put into words what I meant. "But also being its own thing, being independent." These were the kind of thoughts that made me feel like I was stuck in a never-ending cycle of tech frustration.

And so, as I sat in front of my computer, staring at my Apple Watch Series 4, I couldn't help but wonder if it was all worth it. Was the convenience of having a watch that could track my fitness and receive notifications from my phone really enough to justify the cost? Or was I just being paranoid?

Ultimately, the decision is up to each individual. But for me, the question remained: can I trust Apple to deliver on its promises, or will I continue to be disappointed by their products? Only time will tell.

Apple Insider Podcast Episode 23

In this episode of the Apple Insider podcast, Victor and Neil discuss their latest observations about the state of Apple's products. From the watch's compatibility issues to the high cost of the cellular version, they dive into all things Apple.

"I think my main knock on the watch aside from very much the same problem that I have with the iPad is that you know I feel like the watch should be its own platform and and should have its own uh I shouldn't need to set it up with a phone it should connect to a Mac on its own it should connect to an iPad on its own it should be its own more independent platform as I've said before and hopefully we'll get there eventually but I think my main problem really is the cost um it's gone up by a bit this year so I think the cellular was $430 last year now it's $500 this year um and also Apple used to let you basically mix and match and put any band you want with the watch uh but now you basically get your choice of the sport Loop or the regular Sport and uh you know if you already have those bands it's like well I want to get a new band with my watch so I I wish that they had more Choice when it came to the bands and the price at 500 with cellular is a little steep um but all in all super happy with the hardware um it's fast uh it's responsive it works well uh the cellular is reliable uh the Bluetooth connection is reliable um using with headphones great all the health tracking all that kind of stuff super happy with the series 4 definitely recommend it if you're on the market for the new watch absolutely so Neil if I had to takeaway from this episode I would say that your opinion is that all these platforms need to be more independent and less reliant on each other."

Apple's Platform Paradox

As we discussed in our latest podcast, Apple's platform is a double-edged sword. On one hand, it allows for seamless integration between devices, making it easy for users to track their fitness and receive notifications from multiple sources. But on the other hand, it can create problems when trying to sync data across different platforms.

"I think that's what makes me think about Apple's platform," I thought, recalling our conversation. "It should be more independent, more standalone. That way, we wouldn't have to worry about compatibility issues or syncing data between devices."

The Perils of Tech Enthusiasm

As a tech enthusiast, I've spent countless hours researching and discussing the latest gadgets and trends. But sometimes, that enthusiasm can get in the way of critical thinking.

"I think that's what happens when you're too invested in something," my friend once told me. "You start to see things through rose-colored glasses, and forget about the potential pitfalls."

And that's exactly what I was doing with Apple Watch Series 4. I was so caught up in its sleek design and impressive features that I forgot to consider the potential downsides.

But as I sat in front of my computer, staring at my watch, I couldn't help but feel a sense of unease. Was it all worth it? Only time would tell.

The Verdict

Ultimately, the decision is up to each individual. But for me, the question remained: can I trust Apple to deliver on its promises, or will I continue to be disappointed by their products?

As I looked at my watch, I couldn't help but wonder if it was all worth it. Was the convenience of having a watch that could track my fitness and receive notifications from my phone really enough to justify the cost? Or was I just being paranoid?

Only time would tell.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to another episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is Neil Hughes Victor how's it going I am great and this is an interesting week now I am so glad you're back I I want to say for everyone who is concerned that I I don't put Neil in a box I don't put Neil in a cage I I don't prevent Neil from coming on the show Neil is a very busy person when when the end of Indiana Jones talks about who's in charge who's taking care of the Lost Ark and the answer is top men Neil Hughes is one of the top men his life is a mystery all we know is that he's busy that's that's one way of putting it um equally I want to address an iTunes comment that we had we had an iTunes review that talked about how uh they're never quite sure what role I play here am I am I the the interviewer and I'm supposed to only ask questions or am I also one of the participants in the chat and should I be speaking um of course the preference was was that I should never speak um Neil what do you think about that what what should my role be here uh I I think that you're the host of the podcast but I think that you're also entitled to your opinions okay great let's go with it uh let's not take any more time on this but I want you to know and understand that that we read every piece of listener mail we get and we really value it we take it to heart and so when you leave a comment like that we think about it and we try and consider what we're going to do differently to try and make it more listenable for you we appreciate yeah and along along that same note uh to all the people that reached out to me via email and and Twitter uh for being on last week's episode I do appreciate it you're all very kind and and thank you for the kind words we need to do this more often so first up you published our review of the iPhone I did tell me about it so you know I uh I mean let's be real the iPhone XS is not a huge upgrade from the iPhone 10 uh if you've been using the iPhone 10 for the last year and you're paying out of pocket uh and you're not on the iPhone upgrade plan um it's probably not worth the update for you but if you were on any other phone uh then you're going to be blown away by this like a friend of mine the other day he for some reason last year opted for the 8 plus instead of the 10 um I think he like ordered too late and the 10 wasn't coming for a while and then he decided Well I just want a phone now and like he was like I feel like I've been an idiot for the last year using this other phone because like he was just blown away by how easy uh face ID is how how reliable it is that it works um and so you know as I was writing the review I like to keep people like that in mind because I feel like the jaded Tech nerds of us will be like oh it looks the same oh this is you know it does it's just a little bit faster kind of stuff and it's important to keep in mind that you know that first of all is not everybody buying the phone and second of all this phone does have some significant improvements year-over-year but the biggest one really is the camera uh the camera takes much much much better lowlight photos immediately um saw the difference uh in taking pictures um and for myself I I go to a lot of events I go to a lot of concerts and I sometimes take photos at them so I'm very pleased with that um some people may not care but for me I I I think it's fantastic and some of the other changes like the ability to adjust the focal point or the background blur or whatever in uh uh in portrait after you take it um and uh there's better uh stereo audio now which I don't know why there wasn't before but there's stereo audio recording when you do a video um and little things like that that add up that really make this camera uh heads and shoulders above the one from last year now beyond that you know you have the a12 bionic chip and and all this other stuff and yeah it makes AR better and you know you and I have talked before about AR and and how I think it's really kind of a gimmick on the iPhone but laying the ground workor for a presumed headset or something like that that's made Faster by the chip but really the the chip is even doing a lot of this processing for the camera so one of the features is smart HDR which is why you're getting uh these better colors and and better contrast especially when you're taking photos at night and what that's doing is it's taking thanks to the bionic chip it's taking a series of photos at once uh just a fraction of a second apart from each other and then making a composite of them to get the colors better brighter more accurate having better balance in the photo and not having these like blown outs spots or in the case of taking a photo in the dark having you know a few lights blow out the the image that you're actually trying to focus on so you know I I gave the iPhone XS a very positive review um I I love that it has the same camera and same capabilities as the 10 plus 10s plus Max or whatever you call it 10s Max I can't even get these names right they're it's the worst names they I think they've ever had in a product uh but yeah you know it used to be that you had to get the plus model to get the dual camera or telephoto lens and all that uh but this year thankfully they kept the same features in the small phone as are in the Max phone and I think that's a great step in the right direction I don't think that you should be penalized for wanting to have a more manageable smaller phone uh in many ways it's more difficult to cram those components into a smaller device you know when you have a larger device you can put in a bigger battery you can you have more room to work with so I came away very happy with this phone I realized it's not going to be for a lot of our more hardcore readers who already own a 10 or something like that but I think if you're on the iPhone upgrade upgrade program or if you are uh somebody who owns an older phone you're going to be super happy with this upgrade you know it's interesting because I I try and stay in touch with people who are not our listener people who are less technologically knowledgeable people who are you know our listener our listeners are Technologic knowledgeable they're interested they have a high AC Acuity for picking up this stuff and and they're handsome to boot our our listeners are some of the best dressed listeners available in the world I know and so I I try and talk to people who aren't and things that I found were people that wanted to stay with the iPhone 8 or the 8 plus because it had the bigger screen size than the 10 if you went with the plus model that there was some fear around face ID and even now even now that the whole line has shifted to pretty much reflect face ID you know you can still get an eight or a seven but there's still some fear around face ID fear of giving up a home button all of these gestures just seem confusing to people who don't have a a chance to pick them up or or get used to them yeah you know they had a home button for 10 years they know that pressing the home button does one thing it's it's hilarious because if you use an iPhone 10 for a couple days and then try to go back to a regular iPhone you'll find yourself swiping from the bottom of the screen it's like it's like if you have an iPad and a Mac side by side and you're using them both and you're touching on the iPad and then you go over to the mac and you find yourself touching the the Mac screen it's like oh no I can't do that it's one of those things it's just like it just natural it works and it replaces your habits that you've had for so long so quickly and that's that's interesting because that actually dovetails nicely in with another discussion that I want to have but I want to have it in a moment because okay the the other thing that I want to talk about briefly is betas just because you know most of us got off of the beta program as soon as the iPhone o iOS 12 was announced there are still betas coming and the betas in 12.1 the features in 12.1 that are are at least noteworthy for I think most of us are group FaceTime chats group FaceTime calling and the eim functionality beginning to show up now we we had a report where the 10s eim began working for some owners using the 12.1 beta clearly one of the things that that's going to have to sort of catch up is Carrier support for it because I think their whole plan was that you'd go up to a carrier you'd agree to purchase the the plan and they'd show a QR code you'd photograph it with your camera and that would do the settings for eim for you right um obviously that kind of thing's not in place yet but that that the U functionality is live in the beta is a good indicator that we're progressing towards that yeah I I I think that you know it would make sense to launch that and probably you know watch OS 5.1 that has the EKG functionality unfortunately Apple in the last few years has announced stuff or added Hardware features that aren't available at launch uh porir mode was another example of that um so you know and when the airpods launched you couldn't customize what the Taps did that sort of stuff so I think that um you know it's been an unfortunate Trend with apple where they announce stuff and it takes a little while for it to come but you know patience is a virtue and there's a mix of this right so years and years and years ago they used to participate in a show called maor that was run by idg and the problem with going to a show like maor and being a big uh exhibitor there as Apple was is that you're tied to their schedule of the shows for your product releases otherwise you show up and you have nothing to announce which also doesn't go over well and they they stopped participating in those shows After the announcement of the original iPhone and that let them announce things at their own schedule you know they'd send out an invitation say one week come to California and people would come the problem with the phone is that with the phone they are still very much tied to people's schedules they're tied to schedules for carriers they're tied to the schedules for When people's contracts are up or subsidies are renewed kind of thing right they they very much don't have a lot of Liberty to announce whenever they please like they do with other devices like a homepod or an iPad right so it's it's a little bit more understandable that features might develop after the fact for the phone yeah I get it I mean the EKG one for the watch makes sense too because presumably they have to get you know um FDA approval for it and in order to do that they have to go through a process that would make the watch public so they get like a preliminary approval where they can keep it under wraps they announce it then they go through the approval process and they bring in a market like a month later or something like that something like that I get um but some of these other ones it's like uh it's like it's a little frustrating that they can't get stuff out the door on time you know group FaceTime calling announced back in June um and here it is after the release of iOS 12 and we still don't have it and and I'm a little more understanding of of things like the Apple watch although a month late is not a big deal a year late is kind of a big deal yeah well you know don't even get started on the air power mat I'm sorry my hair just caught fire what did you say that is one of the one of the most embarrassing things that they've ever done as a company really I I am dying to know the real story of what happened behind the scenes because there's a lot of rumors and stuff and uh you know I'm waiting to get a new pair of airpods uh with Siri support and you know the wireless charging case and all that but presumably those are just sitting waiting to be manufactured because they can't get air power out the door so it's pretty embarrassing well what they don't want to have happen is for you to go and buy three $10 charging pads and to have your your phone on one and your um your watch on another and your airpods on a third and have three different cables to power these three different charging pads because that would be fantastically awful I saw that uh Nomad announced a dual charging pad the other day a rather nice looking one it was like a leather pad with with two charging coils in it okay I don't know if it was watch compatible though and that's an interesting thing because you and I were talking about this over the summer a little bit I I was trying to charge my daughter's Apple watch with a a gat charging pad and I couldn't get it to work and and we started heard mixed reports right yeah it works with some I I don't know how or why they did that with the watch it's very odd um but yeah this one from uh Nomad is uh USBC power delivery in two charging pads and then it has a 7.5 amp out USB port that you could you know charge an iPad with or whatever wild I know you like that cuz it's got USBC on it yes I'm trying to buy only USBC things now I traveled uh uh last month to bamp and um I like to just plug one thing into the wall and usually that's just my Mac cuz I already have it there and I want it to charge and and so I love the new Macbook Pro because I have four USBC ports on it so I can use one to charge from the wall and three others to charge my stuff my iPhone my iPad I have a USBC to lightning cable it's fine it's easy no dongles nothing the only one I have to get a freaking dongle for is the watch there is no USBC to Apple watch charger they don't make it and uh it's frustrating yeah no kidding you know and you're not alone in this when I was at CES I was uh traveling there with a fell who works for a uh investment fund and he and I would go around to booths and and check out the devices and check out the gadgets and at every single one he said what port is it got and they'd say oh it's it's micro he'd go nope sorry looking for USBC only USBC and they said but are you sure are you kidding no one else is doing it's like that's the future get on board yep yeah I want I want everything USBC I'm I'm done with regular USB I don't mind lightning Lightning's fine I'm happy to stick with lightning but if it's if it's another port on another device USBC yeah but the the contradiction here is that it's a long transition to get rid of all of the USB ports usba ports that are in cars that are in in wall warts that are in all kinds of things right this is this is not just a flip the switch kind of transition totally yeah I get that I agree with that I I just I want options as a consumer as somebody who's willing to pay you know $15 to get a USBC to lightning cable or a USBC to micro us USB cable or whatever just give me the options give me give me a wall charger with four USBC ports all right that's actually an interesting idea that's going to be a whopping big Transformer they don't all have to be USB power delivery all they need to be is enough to charge a phone or a tablet this is not for recharging your Mac all right this episode is brought to you by jamp now jamp now makes it easy to set up manage and protect your Apple devices it's easy to keep track of your own Mac iPad or iPhone but what about other Apple devices at work as a business grows so does its digital inventry making it harder to manage everyone's Apple devices and this is especially true if employees are remote with jamp now you can check your digital inventry distribute Wi-Fi and email settings deploy apps protect company data and even lock or wipe a device as needed from anywhere jamp now manages devices you can focus on your business instead no it experience needed and now Apple Insider podcast listeners can start securing your business today by setting up your first three devices for free forever and more for Just Two do add more for just $2 a month per device create your free account today at jam.com apppp Insider that's jf.com slapple Insider cool speaking of the Mac Mojave was released yes have you used it I have uh since it came out a few days ago what do you think about it it's nice um I I've been using uh I tried out the dark mode for a couple days um I decided that uh uh it I just switched back to the regular mode I I don't like black backgrounds and white text but I'm glad it's there um the dynamic wallpaper is cool um having access to homekit uh is pretty cool um having the news app in there I like um I wish that the dynamic wallpaper worked in tandom with dark mode I think it would be nice to have the wallpaper get darker as the day goes on and then have your window uh fringes uh align with that um but yeah I mean I'm I'm very happy it's a pretty solid release um I haven't had any issues with it uh I've been using it with the Blackmagic egpu uh and a LG ultra fine 4K display um and everything seems to work very well swimmingly um I'm I'm very happy cool now did you read that there was a zero day vulnerability in maest Mojave I saw that yes so what what I understand that this thing does is that there's a a vulnerability that potentially can expose personal user data uh at least according to Patrick wle of digital security basically what it does is it allows an unprivileged app that is an app that doesn't have you know root permissions or admin permissions to bypass built-in system level permissions and skim user information from certain applications uh and this isn't the first time that wle has uncovered Apple related security issues the basically what happen is that that at WWDC in June Apple talked about an extended set of Mac security features that require users to provide express permission they have to explicitly allow select apps and Hardware to to be able to use those things so they have to authorize access to the camera to the microphone to mail history to messages Safari time machine iTunes backups locations routine system cookies and things like that and basically wle was was able to demonstrate bypassing one of these protections um he failed initially to access and copy contacts through terminal and then he runs this unprivileged app and then is able to locate and access the address book and then once he's able to do that he's be able to view all the files in the private folder metadata images things like that so it's um you know it was found Apple runs an iOS bug Bounty program but they don't run one for Mac OS and this is one of the expect more vulnerabilities you expect more vulnerabilities on Mac than you would on iOS so well yeah because the the Mac has uh is a lot less locked down than iOS is right yeah so I mean they they should definitely have a Mac bug Bounty program I think that's but this sort of speaks to a longer transition you know this is something you and I were talking about before the call where iOS is a lot more locked down and iOS is used by a ton more people true absolutely okay and so a lot more apps for iOS too yeah so if if iOS is the dominant platform with the with the majority user base then doesn't it make sense that that in a way we should just kind of get rid of this older Legacy Mac platform and just have IOS become the thing uh uh well no I don't think that that makes sense I think that I think that what does make sense is what you've seen Apple doing and they're going to continue to do is they're going to continue to blur the lines between the two platforms but I think they're going to remain independent for their own reasons right um one of the concerns I had uh that proved unfounded but you never know until you try something but one of the concerns I had about the iPhone 10 before it came out was replacing the home button and the usability and ease of use of having somebody be able to pick up the device just use it right um the home button made uh iOS devices accessible in a way that computers previously had not been um I think that it may end up being more of a problem on the iPad than it was on the iPhone um I think that it does require a slight learning curve of swipe your thumb up from the bottom but it's not really that big of a deal think about the modern laptop you have a trackpad you have a keyboard you have a screen all that my dad um his computer died uh a few months ago and I gave him a 2015 MacBook Pro and the first thing he did he's never used a Mac before he plugged in his Mouse and he didn't use the trackpad at all and then the other day he was trying to set up something I was trying to talk your airplane to his TV and he was like how do I click on this trackpad like he didn't like he didn't really understand to use he didn't understand how to scroll he didn't know the two finger scrolling and that sort of stuff so there's like a certain uh curve but there's a certain understanding as well right we sit down with a Mac and even if someone's never used it they at least know what the track pad for we have you know a few generations of computers behind us where they're modernized in a certain way so the platforms are going to change and they're going to evolve and they're going to be different and they're and they're going to uh have their strengths and their weaknesses but I think that there are certain things that make sense on each side to bring over and so there's a lot of hu and cry about uh the quartet of so-called marsipan apps that are iOS apps basically just ported pretty vanilla over to Mac and I'm not going to sit here and defend them and say they're great they're not they're not it's not like I open them up and I'm like wow these are fantastic he hey hey hey running home app on Mac today is 10 million times better than it was last month that's true it's true it's better than nothing um you know I think that um I think it's a little lazy uh I think that Apple could have done better and I certainly hope that once developers have access to these tools to Port their iOS apps over to the Mac that Apple will have improved these apps to set as kind of a standard Bearer you know I think about when um Apple was trying to drive up the prices of apps years ago and they brought the ior suite to iOS and they were saying this is how premium apps on an iPad can look this is the kind of functionality that you can offer that can replace a computer they were trying to set a standard there and saying you can have all the features you can do everything that you can on a Mac or whatever so I I think that Apple needs to get some of that back and certainly since this so-called marzipan project isn't coming until next year uh there's time to do that but as it is right now these are pretty vanilla ports that don't really make them unique Mac apps in any way and in in many ways limit the functionality uh I'm glad that they're there though and I think that if uh I think some people are looking at the wrong way I think that there's an expectation that all apps are going to be lazy certainly a lot of apps are going to be lazy Maybe not maybe the vast majority of apps will be lazy just we don't care about the Mac we're going to Port it over whatever but it' be nice to have right um I I think that however there are going to be a certain number of developers who it's going to be a gateway drug for them uh to use the term and uh to give them a insight into a world that they may never have thought about developing for before because now it's like well check a few boxes and you get your app on the Mac and developer goes yeah why not and they start dabbling around and they start to learn and then maybe they make some quality Mac apps as well and it makes it easier for them to build for both platforms I see a lot of apps coming to the Mac because of this a lot of them are going to be lazy but I think there's going to be some gold ones out there and I don't think that's any different from the app store right now I mean remember years ago when we had the fart app controversy do we really need this kind of junk on the App Store well we're long past that now and there's a lot of junk on the App Store okay and that's just kind of the nature of it and but there's also some really great apps on the App Store uh the watches the same way you know um I I was uh I tweeted uh last week when I got my Apple watch uh series 4 uh because I was amazed that Nike has this like super close partnership with apple and they make a Nike Edition Hardware of the watch and yet new watch launches last Friday the flagship Nike app for Nike run Club does not have compatibility with the new watch it runs in a smaller window like the old watch it doesn't have support for the complications or anything and it's like seriously if carrot what which is one of the best third party apps on any platform but on the watch is fantastic and on the phone is fantastic if carrot can have that ready to go on day one Nike needs to be ready to have that go on day one that's an embarrassment for apple and it's an embarrassment for Nike I assume that that app's going to be updated before the new Nike Edition launches next week but come on like that that's completely inexcusable so you're going to have lazy developers on all levels these things do happen and to to sit back and say oh you know this is going to be a disaster for the Mac is pretty shortsighted because the Apple watch is still getting pretty good apps from good developers you just be able you need to have some Discerning taste and be able to pick and choose right so I'm thinking about it on a much longer timeline see I don't think that it's about being lazy bringing thermal from the Mac I think it's intentional that we know that the Mac App Store has been kind of a garbage fire right right and and not in terms of quality of application although there's some of that but in terms of uptake and developers wrestling with the sandboxing and and generally no one wants to use it anymore there it's difficult to find the app you really want on the Mac App Store sometimes just because the the reward hasn't been there for developers the same way that it has been for the IOS app store and so this allows them to go ahead and over a longer timeline make the IOS app store simply the app store right and that if if the development effort keeps going into UI kit and uiit understands what to do with a mouse and keyboard then iOS apps using uiit become just the apps that that the distinction between a Mac app and the IOS app dies off I mean think about when the argument was that the the Mac was inferior to Windows because Windows had all the apps right and then we saw a great migration of apps to the cloud and to the browser and so now it doesn't really matter because literally any service you want there are of course some specific apps that may limit you or whatever but it doesn't matter because everything's done through the browser at least on the desktop the phone is very different the phone is app specific I happen to like the phone approach better so I use um fluid which is a app for the Mac that turns a website into an app so like for work um uh I have a thing where I have to like put tasks on there through a website called as as is like a you know a group team task manager you can see who's working on what and who's completed what on the iPhone it has its own dedicated app and it's nice but on the Mac there is no app for a sauna so I used fluid and I made it its own app put it in the dock gave it its own icon and now when I want to use a sauna because I don't want to I have a million tabs open and it's a it's something that I use frequently and I don't want to keep opening a tab for it and browsing around or whatever I just want to have it as an app and so I click on it there and so that's an example of something where I would take a subpar a sauna Port of the iPad version to the Mac to have the app there and I can come up with a handful of apps like that where my life would be better having the dedicated uh Mac app that doesn't exist right now uh mint is another one for my finances uh I would much rather just you know have a dedicated app on there uh then have to go to the website that's just something that I use frequently enough and would want to use um so you know they're they're not going to be the best apps but to your point you're right it's longer term you are looking at taking the biggest and best app platform on the planet has sueded Windows now has super seed everything Android may have more apps but they're certainly not as high quality to put them on the Mac just makes perfect sense it it's it would it's a no-brainer uh and and I think that you're going to continue to see the merging of these Platforms in that sort of way the apps are going to work on both you know I've been an advocate for a long time of cursor input on iOS um and as I was saying before about putting an iPad and a uh and a Mac side by side you don't even have to have them side by side just use your iPad with a keyboard for a while and type and work and get some work done and then go back to your Mac and then see if you touch the screen accidentally cuz you will and I realized that Apple's been resistant to doing touch screen on the Mac and and I don't blame them I I don't think it would be necessary but I think it's one of those things that they should probably just include to just say okay we did it you know I think that it's probably inevitable at some point especially if we get a a Aeries chip based uh you know 12 or 13inch MacBook you know in the next couple years it's probably like okay yeah it's got a touchcreen too but you know this is not the primary mode of input or whatever and I think they should say the same for keyboard and trackpad or mouse or whatever for iOS where it's like if you really you know in the words of Steve Jobs when the first iPad was out if you really want to write war in peace here's a keybo he's a here's a keyboard for you um I think that you know if you really want to do these things if you are the power user that needs these things or if you're the Casual user in the event of you know a touchcreen on the Mac here we are giving you the option we're giving you the best of all worlds I think that that's an inevitability at some point down the road depending on Apple's resistance and technology and that sort of stuff but I think that that's the the road that we're heading down and where we're going yeah now I've mentioned before on this show that xcode is one of the things that keeps the Mac going you can only write xcode applications you can only write applications for iOS on a Mac right and and that should change well it I think it is because Swift playgrounds has a lot of shared code with xcode and if you can do Swift playgrounds on an IP ad then at some point you should be able to completely write applications on an iPad and if you can don't think I don't think that any app that Apple makes for the Mac should not come to the iPad and I don't think that they should be any less fully featured than they are on the Mac I think that there should be a Final Cut Pro 10 on the iPad and I think it should be every bit as good as the one on the Mac which by the way just got support for egpus yeah which is great so through that P piece of news in as well but uh I I that's that's what I'm getting at is I think that that over time all of these things come to iOS and the Mac just remains that form factor that we call a keyboard and track pad with a screen but it basically becomes iOS uh you know so there's a rumor there was a rumor that the new iPads which are expected to be announced in October are going to ditch the lightning port for USBC uh I don't believe that I think that it'll probably ship with a lightning USBC Cable in the box and maybe the lightning interface will be upgraded to support USBC uh uh uh data transfer uh standards so you know much higher quality data transfer and I was thinking about you know what that could lead to and the possibilities of it and one of the things that I thought was really interesting was not only dual screen support for like plugging your iPad into your Mac and then just having a nice second monitor very conveniently and a portable second monitor that you can bring with you have a mobile workstation that's super powerful um in a way that you know you would currently have to use a third party app for like air display or whatever but just to have it native to the platform would be great but then I was also thinking like so there's this rumor of this new iMac right so what if you had a headless iMac and the screen was the iPad and you could just plug in an iPad and make that your monitor for for not iMac I'm sorry Mac Mini uh for your new Mac Mini I I I think what I'm sort of feeling here and I haven't really said it well is I I think that we we should have seen iOS and and iPad make a play for dominance on the desktop by now and I think it's been held back by totally has been by you know this sort of need to preserve the mac and of course now the Mac needs the shot in the arm because the Mac App Store is so lousy and because you know iOS is the dominant of everything the majority platform it's uh it we should have seen the iPad make play for dominance before now right it should have been needs to take the training wheels off the iPad no doubt the hardware is more than capable it's the connectivity and the software that are holding it back yeah yeah they are course but I think that would you know if you could if you could use your iPad as a as an official Mac display um especially with the 12.9 in one right that's a that's a great portable monitor that you could bring with you and and get some work done I you know I think that that's a way for them to start bridging that Gap it still feels like training wheels to me it it feels like you've taken the the best little portable computer and and turned it into a dumb display what if it brought touchscreen support to Mac OS through that I I I feel like they shouldn't they're failing to Dream a Little Bit B bigger I just want them to have a bigger Vision than than doing that it's it's not a terrible idea but it feels like him half steps do you think that they'll hold off on doing any of that until there's a aeries Mac I think so and I think if I had to be specific even if there is an Aeries Mac that the first operating system that releases on the Aeries Mac will be transitional it'll be very much here's the same old thing running on a new chip and it's after that that everything changes because they always see an A series Mac running something that looks more like Mac OS or more like iOS um I whatever the state of mac o is with UI kit and iOS apps from marsipan at that time I I think it's it's still very much this this early hybrid because that's what happens right you you do this change you do this huge platform change and you release the same software on it so that everyone feels comfortable with the change and then the version after that is where you drop support for the old one and you keep the emulation around for a little bit longer and the version after that's where you drop the emulation that's the history that's what we saw with Rosetta and power PC it's what we saw with classic OS as well well running U OS 9 way back in the dark days it's it's going it's going to be an odd transition I don't know how they're going to manage it um it'll be interesting to see what takes precedence and what takes priority in that platform is it more mac is it more iOS I think the trend is towards more mac more freedom um having more functionality and more expandability than you have currently on iOS which is pretty locked down like I said I think you need to take the training wheels off the iPad and I think that if you release a notebook that is more iPad than mac I think that's a step backwards I I agree with that statement only because of the way that we think about what an iPad's capabilities are we even when we say release an a laptop that's more iPad than mac it it sort of has that undercurrent of training wheels still on you know we we need to get the training wheels off to the point where when you say iPad versus Mac and you think of both things being incredibly competent yeah I think the iPad has every capability of being just as competent as the Mac Mac just having its own its own strengths yeah I'm I'm thinking that eventually the iPad the IOS operating system replaces what a Mac is we call it a Mac because that's the form factor but it's It Mac itself changes right yeah it's exciting times ahead I I I hope that uh we see more acceleration in that direction because of marsipan and because of these apps coming there but certainly a lot of room for improvement right now and if anybody is going to be the standard Bearer it has to be apple it does let's change gears for a second talk to me about Siri what do you want to know how much do you like Siri uh you know so one of the things that I like now about um the Siri shortcuts functionality and and opening to third party developers more in um iOS 12 is you can command any possible permutation of of speaking to Siri that you can think of uh that will then override the native apps so I was talking earlier about carrot and using carrot weather well you could make uh custom commands and shortcuts for every possible question you could think of with the weather and have those go to carrot instead of uh of apple and it's kind of a roundabout way of just of removing the built-in default apps which is interesting um another thing I I was talking to a buddy of mine the other day who has a nest thermostat and he was saying um he was trying to use a series shortcuts to have it control his nest thermostat and it does it by proxy of if this then that and he was saying yeah it works except I can't get it to set a specific temperature and I said why not try just making specific series shortcuts for each temperature because I mean think about it right you're only going to use like a 10 Dee range right right so I said just set one for you know set the temperature to 70 set one for set the temperature 71 and so on and he did and it works fine so it's one of those things where it's a little clunky and a little cumbersome but it takes you know maybe 10 minutes effort and then you're done and then you can have it do all that kind of stuff so I think that we're starting to see you know the benefits of series shortcuts and some of the things that you can do um and in a roundabout way like setting temperatures that you're not supposed to be able to set or replacing functions that you aren't necessarily supposed to be able to replace but it works and I think it's pretty good so I had a couple thoughts about this based on the last discussion where if iOS takes over Mac OS if if the majority platform eats the the minority platform here then Apple script and automator go by the wayside and we have series shortcuts everywhere and to make that really take off they'd have to make it so that series shortcuts could really do access to deep links within the apps I mean I think yeah that has to happen either way most I would say 99% of Mac users have no idea what automator is and I've never used it no 99% of the people don't know how to parse Apple script well my dad didn't even know how to click on the trackpad so you know exactly um so I I mean it's not a disaster if automator goes away but yes I think series shortcuts is a acknowledgement by Apple that they need to bring those kind of pro functions from Mac to iOS and it's a baby step and it's a step in the right direction but there's obviously a long way to go um jumping through hoops and and all that kind of stuff to make it work uh is not ideal but much like with having the home app on your Mac it's like you can have that or you can have nothing so right now it's like yeah I'll take it um I'm I'm I'm very happy that it's there and I'm looking forward to diving into it more and uh doing some cool stuff with it so Siri now has integration with Salesforce Einstein and that was announced on uh Tuesday a lot of people talked about integration with Salesforce not as many people played up the integration with Einstein so this is this is kind of an interesting thing so basically sir acts as the front end for the experience for everything else that happens on the back end and Mark benof who is the uh the CEO of Salesforce talked about this a little bit in context of Marriott who is a Salesforce customer and and basically said what's going to happen is that you can have an experience that as a customer makes things easier for you that that you have your digital key right on your phone when you get into the Marriott and then you have the ability to talk to Siri and use Siri as room service so you could just hold up your phone and say Siri please order me my favorite sandwich and because you have your history built up with Marriott that Siri knows what your favorite sandwich is Siri acts as the front end for that Einstein knows the rest and negotiates getting you the sandwich Einstein is is this artificial intelligence solution for personalized and predictive customer experiences and it uses machine learning deep learning predictive and analytics uh natural language processing and all of those things so having Siri as the front end means that everyone has access to Einstein even better right yeah I think that Siri functionality continues to grow I think that partnering with a major operation like Salesforce is is pretty cool um and pretty good uh you know and and certainly Apple has made strides in the Enterprise uh mostly because of iOS we we've seen a couple of demonstrations of the idea of Alexa being used in hotel rooms for this kind of thing and and certainly you can use them to control the lights inside the hotel room but the um and and of course as an integrator that's a little bit easier because instead of having to use pairing keys and things like you do with iOS being able to set up an account the way Amazon does this is you you have an Amazon account and Associate the devices with that account and Amazon autois discovers them by virtue of them being on the same Wi-Fi network in the area and so as as a hotel integrator it's marginally easier because you don't have to go through the trouble of trying to pair homekit devices um but having this with work with Siri means that you don't have to issue people room keys you don't have to deal with changing room keys they're on your phone they're as well as everything else for control the uh the room service and stuff like that so it's we're sort of sort of in this middleware place where what's going to happen for the future of hospitality is an interesting thing it's it's actually something that I touched on a little bit in my uh iPhone 10s review regarding um a new function that is kind of a little lowkey in in the iPhone XS but I think um in the next few years could be a big deal so if you talk to people about ditching their wallet or ditching their keys or ditching of building an access card or whatever for their phone their number one concern the thing that always comes up is what happens when my battery dies yes I can't get on the subway I can't get on the bus I'm locked out of my room I can't pay for anything I can't and my phone dies all the time so so Apple's actually resolved this with a new low power mode it's exclusive to the iPhone XS 10s Max and 10r um that is uh if your phone is dead you can have a set set access card and a set Transit card and it will use whatever little power is left on the phone to provide the NFC blast to get you on the subway get you on the bus get you in your house uh get you in the dorm whatever and again that's a small thing but I think that's an important thing because this is something that prevents adoption and prevents people from going I don't want that I don't want to have my card on my phone it's not convenience whatever and they're bringing down those barriers to adoption and for access management I think that's going to be a very big deal and I think that that brings it to you know as you say hotels and other places as well all right so we're we're nearly out of time here I was going to talk about Apple pay but I think you had a more interesting topic that you wanted to talk about which is the uh Apple Watch series 4 Hardware yeah so uh actually our uh review was published uh by Andrew um for the Apple watch and uh you know he gave it a glowing review and and uh I would have to con with that um I've been using it for the last week um and I'm as you know and anybody listening knows I've been a big Apple watch proponent for a long time um and I think this is a really great upgrade um I love the bigger screen with the largely same form factor um I've been using exclusively the very busy uh uh complication heavy uh face um and while it is busy um I will admit I do like having all the details on the complications there I like how glanceable it is um I'm I'm very happy with the hardware I think that uh it's a really impressive uh device the the edge to edge screen has rounded Corners now um which are akin to what the iPhone 10 looks like so there's more consistency in design with Apple's other devices um and I would expect that the new iPad is probably going to do the same so we're going to have that kind of same Fe on all the devices um and you know the hardware is Snappy um I've been using it uh out running um I use it over cellular I use it at the gym I stream music with it my airpods um there are the aention Nike app does give me some headaches but the native apps seem to work great and some the quality thirdparty ones work well you obviously have the watch os5 features podcast support all that um the EKG functionality as we said not there yet but uh I'm excited to check that out um the mic and speakers are much improved I've taken some calls on it it's good uh they change the side button so that it's now flush with the case um but it still operates the same which I like there's a um a uh when you scroll with the uh uh the uh digal digital Crown there's a um haptic feedback that you feel I'm not sure how I feel about the haptic feedback it's it doesn't feel like it syncs up perfectly with what's on the screen sometimes you know sometimes it feels like it's clicking too much sometimes it feels like it's clicking too little it's a little too soft so um I'm hoping that future software updates will improve that but it does work well and it is nice and it feels smooth I'm guessing there's a setting to turn off that haptic feedback but I haven't actually dug into that yet um and I haven't fallen so it hasn't given me any alerts on that yet which is good fingers crossed uh hopefully none of that I was curious though because I just uh joined and started playing in a um a ice hockey league in New York and um I I've looked and it turns out there is like a a fitness tracking app for playing hockey and it like knows like when you're on the bench versus like when you're out on the ice and it'll like track in resting time and all that but it seems like a really great way to get your $500 investment broken so I Googled and there were people on Reddit and there were people on Reddit they're saying no it fits perfectly under my glove it's perfectly fine I'm like Heming and Hauling and going back and forth It's like ah I don't know should I should I I don't know this seems like a terrible idea so I'm like kind of tempted to do it but I just know I'm going to end up with a shattered $500 watch but uh I I think my main knock on the watch aside from uh very much the same problem that I have with the iPad in that you know I feel like the watch should be its own platform and and should have its own uh I shouldn't need to set it up with a phone it should connect to a Mac on its own it should connect to an iPad on its own it should be its own more independent platform as I've said before and hopefully we'll get there eventually but I think my main problem really is the cost um it's gone up by a bit this year so I think the cellular was $430 last year now it's $500 this year um and also Apple used to let you basically mix and match and put any band you want with the watch uh but now you basically get your choice of the sport Loop or the regular Sport and uh you know if you already have those bands it's like well I want to get a new band with my watch so I I wish that they had more Choice when it came to the bands and the price at 500 with cellular is a little steep uh but all in all super happy with the hardware um it's fast uh it's responsive it works well uh the cellular is reliable uh the Bluetooth connection is reliable um using with headphones great all the health tracking all that kind of stuff super happy with the series 4 definitely recommend it if you're on the market for the new watch absolutely so Neil if I had to takeaway from this episode I would say that your opinion is that all these platforms need to grow up and be their own things yeah absolutely why can't I sync my health data from my I from my watch to my Mac why does it have to be on my iPhone right like it doesn't make any sense to me the the you know battery savings if you use the watch on Cell it dies blah blah okay but if you connect the watch to Wi-Fi as you do at home it doesn't even need your phone it just connects directly to the Wi-Fi on its own it's not using cellular so the battery considerations are only applicable when you're out of the house and I think for the majority of people they're going to be at work they're going to be at home it's going to be connected to Wi-Fi whatever they don't necessarily need to have it connecting their phone they could and presumably most of them will most of the time but you know why can't I sit down and view my health data on my Mac why can't I go into the doctor's office and then say share this data with my doctor and they can pull it up on their iPad you know like the platform should be able to work in tandem with each other but also independently and that's what I think the future of the Mac is as well is playing nice with the iPhone all these great continuity features the ability to run the iPhone or iPad apps the iOS apps and but also to be its own thing to be the device where you sit down and you get work done excellent well we've run out of time this is another episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is Neil fantastic Hughes very fantastic Mr Fantastic Mis very stretchy there you go well it's not a stretch but we have an ad read all right jamp now makes it easy to set up manage and protect your Apple devices so you can focus on your business no it experience needed with jamp now you can check your digital inventory distribute Wi-Fi and email settings deploy apps protect company data and even lock or wipe a device as needed from anywhere and now Apple Insider podcast listeners can start securing your business today by setting up your first three devices for free forever add more for just $2 a month per device create your free account today at j.com appleinsider that's jf.com apppp inssider like I said this brings us to the end of another perfectly good episode of the Apple Insider podcast Neil where can people find you on the internet perfectly good episode I like it uh you can find me on Twitter at this is Neil and you can read my occasional musings including the iPhone 10s review on Apple insider.com and I'm your presenter Victor and you can find me at V marks on Twitter thank you so much for listening we really appreciate you being there with us yeah thank you very much cheers allyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to another episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is Neil Hughes Victor how's it going I am great and this is an interesting week now I am so glad you're back I I want to say for everyone who is concerned that I I don't put Neil in a box I don't put Neil in a cage I I don't prevent Neil from coming on the show Neil is a very busy person when when the end of Indiana Jones talks about who's in charge who's taking care of the Lost Ark and the answer is top men Neil Hughes is one of the top men his life is a mystery all we know is that he's busy that's that's one way of putting it um equally I want to address an iTunes comment that we had we had an iTunes review that talked about how uh they're never quite sure what role I play here am I am I the the interviewer and I'm supposed to only ask questions or am I also one of the participants in the chat and should I be speaking um of course the preference was was that I should never speak um Neil what do you think about that what what should my role be here uh I I think that you're the host of the podcast but I think that you're also entitled to your opinions okay great let's go with it uh let's not take any more time on this but I want you to know and understand that that we read every piece of listener mail we get and we really value it we take it to heart and so when you leave a comment like that we think about it and we try and consider what we're going to do differently to try and make it more listenable for you we appreciate yeah and along along that same note uh to all the people that reached out to me via email and and Twitter uh for being on last week's episode I do appreciate it you're all very kind and and thank you for the kind words we need to do this more often so first up you published our review of the iPhone I did tell me about it so you know I uh I mean let's be real the iPhone XS is not a huge upgrade from the iPhone 10 uh if you've been using the iPhone 10 for the last year and you're paying out of pocket uh and you're not on the iPhone upgrade plan um it's probably not worth the update for you but if you were on any other phone uh then you're going to be blown away by this like a friend of mine the other day he for some reason last year opted for the 8 plus instead of the 10 um I think he like ordered too late and the 10 wasn't coming for a while and then he decided Well I just want a phone now and like he was like I feel like I've been an idiot for the last year using this other phone because like he was just blown away by how easy uh face ID is how how reliable it is that it works um and so you know as I was writing the review I like to keep people like that in mind because I feel like the jaded Tech nerds of us will be like oh it looks the same oh this is you know it does it's just a little bit faster kind of stuff and it's important to keep in mind that you know that first of all is not everybody buying the phone and second of all this phone does have some significant improvements year-over-year but the biggest one really is the camera uh the camera takes much much much better lowlight photos immediately um saw the difference uh in taking pictures um and for myself I I go to a lot of events I go to a lot of concerts and I sometimes take photos at them so I'm very pleased with that um some people may not care but for me I I I think it's fantastic and some of the other changes like the ability to adjust the focal point or the background blur or whatever in uh uh in portrait after you take it um and uh there's better uh stereo audio now which I don't know why there wasn't before but there's stereo audio recording when you do a video um and little things like that that add up that really make this camera uh heads and shoulders above the one from last year now beyond that you know you have the a12 bionic chip and and all this other stuff and yeah it makes AR better and you know you and I have talked before about AR and and how I think it's really kind of a gimmick on the iPhone but laying the ground workor for a presumed headset or something like that that's made Faster by the chip but really the the chip is even doing a lot of this processing for the camera so one of the features is smart HDR which is why you're getting uh these better colors and and better contrast especially when you're taking photos at night and what that's doing is it's taking thanks to the bionic chip it's taking a series of photos at once uh just a fraction of a second apart from each other and then making a composite of them to get the colors better brighter more accurate having better balance in the photo and not having these like blown outs spots or in the case of taking a photo in the dark having you know a few lights blow out the the image that you're actually trying to focus on so you know I I gave the iPhone XS a very positive review um I I love that it has the same camera and same capabilities as the 10 plus 10s plus Max or whatever you call it 10s Max I can't even get these names right they're it's the worst names they I think they've ever had in a product uh but yeah you know it used to be that you had to get the plus model to get the dual camera or telephoto lens and all that uh but this year thankfully they kept the same features in the small phone as are in the Max phone and I think that's a great step in the right direction I don't think that you should be penalized for wanting to have a more manageable smaller phone uh in many ways it's more difficult to cram those components into a smaller device you know when you have a larger device you can put in a bigger battery you can you have more room to work with so I came away very happy with this phone I realized it's not going to be for a lot of our more hardcore readers who already own a 10 or something like that but I think if you're on the iPhone upgrade upgrade program or if you are uh somebody who owns an older phone you're going to be super happy with this upgrade you know it's interesting because I I try and stay in touch with people who are not our listener people who are less technologically knowledgeable people who are you know our listener our listeners are Technologic knowledgeable they're interested they have a high AC Acuity for picking up this stuff and and they're handsome to boot our our listeners are some of the best dressed listeners available in the world I know and so I I try and talk to people who aren't and things that I found were people that wanted to stay with the iPhone 8 or the 8 plus because it had the bigger screen size than the 10 if you went with the plus model that there was some fear around face ID and even now even now that the whole line has shifted to pretty much reflect face ID you know you can still get an eight or a seven but there's still some fear around face ID fear of giving up a home button all of these gestures just seem confusing to people who don't have a a chance to pick them up or or get used to them yeah you know they had a home button for 10 years they know that pressing the home button does one thing it's it's hilarious because if you use an iPhone 10 for a couple days and then try to go back to a regular iPhone you'll find yourself swiping from the bottom of the screen it's like it's like if you have an iPad and a Mac side by side and you're using them both and you're touching on the iPad and then you go over to the mac and you find yourself touching the the Mac screen it's like oh no I can't do that it's one of those things it's just like it just natural it works and it replaces your habits that you've had for so long so quickly and that's that's interesting because that actually dovetails nicely in with another discussion that I want to have but I want to have it in a moment because okay the the other thing that I want to talk about briefly is betas just because you know most of us got off of the beta program as soon as the iPhone o iOS 12 was announced there are still betas coming and the betas in 12.1 the features in 12.1 that are are at least noteworthy for I think most of us are group FaceTime chats group FaceTime calling and the eim functionality beginning to show up now we we had a report where the 10s eim began working for some owners using the 12.1 beta clearly one of the things that that's going to have to sort of catch up is Carrier support for it because I think their whole plan was that you'd go up to a carrier you'd agree to purchase the the plan and they'd show a QR code you'd photograph it with your camera and that would do the settings for eim for you right um obviously that kind of thing's not in place yet but that that the U functionality is live in the beta is a good indicator that we're progressing towards that yeah I I I think that you know it would make sense to launch that and probably you know watch OS 5.1 that has the EKG functionality unfortunately Apple in the last few years has announced stuff or added Hardware features that aren't available at launch uh porir mode was another example of that um so you know and when the airpods launched you couldn't customize what the Taps did that sort of stuff so I think that um you know it's been an unfortunate Trend with apple where they announce stuff and it takes a little while for it to come but you know patience is a virtue and there's a mix of this right so years and years and years ago they used to participate in a show called maor that was run by idg and the problem with going to a show like maor and being a big uh exhibitor there as Apple was is that you're tied to their schedule of the shows for your product releases otherwise you show up and you have nothing to announce which also doesn't go over well and they they stopped participating in those shows After the announcement of the original iPhone and that let them announce things at their own schedule you know they'd send out an invitation say one week come to California and people would come the problem with the phone is that with the phone they are still very much tied to people's schedules they're tied to schedules for carriers they're tied to the schedules for When people's contracts are up or subsidies are renewed kind of thing right they they very much don't have a lot of Liberty to announce whenever they please like they do with other devices like a homepod or an iPad right so it's it's a little bit more understandable that features might develop after the fact for the phone yeah I get it I mean the EKG one for the watch makes sense too because presumably they have to get you know um FDA approval for it and in order to do that they have to go through a process that would make the watch public so they get like a preliminary approval where they can keep it under wraps they announce it then they go through the approval process and they bring in a market like a month later or something like that something like that I get um but some of these other ones it's like uh it's like it's a little frustrating that they can't get stuff out the door on time you know group FaceTime calling announced back in June um and here it is after the release of iOS 12 and we still don't have it and and I'm a little more understanding of of things like the Apple watch although a month late is not a big deal a year late is kind of a big deal yeah well you know don't even get started on the air power mat I'm sorry my hair just caught fire what did you say that is one of the one of the most embarrassing things that they've ever done as a company really I I am dying to know the real story of what happened behind the scenes because there's a lot of rumors and stuff and uh you know I'm waiting to get a new pair of airpods uh with Siri support and you know the wireless charging case and all that but presumably those are just sitting waiting to be manufactured because they can't get air power out the door so it's pretty embarrassing well what they don't want to have happen is for you to go and buy three $10 charging pads and to have your your phone on one and your um your watch on another and your airpods on a third and have three different cables to power these three different charging pads because that would be fantastically awful I saw that uh Nomad announced a dual charging pad the other day a rather nice looking one it was like a leather pad with with two charging coils in it okay I don't know if it was watch compatible though and that's an interesting thing because you and I were talking about this over the summer a little bit I I was trying to charge my daughter's Apple watch with a a gat charging pad and I couldn't get it to work and and we started heard mixed reports right yeah it works with some I I don't know how or why they did that with the watch it's very odd um but yeah this one from uh Nomad is uh USBC power delivery in two charging pads and then it has a 7.5 amp out USB port that you could you know charge an iPad with or whatever wild I know you like that cuz it's got USBC on it yes I'm trying to buy only USBC things now I traveled uh uh last month to bamp and um I like to just plug one thing into the wall and usually that's just my Mac cuz I already have it there and I want it to charge and and so I love the new Macbook Pro because I have four USBC ports on it so I can use one to charge from the wall and three others to charge my stuff my iPhone my iPad I have a USBC to lightning cable it's fine it's easy no dongles nothing the only one I have to get a freaking dongle for is the watch there is no USBC to Apple watch charger they don't make it and uh it's frustrating yeah no kidding you know and you're not alone in this when I was at CES I was uh traveling there with a fell who works for a uh investment fund and he and I would go around to booths and and check out the devices and check out the gadgets and at every single one he said what port is it got and they'd say oh it's it's micro he'd go nope sorry looking for USBC only USBC and they said but are you sure are you kidding no one else is doing it's like that's the future get on board yep yeah I want I want everything USBC I'm I'm done with regular USB I don't mind lightning Lightning's fine I'm happy to stick with lightning but if it's if it's another port on another device USBC yeah but the the contradiction here is that it's a long transition to get rid of all of the USB ports usba ports that are in cars that are in in wall warts that are in all kinds of things right this is this is not just a flip the switch kind of transition totally yeah I get that I agree with that I I just I want options as a consumer as somebody who's willing to pay you know $15 to get a USBC to lightning cable or a USBC to micro us USB cable or whatever just give me the options give me give me a wall charger with four USBC ports all right that's actually an interesting idea that's going to be a whopping big Transformer they don't all have to be USB power delivery all they need to be is enough to charge a phone or a tablet this is not for recharging your Mac all right this episode is brought to you by jamp now jamp now makes it easy to set up manage and protect your Apple devices it's easy to keep track of your own Mac iPad or iPhone but what about other Apple devices at work as a business grows so does its digital inventry making it harder to manage everyone's Apple devices and this is especially true if employees are remote with jamp now you can check your digital inventry distribute Wi-Fi and email settings deploy apps protect company data and even lock or wipe a device as needed from anywhere jamp now manages devices you can focus on your business instead no it experience needed and now Apple Insider podcast listeners can start securing your business today by setting up your first three devices for free forever and more for Just Two do add more for just $2 a month per device create your free account today at jam.com apppp Insider that's jf.com slapple Insider cool speaking of the Mac Mojave was released yes have you used it I have uh since it came out a few days ago what do you think about it it's nice um I I've been using uh I tried out the dark mode for a couple days um I decided that uh uh it I just switched back to the regular mode I I don't like black backgrounds and white text but I'm glad it's there um the dynamic wallpaper is cool um having access to homekit uh is pretty cool um having the news app in there I like um I wish that the dynamic wallpaper worked in tandom with dark mode I think it would be nice to have the wallpaper get darker as the day goes on and then have your window uh fringes uh align with that um but yeah I mean I'm I'm very happy it's a pretty solid release um I haven't had any issues with it uh I've been using it with the Blackmagic egpu uh and a LG ultra fine 4K display um and everything seems to work very well swimmingly um I'm I'm very happy cool now did you read that there was a zero day vulnerability in maest Mojave I saw that yes so what what I understand that this thing does is that there's a a vulnerability that potentially can expose personal user data uh at least according to Patrick wle of digital security basically what it does is it allows an unprivileged app that is an app that doesn't have you know root permissions or admin permissions to bypass built-in system level permissions and skim user information from certain applications uh and this isn't the first time that wle has uncovered Apple related security issues the basically what happen is that that at WWDC in June Apple talked about an extended set of Mac security features that require users to provide express permission they have to explicitly allow select apps and Hardware to to be able to use those things so they have to authorize access to the camera to the microphone to mail history to messages Safari time machine iTunes backups locations routine system cookies and things like that and basically wle was was able to demonstrate bypassing one of these protections um he failed initially to access and copy contacts through terminal and then he runs this unprivileged app and then is able to locate and access the address book and then once he's able to do that he's be able to view all the files in the private folder metadata images things like that so it's um you know it was found Apple runs an iOS bug Bounty program but they don't run one for Mac OS and this is one of the expect more vulnerabilities you expect more vulnerabilities on Mac than you would on iOS so well yeah because the the Mac has uh is a lot less locked down than iOS is right yeah so I mean they they should definitely have a Mac bug Bounty program I think that's but this sort of speaks to a longer transition you know this is something you and I were talking about before the call where iOS is a lot more locked down and iOS is used by a ton more people true absolutely okay and so a lot more apps for iOS too yeah so if if iOS is the dominant platform with the with the majority user base then doesn't it make sense that that in a way we should just kind of get rid of this older Legacy Mac platform and just have IOS become the thing uh uh well no I don't think that that makes sense I think that I think that what does make sense is what you've seen Apple doing and they're going to continue to do is they're going to continue to blur the lines between the two platforms but I think they're going to remain independent for their own reasons right um one of the concerns I had uh that proved unfounded but you never know until you try something but one of the concerns I had about the iPhone 10 before it came out was replacing the home button and the usability and ease of use of having somebody be able to pick up the device just use it right um the home button made uh iOS devices accessible in a way that computers previously had not been um I think that it may end up being more of a problem on the iPad than it was on the iPhone um I think that it does require a slight learning curve of swipe your thumb up from the bottom but it's not really that big of a deal think about the modern laptop you have a trackpad you have a keyboard you have a screen all that my dad um his computer died uh a few months ago and I gave him a 2015 MacBook Pro and the first thing he did he's never used a Mac before he plugged in his Mouse and he didn't use the trackpad at all and then the other day he was trying to set up something I was trying to talk your airplane to his TV and he was like how do I click on this trackpad like he didn't like he didn't really understand to use he didn't understand how to scroll he didn't know the two finger scrolling and that sort of stuff so there's like a certain uh curve but there's a certain understanding as well right we sit down with a Mac and even if someone's never used it they at least know what the track pad for we have you know a few generations of computers behind us where they're modernized in a certain way so the platforms are going to change and they're going to evolve and they're going to be different and they're and they're going to uh have their strengths and their weaknesses but I think that there are certain things that make sense on each side to bring over and so there's a lot of hu and cry about uh the quartet of so-called marsipan apps that are iOS apps basically just ported pretty vanilla over to Mac and I'm not going to sit here and defend them and say they're great they're not they're not it's not like I open them up and I'm like wow these are fantastic he hey hey hey running home app on Mac today is 10 million times better than it was last month that's true it's true it's better than nothing um you know I think that um I think it's a little lazy uh I think that Apple could have done better and I certainly hope that once developers have access to these tools to Port their iOS apps over to the Mac that Apple will have improved these apps to set as kind of a standard Bearer you know I think about when um Apple was trying to drive up the prices of apps years ago and they brought the ior suite to iOS and they were saying this is how premium apps on an iPad can look this is the kind of functionality that you can offer that can replace a computer they were trying to set a standard there and saying you can have all the features you can do everything that you can on a Mac or whatever so I I think that Apple needs to get some of that back and certainly since this so-called marzipan project isn't coming until next year uh there's time to do that but as it is right now these are pretty vanilla ports that don't really make them unique Mac apps in any way and in in many ways limit the functionality uh I'm glad that they're there though and I think that if uh I think some people are looking at the wrong way I think that there's an expectation that all apps are going to be lazy certainly a lot of apps are going to be lazy Maybe not maybe the vast majority of apps will be lazy just we don't care about the Mac we're going to Port it over whatever but it' be nice to have right um I I think that however there are going to be a certain number of developers who it's going to be a gateway drug for them uh to use the term and uh to give them a insight into a world that they may never have thought about developing for before because now it's like well check a few boxes and you get your app on the Mac and developer goes yeah why not and they start dabbling around and they start to learn and then maybe they make some quality Mac apps as well and it makes it easier for them to build for both platforms I see a lot of apps coming to the Mac because of this a lot of them are going to be lazy but I think there's going to be some gold ones out there and I don't think that's any different from the app store right now I mean remember years ago when we had the fart app controversy do we really need this kind of junk on the App Store well we're long past that now and there's a lot of junk on the App Store okay and that's just kind of the nature of it and but there's also some really great apps on the App Store uh the watches the same way you know um I I was uh I tweeted uh last week when I got my Apple watch uh series 4 uh because I was amazed that Nike has this like super close partnership with apple and they make a Nike Edition Hardware of the watch and yet new watch launches last Friday the flagship Nike app for Nike run Club does not have compatibility with the new watch it runs in a smaller window like the old watch it doesn't have support for the complications or anything and it's like seriously if carrot what which is one of the best third party apps on any platform but on the watch is fantastic and on the phone is fantastic if carrot can have that ready to go on day one Nike needs to be ready to have that go on day one that's an embarrassment for apple and it's an embarrassment for Nike I assume that that app's going to be updated before the new Nike Edition launches next week but come on like that that's completely inexcusable so you're going to have lazy developers on all levels these things do happen and to to sit back and say oh you know this is going to be a disaster for the Mac is pretty shortsighted because the Apple watch is still getting pretty good apps from good developers you just be able you need to have some Discerning taste and be able to pick and choose right so I'm thinking about it on a much longer timeline see I don't think that it's about being lazy bringing thermal from the Mac I think it's intentional that we know that the Mac App Store has been kind of a garbage fire right right and and not in terms of quality of application although there's some of that but in terms of uptake and developers wrestling with the sandboxing and and generally no one wants to use it anymore there it's difficult to find the app you really want on the Mac App Store sometimes just because the the reward hasn't been there for developers the same way that it has been for the IOS app store and so this allows them to go ahead and over a longer timeline make the IOS app store simply the app store right and that if if the development effort keeps going into UI kit and uiit understands what to do with a mouse and keyboard then iOS apps using uiit become just the apps that that the distinction between a Mac app and the IOS app dies off I mean think about when the argument was that the the Mac was inferior to Windows because Windows had all the apps right and then we saw a great migration of apps to the cloud and to the browser and so now it doesn't really matter because literally any service you want there are of course some specific apps that may limit you or whatever but it doesn't matter because everything's done through the browser at least on the desktop the phone is very different the phone is app specific I happen to like the phone approach better so I use um fluid which is a app for the Mac that turns a website into an app so like for work um uh I have a thing where I have to like put tasks on there through a website called as as is like a you know a group team task manager you can see who's working on what and who's completed what on the iPhone it has its own dedicated app and it's nice but on the Mac there is no app for a sauna so I used fluid and I made it its own app put it in the dock gave it its own icon and now when I want to use a sauna because I don't want to I have a million tabs open and it's a it's something that I use frequently and I don't want to keep opening a tab for it and browsing around or whatever I just want to have it as an app and so I click on it there and so that's an example of something where I would take a subpar a sauna Port of the iPad version to the Mac to have the app there and I can come up with a handful of apps like that where my life would be better having the dedicated uh Mac app that doesn't exist right now uh mint is another one for my finances uh I would much rather just you know have a dedicated app on there uh then have to go to the website that's just something that I use frequently enough and would want to use um so you know they're they're not going to be the best apps but to your point you're right it's longer term you are looking at taking the biggest and best app platform on the planet has sueded Windows now has super seed everything Android may have more apps but they're certainly not as high quality to put them on the Mac just makes perfect sense it it's it would it's a no-brainer uh and and I think that you're going to continue to see the merging of these Platforms in that sort of way the apps are going to work on both you know I've been an advocate for a long time of cursor input on iOS um and as I was saying before about putting an iPad and a uh and a Mac side by side you don't even have to have them side by side just use your iPad with a keyboard for a while and type and work and get some work done and then go back to your Mac and then see if you touch the screen accidentally cuz you will and I realized that Apple's been resistant to doing touch screen on the Mac and and I don't blame them I I don't think it would be necessary but I think it's one of those things that they should probably just include to just say okay we did it you know I think that it's probably inevitable at some point especially if we get a a Aeries chip based uh you know 12 or 13inch MacBook you know in the next couple years it's probably like okay yeah it's got a touchcreen too but you know this is not the primary mode of input or whatever and I think they should say the same for keyboard and trackpad or mouse or whatever for iOS where it's like if you really you know in the words of Steve Jobs when the first iPad was out if you really want to write war in peace here's a keybo he's a here's a keyboard for you um I think that you know if you really want to do these things if you are the power user that needs these things or if you're the Casual user in the event of you know a touchcreen on the Mac here we are giving you the option we're giving you the best of all worlds I think that that's an inevitability at some point down the road depending on Apple's resistance and technology and that sort of stuff but I think that that's the the road that we're heading down and where we're going yeah now I've mentioned before on this show that xcode is one of the things that keeps the Mac going you can only write xcode applications you can only write applications for iOS on a Mac right and and that should change well it I think it is because Swift playgrounds has a lot of shared code with xcode and if you can do Swift playgrounds on an IP ad then at some point you should be able to completely write applications on an iPad and if you can don't think I don't think that any app that Apple makes for the Mac should not come to the iPad and I don't think that they should be any less fully featured than they are on the Mac I think that there should be a Final Cut Pro 10 on the iPad and I think it should be every bit as good as the one on the Mac which by the way just got support for egpus yeah which is great so through that P piece of news in as well but uh I I that's that's what I'm getting at is I think that that over time all of these things come to iOS and the Mac just remains that form factor that we call a keyboard and track pad with a screen but it basically becomes iOS uh you know so there's a rumor there was a rumor that the new iPads which are expected to be announced in October are going to ditch the lightning port for USBC uh I don't believe that I think that it'll probably ship with a lightning USBC Cable in the box and maybe the lightning interface will be upgraded to support USBC uh uh uh data transfer uh standards so you know much higher quality data transfer and I was thinking about you know what that could lead to and the possibilities of it and one of the things that I thought was really interesting was not only dual screen support for like plugging your iPad into your Mac and then just having a nice second monitor very conveniently and a portable second monitor that you can bring with you have a mobile workstation that's super powerful um in a way that you know you would currently have to use a third party app for like air display or whatever but just to have it native to the platform would be great but then I was also thinking like so there's this rumor of this new iMac right so what if you had a headless iMac and the screen was the iPad and you could just plug in an iPad and make that your monitor for for not iMac I'm sorry Mac Mini uh for your new Mac Mini I I I think what I'm sort of feeling here and I haven't really said it well is I I think that we we should have seen iOS and and iPad make a play for dominance on the desktop by now and I think it's been held back by totally has been by you know this sort of need to preserve the mac and of course now the Mac needs the shot in the arm because the Mac App Store is so lousy and because you know iOS is the dominant of everything the majority platform it's uh it we should have seen the iPad make play for dominance before now right it should have been needs to take the training wheels off the iPad no doubt the hardware is more than capable it's the connectivity and the software that are holding it back yeah yeah they are course but I think that would you know if you could if you could use your iPad as a as an official Mac display um especially with the 12.9 in one right that's a that's a great portable monitor that you could bring with you and and get some work done I you know I think that that's a way for them to start bridging that Gap it still feels like training wheels to me it it feels like you've taken the the best little portable computer and and turned it into a dumb display what if it brought touchscreen support to Mac OS through that I I I feel like they shouldn't they're failing to Dream a Little Bit B bigger I just want them to have a bigger Vision than than doing that it's it's not a terrible idea but it feels like him half steps do you think that they'll hold off on doing any of that until there's a aeries Mac I think so and I think if I had to be specific even if there is an Aeries Mac that the first operating system that releases on the Aeries Mac will be transitional it'll be very much here's the same old thing running on a new chip and it's after that that everything changes because they always see an A series Mac running something that looks more like Mac OS or more like iOS um I whatever the state of mac o is with UI kit and iOS apps from marsipan at that time I I think it's it's still very much this this early hybrid because that's what happens right you you do this change you do this huge platform change and you release the same software on it so that everyone feels comfortable with the change and then the version after that is where you drop support for the old one and you keep the emulation around for a little bit longer and the version after that's where you drop the emulation that's the history that's what we saw with Rosetta and power PC it's what we saw with classic OS as well well running U OS 9 way back in the dark days it's it's going it's going to be an odd transition I don't know how they're going to manage it um it'll be interesting to see what takes precedence and what takes priority in that platform is it more mac is it more iOS I think the trend is towards more mac more freedom um having more functionality and more expandability than you have currently on iOS which is pretty locked down like I said I think you need to take the training wheels off the iPad and I think that if you release a notebook that is more iPad than mac I think that's a step backwards I I agree with that statement only because of the way that we think about what an iPad's capabilities are we even when we say release an a laptop that's more iPad than mac it it sort of has that undercurrent of training wheels still on you know we we need to get the training wheels off to the point where when you say iPad versus Mac and you think of both things being incredibly competent yeah I think the iPad has every capability of being just as competent as the Mac Mac just having its own its own strengths yeah I'm I'm thinking that eventually the iPad the IOS operating system replaces what a Mac is we call it a Mac because that's the form factor but it's It Mac itself changes right yeah it's exciting times ahead I I I hope that uh we see more acceleration in that direction because of marsipan and because of these apps coming there but certainly a lot of room for improvement right now and if anybody is going to be the standard Bearer it has to be apple it does let's change gears for a second talk to me about Siri what do you want to know how much do you like Siri uh you know so one of the things that I like now about um the Siri shortcuts functionality and and opening to third party developers more in um iOS 12 is you can command any possible permutation of of speaking to Siri that you can think of uh that will then override the native apps so I was talking earlier about carrot and using carrot weather well you could make uh custom commands and shortcuts for every possible question you could think of with the weather and have those go to carrot instead of uh of apple and it's kind of a roundabout way of just of removing the built-in default apps which is interesting um another thing I I was talking to a buddy of mine the other day who has a nest thermostat and he was saying um he was trying to use a series shortcuts to have it control his nest thermostat and it does it by proxy of if this then that and he was saying yeah it works except I can't get it to set a specific temperature and I said why not try just making specific series shortcuts for each temperature because I mean think about it right you're only going to use like a 10 Dee range right right so I said just set one for you know set the temperature to 70 set one for set the temperature 71 and so on and he did and it works fine so it's one of those things where it's a little clunky and a little cumbersome but it takes you know maybe 10 minutes effort and then you're done and then you can have it do all that kind of stuff so I think that we're starting to see you know the benefits of series shortcuts and some of the things that you can do um and in a roundabout way like setting temperatures that you're not supposed to be able to set or replacing functions that you aren't necessarily supposed to be able to replace but it works and I think it's pretty good so I had a couple thoughts about this based on the last discussion where if iOS takes over Mac OS if if the majority platform eats the the minority platform here then Apple script and automator go by the wayside and we have series shortcuts everywhere and to make that really take off they'd have to make it so that series shortcuts could really do access to deep links within the apps I mean I think yeah that has to happen either way most I would say 99% of Mac users have no idea what automator is and I've never used it no 99% of the people don't know how to parse Apple script well my dad didn't even know how to click on the trackpad so you know exactly um so I I mean it's not a disaster if automator goes away but yes I think series shortcuts is a acknowledgement by Apple that they need to bring those kind of pro functions from Mac to iOS and it's a baby step and it's a step in the right direction but there's obviously a long way to go um jumping through hoops and and all that kind of stuff to make it work uh is not ideal but much like with having the home app on your Mac it's like you can have that or you can have nothing so right now it's like yeah I'll take it um I'm I'm I'm very happy that it's there and I'm looking forward to diving into it more and uh doing some cool stuff with it so Siri now has integration with Salesforce Einstein and that was announced on uh Tuesday a lot of people talked about integration with Salesforce not as many people played up the integration with Einstein so this is this is kind of an interesting thing so basically sir acts as the front end for the experience for everything else that happens on the back end and Mark benof who is the uh the CEO of Salesforce talked about this a little bit in context of Marriott who is a Salesforce customer and and basically said what's going to happen is that you can have an experience that as a customer makes things easier for you that that you have your digital key right on your phone when you get into the Marriott and then you have the ability to talk to Siri and use Siri as room service so you could just hold up your phone and say Siri please order me my favorite sandwich and because you have your history built up with Marriott that Siri knows what your favorite sandwich is Siri acts as the front end for that Einstein knows the rest and negotiates getting you the sandwich Einstein is is this artificial intelligence solution for personalized and predictive customer experiences and it uses machine learning deep learning predictive and analytics uh natural language processing and all of those things so having Siri as the front end means that everyone has access to Einstein even better right yeah I think that Siri functionality continues to grow I think that partnering with a major operation like Salesforce is is pretty cool um and pretty good uh you know and and certainly Apple has made strides in the Enterprise uh mostly because of iOS we we've seen a couple of demonstrations of the idea of Alexa being used in hotel rooms for this kind of thing and and certainly you can use them to control the lights inside the hotel room but the um and and of course as an integrator that's a little bit easier because instead of having to use pairing keys and things like you do with iOS being able to set up an account the way Amazon does this is you you have an Amazon account and Associate the devices with that account and Amazon autois discovers them by virtue of them being on the same Wi-Fi network in the area and so as as a hotel integrator it's marginally easier because you don't have to go through the trouble of trying to pair homekit devices um but having this with work with Siri means that you don't have to issue people room keys you don't have to deal with changing room keys they're on your phone they're as well as everything else for control the uh the room service and stuff like that so it's we're sort of sort of in this middleware place where what's going to happen for the future of hospitality is an interesting thing it's it's actually something that I touched on a little bit in my uh iPhone 10s review regarding um a new function that is kind of a little lowkey in in the iPhone XS but I think um in the next few years could be a big deal so if you talk to people about ditching their wallet or ditching their keys or ditching of building an access card or whatever for their phone their number one concern the thing that always comes up is what happens when my battery dies yes I can't get on the subway I can't get on the bus I'm locked out of my room I can't pay for anything I can't and my phone dies all the time so so Apple's actually resolved this with a new low power mode it's exclusive to the iPhone XS 10s Max and 10r um that is uh if your phone is dead you can have a set set access card and a set Transit card and it will use whatever little power is left on the phone to provide the NFC blast to get you on the subway get you on the bus get you in your house uh get you in the dorm whatever and again that's a small thing but I think that's an important thing because this is something that prevents adoption and prevents people from going I don't want that I don't want to have my card on my phone it's not convenience whatever and they're bringing down those barriers to adoption and for access management I think that's going to be a very big deal and I think that that brings it to you know as you say hotels and other places as well all right so we're we're nearly out of time here I was going to talk about Apple pay but I think you had a more interesting topic that you wanted to talk about which is the uh Apple Watch series 4 Hardware yeah so uh actually our uh review was published uh by Andrew um for the Apple watch and uh you know he gave it a glowing review and and uh I would have to con with that um I've been using it for the last week um and I'm as you know and anybody listening knows I've been a big Apple watch proponent for a long time um and I think this is a really great upgrade um I love the bigger screen with the largely same form factor um I've been using exclusively the very busy uh uh complication heavy uh face um and while it is busy um I will admit I do like having all the details on the complications there I like how glanceable it is um I'm I'm very happy with the hardware I think that uh it's a really impressive uh device the the edge to edge screen has rounded Corners now um which are akin to what the iPhone 10 looks like so there's more consistency in design with Apple's other devices um and I would expect that the new iPad is probably going to do the same so we're going to have that kind of same Fe on all the devices um and you know the hardware is Snappy um I've been using it uh out running um I use it over cellular I use it at the gym I stream music with it my airpods um there are the aention Nike app does give me some headaches but the native apps seem to work great and some the quality thirdparty ones work well you obviously have the watch os5 features podcast support all that um the EKG functionality as we said not there yet but uh I'm excited to check that out um the mic and speakers are much improved I've taken some calls on it it's good uh they change the side button so that it's now flush with the case um but it still operates the same which I like there's a um a uh when you scroll with the uh uh the uh digal digital Crown there's a um haptic feedback that you feel I'm not sure how I feel about the haptic feedback it's it doesn't feel like it syncs up perfectly with what's on the screen sometimes you know sometimes it feels like it's clicking too much sometimes it feels like it's clicking too little it's a little too soft so um I'm hoping that future software updates will improve that but it does work well and it is nice and it feels smooth I'm guessing there's a setting to turn off that haptic feedback but I haven't actually dug into that yet um and I haven't fallen so it hasn't given me any alerts on that yet which is good fingers crossed uh hopefully none of that I was curious though because I just uh joined and started playing in a um a ice hockey league in New York and um I I've looked and it turns out there is like a a fitness tracking app for playing hockey and it like knows like when you're on the bench versus like when you're out on the ice and it'll like track in resting time and all that but it seems like a really great way to get your $500 investment broken so I Googled and there were people on Reddit and there were people on Reddit they're saying no it fits perfectly under my glove it's perfectly fine I'm like Heming and Hauling and going back and forth It's like ah I don't know should I should I I don't know this seems like a terrible idea so I'm like kind of tempted to do it but I just know I'm going to end up with a shattered $500 watch but uh I I think my main knock on the watch aside from uh very much the same problem that I have with the iPad in that you know I feel like the watch should be its own platform and and should have its own uh I shouldn't need to set it up with a phone it should connect to a Mac on its own it should connect to an iPad on its own it should be its own more independent platform as I've said before and hopefully we'll get there eventually but I think my main problem really is the cost um it's gone up by a bit this year so I think the cellular was $430 last year now it's $500 this year um and also Apple used to let you basically mix and match and put any band you want with the watch uh but now you basically get your choice of the sport Loop or the regular Sport and uh you know if you already have those bands it's like well I want to get a new band with my watch so I I wish that they had more Choice when it came to the bands and the price at 500 with cellular is a little steep uh but all in all super happy with the hardware um it's fast uh it's responsive it works well uh the cellular is reliable uh the Bluetooth connection is reliable um using with headphones great all the health tracking all that kind of stuff super happy with the series 4 definitely recommend it if you're on the market for the new watch absolutely so Neil if I had to takeaway from this episode I would say that your opinion is that all these platforms need to grow up and be their own things yeah absolutely why can't I sync my health data from my I from my watch to my Mac why does it have to be on my iPhone right like it doesn't make any sense to me the the you know battery savings if you use the watch on Cell it dies blah blah okay but if you connect the watch to Wi-Fi as you do at home it doesn't even need your phone it just connects directly to the Wi-Fi on its own it's not using cellular so the battery considerations are only applicable when you're out of the house and I think for the majority of people they're going to be at work they're going to be at home it's going to be connected to Wi-Fi whatever they don't necessarily need to have it connecting their phone they could and presumably most of them will most of the time but you know why can't I sit down and view my health data on my Mac why can't I go into the doctor's office and then say share this data with my doctor and they can pull it up on their iPad you know like the platform should be able to work in tandem with each other but also independently and that's what I think the future of the Mac is as well is playing nice with the iPhone all these great continuity features the ability to run the iPhone or iPad apps the iOS apps and but also to be its own thing to be the device where you sit down and you get work done excellent well we've run out of time this is another episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is Neil fantastic Hughes very fantastic Mr Fantastic Mis very stretchy there you go well it's not a stretch but we have an ad read all right jamp now makes it easy to set up manage and protect your Apple devices so you can focus on your business no it experience needed with jamp now you can check your digital inventory distribute Wi-Fi and email settings deploy apps protect company data and even lock or wipe a device as needed from anywhere and now Apple Insider podcast listeners can start securing your business today by setting up your first three devices for free forever add more for just $2 a month per device create your free account today at j.com appleinsider that's jf.com apppp inssider like I said this brings us to the end of another perfectly good episode of the Apple Insider podcast Neil where can people find you on the internet perfectly good episode I like it uh you can find me on Twitter at this is Neil and you can read my occasional musings including the iPhone 10s review on Apple insider.com and I'm your presenter Victor and you can find me at V marks on Twitter thank you so much for listening we really appreciate you being there with us yeah thank you very much cheers allyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to another episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is Neil Hughes Victor how's it going I am great and this is an interesting week now I am so glad you're back I I want to say for everyone who is concerned that I I don't put Neil in a box I don't put Neil in a cage I I don't prevent Neil from coming on the show Neil is a very busy person when when the end of Indiana Jones talks about who's in charge who's taking care of the Lost Ark and the answer is top men Neil Hughes is one of the top men his life is a mystery all we know is that he's busy that's that's one way of putting it um equally I want to address an iTunes comment that we had we had an iTunes review that talked about how uh they're never quite sure what role I play here am I am I the the interviewer and I'm supposed to only ask questions or am I also one of the participants in the chat and should I be speaking um of course the preference was was that I should never speak um Neil what do you think about that what what should my role be here uh I I think that you're the host of the podcast but I think that you're also entitled to your opinions okay great let's go with it uh let's not take any more time on this but I want you to know and understand that that we read every piece of listener mail we get and we really value it we take it to heart and so when you leave a comment like that we think about it and we try and consider what we're going to do differently to try and make it more listenable for you we appreciate yeah and along along that same note uh to all the people that reached out to me via email and and Twitter uh for being on last week's episode I do appreciate it you're all very kind and and thank you for the kind words we need to do this more often so first up you published our review of the iPhone I did tell me about it so you know I uh I mean let's be real the iPhone XS is not a huge upgrade from the iPhone 10 uh if you've been using the iPhone 10 for the last year and you're paying out of pocket uh and you're not on the iPhone upgrade plan um it's probably not worth the update for you but if you were on any other phone uh then you're going to be blown away by this like a friend of mine the other day he for some reason last year opted for the 8 plus instead of the 10 um I think he like ordered too late and the 10 wasn't coming for a while and then he decided Well I just want a phone now and like he was like I feel like I've been an idiot for the last year using this other phone because like he was just blown away by how easy uh face ID is how how reliable it is that it works um and so you know as I was writing the review I like to keep people like that in mind because I feel like the jaded Tech nerds of us will be like oh it looks the same oh this is you know it does it's just a little bit faster kind of stuff and it's important to keep in mind that you know that first of all is not everybody buying the phone and second of all this phone does have some significant improvements year-over-year but the biggest one really is the camera uh the camera takes much much much better lowlight photos immediately um saw the difference uh in taking pictures um and for myself I I go to a lot of events I go to a lot of concerts and I sometimes take photos at them so I'm very pleased with that um some people may not care but for me I I I think it's fantastic and some of the other changes like the ability to adjust the focal point or the background blur or whatever in uh uh in portrait after you take it um and uh there's better uh stereo audio now which I don't know why there wasn't before but there's stereo audio recording when you do a video um and little things like that that add up that really make this camera uh heads and shoulders above the one from last year now beyond that you know you have the a12 bionic chip and and all this other stuff and yeah it makes AR better and you know you and I have talked before about AR and and how I think it's really kind of a gimmick on the iPhone but laying the ground workor for a presumed headset or something like that that's made Faster by the chip but really the the chip is even doing a lot of this processing for the camera so one of the features is smart HDR which is why you're getting uh these better colors and and better contrast especially when you're taking photos at night and what that's doing is it's taking thanks to the bionic chip it's taking a series of photos at once uh just a fraction of a second apart from each other and then making a composite of them to get the colors better brighter more accurate having better balance in the photo and not having these like blown outs spots or in the case of taking a photo in the dark having you know a few lights blow out the the image that you're actually trying to focus on so you know I I gave the iPhone XS a very positive review um I I love that it has the same camera and same capabilities as the 10 plus 10s plus Max or whatever you call it 10s Max I can't even get these names right they're it's the worst names they I think they've ever had in a product uh but yeah you know it used to be that you had to get the plus model to get the dual camera or telephoto lens and all that uh but this year thankfully they kept the same features in the small phone as are in the Max phone and I think that's a great step in the right direction I don't think that you should be penalized for wanting to have a more manageable smaller phone uh in many ways it's more difficult to cram those components into a smaller device you know when you have a larger device you can put in a bigger battery you can you have more room to work with so I came away very happy with this phone I realized it's not going to be for a lot of our more hardcore readers who already own a 10 or something like that but I think if you're on the iPhone upgrade upgrade program or if you are uh somebody who owns an older phone you're going to be super happy with this upgrade you know it's interesting because I I try and stay in touch with people who are not our listener people who are less technologically knowledgeable people who are you know our listener our listeners are Technologic knowledgeable they're interested they have a high AC Acuity for picking up this stuff and and they're handsome to boot our our listeners are some of the best dressed listeners available in the world I know and so I I try and talk to people who aren't and things that I found were people that wanted to stay with the iPhone 8 or the 8 plus because it had the bigger screen size than the 10 if you went with the plus model that there was some fear around face ID and even now even now that the whole line has shifted to pretty much reflect face ID you know you can still get an eight or a seven but there's still some fear around face ID fear of giving up a home button all of these gestures just seem confusing to people who don't have a a chance to pick them up or or get used to them yeah you know they had a home button for 10 years they know that pressing the home button does one thing it's it's hilarious because if you use an iPhone 10 for a couple days and then try to go back to a regular iPhone you'll find yourself swiping from the bottom of the screen it's like it's like if you have an iPad and a Mac side by side and you're using them both and you're touching on the iPad and then you go over to the mac and you find yourself touching the the Mac screen it's like oh no I can't do that it's one of those things it's just like it just natural it works and it replaces your habits that you've had for so long so quickly and that's that's interesting because that actually dovetails nicely in with another discussion that I want to have but I want to have it in a moment because okay the the other thing that I want to talk about briefly is betas just because you know most of us got off of the beta program as soon as the iPhone o iOS 12 was announced there are still betas coming and the betas in 12.1 the features in 12.1 that are are at least noteworthy for I think most of us are group FaceTime chats group FaceTime calling and the eim functionality beginning to show up now we we had a report where the 10s eim began working for some owners using the 12.1 beta clearly one of the things that that's going to have to sort of catch up is Carrier support for it because I think their whole plan was that you'd go up to a carrier you'd agree to purchase the the plan and they'd show a QR code you'd photograph it with your camera and that would do the settings for eim for you right um obviously that kind of thing's not in place yet but that that the U functionality is live in the beta is a good indicator that we're progressing towards that yeah I I I think that you know it would make sense to launch that and probably you know watch OS 5.1 that has the EKG functionality unfortunately Apple in the last few years has announced stuff or added Hardware features that aren't available at launch uh porir mode was another example of that um so you know and when the airpods launched you couldn't customize what the Taps did that sort of stuff so I think that um you know it's been an unfortunate Trend with apple where they announce stuff and it takes a little while for it to come but you know patience is a virtue and there's a mix of this right so years and years and years ago they used to participate in a show called maor that was run by idg and the problem with going to a show like maor and being a big uh exhibitor there as Apple was is that you're tied to their schedule of the shows for your product releases otherwise you show up and you have nothing to announce which also doesn't go over well and they they stopped participating in those shows After the announcement of the original iPhone and that let them announce things at their own schedule you know they'd send out an invitation say one week come to California and people would come the problem with the phone is that with the phone they are still very much tied to people's schedules they're tied to schedules for carriers they're tied to the schedules for When people's contracts are up or subsidies are renewed kind of thing right they they very much don't have a lot of Liberty to announce whenever they please like they do with other devices like a homepod or an iPad right so it's it's a little bit more understandable that features might develop after the fact for the phone yeah I get it I mean the EKG one for the watch makes sense too because presumably they have to get you know um FDA approval for it and in order to do that they have to go through a process that would make the watch public so they get like a preliminary approval where they can keep it under wraps they announce it then they go through the approval process and they bring in a market like a month later or something like that something like that I get um but some of these other ones it's like uh it's like it's a little frustrating that they can't get stuff out the door on time you know group FaceTime calling announced back in June um and here it is after the release of iOS 12 and we still don't have it and and I'm a little more understanding of of things like the Apple watch although a month late is not a big deal a year late is kind of a big deal yeah well you know don't even get started on the air power mat I'm sorry my hair just caught fire what did you say that is one of the one of the most embarrassing things that they've ever done as a company really I I am dying to know the real story of what happened behind the scenes because there's a lot of rumors and stuff and uh you know I'm waiting to get a new pair of airpods uh with Siri support and you know the wireless charging case and all that but presumably those are just sitting waiting to be manufactured because they can't get air power out the door so it's pretty embarrassing well what they don't want to have happen is for you to go and buy three $10 charging pads and to have your your phone on one and your um your watch on another and your airpods on a third and have three different cables to power these three different charging pads because that would be fantastically awful I saw that uh Nomad announced a dual charging pad the other day a rather nice looking one it was like a leather pad with with two charging coils in it okay I don't know if it was watch compatible though and that's an interesting thing because you and I were talking about this over the summer a little bit I I was trying to charge my daughter's Apple watch with a a gat charging pad and I couldn't get it to work and and we started heard mixed reports right yeah it works with some I I don't know how or why they did that with the watch it's very odd um but yeah this one from uh Nomad is uh USBC power delivery in two charging pads and then it has a 7.5 amp out USB port that you could you know charge an iPad with or whatever wild I know you like that cuz it's got USBC on it yes I'm trying to buy only USBC things now I traveled uh uh last month to bamp and um I like to just plug one thing into the wall and usually that's just my Mac cuz I already have it there and I want it to charge and and so I love the new Macbook Pro because I have four USBC ports on it so I can use one to charge from the wall and three others to charge my stuff my iPhone my iPad I have a USBC to lightning cable it's fine it's easy no dongles nothing the only one I have to get a freaking dongle for is the watch there is no USBC to Apple watch charger they don't make it and uh it's frustrating yeah no kidding you know and you're not alone in this when I was at CES I was uh traveling there with a fell who works for a uh investment fund and he and I would go around to booths and and check out the devices and check out the gadgets and at every single one he said what port is it got and they'd say oh it's it's micro he'd go nope sorry looking for USBC only USBC and they said but are you sure are you kidding no one else is doing it's like that's the future get on board yep yeah I want I want everything USBC I'm I'm done with regular USB I don't mind lightning Lightning's fine I'm happy to stick with lightning but if it's if it's another port on another device USBC yeah but the the contradiction here is that it's a long transition to get rid of all of the USB ports usba ports that are in cars that are in in wall warts that are in all kinds of things right this is this is not just a flip the switch kind of transition totally yeah I get that I agree with that I I just I want options as a consumer as somebody who's willing to pay you know $15 to get a USBC to lightning cable or a USBC to micro us USB cable or whatever just give me the options give me give me a wall charger with four USBC ports all right that's actually an interesting idea that's going to be a whopping big Transformer they don't all have to be USB power delivery all they need to be is enough to charge a phone or a tablet this is not for recharging your Mac all right this episode is brought to you by jamp now jamp now makes it easy to set up manage and protect your Apple devices it's easy to keep track of your own Mac iPad or iPhone but what about other Apple devices at work as a business grows so does its digital inventry making it harder to manage everyone's Apple devices and this is especially true if employees are remote with jamp now you can check your digital inventry distribute Wi-Fi and email settings deploy apps protect company data and even lock or wipe a device as needed from anywhere jamp now manages devices you can focus on your business instead no it experience needed and now Apple Insider podcast listeners can start securing your business today by setting up your first three devices for free forever and more for Just Two do add more for just $2 a month per device create your free account today at jam.com apppp Insider that's jf.com slapple Insider cool speaking of the Mac Mojave was released yes have you used it I have uh since it came out a few days ago what do you think about it it's nice um I I've been using uh I tried out the dark mode for a couple days um I decided that uh uh it I just switched back to the regular mode I I don't like black backgrounds and white text but I'm glad it's there um the dynamic wallpaper is cool um having access to homekit uh is pretty cool um having the news app in there I like um I wish that the dynamic wallpaper worked in tandom with dark mode I think it would be nice to have the wallpaper get darker as the day goes on and then have your window uh fringes uh align with that um but yeah I mean I'm I'm very happy it's a pretty solid release um I haven't had any issues with it uh I've been using it with the Blackmagic egpu uh and a LG ultra fine 4K display um and everything seems to work very well swimmingly um I'm I'm very happy cool now did you read that there was a zero day vulnerability in maest Mojave I saw that yes so what what I understand that this thing does is that there's a a vulnerability that potentially can expose personal user data uh at least according to Patrick wle of digital security basically what it does is it allows an unprivileged app that is an app that doesn't have you know root permissions or admin permissions to bypass built-in system level permissions and skim user information from certain applications uh and this isn't the first time that wle has uncovered Apple related security issues the basically what happen is that that at WWDC in June Apple talked about an extended set of Mac security features that require users to provide express permission they have to explicitly allow select apps and Hardware to to be able to use those things so they have to authorize access to the camera to the microphone to mail history to messages Safari time machine iTunes backups locations routine system cookies and things like that and basically wle was was able to demonstrate bypassing one of these protections um he failed initially to access and copy contacts through terminal and then he runs this unprivileged app and then is able to locate and access the address book and then once he's able to do that he's be able to view all the files in the private folder metadata images things like that so it's um you know it was found Apple runs an iOS bug Bounty program but they don't run one for Mac OS and this is one of the expect more vulnerabilities you expect more vulnerabilities on Mac than you would on iOS so well yeah because the the Mac has uh is a lot less locked down than iOS is right yeah so I mean they they should definitely have a Mac bug Bounty program I think that's but this sort of speaks to a longer transition you know this is something you and I were talking about before the call where iOS is a lot more locked down and iOS is used by a ton more people true absolutely okay and so a lot more apps for iOS too yeah so if if iOS is the dominant platform with the with the majority user base then doesn't it make sense that that in a way we should just kind of get rid of this older Legacy Mac platform and just have IOS become the thing uh uh well no I don't think that that makes sense I think that I think that what does make sense is what you've seen Apple doing and they're going to continue to do is they're going to continue to blur the lines between the two platforms but I think they're going to remain independent for their own reasons right um one of the concerns I had uh that proved unfounded but you never know until you try something but one of the concerns I had about the iPhone 10 before it came out was replacing the home button and the usability and ease of use of having somebody be able to pick up the device just use it right um the home button made uh iOS devices accessible in a way that computers previously had not been um I think that it may end up being more of a problem on the iPad than it was on the iPhone um I think that it does require a slight learning curve of swipe your thumb up from the bottom but it's not really that big of a deal think about the modern laptop you have a trackpad you have a keyboard you have a screen all that my dad um his computer died uh a few months ago and I gave him a 2015 MacBook Pro and the first thing he did he's never used a Mac before he plugged in his Mouse and he didn't use the trackpad at all and then the other day he was trying to set up something I was trying to talk your airplane to his TV and he was like how do I click on this trackpad like he didn't like he didn't really understand to use he didn't understand how to scroll he didn't know the two finger scrolling and that sort of stuff so there's like a certain uh curve but there's a certain understanding as well right we sit down with a Mac and even if someone's never used it they at least know what the track pad for we have you know a few generations of computers behind us where they're modernized in a certain way so the platforms are going to change and they're going to evolve and they're going to be different and they're and they're going to uh have their strengths and their weaknesses but I think that there are certain things that make sense on each side to bring over and so there's a lot of hu and cry about uh the quartet of so-called marsipan apps that are iOS apps basically just ported pretty vanilla over to Mac and I'm not going to sit here and defend them and say they're great they're not they're not it's not like I open them up and I'm like wow these are fantastic he hey hey hey running home app on Mac today is 10 million times better than it was last month that's true it's true it's better than nothing um you know I think that um I think it's a little lazy uh I think that Apple could have done better and I certainly hope that once developers have access to these tools to Port their iOS apps over to the Mac that Apple will have improved these apps to set as kind of a standard Bearer you know I think about when um Apple was trying to drive up the prices of apps years ago and they brought the ior suite to iOS and they were saying this is how premium apps on an iPad can look this is the kind of functionality that you can offer that can replace a computer they were trying to set a standard there and saying you can have all the features you can do everything that you can on a Mac or whatever so I I think that Apple needs to get some of that back and certainly since this so-called marzipan project isn't coming until next year uh there's time to do that but as it is right now these are pretty vanilla ports that don't really make them unique Mac apps in any way and in in many ways limit the functionality uh I'm glad that they're there though and I think that if uh I think some people are looking at the wrong way I think that there's an expectation that all apps are going to be lazy certainly a lot of apps are going to be lazy Maybe not maybe the vast majority of apps will be lazy just we don't care about the Mac we're going to Port it over whatever but it' be nice to have right um I I think that however there are going to be a certain number of developers who it's going to be a gateway drug for them uh to use the term and uh to give them a insight into a world that they may never have thought about developing for before because now it's like well check a few boxes and you get your app on the Mac and developer goes yeah why not and they start dabbling around and they start to learn and then maybe they make some quality Mac apps as well and it makes it easier for them to build for both platforms I see a lot of apps coming to the Mac because of this a lot of them are going to be lazy but I think there's going to be some gold ones out there and I don't think that's any different from the app store right now I mean remember years ago when we had the fart app controversy do we really need this kind of junk on the App Store well we're long past that now and there's a lot of junk on the App Store okay and that's just kind of the nature of it and but there's also some really great apps on the App Store uh the watches the same way you know um I I was uh I tweeted uh last week when I got my Apple watch uh series 4 uh because I was amazed that Nike has this like super close partnership with apple and they make a Nike Edition Hardware of the watch and yet new watch launches last Friday the flagship Nike app for Nike run Club does not have compatibility with the new watch it runs in a smaller window like the old watch it doesn't have support for the complications or anything and it's like seriously if carrot what which is one of the best third party apps on any platform but on the watch is fantastic and on the phone is fantastic if carrot can have that ready to go on day one Nike needs to be ready to have that go on day one that's an embarrassment for apple and it's an embarrassment for Nike I assume that that app's going to be updated before the new Nike Edition launches next week but come on like that that's completely inexcusable so you're going to have lazy developers on all levels these things do happen and to to sit back and say oh you know this is going to be a disaster for the Mac is pretty shortsighted because the Apple watch is still getting pretty good apps from good developers you just be able you need to have some Discerning taste and be able to pick and choose right so I'm thinking about it on a much longer timeline see I don't think that it's about being lazy bringing thermal from the Mac I think it's intentional that we know that the Mac App Store has been kind of a garbage fire right right and and not in terms of quality of application although there's some of that but in terms of uptake and developers wrestling with the sandboxing and and generally no one wants to use it anymore there it's difficult to find the app you really want on the Mac App Store sometimes just because the the reward hasn't been there for developers the same way that it has been for the IOS app store and so this allows them to go ahead and over a longer timeline make the IOS app store simply the app store right and that if if the development effort keeps going into UI kit and uiit understands what to do with a mouse and keyboard then iOS apps using uiit become just the apps that that the distinction between a Mac app and the IOS app dies off I mean think about when the argument was that the the Mac was inferior to Windows because Windows had all the apps right and then we saw a great migration of apps to the cloud and to the browser and so now it doesn't really matter because literally any service you want there are of course some specific apps that may limit you or whatever but it doesn't matter because everything's done through the browser at least on the desktop the phone is very different the phone is app specific I happen to like the phone approach better so I use um fluid which is a app for the Mac that turns a website into an app so like for work um uh I have a thing where I have to like put tasks on there through a website called as as is like a you know a group team task manager you can see who's working on what and who's completed what on the iPhone it has its own dedicated app and it's nice but on the Mac there is no app for a sauna so I used fluid and I made it its own app put it in the dock gave it its own icon and now when I want to use a sauna because I don't want to I have a million tabs open and it's a it's something that I use frequently and I don't want to keep opening a tab for it and browsing around or whatever I just want to have it as an app and so I click on it there and so that's an example of something where I would take a subpar a sauna Port of the iPad version to the Mac to have the app there and I can come up with a handful of apps like that where my life would be better having the dedicated uh Mac app that doesn't exist right now uh mint is another one for my finances uh I would much rather just you know have a dedicated app on there uh then have to go to the website that's just something that I use frequently enough and would want to use um so you know they're they're not going to be the best apps but to your point you're right it's longer term you are looking at taking the biggest and best app platform on the planet has sueded Windows now has super seed everything Android may have more apps but they're certainly not as high quality to put them on the Mac just makes perfect sense it it's it would it's a no-brainer uh and and I think that you're going to continue to see the merging of these Platforms in that sort of way the apps are going to work on both you know I've been an advocate for a long time of cursor input on iOS um and as I was saying before about putting an iPad and a uh and a Mac side by side you don't even have to have them side by side just use your iPad with a keyboard for a while and type and work and get some work done and then go back to your Mac and then see if you touch the screen accidentally cuz you will and I realized that Apple's been resistant to doing touch screen on the Mac and and I don't blame them I I don't think it would be necessary but I think it's one of those things that they should probably just include to just say okay we did it you know I think that it's probably inevitable at some point especially if we get a a Aeries chip based uh you know 12 or 13inch MacBook you know in the next couple years it's probably like okay yeah it's got a touchcreen too but you know this is not the primary mode of input or whatever and I think they should say the same for keyboard and trackpad or mouse or whatever for iOS where it's like if you really you know in the words of Steve Jobs when the first iPad was out if you really want to write war in peace here's a keybo he's a here's a keyboard for you um I think that you know if you really want to do these things if you are the power user that needs these things or if you're the Casual user in the event of you know a touchcreen on the Mac here we are giving you the option we're giving you the best of all worlds I think that that's an inevitability at some point down the road depending on Apple's resistance and technology and that sort of stuff but I think that that's the the road that we're heading down and where we're going yeah now I've mentioned before on this show that xcode is one of the things that keeps the Mac going you can only write xcode applications you can only write applications for iOS on a Mac right and and that should change well it I think it is because Swift playgrounds has a lot of shared code with xcode and if you can do Swift playgrounds on an IP ad then at some point you should be able to completely write applications on an iPad and if you can don't think I don't think that any app that Apple makes for the Mac should not come to the iPad and I don't think that they should be any less fully featured than they are on the Mac I think that there should be a Final Cut Pro 10 on the iPad and I think it should be every bit as good as the one on the Mac which by the way just got support for egpus yeah which is great so through that P piece of news in as well but uh I I that's that's what I'm getting at is I think that that over time all of these things come to iOS and the Mac just remains that form factor that we call a keyboard and track pad with a screen but it basically becomes iOS uh you know so there's a rumor there was a rumor that the new iPads which are expected to be announced in October are going to ditch the lightning port for USBC uh I don't believe that I think that it'll probably ship with a lightning USBC Cable in the box and maybe the lightning interface will be upgraded to support USBC uh uh uh data transfer uh standards so you know much higher quality data transfer and I was thinking about you know what that could lead to and the possibilities of it and one of the things that I thought was really interesting was not only dual screen support for like plugging your iPad into your Mac and then just having a nice second monitor very conveniently and a portable second monitor that you can bring with you have a mobile workstation that's super powerful um in a way that you know you would currently have to use a third party app for like air display or whatever but just to have it native to the platform would be great but then I was also thinking like so there's this rumor of this new iMac right so what if you had a headless iMac and the screen was the iPad and you could just plug in an iPad and make that your monitor for for not iMac I'm sorry Mac Mini uh for your new Mac Mini I I I think what I'm sort of feeling here and I haven't really said it well is I I think that we we should have seen iOS and and iPad make a play for dominance on the desktop by now and I think it's been held back by totally has been by you know this sort of need to preserve the mac and of course now the Mac needs the shot in the arm because the Mac App Store is so lousy and because you know iOS is the dominant of everything the majority platform it's uh it we should have seen the iPad make play for dominance before now right it should have been needs to take the training wheels off the iPad no doubt the hardware is more than capable it's the connectivity and the software that are holding it back yeah yeah they are course but I think that would you know if you could if you could use your iPad as a as an official Mac display um especially with the 12.9 in one right that's a that's a great portable monitor that you could bring with you and and get some work done I you know I think that that's a way for them to start bridging that Gap it still feels like training wheels to me it it feels like you've taken the the best little portable computer and and turned it into a dumb display what if it brought touchscreen support to Mac OS through that I I I feel like they shouldn't they're failing to Dream a Little Bit B bigger I just want them to have a bigger Vision than than doing that it's it's not a terrible idea but it feels like him half steps do you think that they'll hold off on doing any of that until there's a aeries Mac I think so and I think if I had to be specific even if there is an Aeries Mac that the first operating system that releases on the Aeries Mac will be transitional it'll be very much here's the same old thing running on a new chip and it's after that that everything changes because they always see an A series Mac running something that looks more like Mac OS or more like iOS um I whatever the state of mac o is with UI kit and iOS apps from marsipan at that time I I think it's it's still very much this this early hybrid because that's what happens right you you do this change you do this huge platform change and you release the same software on it so that everyone feels comfortable with the change and then the version after that is where you drop support for the old one and you keep the emulation around for a little bit longer and the version after that's where you drop the emulation that's the history that's what we saw with Rosetta and power PC it's what we saw with classic OS as well well running U OS 9 way back in the dark days it's it's going it's going to be an odd transition I don't know how they're going to manage it um it'll be interesting to see what takes precedence and what takes priority in that platform is it more mac is it more iOS I think the trend is towards more mac more freedom um having more functionality and more expandability than you have currently on iOS which is pretty locked down like I said I think you need to take the training wheels off the iPad and I think that if you release a notebook that is more iPad than mac I think that's a step backwards I I agree with that statement only because of the way that we think about what an iPad's capabilities are we even when we say release an a laptop that's more iPad than mac it it sort of has that undercurrent of training wheels still on you know we we need to get the training wheels off to the point where when you say iPad versus Mac and you think of both things being incredibly competent yeah I think the iPad has every capability of being just as competent as the Mac Mac just having its own its own strengths yeah I'm I'm thinking that eventually the iPad the IOS operating system replaces what a Mac is we call it a Mac because that's the form factor but it's It Mac itself changes right yeah it's exciting times ahead I I I hope that uh we see more acceleration in that direction because of marsipan and because of these apps coming there but certainly a lot of room for improvement right now and if anybody is going to be the standard Bearer it has to be apple it does let's change gears for a second talk to me about Siri what do you want to know how much do you like Siri uh you know so one of the things that I like now about um the Siri shortcuts functionality and and opening to third party developers more in um iOS 12 is you can command any possible permutation of of speaking to Siri that you can think of uh that will then override the native apps so I was talking earlier about carrot and using carrot weather well you could make uh custom commands and shortcuts for every possible question you could think of with the weather and have those go to carrot instead of uh of apple and it's kind of a roundabout way of just of removing the built-in default apps which is interesting um another thing I I was talking to a buddy of mine the other day who has a nest thermostat and he was saying um he was trying to use a series shortcuts to have it control his nest thermostat and it does it by proxy of if this then that and he was saying yeah it works except I can't get it to set a specific temperature and I said why not try just making specific series shortcuts for each temperature because I mean think about it right you're only going to use like a 10 Dee range right right so I said just set one for you know set the temperature to 70 set one for set the temperature 71 and so on and he did and it works fine so it's one of those things where it's a little clunky and a little cumbersome but it takes you know maybe 10 minutes effort and then you're done and then you can have it do all that kind of stuff so I think that we're starting to see you know the benefits of series shortcuts and some of the things that you can do um and in a roundabout way like setting temperatures that you're not supposed to be able to set or replacing functions that you aren't necessarily supposed to be able to replace but it works and I think it's pretty good so I had a couple thoughts about this based on the last discussion where if iOS takes over Mac OS if if the majority platform eats the the minority platform here then Apple script and automator go by the wayside and we have series shortcuts everywhere and to make that really take off they'd have to make it so that series shortcuts could really do access to deep links within the apps I mean I think yeah that has to happen either way most I would say 99% of Mac users have no idea what automator is and I've never used it no 99% of the people don't know how to parse Apple script well my dad didn't even know how to click on the trackpad so you know exactly um so I I mean it's not a disaster if automator goes away but yes I think series shortcuts is a acknowledgement by Apple that they need to bring those kind of pro functions from Mac to iOS and it's a baby step and it's a step in the right direction but there's obviously a long way to go um jumping through hoops and and all that kind of stuff to make it work uh is not ideal but much like with having the home app on your Mac it's like you can have that or you can have nothing so right now it's like yeah I'll take it um I'm I'm I'm very happy that it's there and I'm looking forward to diving into it more and uh doing some cool stuff with it so Siri now has integration with Salesforce Einstein and that was announced on uh Tuesday a lot of people talked about integration with Salesforce not as many people played up the integration with Einstein so this is this is kind of an interesting thing so basically sir acts as the front end for the experience for everything else that happens on the back end and Mark benof who is the uh the CEO of Salesforce talked about this a little bit in context of Marriott who is a Salesforce customer and and basically said what's going to happen is that you can have an experience that as a customer makes things easier for you that that you have your digital key right on your phone when you get into the Marriott and then you have the ability to talk to Siri and use Siri as room service so you could just hold up your phone and say Siri please order me my favorite sandwich and because you have your history built up with Marriott that Siri knows what your favorite sandwich is Siri acts as the front end for that Einstein knows the rest and negotiates getting you the sandwich Einstein is is this artificial intelligence solution for personalized and predictive customer experiences and it uses machine learning deep learning predictive and analytics uh natural language processing and all of those things so having Siri as the front end means that everyone has access to Einstein even better right yeah I think that Siri functionality continues to grow I think that partnering with a major operation like Salesforce is is pretty cool um and pretty good uh you know and and certainly Apple has made strides in the Enterprise uh mostly because of iOS we we've seen a couple of demonstrations of the idea of Alexa being used in hotel rooms for this kind of thing and and certainly you can use them to control the lights inside the hotel room but the um and and of course as an integrator that's a little bit easier because instead of having to use pairing keys and things like you do with iOS being able to set up an account the way Amazon does this is you you have an Amazon account and Associate the devices with that account and Amazon autois discovers them by virtue of them being on the same Wi-Fi network in the area and so as as a hotel integrator it's marginally easier because you don't have to go through the trouble of trying to pair homekit devices um but having this with work with Siri means that you don't have to issue people room keys you don't have to deal with changing room keys they're on your phone they're as well as everything else for control the uh the room service and stuff like that so it's we're sort of sort of in this middleware place where what's going to happen for the future of hospitality is an interesting thing it's it's actually something that I touched on a little bit in my uh iPhone 10s review regarding um a new function that is kind of a little lowkey in in the iPhone XS but I think um in the next few years could be a big deal so if you talk to people about ditching their wallet or ditching their keys or ditching of building an access card or whatever for their phone their number one concern the thing that always comes up is what happens when my battery dies yes I can't get on the subway I can't get on the bus I'm locked out of my room I can't pay for anything I can't and my phone dies all the time so so Apple's actually resolved this with a new low power mode it's exclusive to the iPhone XS 10s Max and 10r um that is uh if your phone is dead you can have a set set access card and a set Transit card and it will use whatever little power is left on the phone to provide the NFC blast to get you on the subway get you on the bus get you in your house uh get you in the dorm whatever and again that's a small thing but I think that's an important thing because this is something that prevents adoption and prevents people from going I don't want that I don't want to have my card on my phone it's not convenience whatever and they're bringing down those barriers to adoption and for access management I think that's going to be a very big deal and I think that that brings it to you know as you say hotels and other places as well all right so we're we're nearly out of time here I was going to talk about Apple pay but I think you had a more interesting topic that you wanted to talk about which is the uh Apple Watch series 4 Hardware yeah so uh actually our uh review was published uh by Andrew um for the Apple watch and uh you know he gave it a glowing review and and uh I would have to con with that um I've been using it for the last week um and I'm as you know and anybody listening knows I've been a big Apple watch proponent for a long time um and I think this is a really great upgrade um I love the bigger screen with the largely same form factor um I've been using exclusively the very busy uh uh complication heavy uh face um and while it is busy um I will admit I do like having all the details on the complications there I like how glanceable it is um I'm I'm very happy with the hardware I think that uh it's a really impressive uh device the the edge to edge screen has rounded Corners now um which are akin to what the iPhone 10 looks like so there's more consistency in design with Apple's other devices um and I would expect that the new iPad is probably going to do the same so we're going to have that kind of same Fe on all the devices um and you know the hardware is Snappy um I've been using it uh out running um I use it over cellular I use it at the gym I stream music with it my airpods um there are the aention Nike app does give me some headaches but the native apps seem to work great and some the quality thirdparty ones work well you obviously have the watch os5 features podcast support all that um the EKG functionality as we said not there yet but uh I'm excited to check that out um the mic and speakers are much improved I've taken some calls on it it's good uh they change the side button so that it's now flush with the case um but it still operates the same which I like there's a um a uh when you scroll with the uh uh the uh digal digital Crown there's a um haptic feedback that you feel I'm not sure how I feel about the haptic feedback it's it doesn't feel like it syncs up perfectly with what's on the screen sometimes you know sometimes it feels like it's clicking too much sometimes it feels like it's clicking too little it's a little too soft so um I'm hoping that future software updates will improve that but it does work well and it is nice and it feels smooth I'm guessing there's a setting to turn off that haptic feedback but I haven't actually dug into that yet um and I haven't fallen so it hasn't given me any alerts on that yet which is good fingers crossed uh hopefully none of that I was curious though because I just uh joined and started playing in a um a ice hockey league in New York and um I I've looked and it turns out there is like a a fitness tracking app for playing hockey and it like knows like when you're on the bench versus like when you're out on the ice and it'll like track in resting time and all that but it seems like a really great way to get your $500 investment broken so I Googled and there were people on Reddit and there were people on Reddit they're saying no it fits perfectly under my glove it's perfectly fine I'm like Heming and Hauling and going back and forth It's like ah I don't know should I should I I don't know this seems like a terrible idea so I'm like kind of tempted to do it but I just know I'm going to end up with a shattered $500 watch but uh I I think my main knock on the watch aside from uh very much the same problem that I have with the iPad in that you know I feel like the watch should be its own platform and and should have its own uh I shouldn't need to set it up with a phone it should connect to a Mac on its own it should connect to an iPad on its own it should be its own more independent platform as I've said before and hopefully we'll get there eventually but I think my main problem really is the cost um it's gone up by a bit this year so I think the cellular was $430 last year now it's $500 this year um and also Apple used to let you basically mix and match and put any band you want with the watch uh but now you basically get your choice of the sport Loop or the regular Sport and uh you know if you already have those bands it's like well I want to get a new band with my watch so I I wish that they had more Choice when it came to the bands and the price at 500 with cellular is a little steep uh but all in all super happy with the hardware um it's fast uh it's responsive it works well uh the cellular is reliable uh the Bluetooth connection is reliable um using with headphones great all the health tracking all that kind of stuff super happy with the series 4 definitely recommend it if you're on the market for the new watch absolutely so Neil if I had to takeaway from this episode I would say that your opinion is that all these platforms need to grow up and be their own things yeah absolutely why can't I sync my health data from my I from my watch to my Mac why does it have to be on my iPhone right like it doesn't make any sense to me the the you know battery savings if you use the watch on Cell it dies blah blah okay but if you connect the watch to Wi-Fi as you do at home it doesn't even need your phone it just connects directly to the Wi-Fi on its own it's not using cellular so the battery considerations are only applicable when you're out of the house and I think for the majority of people they're going to be at work they're going to be at home it's going to be connected to Wi-Fi whatever they don't necessarily need to have it connecting their phone they could and presumably most of them will most of the time but you know why can't I sit down and view my health data on my Mac why can't I go into the doctor's office and then say share this data with my doctor and they can pull it up on their iPad you know like the platform should be able to work in tandem with each other but also independently and that's what I think the future of the Mac is as well is playing nice with the iPhone all these great continuity features the ability to run the iPhone or iPad apps the iOS apps and but also to be its own thing to be the device where you sit down and you get work done excellent well we've run out of time this is another episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is Neil fantastic Hughes very fantastic Mr Fantastic Mis very stretchy there you go well it's not a stretch but we have an ad read all right jamp now makes it easy to set up manage and protect your Apple devices so you can focus on your business no it experience needed with jamp now you can check your digital inventory distribute Wi-Fi and email settings deploy apps protect company data and even lock or wipe a device as needed from anywhere and now Apple Insider podcast listeners can start securing your business today by setting up your first three devices for free forever add more for just $2 a month per device create your free account today at j.com appleinsider that's jf.com apppp inssider like I said this brings us to the end of another perfectly good episode of the Apple Insider podcast Neil where can people find you on the internet perfectly good episode I like it uh you can find me on Twitter at this is Neil and you can read my occasional musings including the iPhone 10s review on Apple insider.com and I'm your presenter Victor and you can find me at V marks on Twitter thank you so much for listening we really appreciate you being there with us yeah thank you very much cheers all\n"