The Apple Insider Podcast: A Conversation with Dan and Victor

As we sit down to record this episode of the Apple Insider podcast, I am reminded of the many amazing products that Apple has released over the years. From the original iPhone to the latest AirPods, Apple has consistently pushed the boundaries of innovation and design. In this episode, we will be discussing the latest development in Apple's Bluetooth technology and how it compares to other devices on the market.

One of the standout features of Apple's implementation of Bluetooth is its reliability. Unlike many other devices that are prone to falling off or losing signal, Apple's Bluetooth connection is surprisingly robust. This is especially noticeable when compared to older generations of headphones, which can often be finicky and frustrating to use. For example, I remember struggling with my old iPhone 4 back in the day, trying to pair it with my wireless headphones only to have them fall off or lose signal altogether.

But Apple's Bluetooth implementation goes beyond just reliability. It also offers a unique and enjoyable listening experience that is unmatched by many other devices on the market. The sound quality is flat in the mid-range, but this can be adjusted through the Music settings app. This allows users to customize their audio experience to suit their preferences. Furthermore, Apple's algorithm uses the type of music being listened to to make adjustments to the sound. For example, if you're listening to a song with strong bass, the algorithm will amplify it to create a more immersive experience.

One aspect that is often overlooked in discussions about Apple's products is the level of competition they actually face in the market. In 2016, I wrote an article saying that Apple didn't have any real competitors left in the market. And now, with their continued investment in silicon and development tools, it seems that this may be true. Samsung, for example, was struggling to regain its footing after a series of setbacks, and while they've made some progress, they still lag behind Apple's innovative products.

As we move forward into 2017, one thing is certain: the tech industry will continue to evolve rapidly. New devices and innovations will emerge, and it's hard to predict exactly what the future holds for Apple. However, given their track record of innovation and customer satisfaction, it's likely that they will remain at the forefront of the market. One possibility is that people may start looking back to feature phones or other simpler options, but this seems unlikely given the widespread adoption of smartphones over the past decade.

Finally, I'd like to take a moment to express my gratitude to our listeners for their support and enthusiasm. As we continue to produce new content on the Apple Insider podcast, we're always looking for ways to improve and connect with our audience. If you have any feedback or suggestions, please don't hesitate to reach out to us at [email address]. We'd love to hear from you and continue to provide the best possible experience for all of our listeners.

In conclusion, this has been an exciting episode of the Apple Insider podcast, exploring the latest developments in Bluetooth technology and discussing the state of competition in the market. As we move forward into 2017, one thing is certain: Apple will continue to innovate and push the boundaries of what's possible with their products. Thank you for tuning in, and we'll see you next week!

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to the Apple Insider podcast this is episode 101 I'm Victor marks your host and joining me is Daniel Aon doger hey Dan how are you hi um thanks for doing the podcast for having on it and and I just definitely definitely I I uh I I note that you're using the airpods to record today so for our listeners who are wondering what's going on with sound quality or things like that this is because this is the sound of the airpods microphone I have all my stuff in boxes and uh so that's what I'm using right now for a microphone very very good so I want to start off by mentioning to our listeners that we have deals there are uh through our good friends B&H we're offering Shoppers the lowest prices available on a variety of 2016 12-in MacBooks with discounts of up to $200 off and you get Parallels Desktop for free which allows you to run Windows applications on your Mac if you need to plus you can save $50 off iPad Air 2os and uh the late 2016 13-inch MacBook Pros also start at $1,349 after the cash savings and there's free expedited shipping and no tax outside of New York state so this is a great way for you to get a new machine or an iPad Air 2 or or other discounts if you're looking for them from our good friends at B&H and I'll have that link in the show notes um so Dan I I need you to unpack something for me I I I always come to you when I have these questions cuz I I think about these things but it's not always easy easy to make it clear so we we ran two stories this week we ran one story whose headline said that Apple saw twice as many mobile device activations this holiday season as Samsung and we also ran a story entitled Love is Blind that NPD says that Android customers are so committed to the exploding Note 7 that that or so committed to Android that the Samsung failure with Note 7 didn't really give a bump to Apple so these these these two things seem like they're competing stories but I imagine that that somewhere in there there's a truth that can apply to both of them can you help me understand this um so my idea is that both are a little bit right and a little bit wrong so starting with the flurry information uh flurry looks at activations I believe that Apple's uh iPhone launch is much more cyclical than Samsung's are Samsung has a couple flagships they have the the S7 in the spring and they have the uh the fablet note in the fall and so they do have some cality when you know when the new phone comes out there's there's a difference in how many people are buying it uh but it's not nearly as much as apple with the iPhone every year where it it you know there's a huge surge when they first release it there's often people waiting in line and then it Trails off towards the end of the year it doesn't Trail off as much as it used to it used to be a very you know immediate boom and then sort of waiting for the next one to come out um and we've seen a couple there's a couple other things that change the cycle you know China has a boom that happens later with Chinese New Year in the early part of the year so the cyclicality of iPhones is changing a little bit but it is very much a thing where you know the new iPhone comes out and there's going to be a huge bump and if you if you look at flurry's data then they're saying that there's more activations for iPhones than there is for anything else uh but more so for Samsung almost twice as much or maybe more than twice as much I I remember the numbers exactly right so I'm looking at it and it says that 44% activations were apple and 21% activations were Samsung according to their dat right so uh among other things that's a percentage and when you look at last year's numbers those are actually a little bit worse for Apple because last year Apple had a slightly higher percentage and Samsung had a slightly lower percentage so what does that mean well it doesn't mean a whole lot because you can't compare uh two different years because a lot of things are changing this year Samsung's entire Flagship exploded that's the most horrible thing that's ever happened to Samsung it's I believe it's the worst technical problem that a tech company's ever faced it's a huge recall um it's hard to think of anything that's even comparable I mean Microsoft had you know they repaired like half their Xboxes or something and they put a billion dollar charge this is much bigger than that this is going to cost them billions and billions of dollars uh it's the only phone they're making the the difference between Samsung and Apple besides cality is uh Apple makes one kind of phone profitable phones that are quite expensive they're more than $400 Apple owns almost all of that market Samsung makes a ton of phones that are you know just rimary phones like everybody else in the industry that make no money and the phones they make that are like iPhones the Galaxy most of the Galaxy brand uh are the ones that make some money they don't make as much money as iPhones and they give a lot of at discounts and promotions and stuff so Samsung is selling a lot more phones than Apple we know that every quarter they come out I mean we have estimates of that are you know quite reliable they they've consistently sold something like twice as many phones as Apple forever but they make much less money than Apple so when you're comparing activations of Samsung phones what does that mean does that mean Samsung phones are sort of like an iPhone no it doesn't it means everything Samsung makes there's no signality there because there's always people buying junk Samsung phones and this year there's a huge deficit of people buying the phones that make money at least for the on the fablet model that got pulled back so everything is different it's really hard to make any clear generalizations from these percentage numbers because the numbers are changing so radically and they're a composite number like I'm saying the Samsung number is not just a percentage of the market but it's broken down into you know it's mostly cheaper phones so looking at the flurry numbers are almost useless that you know it's kind of a tantalizing idea that Apple's activating more phones but of course they are it's Apple's launch and looking back at last year's numbers they actually don't look as good but there's so much other things that are happening that it's hard to really say anything from what they're doing and that's I have a problem with a lot of research companies that put out data that has this very tantalizing idea that something is happening when if you really examine it it's like wait a minute you've just said something in an artfully contrived way that you're you're stating something as if it's facts and numbers but it's really a graph that you have created to you know get people's attention make people click links and I'm slurry here this is like almost every report we get yeah I breaking up I'm sorry I was just think you don't have necessarily enough information to draw a a well-founded conclusion right right I mean it's not only you don't have enough information but it's like it's almost purposely information that they they're pres presenting is not enough uh to come to any useful conclusion but it's it's also does not support what they're actually insinuating and we see this so much in Tech reporting and I'm I'm writing this article about it and um it's almost every report and of course that benefits companies that put out information in overt press releases I mean Microsoft just came out and they're talking about how you know the number of MacBook switches to surface is just really incredible and it's huge and what does that mean where what is the numbers I mean Microsoft is not selling huge numbers of surface computers we know that we can look at they've been in a ceiling of a billion dollars for the last several years they're not surging selling huge numbers of computers and they're really jumping on this idea that oh Mac users are really upset with apple it's like yeah there's a couple bloggers that are but overall Apple's not having any problem selling Macs that's why they're putting such a huge price steak on their Macs because they don't have any problem selling them Samsung has problem selling phone that's why they keep slashing the price when you see companies slashing the price way Google does and the way Microsoft does the way Samsung does that's because they're trying to create demand for their products so it doesn't matter how much they say about you know blah blah whatever Amazon's you know popularity list whatever it's all meaningless so that's the problem that I have with the flurry data the other data you know you can take a poll and construct it in such a way as to get whatever information you want from people I see that so much wait wait wait let me I mean so I've seen four polls SE four polls about the Samsung thing and the first two said 30% would never buy a phone before like 34% would never buy a Samsung phone again because of the recall they did it later in like October 40% said they would never buy a Samsung phone again because of this unfolding trauma of Samsung and a third of those said that they would buy it they would move to an iPhone so then you have Reuters and uh CNBC jointly coming up with this data that says oh we we ask a bunch of people certain questions and you know what we got back was that this has no impact on Samsung's brand and doesn't help Apple at all that's completely hard to believe and so NPD is saying the same thing and these are companies that know how to say craft questions to get responses that create whatever story they want to say to say but stop for a second because npd's data is a little bit different n npd's data is data that comes from registers what what they do is they don't survey people so much they they instead look at the register data coming out for what's sold and that's where their numbers come from is is they know what got sold out of a number of different retailers they they track best by they track uh they you know they they track the cell phone carrier stores they track Walmart Target and and the cell phones that are sold through those guys so they have retail and they have real detail real retail data from the register so they have numbers that aren't bed not not all but many believe they don't have which is kind of important if you're talking about Apple stuff but well yeah but they're they're talking about Samsung stuff really they're but are they they only talking about sales because the Samsung Note thing not selling is kind of a big deal and Samsung doesn't have another phone that's comparable to that except for the S7 and I don't think a lot of people are that's where their data comes from what they what they say or or or come up with as their contrive statement after that is is another matter right one is is data based the other is their opinion about trying to interpret that data so what they said was that they believe that you know what happened was that the number suggest to them that Apple's share was uh slightly lower and as s SS was slightly higher from last year and and the flurry data showed the same kind of thing there their NPD analyst stepen Baker told the Wall Street Journal that he believes that Android loyalists are committed and that even the dangerous exploding batteries in the Galaxy Note 7 were not enough to pushed significant numbers of customers over to the iPhone and that his what what he's saying is that people who bought or wanted to buy a note 7 went for a different high-end Galaxy phone yeah certainly people there there are people who like Samsung and they're they're going to keep shopping samung stuff and the comment that he made was he actually said it um people who wanted to buy the Note 7 opted for a different high-end Galaxy phone uh what are the other Galaxy phones that they have that are high-end well so they had the note and then they had the the S7 right which is half a year old now and what else do they have it's a high-end phone not really anything they have some mid-grade phones like the r what that the J5 the other one that caught on fire but um it it's really it's it's kind of that data that it's catchy headlines because it's so counterintuitive but I don't think it's counterintuitive it did hurt Samsung you cannot have just constant bad news have bad PR after bad press yeah yeah I mean this is pretty bad and you know the kind of stuff that this is not the way they would report it if anything similar happened to Apple I mean if you remember iPhone 4 and there was a problem where if you put your hand over the phone yeah and it it would cut out your phone call it was like this is a recall you know we have to like make this is the death of Apple this like the end of the smart the iPhone and you know they're just going to like fade off into the sunset as a and you know these are phones that caught on fire and burn people and you're telling me that it's going to have impact yeah I'm sorry this this is just completely ridiculous to say that it has no impact on Samsung's brand and that people aren't changing their buying decisions so so I think what happened and this is my speculation is is that when this happened you went into the cell phone store your carrier store and all the carriers had this program going at the time where you'd walk in and you'd say I'd like a different phone here's my Note 7 I'm returning it give me and and early on in this catastrophe they would give you a fresh Note 7 and then shortly thereafter as as it was clear that this was not the fix you'd walk in and they'd give you any other phone in the store and my suspicion is that when people came in with the Samsung and returned it that they were pushed to the S7 you liked your Samsung well sure I kind of liked it I hate that I have to return it it's a nuisance great I've got another Samsung for you it's right there and that well it was in the the the announcements that they would let you move to to an iPhone that I don't I don't know if the people in the stores pushed for that or or made it clear right you'd walk in you'd say here's my phone we have no idea it's my speculation uh but but that that's I mean the closest we have to data is this other report where people were you know this is a an independent company that looked at it was a a poll they're asking people what they were going to buy and it was a significant number 3 34 and then 40% said that they would never buy a Samsung phone again and a third of those they were going to move to on iPhone that's a a huge number of switchers because if you look at the the pools of switchers like um er I believe it's Ericson did a report showing how very there is a lot of loyalty among buyers people tend to buy what they had before and the the number of switchers is something like 2% it's a very small number but that's really important if you can siphon off 2% of your competitors um clients then you have a sticky ecosystem that stay keeps them on an iPhone I mean in Apple's Direction so yeah with surveys is this right when when you make a survey you you have to first design it so that you know you're getting a representative sample and and if they do it and they send out and they get result back says 30% and they do it a couple weeks later and come back with another 40% example um I I'm I'm I I understand that the conditions have changed under which they were surveyed right the catastrophe kept getting worse more people might have said but you know you I I I look at that with a skeptical eye because I want to make sure that it's the same sample right they're getting the same people or the same types of people so that they know that it's representative that's the first issue and then the second issue is is are are the questions enough questions are they the right questions because people lie and and people will tell you oh heck no I'm never going to buy that again and you know give them a couple months the disaster blows over they feel better about it maybe they do buy another one right sure I mean like what you're saying is is true I agree with it that it deserves skepticism to look at uh any of these kind of polls facts that are gathered in a any sort of way like that but there also needs to be skepticism of numbers in the industry that uh companies that are presenting only a very tiny subset of information they do so strategically they're not doing it because they only have one number they have a lot of numbers they're not sharing a lot of their data they find one little bit that is scandalous and you know creates headlines that's what they share and that's the case with NPD I like I like the company mean I like I've talk guy guy but very dat right exactly I mean for MPD that's they're kind of their business model there's a lot of other companies I mean IDC I've written a lot about them they very clearly have a in intent and bias to present certain facts that you know they they line up data behind it but it's kind of clearly not the true you know like like I've I've had a little problem with their the way that they look at Apple watch and the way that they present information about it it's very very carefully coached data to suggest that Apple watch is just this huge smoldering failure and then they compare it to $25 Chinese exercise bands and suggest that XI is you know on the same level that they're kind of tied with apple which is just absurd because we're talking about like $30 million business versus you know multi-billion Dollar business yeah and one is a real product you know and one it's just like something people are buying out of a curiosity or something Ian it's very clear that you know what they're putting out there is you know intended to create a picture that's not true what is your verdict on this what is what is your verdict here on what the Samsung phones the well and and apple activations and what you think these the the sum of these two stories is what's the truth part of it because you mentioned that part was true and part was false what's just pin down the truth for me so what I'm saying is with activations that that's it's kind of like looking at two different pictures of the same thing and you're getting very different data but also it's showing it's not showing you a lot of the other information is really important so for example the activation data doesn't really really capture how much of that is phones that matter phones that are expensive enough to drive sustainable business model you know they have to have phones with a profit margin so if you're comparing junk Samsung phones with iPhones you know that's that's one thing that kind of doesn't even matter anymore it's like now you're talking about two different things that we're not talking about profit we're not talking about ability to sustain a company or or a platform or anything like that we're just pulling numbers out of the air you know that are kind of meaningless um cyclicality is also important the fact that you know the iPhone is launching Samsung isn't really launching anything they've had something you know Mis launch so there's just so many things in play that it's hard to it's hard to pull any really useful information out about percentages of total activations I mean you know that kind of data is getting really close to being useless so until we really have estimates of how many phone shipped I mean that that's even those estimates are a little bit sketchy but at least at least you're looking at numbers not percentages of a you know total pool that's constantly changing on a weekly basis percentages are a very easy way to present misleading statistics all right particularly percentages of change you know yeah so let's let's move on I want to talk about a story that we ran about an unfortunate really really a sad thing that happened and what happened was that um there was a young woman who was uh was was driving a car and FaceTime was involved because the there was a a driver who slammed into this young one's car and was engaged in a Face Time call when um when he was in progress and and the police found that the app was still running and that a call was in progress when they arrived at the accident scene and this this poor young woman um died at the accident and has seen and or or at least her death stemmed from the accident and there's a lawsuit from her family suing Apple because the FaceTime implantation is apparently less safe than Poss than than possibly available and as such as somehow partly responsible for the crash the uh the filing says that the conduct of the driver that caused the accident is inext intertwined with Apple's failure to implement a lockout feature on FaceTime the try to exro this girl died but her attorneys are just trying to collect money and this is really a tenuous thing I mean one of the things the article says is that Texas doesn't have a lot of restricting cell phone use so it wasn't even illegal that this guy was was doing something that was completely insane you should not you know it's it's bad to be on the phone in your car but having a FaceTime conversation I mean are you kidding me this is ridiculous so I mean that is completely the fault of the driver at fa but you're going to blame Apple for not preventing it from doing that in a state where it's not illegal that the state doesn't even make it illegal I I find that it's just it's the ambulance stes here I mean they're trying to get money which you know I mean if my daughter was killed by a car I mean I suppose I'd be letting the lawyer do whatever he wanted to get money but um yeah it's a tragic story but yeah nobody time in the car and apple doesn't you know if Apple created an implementation for like carplay or something that encouraged people to use their video phone and in their card Dash I mean that would be something that you could say is liability but to be using is so obviously not safe right right to be using a FaceTime conversation when you're driving and you know we don't know the whole circumstances too it could have been a situation where you know he wasn't using it in an unsafe Manner and something else happened to ca the crash you know we don't really can't yeah you know the point is is that if you're driving a hands-free system is a better idea than holding a phone and carplay is a good hands-free system carplay will take FaceTime audio calls and handle them the same as regular audio calls placed over the cell network so that's that's the correct thing to do and Apple's already implemented that uh as you say answering video calls while driving is absurd and and irresponsible but that's not Apple's being irresponsible and that that they don't lock it out by based on you driving uh doesn't seem wrong to me it seems the same as as whether or not they would lock out regular phone calls based on driving Am I Wrong Am I understand this incorrectly yeah I mean the complaint is actually saying that Apple needed to create a design that would lock out prevent use of FaceTime while driving it's like no they don't that yeah companies don't have to like stop people from doing any crazy thing that I think it's pretty clear that you shouldn't be doing a FaceTime conversation while you're driving I agree is Apple you know what else is it going to do they going to prevent you from using your phone at all what about if you're a passenger how does Apple like figure out whether you're a passenger or the driver there are apps to do that there's this Gas Buddy app that I use and if you're using it while you're driving it says hey are you using this when you're driving and you have to push a button that says no I'm a passenger which you know how safe is that you can be driving and say no I'm a passenger yeah but you know this is obviously just a kind of a desperate money grab but you know I don't can't say anything bad about that either it's how America works okay do you use an Apple Watch yes have you ever had your digital Crown get stuck um I sort of noticed it getting a little bit um not stuck but like not moving as smoothie as it used to it kind of like came and then went away but so apple has a solution for that and it's actually very easy um because all of the devices can be worn while you're you know exposing them to water in the sink for example the correct answer is if your Apple watch digital Crown is getting a little gummy a little sticky a little not moving as smoothly as possible so hold your Apple watch powering on off and holding digital Crown under lightly running warm fresh water from a faucet for about 10 to 15 seconds and as you rotate and press the crown as the water's running over it it will free it up and you don't need to use soap you don't need to use anything else just just warm running water will fit your Apple watch kind like the mouse balls of the current decade pull the ball out and clean it out every once a while well if you remember the uh the old magic mouse with the ball on top of it and and you'd have to turn that upside down and run it on your jeans to get junk out of it there's another thing that I I heroically fix somebody's phone they had an old like iPhone 4 or something and he was saying that it doesn't charge anymore I mean it barely charges you plug it in and it would take forever to to charge up a little bit and you take a toothpick and you stick it in the dot connector and go back and forth and this also works with lightning and you can pull out a cat there will be a cat I guarantee you if you put your phone in your pocket it builds up so much lent and junk that you can pull out a huge grotesque amount of stuff out of the dot connector and then your connection works again amazingly so do connector or lightning connector whatever they're they tend to build up junk and crust because unlike most things it's in your pocket all the time and just collects lens and but if you're having a problem plugging in that that's something to try just take a go pick and clean it out I usually blow it out with compressed air but that might work too you we can compress so we every week we come here and we talk a little bit about iPhone rumors and this this week is no exception uh this week we have reports from the supply chain that suggest that withdrawn the Builder of the iPhone 5C and SE has secured some orders for future iPhone models uh we don't know exactly what models those will be Al though obviously the suspicion is the iPhone 7S and you know rumored 7s or rumored iPhone 8 um Can Can you tell me what you think about that I I think the touch bar component in the MacBook Pro is built by westron um an interesting I think it was the flurry data that we were looking at it was also other information about uh popularity of different phone sizes and iPads yeah and it was showing basically since over the last three years or 2013 maybe the popularity of large screen like iPads and also mini iPads has gone down considerably and big format phones and that's not just Apple stuff it's like across the industry and larger format phones have rapidly increased in popularity let's call faets that's like the iPhone 6 Plus or 7 plus um and uh small phones have almost blown up and dried away gone away now in Android there aren't any like premium small phones there haven't been for a very long time Apple's been kind of the only company especially with the iPhone SE to be putting out a modern kind of high-end premium smaller phone but if you look at Trends it's it's kind of looks like the the rumors suggesting that we're going to have two new iPhones that are sort of a upgrade of the 7 so a 7s and the 7s plus and then a new phone that's kind of like a Ultra Premium thing and I find that likely that Apple's going to go in that direction although they do have a lot of data and they have made comments that the iPhone sold in kind of more than they expected I don't know how much it changed I haven't seen the actual I haven't looked at figures recently on on um you the sales of breakdown estimates but there are people who do like that I have some friends that have picked an iPhone SE because they're like the size same is true for Neil Hughes and I'm kind of deciding I I don't know if I told you this Theory I have I've been using a a plus-sized phone the 6s um now the 7 plus um all year long and I find it kind of prevents me from getting on my computer because I can sort of sit and use this phone that you can't do productive things with but you can do almost everything you can do on a computer so I waste a lot of time on it and I found I I think that's what's hurting my back there were a couple times when I had just like horrible back pain and I think it's from sitting in a in a terrible Louch with a huge phone instead of sitting in my ergonomic desk working on a computer or having a small phone that you occasionally pull out and check but when you're just constantly on a big phone I think that's really bad for your health wow so I mean I mean that's interesting yeah yourself like three months with an SE siiz device and see if it if your back felt different yeah so I i' I've changeed my behavior intentionally so that I I kind of avoid doing that and that seems to help dramatically but I mean one of the things I noticed it was like the summer when I was in the hospital my appendic exploded and I was afraid that you know I'm going to be I'm laying around so much I'm going to be dealing with back problems and I didn't have any back problems really and um then after I got out of the hospital I was sort of going back to sitting around on my phone and started developing the same kind of things as like tightness in my shoulder and I had like tingling down my arm and just starting to fall apart and when I consciously avoided that Behavior Uh it got better now it's not really a problem anymore but I think it I was also reading about uh there was a video on Facebook about Millennials and how much time we're spending on our phones and how the you know we've created a younger generation where my generation was like oh you're watching too much TV you're sit you're around watching TV and now that we have a TV in your pocket that's also an internet terminal and you you can do anything you talk to people and you can send videos and whatever it's very easy to just be constantly en raptured with other people on in other places and not who you're around and not pay attention to here around when you're at dinner you're not talking to people at dinner one things they're talking about you're sitting down to a meeting at work and everyone's on their phone waiting for the meeting to start and they're they're doing whatever they want to do on their smartphone and then meeting starts they put their phone down but they're not talking to each other before that they're not there's no Small Talk there's no blah blah there's no just enjoying the moment and I think that's having an impact on society in ways that are kind of unanticipated I think we need to think more about how to kind of break the cycle of just spending so much time because it's it's very attractive to to have a computer that can just tell you anything you want to know right now but it's also you know that's not something that we've been able to do until sort of recently and it's having an impact the same way the television had an impact and before that you know radio to some extent but it's really changing how a lot of things things work on a fundamental level and there's health issues related to that and you know almost anywhere you're walking around you see so many people looking looking down at their phones I think we need to change how we do things the the a great example of that was Halloween night where we were out trick-or-treating and you could see how many parents were walking along behind their kids staring at their phones yeah yeah like if I'm just slightly bored I can go to my happy place on my phone yeah and that that prevents you from having a lot of interactions that you might not immediately choose to have but they could be important you know talking to people you would normally choose to talk to it's like I can talk to you but I would rather talk to somebody on my phone that I like better well you're missing your opportunity to talk to somebody in a work place environment or you know a stranger or any number of situations where things could open up and you could have you know things could be different so talking about immersion you you've been wearing the apple airpods and you've been using the airpods this whole show but but you've been wearing them and using them and and experiencing them do they make it that much easier to separate from from the rest of the world when you're wearing them daily because we're talking about this kind of of avoiding thing um well first of all I was thought to that you wear them full time I mean I don't wear them all the time no but I do wear they walking down the street and it is you know it's very much like an iPod sort of feeling where um when you're sitting on a bus or or whatever it's it's like an anti- invitation to talk to you if you have white your pugs your plug and you know it's like not just Apple it's like any any kind of music device that you're listening to but Apple really popularized it and you know everybody had headphones in and it kind of means like I'm listening to music I mean are you going to interrupt me it better be important and so in San Francisco there's so many you know there's so much just kind of vagrancy and people making for money all the time and um having headphones then you can just kind of like ignore it all which you know sounds terrible but it's also like there's a reason why people do that because they just don't want to constantly be telling you know interacting with people that's like no I don't have I'm not going to buy you drugs right now the the confrontation part there is is worth avoiding or at least that's what they're doing yeah and it's not like a conscious it's not like a rude like like you're putting up your hand like you're not going to talk to somebody it's just you know I'm listening to something and I'm in a bubble and unless you have something really important you you know is like a little barrier to asking you for something and um so I I've felt that before with iPhones in when you or um earphones in uh without wires it's a little bit different because you have something in your ears but you don't have this kind of signaling wire you know coming down that's coming to your music Source um people can tell you have them in and you can talk to people when you have them in it's not like over the your headphones where you can't really hear somebody um and you can sort of discreetly turn down the volume like on your watch or something so you can walk up to your register and have a conversation with somebody and turn them back up afterwards so I think it's maybe a little bit less uh of that barrier that I was describing and less isolating um and it's also like in the review I was talking about how invisible it feels when you have headphones in you're constantly reminded like as the wind touches the the cables kind of sway around and touch your face or you you turn and it creates tension and pulls and pulls in your ear and you're very aware that you have headphones in with these you put them in and you kind of forget that they're in there and you just have sort of a music soundtrack that sort of just magically happening and you know it's just headphones in your ear but um it's that feeling of just having a soundtrack as you're walking along and so it feels more like an augmentation than a barrier do you find that you use Siri more yeah I mean I I use Siri a lot when I'm in a car because I don't have to feel embarrassed or anything when I'm walking down the street I feel like a little bit embarrassed to be talking to my even even the ear pods I feel like I have to look around and be like is anyone on my block I don't want to be too nerdy right now but I'm I'm kind of like that I mean that's kind of I'm PR more over than most people well there is a societal pressure there you know you don't want to be the uh the The Jerk using the Bluetooth headset right yeah I mean whenever I see somebody just talking loud on a Bluetooth headset I'm just like wow you're you're the commander of Your World don't you well it's it's the always you know the classic one is where someone's having a conversation but they're asking questions and so you feel like they're asking you you start answering and they they say no I wasn't talking to you yeah or they're just completely unaware because they're so in their conversation for sure so so that's the societal experience of using it and the Siri experience of using it what what do you think about the sound quality where cuz a lot of people were talking about how great they sound what's your impression I think they're better than ear pods the wired version that Apple's bundled with iPhones which we're already you know they're like okay they're not audio file like devices but um the the earpods fit your ear better I mean for me with when you have wired headphones in or earbuds they tend the wires tend to pull them straight downward where these fit at sort of an angle so at least for my ears they fit in like a puzzle piece and direct towards your mouth and they feel they feel more um fit and like don't move around as much and everyone's ears are different and some people might not work for them I've heard people say that they don't there was somebody who wrote an article for the The Verge that was complaining that they didn't work for them personally in sort of um but I think they said everyone that they work with it fits in so it's kind of like if you're on The Fringe of the bell curve it might not work for you but kind of the same thing for anybody so they sound better than Ear Pod there there's um they don't sound as good as studio microphone your Studio headphones that fit over ear and um have huge magnets and all that kind of stuff but I think the sound quality is very adequate for what they are it's very good and also Bluetooth um particularly if you put your phone in your pocket and your hand over the top of your phone I know that I did that sometimes you can make it click click uh clip um and it seems It's kind of brief and it's kind of the thing where you almost don't even notice it until after it's happened and then it's like kind of in the past and doesn't where is a lot of a lot of Bluetooth devices they would like fall off and just like stop working and then you have to reset it up so Apple's implementation of Bluetooth is much better it's not completely perfect in every way but it's it's it's to the point where it's so good that it's very pleasant to use and in terms of sound quality it's like there's a little bit um I don't know how to describe it perfectly but it's like flat in the mid-range to me but you can also change depending on what you're listening to you can change the EQ settings on in Music settings and apple kind of buries it I wish they would expose that more or even just kind of automatically have a setting to be like hey do you want to make it sound better you here push this button and we'll analyze the kind of music you're listening to and you know make it so that it sounds as good as your earpods can sound so what's what's your verdict do you have a recommendation for people for this the airpods yeah I G I give it the best review I've ever given an Apple device I've never given an Apple device five stars before because there's always you know something you can say you know it needs this needs that and you know you can imagine things that this that Apple could do with airpods going forward but as a as a product that you can buy right now they're amazing and I love them and I really enjoy them it's not just like it's a very good product it's like it's really enjoyable it makes me happy to use them really so yes yes there you have it all right can be I I mean that's that's a fairly positive review let's say I think the other the second most like gushing review I ever wrote was the original iPhone it was just like hold the phone you know here's see I can understand that yeah it was pretty amazing and I don't know if I gave it full five stars I mean I I think maybe we're grading them differently at the time but and also when the the first iPad came out I was also like this is a really cool thing it's going to blow up and everyone was say it's nothing and you know big iPod Touch well thank you Dan th this has been the Apple Insider podcast uh Dan do you have a parting thought for our listeners um well it's the end of the end of the year at the beginning of 2016 I wrote These articles saying basically Apple doesn't have competition anymore and I think 2016 made that clear and Apple's competition actually got weaker and you know Samsung was almost starting to like go back to where they were in 2014 they were almost you know re achieving that that level of success and then they kind of blew up on their own so going in 2017 will be really interesting because Apple just invested billions of dollars into silicon and you know all the new stuff they're doing with development tools and and Swift and also just incremental changes in the operating system to make things better so Apple's really getting to a point where they're they don't really have competitors and you know the tech mea keeps inventing competitors for them you know the Google pixel phone or whatever and it's like you know it might be an okay phone but it's not going to matter commercially so I mean going forward it's hard to see what Apple's what what's going to really compete with apple I mean there may be sort of a A disruption for us where people go back to feature phones or something you know on that kind of level but um it's hard to see what's going to be in their path so it'll be interesting to see what happens in 2017 what new stuff they roll out all right this has been episode 101 uh where can people find you on the internet Dan on Twitter at Daniel Aaron and it's also my Instagram but we also have a an apple Insider it's Apple Insider official on Instagram where we post photos and videos and stuff excellent well I'm I'm your host Victor you can see me doing my headstand with my earpods in yeah we saw that in your article we talked about it last week and and that's the episode if you catch Daniel wearing airpods doing headstands around San Francisco be sure to talk to him and uh or or at least take funny pictures and post them on Instagram and Link them to us at Twitter we will be back next week this is episode1 thank you very much please feel free to leave reviews at iTunes and uh contact us and tell us what we're doing what could do better we are happy to do this for you and we hope you keep enjoying ityou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to the Apple Insider podcast this is episode 101 I'm Victor marks your host and joining me is Daniel Aon doger hey Dan how are you hi um thanks for doing the podcast for having on it and and I just definitely definitely I I uh I I note that you're using the airpods to record today so for our listeners who are wondering what's going on with sound quality or things like that this is because this is the sound of the airpods microphone I have all my stuff in boxes and uh so that's what I'm using right now for a microphone very very good so I want to start off by mentioning to our listeners that we have deals there are uh through our good friends B&H we're offering Shoppers the lowest prices available on a variety of 2016 12-in MacBooks with discounts of up to $200 off and you get Parallels Desktop for free which allows you to run Windows applications on your Mac if you need to plus you can save $50 off iPad Air 2os and uh the late 2016 13-inch MacBook Pros also start at $1,349 after the cash savings and there's free expedited shipping and no tax outside of New York state so this is a great way for you to get a new machine or an iPad Air 2 or or other discounts if you're looking for them from our good friends at B&H and I'll have that link in the show notes um so Dan I I need you to unpack something for me I I I always come to you when I have these questions cuz I I think about these things but it's not always easy easy to make it clear so we we ran two stories this week we ran one story whose headline said that Apple saw twice as many mobile device activations this holiday season as Samsung and we also ran a story entitled Love is Blind that NPD says that Android customers are so committed to the exploding Note 7 that that or so committed to Android that the Samsung failure with Note 7 didn't really give a bump to Apple so these these these two things seem like they're competing stories but I imagine that that somewhere in there there's a truth that can apply to both of them can you help me understand this um so my idea is that both are a little bit right and a little bit wrong so starting with the flurry information uh flurry looks at activations I believe that Apple's uh iPhone launch is much more cyclical than Samsung's are Samsung has a couple flagships they have the the S7 in the spring and they have the uh the fablet note in the fall and so they do have some cality when you know when the new phone comes out there's there's a difference in how many people are buying it uh but it's not nearly as much as apple with the iPhone every year where it it you know there's a huge surge when they first release it there's often people waiting in line and then it Trails off towards the end of the year it doesn't Trail off as much as it used to it used to be a very you know immediate boom and then sort of waiting for the next one to come out um and we've seen a couple there's a couple other things that change the cycle you know China has a boom that happens later with Chinese New Year in the early part of the year so the cyclicality of iPhones is changing a little bit but it is very much a thing where you know the new iPhone comes out and there's going to be a huge bump and if you if you look at flurry's data then they're saying that there's more activations for iPhones than there is for anything else uh but more so for Samsung almost twice as much or maybe more than twice as much I I remember the numbers exactly right so I'm looking at it and it says that 44% activations were apple and 21% activations were Samsung according to their dat right so uh among other things that's a percentage and when you look at last year's numbers those are actually a little bit worse for Apple because last year Apple had a slightly higher percentage and Samsung had a slightly lower percentage so what does that mean well it doesn't mean a whole lot because you can't compare uh two different years because a lot of things are changing this year Samsung's entire Flagship exploded that's the most horrible thing that's ever happened to Samsung it's I believe it's the worst technical problem that a tech company's ever faced it's a huge recall um it's hard to think of anything that's even comparable I mean Microsoft had you know they repaired like half their Xboxes or something and they put a billion dollar charge this is much bigger than that this is going to cost them billions and billions of dollars uh it's the only phone they're making the the difference between Samsung and Apple besides cality is uh Apple makes one kind of phone profitable phones that are quite expensive they're more than $400 Apple owns almost all of that market Samsung makes a ton of phones that are you know just rimary phones like everybody else in the industry that make no money and the phones they make that are like iPhones the Galaxy most of the Galaxy brand uh are the ones that make some money they don't make as much money as iPhones and they give a lot of at discounts and promotions and stuff so Samsung is selling a lot more phones than Apple we know that every quarter they come out I mean we have estimates of that are you know quite reliable they they've consistently sold something like twice as many phones as Apple forever but they make much less money than Apple so when you're comparing activations of Samsung phones what does that mean does that mean Samsung phones are sort of like an iPhone no it doesn't it means everything Samsung makes there's no signality there because there's always people buying junk Samsung phones and this year there's a huge deficit of people buying the phones that make money at least for the on the fablet model that got pulled back so everything is different it's really hard to make any clear generalizations from these percentage numbers because the numbers are changing so radically and they're a composite number like I'm saying the Samsung number is not just a percentage of the market but it's broken down into you know it's mostly cheaper phones so looking at the flurry numbers are almost useless that you know it's kind of a tantalizing idea that Apple's activating more phones but of course they are it's Apple's launch and looking back at last year's numbers they actually don't look as good but there's so much other things that are happening that it's hard to really say anything from what they're doing and that's I have a problem with a lot of research companies that put out data that has this very tantalizing idea that something is happening when if you really examine it it's like wait a minute you've just said something in an artfully contrived way that you're you're stating something as if it's facts and numbers but it's really a graph that you have created to you know get people's attention make people click links and I'm slurry here this is like almost every report we get yeah I breaking up I'm sorry I was just think you don't have necessarily enough information to draw a a well-founded conclusion right right I mean it's not only you don't have enough information but it's like it's almost purposely information that they they're pres presenting is not enough uh to come to any useful conclusion but it's it's also does not support what they're actually insinuating and we see this so much in Tech reporting and I'm I'm writing this article about it and um it's almost every report and of course that benefits companies that put out information in overt press releases I mean Microsoft just came out and they're talking about how you know the number of MacBook switches to surface is just really incredible and it's huge and what does that mean where what is the numbers I mean Microsoft is not selling huge numbers of surface computers we know that we can look at they've been in a ceiling of a billion dollars for the last several years they're not surging selling huge numbers of computers and they're really jumping on this idea that oh Mac users are really upset with apple it's like yeah there's a couple bloggers that are but overall Apple's not having any problem selling Macs that's why they're putting such a huge price steak on their Macs because they don't have any problem selling them Samsung has problem selling phone that's why they keep slashing the price when you see companies slashing the price way Google does and the way Microsoft does the way Samsung does that's because they're trying to create demand for their products so it doesn't matter how much they say about you know blah blah whatever Amazon's you know popularity list whatever it's all meaningless so that's the problem that I have with the flurry data the other data you know you can take a poll and construct it in such a way as to get whatever information you want from people I see that so much wait wait wait let me I mean so I've seen four polls SE four polls about the Samsung thing and the first two said 30% would never buy a phone before like 34% would never buy a Samsung phone again because of the recall they did it later in like October 40% said they would never buy a Samsung phone again because of this unfolding trauma of Samsung and a third of those said that they would buy it they would move to an iPhone so then you have Reuters and uh CNBC jointly coming up with this data that says oh we we ask a bunch of people certain questions and you know what we got back was that this has no impact on Samsung's brand and doesn't help Apple at all that's completely hard to believe and so NPD is saying the same thing and these are companies that know how to say craft questions to get responses that create whatever story they want to say to say but stop for a second because npd's data is a little bit different n npd's data is data that comes from registers what what they do is they don't survey people so much they they instead look at the register data coming out for what's sold and that's where their numbers come from is is they know what got sold out of a number of different retailers they they track best by they track uh they you know they they track the cell phone carrier stores they track Walmart Target and and the cell phones that are sold through those guys so they have retail and they have real detail real retail data from the register so they have numbers that aren't bed not not all but many believe they don't have which is kind of important if you're talking about Apple stuff but well yeah but they're they're talking about Samsung stuff really they're but are they they only talking about sales because the Samsung Note thing not selling is kind of a big deal and Samsung doesn't have another phone that's comparable to that except for the S7 and I don't think a lot of people are that's where their data comes from what they what they say or or or come up with as their contrive statement after that is is another matter right one is is data based the other is their opinion about trying to interpret that data so what they said was that they believe that you know what happened was that the number suggest to them that Apple's share was uh slightly lower and as s SS was slightly higher from last year and and the flurry data showed the same kind of thing there their NPD analyst stepen Baker told the Wall Street Journal that he believes that Android loyalists are committed and that even the dangerous exploding batteries in the Galaxy Note 7 were not enough to pushed significant numbers of customers over to the iPhone and that his what what he's saying is that people who bought or wanted to buy a note 7 went for a different high-end Galaxy phone yeah certainly people there there are people who like Samsung and they're they're going to keep shopping samung stuff and the comment that he made was he actually said it um people who wanted to buy the Note 7 opted for a different high-end Galaxy phone uh what are the other Galaxy phones that they have that are high-end well so they had the note and then they had the the S7 right which is half a year old now and what else do they have it's a high-end phone not really anything they have some mid-grade phones like the r what that the J5 the other one that caught on fire but um it it's really it's it's kind of that data that it's catchy headlines because it's so counterintuitive but I don't think it's counterintuitive it did hurt Samsung you cannot have just constant bad news have bad PR after bad press yeah yeah I mean this is pretty bad and you know the kind of stuff that this is not the way they would report it if anything similar happened to Apple I mean if you remember iPhone 4 and there was a problem where if you put your hand over the phone yeah and it it would cut out your phone call it was like this is a recall you know we have to like make this is the death of Apple this like the end of the smart the iPhone and you know they're just going to like fade off into the sunset as a and you know these are phones that caught on fire and burn people and you're telling me that it's going to have impact yeah I'm sorry this this is just completely ridiculous to say that it has no impact on Samsung's brand and that people aren't changing their buying decisions so so I think what happened and this is my speculation is is that when this happened you went into the cell phone store your carrier store and all the carriers had this program going at the time where you'd walk in and you'd say I'd like a different phone here's my Note 7 I'm returning it give me and and early on in this catastrophe they would give you a fresh Note 7 and then shortly thereafter as as it was clear that this was not the fix you'd walk in and they'd give you any other phone in the store and my suspicion is that when people came in with the Samsung and returned it that they were pushed to the S7 you liked your Samsung well sure I kind of liked it I hate that I have to return it it's a nuisance great I've got another Samsung for you it's right there and that well it was in the the the announcements that they would let you move to to an iPhone that I don't I don't know if the people in the stores pushed for that or or made it clear right you'd walk in you'd say here's my phone we have no idea it's my speculation uh but but that that's I mean the closest we have to data is this other report where people were you know this is a an independent company that looked at it was a a poll they're asking people what they were going to buy and it was a significant number 3 34 and then 40% said that they would never buy a Samsung phone again and a third of those they were going to move to on iPhone that's a a huge number of switchers because if you look at the the pools of switchers like um er I believe it's Ericson did a report showing how very there is a lot of loyalty among buyers people tend to buy what they had before and the the number of switchers is something like 2% it's a very small number but that's really important if you can siphon off 2% of your competitors um clients then you have a sticky ecosystem that stay keeps them on an iPhone I mean in Apple's Direction so yeah with surveys is this right when when you make a survey you you have to first design it so that you know you're getting a representative sample and and if they do it and they send out and they get result back says 30% and they do it a couple weeks later and come back with another 40% example um I I'm I'm I I understand that the conditions have changed under which they were surveyed right the catastrophe kept getting worse more people might have said but you know you I I I look at that with a skeptical eye because I want to make sure that it's the same sample right they're getting the same people or the same types of people so that they know that it's representative that's the first issue and then the second issue is is are are the questions enough questions are they the right questions because people lie and and people will tell you oh heck no I'm never going to buy that again and you know give them a couple months the disaster blows over they feel better about it maybe they do buy another one right sure I mean like what you're saying is is true I agree with it that it deserves skepticism to look at uh any of these kind of polls facts that are gathered in a any sort of way like that but there also needs to be skepticism of numbers in the industry that uh companies that are presenting only a very tiny subset of information they do so strategically they're not doing it because they only have one number they have a lot of numbers they're not sharing a lot of their data they find one little bit that is scandalous and you know creates headlines that's what they share and that's the case with NPD I like I like the company mean I like I've talk guy guy but very dat right exactly I mean for MPD that's they're kind of their business model there's a lot of other companies I mean IDC I've written a lot about them they very clearly have a in intent and bias to present certain facts that you know they they line up data behind it but it's kind of clearly not the true you know like like I've I've had a little problem with their the way that they look at Apple watch and the way that they present information about it it's very very carefully coached data to suggest that Apple watch is just this huge smoldering failure and then they compare it to $25 Chinese exercise bands and suggest that XI is you know on the same level that they're kind of tied with apple which is just absurd because we're talking about like $30 million business versus you know multi-billion Dollar business yeah and one is a real product you know and one it's just like something people are buying out of a curiosity or something Ian it's very clear that you know what they're putting out there is you know intended to create a picture that's not true what is your verdict on this what is what is your verdict here on what the Samsung phones the well and and apple activations and what you think these the the sum of these two stories is what's the truth part of it because you mentioned that part was true and part was false what's just pin down the truth for me so what I'm saying is with activations that that's it's kind of like looking at two different pictures of the same thing and you're getting very different data but also it's showing it's not showing you a lot of the other information is really important so for example the activation data doesn't really really capture how much of that is phones that matter phones that are expensive enough to drive sustainable business model you know they have to have phones with a profit margin so if you're comparing junk Samsung phones with iPhones you know that's that's one thing that kind of doesn't even matter anymore it's like now you're talking about two different things that we're not talking about profit we're not talking about ability to sustain a company or or a platform or anything like that we're just pulling numbers out of the air you know that are kind of meaningless um cyclicality is also important the fact that you know the iPhone is launching Samsung isn't really launching anything they've had something you know Mis launch so there's just so many things in play that it's hard to it's hard to pull any really useful information out about percentages of total activations I mean you know that kind of data is getting really close to being useless so until we really have estimates of how many phone shipped I mean that that's even those estimates are a little bit sketchy but at least at least you're looking at numbers not percentages of a you know total pool that's constantly changing on a weekly basis percentages are a very easy way to present misleading statistics all right particularly percentages of change you know yeah so let's let's move on I want to talk about a story that we ran about an unfortunate really really a sad thing that happened and what happened was that um there was a young woman who was uh was was driving a car and FaceTime was involved because the there was a a driver who slammed into this young one's car and was engaged in a Face Time call when um when he was in progress and and the police found that the app was still running and that a call was in progress when they arrived at the accident scene and this this poor young woman um died at the accident and has seen and or or at least her death stemmed from the accident and there's a lawsuit from her family suing Apple because the FaceTime implantation is apparently less safe than Poss than than possibly available and as such as somehow partly responsible for the crash the uh the filing says that the conduct of the driver that caused the accident is inext intertwined with Apple's failure to implement a lockout feature on FaceTime the try to exro this girl died but her attorneys are just trying to collect money and this is really a tenuous thing I mean one of the things the article says is that Texas doesn't have a lot of restricting cell phone use so it wasn't even illegal that this guy was was doing something that was completely insane you should not you know it's it's bad to be on the phone in your car but having a FaceTime conversation I mean are you kidding me this is ridiculous so I mean that is completely the fault of the driver at fa but you're going to blame Apple for not preventing it from doing that in a state where it's not illegal that the state doesn't even make it illegal I I find that it's just it's the ambulance stes here I mean they're trying to get money which you know I mean if my daughter was killed by a car I mean I suppose I'd be letting the lawyer do whatever he wanted to get money but um yeah it's a tragic story but yeah nobody time in the car and apple doesn't you know if Apple created an implementation for like carplay or something that encouraged people to use their video phone and in their card Dash I mean that would be something that you could say is liability but to be using is so obviously not safe right right to be using a FaceTime conversation when you're driving and you know we don't know the whole circumstances too it could have been a situation where you know he wasn't using it in an unsafe Manner and something else happened to ca the crash you know we don't really can't yeah you know the point is is that if you're driving a hands-free system is a better idea than holding a phone and carplay is a good hands-free system carplay will take FaceTime audio calls and handle them the same as regular audio calls placed over the cell network so that's that's the correct thing to do and Apple's already implemented that uh as you say answering video calls while driving is absurd and and irresponsible but that's not Apple's being irresponsible and that that they don't lock it out by based on you driving uh doesn't seem wrong to me it seems the same as as whether or not they would lock out regular phone calls based on driving Am I Wrong Am I understand this incorrectly yeah I mean the complaint is actually saying that Apple needed to create a design that would lock out prevent use of FaceTime while driving it's like no they don't that yeah companies don't have to like stop people from doing any crazy thing that I think it's pretty clear that you shouldn't be doing a FaceTime conversation while you're driving I agree is Apple you know what else is it going to do they going to prevent you from using your phone at all what about if you're a passenger how does Apple like figure out whether you're a passenger or the driver there are apps to do that there's this Gas Buddy app that I use and if you're using it while you're driving it says hey are you using this when you're driving and you have to push a button that says no I'm a passenger which you know how safe is that you can be driving and say no I'm a passenger yeah but you know this is obviously just a kind of a desperate money grab but you know I don't can't say anything bad about that either it's how America works okay do you use an Apple Watch yes have you ever had your digital Crown get stuck um I sort of noticed it getting a little bit um not stuck but like not moving as smoothie as it used to it kind of like came and then went away but so apple has a solution for that and it's actually very easy um because all of the devices can be worn while you're you know exposing them to water in the sink for example the correct answer is if your Apple watch digital Crown is getting a little gummy a little sticky a little not moving as smoothly as possible so hold your Apple watch powering on off and holding digital Crown under lightly running warm fresh water from a faucet for about 10 to 15 seconds and as you rotate and press the crown as the water's running over it it will free it up and you don't need to use soap you don't need to use anything else just just warm running water will fit your Apple watch kind like the mouse balls of the current decade pull the ball out and clean it out every once a while well if you remember the uh the old magic mouse with the ball on top of it and and you'd have to turn that upside down and run it on your jeans to get junk out of it there's another thing that I I heroically fix somebody's phone they had an old like iPhone 4 or something and he was saying that it doesn't charge anymore I mean it barely charges you plug it in and it would take forever to to charge up a little bit and you take a toothpick and you stick it in the dot connector and go back and forth and this also works with lightning and you can pull out a cat there will be a cat I guarantee you if you put your phone in your pocket it builds up so much lent and junk that you can pull out a huge grotesque amount of stuff out of the dot connector and then your connection works again amazingly so do connector or lightning connector whatever they're they tend to build up junk and crust because unlike most things it's in your pocket all the time and just collects lens and but if you're having a problem plugging in that that's something to try just take a go pick and clean it out I usually blow it out with compressed air but that might work too you we can compress so we every week we come here and we talk a little bit about iPhone rumors and this this week is no exception uh this week we have reports from the supply chain that suggest that withdrawn the Builder of the iPhone 5C and SE has secured some orders for future iPhone models uh we don't know exactly what models those will be Al though obviously the suspicion is the iPhone 7S and you know rumored 7s or rumored iPhone 8 um Can Can you tell me what you think about that I I think the touch bar component in the MacBook Pro is built by westron um an interesting I think it was the flurry data that we were looking at it was also other information about uh popularity of different phone sizes and iPads yeah and it was showing basically since over the last three years or 2013 maybe the popularity of large screen like iPads and also mini iPads has gone down considerably and big format phones and that's not just Apple stuff it's like across the industry and larger format phones have rapidly increased in popularity let's call faets that's like the iPhone 6 Plus or 7 plus um and uh small phones have almost blown up and dried away gone away now in Android there aren't any like premium small phones there haven't been for a very long time Apple's been kind of the only company especially with the iPhone SE to be putting out a modern kind of high-end premium smaller phone but if you look at Trends it's it's kind of looks like the the rumors suggesting that we're going to have two new iPhones that are sort of a upgrade of the 7 so a 7s and the 7s plus and then a new phone that's kind of like a Ultra Premium thing and I find that likely that Apple's going to go in that direction although they do have a lot of data and they have made comments that the iPhone sold in kind of more than they expected I don't know how much it changed I haven't seen the actual I haven't looked at figures recently on on um you the sales of breakdown estimates but there are people who do like that I have some friends that have picked an iPhone SE because they're like the size same is true for Neil Hughes and I'm kind of deciding I I don't know if I told you this Theory I have I've been using a a plus-sized phone the 6s um now the 7 plus um all year long and I find it kind of prevents me from getting on my computer because I can sort of sit and use this phone that you can't do productive things with but you can do almost everything you can do on a computer so I waste a lot of time on it and I found I I think that's what's hurting my back there were a couple times when I had just like horrible back pain and I think it's from sitting in a in a terrible Louch with a huge phone instead of sitting in my ergonomic desk working on a computer or having a small phone that you occasionally pull out and check but when you're just constantly on a big phone I think that's really bad for your health wow so I mean I mean that's interesting yeah yourself like three months with an SE siiz device and see if it if your back felt different yeah so I i' I've changeed my behavior intentionally so that I I kind of avoid doing that and that seems to help dramatically but I mean one of the things I noticed it was like the summer when I was in the hospital my appendic exploded and I was afraid that you know I'm going to be I'm laying around so much I'm going to be dealing with back problems and I didn't have any back problems really and um then after I got out of the hospital I was sort of going back to sitting around on my phone and started developing the same kind of things as like tightness in my shoulder and I had like tingling down my arm and just starting to fall apart and when I consciously avoided that Behavior Uh it got better now it's not really a problem anymore but I think it I was also reading about uh there was a video on Facebook about Millennials and how much time we're spending on our phones and how the you know we've created a younger generation where my generation was like oh you're watching too much TV you're sit you're around watching TV and now that we have a TV in your pocket that's also an internet terminal and you you can do anything you talk to people and you can send videos and whatever it's very easy to just be constantly en raptured with other people on in other places and not who you're around and not pay attention to here around when you're at dinner you're not talking to people at dinner one things they're talking about you're sitting down to a meeting at work and everyone's on their phone waiting for the meeting to start and they're they're doing whatever they want to do on their smartphone and then meeting starts they put their phone down but they're not talking to each other before that they're not there's no Small Talk there's no blah blah there's no just enjoying the moment and I think that's having an impact on society in ways that are kind of unanticipated I think we need to think more about how to kind of break the cycle of just spending so much time because it's it's very attractive to to have a computer that can just tell you anything you want to know right now but it's also you know that's not something that we've been able to do until sort of recently and it's having an impact the same way the television had an impact and before that you know radio to some extent but it's really changing how a lot of things things work on a fundamental level and there's health issues related to that and you know almost anywhere you're walking around you see so many people looking looking down at their phones I think we need to change how we do things the the a great example of that was Halloween night where we were out trick-or-treating and you could see how many parents were walking along behind their kids staring at their phones yeah yeah like if I'm just slightly bored I can go to my happy place on my phone yeah and that that prevents you from having a lot of interactions that you might not immediately choose to have but they could be important you know talking to people you would normally choose to talk to it's like I can talk to you but I would rather talk to somebody on my phone that I like better well you're missing your opportunity to talk to somebody in a work place environment or you know a stranger or any number of situations where things could open up and you could have you know things could be different so talking about immersion you you've been wearing the apple airpods and you've been using the airpods this whole show but but you've been wearing them and using them and and experiencing them do they make it that much easier to separate from from the rest of the world when you're wearing them daily because we're talking about this kind of of avoiding thing um well first of all I was thought to that you wear them full time I mean I don't wear them all the time no but I do wear they walking down the street and it is you know it's very much like an iPod sort of feeling where um when you're sitting on a bus or or whatever it's it's like an anti- invitation to talk to you if you have white your pugs your plug and you know it's like not just Apple it's like any any kind of music device that you're listening to but Apple really popularized it and you know everybody had headphones in and it kind of means like I'm listening to music I mean are you going to interrupt me it better be important and so in San Francisco there's so many you know there's so much just kind of vagrancy and people making for money all the time and um having headphones then you can just kind of like ignore it all which you know sounds terrible but it's also like there's a reason why people do that because they just don't want to constantly be telling you know interacting with people that's like no I don't have I'm not going to buy you drugs right now the the confrontation part there is is worth avoiding or at least that's what they're doing yeah and it's not like a conscious it's not like a rude like like you're putting up your hand like you're not going to talk to somebody it's just you know I'm listening to something and I'm in a bubble and unless you have something really important you you know is like a little barrier to asking you for something and um so I I've felt that before with iPhones in when you or um earphones in uh without wires it's a little bit different because you have something in your ears but you don't have this kind of signaling wire you know coming down that's coming to your music Source um people can tell you have them in and you can talk to people when you have them in it's not like over the your headphones where you can't really hear somebody um and you can sort of discreetly turn down the volume like on your watch or something so you can walk up to your register and have a conversation with somebody and turn them back up afterwards so I think it's maybe a little bit less uh of that barrier that I was describing and less isolating um and it's also like in the review I was talking about how invisible it feels when you have headphones in you're constantly reminded like as the wind touches the the cables kind of sway around and touch your face or you you turn and it creates tension and pulls and pulls in your ear and you're very aware that you have headphones in with these you put them in and you kind of forget that they're in there and you just have sort of a music soundtrack that sort of just magically happening and you know it's just headphones in your ear but um it's that feeling of just having a soundtrack as you're walking along and so it feels more like an augmentation than a barrier do you find that you use Siri more yeah I mean I I use Siri a lot when I'm in a car because I don't have to feel embarrassed or anything when I'm walking down the street I feel like a little bit embarrassed to be talking to my even even the ear pods I feel like I have to look around and be like is anyone on my block I don't want to be too nerdy right now but I'm I'm kind of like that I mean that's kind of I'm PR more over than most people well there is a societal pressure there you know you don't want to be the uh the The Jerk using the Bluetooth headset right yeah I mean whenever I see somebody just talking loud on a Bluetooth headset I'm just like wow you're you're the commander of Your World don't you well it's it's the always you know the classic one is where someone's having a conversation but they're asking questions and so you feel like they're asking you you start answering and they they say no I wasn't talking to you yeah or they're just completely unaware because they're so in their conversation for sure so so that's the societal experience of using it and the Siri experience of using it what what do you think about the sound quality where cuz a lot of people were talking about how great they sound what's your impression I think they're better than ear pods the wired version that Apple's bundled with iPhones which we're already you know they're like okay they're not audio file like devices but um the the earpods fit your ear better I mean for me with when you have wired headphones in or earbuds they tend the wires tend to pull them straight downward where these fit at sort of an angle so at least for my ears they fit in like a puzzle piece and direct towards your mouth and they feel they feel more um fit and like don't move around as much and everyone's ears are different and some people might not work for them I've heard people say that they don't there was somebody who wrote an article for the The Verge that was complaining that they didn't work for them personally in sort of um but I think they said everyone that they work with it fits in so it's kind of like if you're on The Fringe of the bell curve it might not work for you but kind of the same thing for anybody so they sound better than Ear Pod there there's um they don't sound as good as studio microphone your Studio headphones that fit over ear and um have huge magnets and all that kind of stuff but I think the sound quality is very adequate for what they are it's very good and also Bluetooth um particularly if you put your phone in your pocket and your hand over the top of your phone I know that I did that sometimes you can make it click click uh clip um and it seems It's kind of brief and it's kind of the thing where you almost don't even notice it until after it's happened and then it's like kind of in the past and doesn't where is a lot of a lot of Bluetooth devices they would like fall off and just like stop working and then you have to reset it up so Apple's implementation of Bluetooth is much better it's not completely perfect in every way but it's it's it's to the point where it's so good that it's very pleasant to use and in terms of sound quality it's like there's a little bit um I don't know how to describe it perfectly but it's like flat in the mid-range to me but you can also change depending on what you're listening to you can change the EQ settings on in Music settings and apple kind of buries it I wish they would expose that more or even just kind of automatically have a setting to be like hey do you want to make it sound better you here push this button and we'll analyze the kind of music you're listening to and you know make it so that it sounds as good as your earpods can sound so what's what's your verdict do you have a recommendation for people for this the airpods yeah I G I give it the best review I've ever given an Apple device I've never given an Apple device five stars before because there's always you know something you can say you know it needs this needs that and you know you can imagine things that this that Apple could do with airpods going forward but as a as a product that you can buy right now they're amazing and I love them and I really enjoy them it's not just like it's a very good product it's like it's really enjoyable it makes me happy to use them really so yes yes there you have it all right can be I I mean that's that's a fairly positive review let's say I think the other the second most like gushing review I ever wrote was the original iPhone it was just like hold the phone you know here's see I can understand that yeah it was pretty amazing and I don't know if I gave it full five stars I mean I I think maybe we're grading them differently at the time but and also when the the first iPad came out I was also like this is a really cool thing it's going to blow up and everyone was say it's nothing and you know big iPod Touch well thank you Dan th this has been the Apple Insider podcast uh Dan do you have a parting thought for our listeners um well it's the end of the end of the year at the beginning of 2016 I wrote These articles saying basically Apple doesn't have competition anymore and I think 2016 made that clear and Apple's competition actually got weaker and you know Samsung was almost starting to like go back to where they were in 2014 they were almost you know re achieving that that level of success and then they kind of blew up on their own so going in 2017 will be really interesting because Apple just invested billions of dollars into silicon and you know all the new stuff they're doing with development tools and and Swift and also just incremental changes in the operating system to make things better so Apple's really getting to a point where they're they don't really have competitors and you know the tech mea keeps inventing competitors for them you know the Google pixel phone or whatever and it's like you know it might be an okay phone but it's not going to matter commercially so I mean going forward it's hard to see what Apple's what what's going to really compete with apple I mean there may be sort of a A disruption for us where people go back to feature phones or something you know on that kind of level but um it's hard to see what's going to be in their path so it'll be interesting to see what happens in 2017 what new stuff they roll out all right this has been episode 101 uh where can people find you on the internet Dan on Twitter at Daniel Aaron and it's also my Instagram but we also have a an apple Insider it's Apple Insider official on Instagram where we post photos and videos and stuff excellent well I'm I'm your host Victor you can see me doing my headstand with my earpods in yeah we saw that in your article we talked about it last week and and that's the episode if you catch Daniel wearing airpods doing headstands around San Francisco be sure to talk to him and uh or or at least take funny pictures and post them on Instagram and Link them to us at Twitter we will be back next week this is episode1 thank you very much please feel free to leave reviews at iTunes and uh contact us and tell us what we're doing what could do better we are happy to do this for you and we hope you keep enjoying ityou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to the Apple Insider podcast this is episode 101 I'm Victor marks your host and joining me is Daniel Aon doger hey Dan how are you hi um thanks for doing the podcast for having on it and and I just definitely definitely I I uh I I note that you're using the airpods to record today so for our listeners who are wondering what's going on with sound quality or things like that this is because this is the sound of the airpods microphone I have all my stuff in boxes and uh so that's what I'm using right now for a microphone very very good so I want to start off by mentioning to our listeners that we have deals there are uh through our good friends B&H we're offering Shoppers the lowest prices available on a variety of 2016 12-in MacBooks with discounts of up to $200 off and you get Parallels Desktop for free which allows you to run Windows applications on your Mac if you need to plus you can save $50 off iPad Air 2os and uh the late 2016 13-inch MacBook Pros also start at $1,349 after the cash savings and there's free expedited shipping and no tax outside of New York state so this is a great way for you to get a new machine or an iPad Air 2 or or other discounts if you're looking for them from our good friends at B&H and I'll have that link in the show notes um so Dan I I need you to unpack something for me I I I always come to you when I have these questions cuz I I think about these things but it's not always easy easy to make it clear so we we ran two stories this week we ran one story whose headline said that Apple saw twice as many mobile device activations this holiday season as Samsung and we also ran a story entitled Love is Blind that NPD says that Android customers are so committed to the exploding Note 7 that that or so committed to Android that the Samsung failure with Note 7 didn't really give a bump to Apple so these these these two things seem like they're competing stories but I imagine that that somewhere in there there's a truth that can apply to both of them can you help me understand this um so my idea is that both are a little bit right and a little bit wrong so starting with the flurry information uh flurry looks at activations I believe that Apple's uh iPhone launch is much more cyclical than Samsung's are Samsung has a couple flagships they have the the S7 in the spring and they have the uh the fablet note in the fall and so they do have some cality when you know when the new phone comes out there's there's a difference in how many people are buying it uh but it's not nearly as much as apple with the iPhone every year where it it you know there's a huge surge when they first release it there's often people waiting in line and then it Trails off towards the end of the year it doesn't Trail off as much as it used to it used to be a very you know immediate boom and then sort of waiting for the next one to come out um and we've seen a couple there's a couple other things that change the cycle you know China has a boom that happens later with Chinese New Year in the early part of the year so the cyclicality of iPhones is changing a little bit but it is very much a thing where you know the new iPhone comes out and there's going to be a huge bump and if you if you look at flurry's data then they're saying that there's more activations for iPhones than there is for anything else uh but more so for Samsung almost twice as much or maybe more than twice as much I I remember the numbers exactly right so I'm looking at it and it says that 44% activations were apple and 21% activations were Samsung according to their dat right so uh among other things that's a percentage and when you look at last year's numbers those are actually a little bit worse for Apple because last year Apple had a slightly higher percentage and Samsung had a slightly lower percentage so what does that mean well it doesn't mean a whole lot because you can't compare uh two different years because a lot of things are changing this year Samsung's entire Flagship exploded that's the most horrible thing that's ever happened to Samsung it's I believe it's the worst technical problem that a tech company's ever faced it's a huge recall um it's hard to think of anything that's even comparable I mean Microsoft had you know they repaired like half their Xboxes or something and they put a billion dollar charge this is much bigger than that this is going to cost them billions and billions of dollars uh it's the only phone they're making the the difference between Samsung and Apple besides cality is uh Apple makes one kind of phone profitable phones that are quite expensive they're more than $400 Apple owns almost all of that market Samsung makes a ton of phones that are you know just rimary phones like everybody else in the industry that make no money and the phones they make that are like iPhones the Galaxy most of the Galaxy brand uh are the ones that make some money they don't make as much money as iPhones and they give a lot of at discounts and promotions and stuff so Samsung is selling a lot more phones than Apple we know that every quarter they come out I mean we have estimates of that are you know quite reliable they they've consistently sold something like twice as many phones as Apple forever but they make much less money than Apple so when you're comparing activations of Samsung phones what does that mean does that mean Samsung phones are sort of like an iPhone no it doesn't it means everything Samsung makes there's no signality there because there's always people buying junk Samsung phones and this year there's a huge deficit of people buying the phones that make money at least for the on the fablet model that got pulled back so everything is different it's really hard to make any clear generalizations from these percentage numbers because the numbers are changing so radically and they're a composite number like I'm saying the Samsung number is not just a percentage of the market but it's broken down into you know it's mostly cheaper phones so looking at the flurry numbers are almost useless that you know it's kind of a tantalizing idea that Apple's activating more phones but of course they are it's Apple's launch and looking back at last year's numbers they actually don't look as good but there's so much other things that are happening that it's hard to really say anything from what they're doing and that's I have a problem with a lot of research companies that put out data that has this very tantalizing idea that something is happening when if you really examine it it's like wait a minute you've just said something in an artfully contrived way that you're you're stating something as if it's facts and numbers but it's really a graph that you have created to you know get people's attention make people click links and I'm slurry here this is like almost every report we get yeah I breaking up I'm sorry I was just think you don't have necessarily enough information to draw a a well-founded conclusion right right I mean it's not only you don't have enough information but it's like it's almost purposely information that they they're pres presenting is not enough uh to come to any useful conclusion but it's it's also does not support what they're actually insinuating and we see this so much in Tech reporting and I'm I'm writing this article about it and um it's almost every report and of course that benefits companies that put out information in overt press releases I mean Microsoft just came out and they're talking about how you know the number of MacBook switches to surface is just really incredible and it's huge and what does that mean where what is the numbers I mean Microsoft is not selling huge numbers of surface computers we know that we can look at they've been in a ceiling of a billion dollars for the last several years they're not surging selling huge numbers of computers and they're really jumping on this idea that oh Mac users are really upset with apple it's like yeah there's a couple bloggers that are but overall Apple's not having any problem selling Macs that's why they're putting such a huge price steak on their Macs because they don't have any problem selling them Samsung has problem selling phone that's why they keep slashing the price when you see companies slashing the price way Google does and the way Microsoft does the way Samsung does that's because they're trying to create demand for their products so it doesn't matter how much they say about you know blah blah whatever Amazon's you know popularity list whatever it's all meaningless so that's the problem that I have with the flurry data the other data you know you can take a poll and construct it in such a way as to get whatever information you want from people I see that so much wait wait wait let me I mean so I've seen four polls SE four polls about the Samsung thing and the first two said 30% would never buy a phone before like 34% would never buy a Samsung phone again because of the recall they did it later in like October 40% said they would never buy a Samsung phone again because of this unfolding trauma of Samsung and a third of those said that they would buy it they would move to an iPhone so then you have Reuters and uh CNBC jointly coming up with this data that says oh we we ask a bunch of people certain questions and you know what we got back was that this has no impact on Samsung's brand and doesn't help Apple at all that's completely hard to believe and so NPD is saying the same thing and these are companies that know how to say craft questions to get responses that create whatever story they want to say to say but stop for a second because npd's data is a little bit different n npd's data is data that comes from registers what what they do is they don't survey people so much they they instead look at the register data coming out for what's sold and that's where their numbers come from is is they know what got sold out of a number of different retailers they they track best by they track uh they you know they they track the cell phone carrier stores they track Walmart Target and and the cell phones that are sold through those guys so they have retail and they have real detail real retail data from the register so they have numbers that aren't bed not not all but many believe they don't have which is kind of important if you're talking about Apple stuff but well yeah but they're they're talking about Samsung stuff really they're but are they they only talking about sales because the Samsung Note thing not selling is kind of a big deal and Samsung doesn't have another phone that's comparable to that except for the S7 and I don't think a lot of people are that's where their data comes from what they what they say or or or come up with as their contrive statement after that is is another matter right one is is data based the other is their opinion about trying to interpret that data so what they said was that they believe that you know what happened was that the number suggest to them that Apple's share was uh slightly lower and as s SS was slightly higher from last year and and the flurry data showed the same kind of thing there their NPD analyst stepen Baker told the Wall Street Journal that he believes that Android loyalists are committed and that even the dangerous exploding batteries in the Galaxy Note 7 were not enough to pushed significant numbers of customers over to the iPhone and that his what what he's saying is that people who bought or wanted to buy a note 7 went for a different high-end Galaxy phone yeah certainly people there there are people who like Samsung and they're they're going to keep shopping samung stuff and the comment that he made was he actually said it um people who wanted to buy the Note 7 opted for a different high-end Galaxy phone uh what are the other Galaxy phones that they have that are high-end well so they had the note and then they had the the S7 right which is half a year old now and what else do they have it's a high-end phone not really anything they have some mid-grade phones like the r what that the J5 the other one that caught on fire but um it it's really it's it's kind of that data that it's catchy headlines because it's so counterintuitive but I don't think it's counterintuitive it did hurt Samsung you cannot have just constant bad news have bad PR after bad press yeah yeah I mean this is pretty bad and you know the kind of stuff that this is not the way they would report it if anything similar happened to Apple I mean if you remember iPhone 4 and there was a problem where if you put your hand over the phone yeah and it it would cut out your phone call it was like this is a recall you know we have to like make this is the death of Apple this like the end of the smart the iPhone and you know they're just going to like fade off into the sunset as a and you know these are phones that caught on fire and burn people and you're telling me that it's going to have impact yeah I'm sorry this this is just completely ridiculous to say that it has no impact on Samsung's brand and that people aren't changing their buying decisions so so I think what happened and this is my speculation is is that when this happened you went into the cell phone store your carrier store and all the carriers had this program going at the time where you'd walk in and you'd say I'd like a different phone here's my Note 7 I'm returning it give me and and early on in this catastrophe they would give you a fresh Note 7 and then shortly thereafter as as it was clear that this was not the fix you'd walk in and they'd give you any other phone in the store and my suspicion is that when people came in with the Samsung and returned it that they were pushed to the S7 you liked your Samsung well sure I kind of liked it I hate that I have to return it it's a nuisance great I've got another Samsung for you it's right there and that well it was in the the the announcements that they would let you move to to an iPhone that I don't I don't know if the people in the stores pushed for that or or made it clear right you'd walk in you'd say here's my phone we have no idea it's my speculation uh but but that that's I mean the closest we have to data is this other report where people were you know this is a an independent company that looked at it was a a poll they're asking people what they were going to buy and it was a significant number 3 34 and then 40% said that they would never buy a Samsung phone again and a third of those they were going to move to on iPhone that's a a huge number of switchers because if you look at the the pools of switchers like um er I believe it's Ericson did a report showing how very there is a lot of loyalty among buyers people tend to buy what they had before and the the number of switchers is something like 2% it's a very small number but that's really important if you can siphon off 2% of your competitors um clients then you have a sticky ecosystem that stay keeps them on an iPhone I mean in Apple's Direction so yeah with surveys is this right when when you make a survey you you have to first design it so that you know you're getting a representative sample and and if they do it and they send out and they get result back says 30% and they do it a couple weeks later and come back with another 40% example um I I'm I'm I I understand that the conditions have changed under which they were surveyed right the catastrophe kept getting worse more people might have said but you know you I I I look at that with a skeptical eye because I want to make sure that it's the same sample right they're getting the same people or the same types of people so that they know that it's representative that's the first issue and then the second issue is is are are the questions enough questions are they the right questions because people lie and and people will tell you oh heck no I'm never going to buy that again and you know give them a couple months the disaster blows over they feel better about it maybe they do buy another one right sure I mean like what you're saying is is true I agree with it that it deserves skepticism to look at uh any of these kind of polls facts that are gathered in a any sort of way like that but there also needs to be skepticism of numbers in the industry that uh companies that are presenting only a very tiny subset of information they do so strategically they're not doing it because they only have one number they have a lot of numbers they're not sharing a lot of their data they find one little bit that is scandalous and you know creates headlines that's what they share and that's the case with NPD I like I like the company mean I like I've talk guy guy but very dat right exactly I mean for MPD that's they're kind of their business model there's a lot of other companies I mean IDC I've written a lot about them they very clearly have a in intent and bias to present certain facts that you know they they line up data behind it but it's kind of clearly not the true you know like like I've I've had a little problem with their the way that they look at Apple watch and the way that they present information about it it's very very carefully coached data to suggest that Apple watch is just this huge smoldering failure and then they compare it to $25 Chinese exercise bands and suggest that XI is you know on the same level that they're kind of tied with apple which is just absurd because we're talking about like $30 million business versus you know multi-billion Dollar business yeah and one is a real product you know and one it's just like something people are buying out of a curiosity or something Ian it's very clear that you know what they're putting out there is you know intended to create a picture that's not true what is your verdict on this what is what is your verdict here on what the Samsung phones the well and and apple activations and what you think these the the sum of these two stories is what's the truth part of it because you mentioned that part was true and part was false what's just pin down the truth for me so what I'm saying is with activations that that's it's kind of like looking at two different pictures of the same thing and you're getting very different data but also it's showing it's not showing you a lot of the other information is really important so for example the activation data doesn't really really capture how much of that is phones that matter phones that are expensive enough to drive sustainable business model you know they have to have phones with a profit margin so if you're comparing junk Samsung phones with iPhones you know that's that's one thing that kind of doesn't even matter anymore it's like now you're talking about two different things that we're not talking about profit we're not talking about ability to sustain a company or or a platform or anything like that we're just pulling numbers out of the air you know that are kind of meaningless um cyclicality is also important the fact that you know the iPhone is launching Samsung isn't really launching anything they've had something you know Mis launch so there's just so many things in play that it's hard to it's hard to pull any really useful information out about percentages of total activations I mean you know that kind of data is getting really close to being useless so until we really have estimates of how many phone shipped I mean that that's even those estimates are a little bit sketchy but at least at least you're looking at numbers not percentages of a you know total pool that's constantly changing on a weekly basis percentages are a very easy way to present misleading statistics all right particularly percentages of change you know yeah so let's let's move on I want to talk about a story that we ran about an unfortunate really really a sad thing that happened and what happened was that um there was a young woman who was uh was was driving a car and FaceTime was involved because the there was a a driver who slammed into this young one's car and was engaged in a Face Time call when um when he was in progress and and the police found that the app was still running and that a call was in progress when they arrived at the accident scene and this this poor young woman um died at the accident and has seen and or or at least her death stemmed from the accident and there's a lawsuit from her family suing Apple because the FaceTime implantation is apparently less safe than Poss than than possibly available and as such as somehow partly responsible for the crash the uh the filing says that the conduct of the driver that caused the accident is inext intertwined with Apple's failure to implement a lockout feature on FaceTime the try to exro this girl died but her attorneys are just trying to collect money and this is really a tenuous thing I mean one of the things the article says is that Texas doesn't have a lot of restricting cell phone use so it wasn't even illegal that this guy was was doing something that was completely insane you should not you know it's it's bad to be on the phone in your car but having a FaceTime conversation I mean are you kidding me this is ridiculous so I mean that is completely the fault of the driver at fa but you're going to blame Apple for not preventing it from doing that in a state where it's not illegal that the state doesn't even make it illegal I I find that it's just it's the ambulance stes here I mean they're trying to get money which you know I mean if my daughter was killed by a car I mean I suppose I'd be letting the lawyer do whatever he wanted to get money but um yeah it's a tragic story but yeah nobody time in the car and apple doesn't you know if Apple created an implementation for like carplay or something that encouraged people to use their video phone and in their card Dash I mean that would be something that you could say is liability but to be using is so obviously not safe right right to be using a FaceTime conversation when you're driving and you know we don't know the whole circumstances too it could have been a situation where you know he wasn't using it in an unsafe Manner and something else happened to ca the crash you know we don't really can't yeah you know the point is is that if you're driving a hands-free system is a better idea than holding a phone and carplay is a good hands-free system carplay will take FaceTime audio calls and handle them the same as regular audio calls placed over the cell network so that's that's the correct thing to do and Apple's already implemented that uh as you say answering video calls while driving is absurd and and irresponsible but that's not Apple's being irresponsible and that that they don't lock it out by based on you driving uh doesn't seem wrong to me it seems the same as as whether or not they would lock out regular phone calls based on driving Am I Wrong Am I understand this incorrectly yeah I mean the complaint is actually saying that Apple needed to create a design that would lock out prevent use of FaceTime while driving it's like no they don't that yeah companies don't have to like stop people from doing any crazy thing that I think it's pretty clear that you shouldn't be doing a FaceTime conversation while you're driving I agree is Apple you know what else is it going to do they going to prevent you from using your phone at all what about if you're a passenger how does Apple like figure out whether you're a passenger or the driver there are apps to do that there's this Gas Buddy app that I use and if you're using it while you're driving it says hey are you using this when you're driving and you have to push a button that says no I'm a passenger which you know how safe is that you can be driving and say no I'm a passenger yeah but you know this is obviously just a kind of a desperate money grab but you know I don't can't say anything bad about that either it's how America works okay do you use an Apple Watch yes have you ever had your digital Crown get stuck um I sort of noticed it getting a little bit um not stuck but like not moving as smoothie as it used to it kind of like came and then went away but so apple has a solution for that and it's actually very easy um because all of the devices can be worn while you're you know exposing them to water in the sink for example the correct answer is if your Apple watch digital Crown is getting a little gummy a little sticky a little not moving as smoothly as possible so hold your Apple watch powering on off and holding digital Crown under lightly running warm fresh water from a faucet for about 10 to 15 seconds and as you rotate and press the crown as the water's running over it it will free it up and you don't need to use soap you don't need to use anything else just just warm running water will fit your Apple watch kind like the mouse balls of the current decade pull the ball out and clean it out every once a while well if you remember the uh the old magic mouse with the ball on top of it and and you'd have to turn that upside down and run it on your jeans to get junk out of it there's another thing that I I heroically fix somebody's phone they had an old like iPhone 4 or something and he was saying that it doesn't charge anymore I mean it barely charges you plug it in and it would take forever to to charge up a little bit and you take a toothpick and you stick it in the dot connector and go back and forth and this also works with lightning and you can pull out a cat there will be a cat I guarantee you if you put your phone in your pocket it builds up so much lent and junk that you can pull out a huge grotesque amount of stuff out of the dot connector and then your connection works again amazingly so do connector or lightning connector whatever they're they tend to build up junk and crust because unlike most things it's in your pocket all the time and just collects lens and but if you're having a problem plugging in that that's something to try just take a go pick and clean it out I usually blow it out with compressed air but that might work too you we can compress so we every week we come here and we talk a little bit about iPhone rumors and this this week is no exception uh this week we have reports from the supply chain that suggest that withdrawn the Builder of the iPhone 5C and SE has secured some orders for future iPhone models uh we don't know exactly what models those will be Al though obviously the suspicion is the iPhone 7S and you know rumored 7s or rumored iPhone 8 um Can Can you tell me what you think about that I I think the touch bar component in the MacBook Pro is built by westron um an interesting I think it was the flurry data that we were looking at it was also other information about uh popularity of different phone sizes and iPads yeah and it was showing basically since over the last three years or 2013 maybe the popularity of large screen like iPads and also mini iPads has gone down considerably and big format phones and that's not just Apple stuff it's like across the industry and larger format phones have rapidly increased in popularity let's call faets that's like the iPhone 6 Plus or 7 plus um and uh small phones have almost blown up and dried away gone away now in Android there aren't any like premium small phones there haven't been for a very long time Apple's been kind of the only company especially with the iPhone SE to be putting out a modern kind of high-end premium smaller phone but if you look at Trends it's it's kind of looks like the the rumors suggesting that we're going to have two new iPhones that are sort of a upgrade of the 7 so a 7s and the 7s plus and then a new phone that's kind of like a Ultra Premium thing and I find that likely that Apple's going to go in that direction although they do have a lot of data and they have made comments that the iPhone sold in kind of more than they expected I don't know how much it changed I haven't seen the actual I haven't looked at figures recently on on um you the sales of breakdown estimates but there are people who do like that I have some friends that have picked an iPhone SE because they're like the size same is true for Neil Hughes and I'm kind of deciding I I don't know if I told you this Theory I have I've been using a a plus-sized phone the 6s um now the 7 plus um all year long and I find it kind of prevents me from getting on my computer because I can sort of sit and use this phone that you can't do productive things with but you can do almost everything you can do on a computer so I waste a lot of time on it and I found I I think that's what's hurting my back there were a couple times when I had just like horrible back pain and I think it's from sitting in a in a terrible Louch with a huge phone instead of sitting in my ergonomic desk working on a computer or having a small phone that you occasionally pull out and check but when you're just constantly on a big phone I think that's really bad for your health wow so I mean I mean that's interesting yeah yourself like three months with an SE siiz device and see if it if your back felt different yeah so I i' I've changeed my behavior intentionally so that I I kind of avoid doing that and that seems to help dramatically but I mean one of the things I noticed it was like the summer when I was in the hospital my appendic exploded and I was afraid that you know I'm going to be I'm laying around so much I'm going to be dealing with back problems and I didn't have any back problems really and um then after I got out of the hospital I was sort of going back to sitting around on my phone and started developing the same kind of things as like tightness in my shoulder and I had like tingling down my arm and just starting to fall apart and when I consciously avoided that Behavior Uh it got better now it's not really a problem anymore but I think it I was also reading about uh there was a video on Facebook about Millennials and how much time we're spending on our phones and how the you know we've created a younger generation where my generation was like oh you're watching too much TV you're sit you're around watching TV and now that we have a TV in your pocket that's also an internet terminal and you you can do anything you talk to people and you can send videos and whatever it's very easy to just be constantly en raptured with other people on in other places and not who you're around and not pay attention to here around when you're at dinner you're not talking to people at dinner one things they're talking about you're sitting down to a meeting at work and everyone's on their phone waiting for the meeting to start and they're they're doing whatever they want to do on their smartphone and then meeting starts they put their phone down but they're not talking to each other before that they're not there's no Small Talk there's no blah blah there's no just enjoying the moment and I think that's having an impact on society in ways that are kind of unanticipated I think we need to think more about how to kind of break the cycle of just spending so much time because it's it's very attractive to to have a computer that can just tell you anything you want to know right now but it's also you know that's not something that we've been able to do until sort of recently and it's having an impact the same way the television had an impact and before that you know radio to some extent but it's really changing how a lot of things things work on a fundamental level and there's health issues related to that and you know almost anywhere you're walking around you see so many people looking looking down at their phones I think we need to change how we do things the the a great example of that was Halloween night where we were out trick-or-treating and you could see how many parents were walking along behind their kids staring at their phones yeah yeah like if I'm just slightly bored I can go to my happy place on my phone yeah and that that prevents you from having a lot of interactions that you might not immediately choose to have but they could be important you know talking to people you would normally choose to talk to it's like I can talk to you but I would rather talk to somebody on my phone that I like better well you're missing your opportunity to talk to somebody in a work place environment or you know a stranger or any number of situations where things could open up and you could have you know things could be different so talking about immersion you you've been wearing the apple airpods and you've been using the airpods this whole show but but you've been wearing them and using them and and experiencing them do they make it that much easier to separate from from the rest of the world when you're wearing them daily because we're talking about this kind of of avoiding thing um well first of all I was thought to that you wear them full time I mean I don't wear them all the time no but I do wear they walking down the street and it is you know it's very much like an iPod sort of feeling where um when you're sitting on a bus or or whatever it's it's like an anti- invitation to talk to you if you have white your pugs your plug and you know it's like not just Apple it's like any any kind of music device that you're listening to but Apple really popularized it and you know everybody had headphones in and it kind of means like I'm listening to music I mean are you going to interrupt me it better be important and so in San Francisco there's so many you know there's so much just kind of vagrancy and people making for money all the time and um having headphones then you can just kind of like ignore it all which you know sounds terrible but it's also like there's a reason why people do that because they just don't want to constantly be telling you know interacting with people that's like no I don't have I'm not going to buy you drugs right now the the confrontation part there is is worth avoiding or at least that's what they're doing yeah and it's not like a conscious it's not like a rude like like you're putting up your hand like you're not going to talk to somebody it's just you know I'm listening to something and I'm in a bubble and unless you have something really important you you know is like a little barrier to asking you for something and um so I I've felt that before with iPhones in when you or um earphones in uh without wires it's a little bit different because you have something in your ears but you don't have this kind of signaling wire you know coming down that's coming to your music Source um people can tell you have them in and you can talk to people when you have them in it's not like over the your headphones where you can't really hear somebody um and you can sort of discreetly turn down the volume like on your watch or something so you can walk up to your register and have a conversation with somebody and turn them back up afterwards so I think it's maybe a little bit less uh of that barrier that I was describing and less isolating um and it's also like in the review I was talking about how invisible it feels when you have headphones in you're constantly reminded like as the wind touches the the cables kind of sway around and touch your face or you you turn and it creates tension and pulls and pulls in your ear and you're very aware that you have headphones in with these you put them in and you kind of forget that they're in there and you just have sort of a music soundtrack that sort of just magically happening and you know it's just headphones in your ear but um it's that feeling of just having a soundtrack as you're walking along and so it feels more like an augmentation than a barrier do you find that you use Siri more yeah I mean I I use Siri a lot when I'm in a car because I don't have to feel embarrassed or anything when I'm walking down the street I feel like a little bit embarrassed to be talking to my even even the ear pods I feel like I have to look around and be like is anyone on my block I don't want to be too nerdy right now but I'm I'm kind of like that I mean that's kind of I'm PR more over than most people well there is a societal pressure there you know you don't want to be the uh the The Jerk using the Bluetooth headset right yeah I mean whenever I see somebody just talking loud on a Bluetooth headset I'm just like wow you're you're the commander of Your World don't you well it's it's the always you know the classic one is where someone's having a conversation but they're asking questions and so you feel like they're asking you you start answering and they they say no I wasn't talking to you yeah or they're just completely unaware because they're so in their conversation for sure so so that's the societal experience of using it and the Siri experience of using it what what do you think about the sound quality where cuz a lot of people were talking about how great they sound what's your impression I think they're better than ear pods the wired version that Apple's bundled with iPhones which we're already you know they're like okay they're not audio file like devices but um the the earpods fit your ear better I mean for me with when you have wired headphones in or earbuds they tend the wires tend to pull them straight downward where these fit at sort of an angle so at least for my ears they fit in like a puzzle piece and direct towards your mouth and they feel they feel more um fit and like don't move around as much and everyone's ears are different and some people might not work for them I've heard people say that they don't there was somebody who wrote an article for the The Verge that was complaining that they didn't work for them personally in sort of um but I think they said everyone that they work with it fits in so it's kind of like if you're on The Fringe of the bell curve it might not work for you but kind of the same thing for anybody so they sound better than Ear Pod there there's um they don't sound as good as studio microphone your Studio headphones that fit over ear and um have huge magnets and all that kind of stuff but I think the sound quality is very adequate for what they are it's very good and also Bluetooth um particularly if you put your phone in your pocket and your hand over the top of your phone I know that I did that sometimes you can make it click click uh clip um and it seems It's kind of brief and it's kind of the thing where you almost don't even notice it until after it's happened and then it's like kind of in the past and doesn't where is a lot of a lot of Bluetooth devices they would like fall off and just like stop working and then you have to reset it up so Apple's implementation of Bluetooth is much better it's not completely perfect in every way but it's it's it's to the point where it's so good that it's very pleasant to use and in terms of sound quality it's like there's a little bit um I don't know how to describe it perfectly but it's like flat in the mid-range to me but you can also change depending on what you're listening to you can change the EQ settings on in Music settings and apple kind of buries it I wish they would expose that more or even just kind of automatically have a setting to be like hey do you want to make it sound better you here push this button and we'll analyze the kind of music you're listening to and you know make it so that it sounds as good as your earpods can sound so what's what's your verdict do you have a recommendation for people for this the airpods yeah I G I give it the best review I've ever given an Apple device I've never given an Apple device five stars before because there's always you know something you can say you know it needs this needs that and you know you can imagine things that this that Apple could do with airpods going forward but as a as a product that you can buy right now they're amazing and I love them and I really enjoy them it's not just like it's a very good product it's like it's really enjoyable it makes me happy to use them really so yes yes there you have it all right can be I I mean that's that's a fairly positive review let's say I think the other the second most like gushing review I ever wrote was the original iPhone it was just like hold the phone you know here's see I can understand that yeah it was pretty amazing and I don't know if I gave it full five stars I mean I I think maybe we're grading them differently at the time but and also when the the first iPad came out I was also like this is a really cool thing it's going to blow up and everyone was say it's nothing and you know big iPod Touch well thank you Dan th this has been the Apple Insider podcast uh Dan do you have a parting thought for our listeners um well it's the end of the end of the year at the beginning of 2016 I wrote These articles saying basically Apple doesn't have competition anymore and I think 2016 made that clear and Apple's competition actually got weaker and you know Samsung was almost starting to like go back to where they were in 2014 they were almost you know re achieving that that level of success and then they kind of blew up on their own so going in 2017 will be really interesting because Apple just invested billions of dollars into silicon and you know all the new stuff they're doing with development tools and and Swift and also just incremental changes in the operating system to make things better so Apple's really getting to a point where they're they don't really have competitors and you know the tech mea keeps inventing competitors for them you know the Google pixel phone or whatever and it's like you know it might be an okay phone but it's not going to matter commercially so I mean going forward it's hard to see what Apple's what what's going to really compete with apple I mean there may be sort of a A disruption for us where people go back to feature phones or something you know on that kind of level but um it's hard to see what's going to be in their path so it'll be interesting to see what happens in 2017 what new stuff they roll out all right this has been episode 101 uh where can people find you on the internet Dan on Twitter at Daniel Aaron and it's also my Instagram but we also have a an apple Insider it's Apple Insider official on Instagram where we post photos and videos and stuff excellent well I'm I'm your host Victor you can see me doing my headstand with my earpods in yeah we saw that in your article we talked about it last week and and that's the episode if you catch Daniel wearing airpods doing headstands around San Francisco be sure to talk to him and uh or or at least take funny pictures and post them on Instagram and Link them to us at Twitter we will be back next week this is episode1 thank you very much please feel free to leave reviews at iTunes and uh contact us and tell us what we're doing what could do better we are happy to do this for you and we hope you keep enjoying it\n"