The NEST Secure Product: A Case Study

The Nest secure product has been around for four years now, and many people have had suspicions about its legitimacy from the very beginning. However, despite these concerns, the product continued to be sold without much scrutiny. It's astonishing to think that it took this long for anyone to really take a closer look at how such a product could exist in the first place. One can only wonder what kind of expertise and resources went into creating something like this.

The Founders' Departure and Staff Changes

It appears that there have been some significant changes within the Nest team over the years. The founders, Tony Fidel and Matt Rogers, seem to have moved on from their roles at Nest, which raises questions about the company's stability and direction. This departure has left fans wondering what exactly is happening behind the scenes.

Qualcomm and Apple: A Patent Dispute

A recent development in the world of technology involves a dispute between Qualcomm and Apple over patents. It turns out that Apple had discovered a software workaround to overcome one of Qualcomm's patented designs, which was deemed impossible just months prior. This revelation has led to concerns about the ITC (International Trade Commission) making a final ruling on whether or not there should be a ban on iPhones with Intel chips. The stakes are high, as this could have significant implications for both companies and the wireless modem market.

Apple's Solution: Software Update

In an unexpected twist, Apple revealed that they had discovered a software workaround to circumvent Qualcomm's patented design. Instead of modifying their hardware or relying on external workarounds, they opted to update their iOS system, which effectively rendered the patent invalid. This move was seen as a clever solution by Apple, but also raised questions about whether this was indeed a legitimate way to skirt around the ban.

Qualcomm's Rebuttal

Qualcomm has taken issue with Apple's discovery of this software workaround, arguing that it undermines the previous decision made by the ITC. According to Qualcomm, this new development opens up the door for another temporary ban on iPhones with Intel chips. The company is pushing for a final ruling from the ITC, which will determine whether or not there should be an injunction against Apple.

The Impact of the Ban

If the ITC were to grant the injunction, it would have significant consequences for both companies and consumers alike. A ban on iPhones with Intel chips could lead to lost sales, missed opportunities, and a negative impact on consumer confidence. With Apple having already found a way to work around this issue in Germany, it's likely that other manufacturers will also explore similar solutions.

Qualcomm's Monopoly

One of the key concerns raised by Qualcomm is the potential for a monopoly on wireless modems. By granting a ban on iPhones with Intel chips, Qualcomm would effectively give itself control over the market. This could lead to higher prices and reduced competition, which would be detrimental to consumers in the long run.

Conclusion

The situation surrounding Apple, Qualcomm, and the ITC is complex and multifaceted. While Apple has found creative solutions to overcome the ban, Qualcomm continues to push for a final ruling that would uphold the injunction. The outcome of this case will have significant implications for both companies and the wireless modem market as a whole.

Qualcomm's Actions in Germany

In Germany, Apple has been selling modified iPhones with Intel chips, which has raised questions about how they managed to skirt around the ban so easily. It appears that Apple had anticipated this issue and took steps to modify their product to comply with German regulations.

The Impact of Resolving the Legal Case

While it's unclear what the outcome of this case will be, one thing is certain: resolving this dispute will bring a sense of closure to all parties involved. Whether through a settlement or a final ruling from the ITC, this case has highlighted the complexities and challenges of navigating patent disputes in the tech industry.

The Case in April

There's also another case pending in April, which could have further implications for Apple and Qualcomm. While details about this case are scarce, it's clear that there will be more twists and turns to come as this dispute continues to unfold.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor and joining me is my good friend friend to all mankind William gallager see I spend the week worrying how you're going to describe that I don't know why actually cuz uh this is your show and I'm just a kind of stand in stunt guest aren't I so at any moment you could have somebody better on but every week I'm wondering what you going to do to me well have I ever ever I have never come on and introduced you saying this is my friend William a very little brain no you could better have done this is William because no one else is available I would have accepted that one okay no no William you're always welcome okay that's very nice and I do look forward to when we get to do this especially on weeks like this when there does seem to be quite a lot going on isn't there just a little bit not much actually yeah right okay well let's let's start talking about some of this because I know exactly what it is you want out of life more than anything please tell me cuz I'm not sure more than anything yes you want a 16 to 16 and 1 12 inch MacBook Pro not not ESP Healy here but not so much I know no I want to finish the play I'm working on but in terms of Hardware you want an iMac I'm aware but go with me for a second because there's the possibility that the MacBook as we know it could change entirely well into Windows machine or well I mean you can do that with boot camp anyway but currently we've had for a long time we've had machines that were 13in that were 15in that were occasionally 17in and since 2015 we'd have had the current models of 13 and 15 that were very slim with the uh the the new style butterfly keyboard and along the way we've had rumors of of different things that were going to happen to the keyboard whether it was putting in extra rubber cups to try and prevent dust and dirt from getting into the keyboard for the butterfly keyboard to the idea that the whole keyboard could be replaced with a glass panel that would have haptic feedback and that it would feel like a keyboard and now we have a rumor from TF International Securities analyst minki quo who says that sometime in 2019 that there will be an upgraded 13-in MacBook Pro with 32 GB of RAM and the 15-in models will become 16 and 16 and 12 inch models now one of the ways that that can happen is if you look at a convert MacBook Pro there's a rather large bezel around the screen there's a black border right and yes and you can push the screen to the edges now that that's since about 2018 it's been possible to get screens that go to the edges and so okay this is when I should confess that only a couple days ago as we record this I got out my tape measure and measured my old iMac to see just how big the screen could potentially be so um you're saying you've done that with MacBooks and you think this is how it's going to work I I think that so the the the the screen is what dictates the size of the actual laptop because you can't have a screen that overlaps the uh the the the base the Palm rest the the keys right the screen dictates the size of the Palm rest and they don't really I mean the 15in size is a good size it's a size a lot of people use it fits in bags well and if you grow that then everyone's got to go ahead and buy new bags which isn't necessarily a bad problem but it's not necessarily a good problem either you know this is a good form factor and so my expectation is that they would do a little bit of both they would grow screen to the edge and maybe increase the overall size just a little bit okay resulting in a 16 to 16 and a bit inch MacBook Pro right and the one of the nice things about when you grow the the size in terms of width and depth of the laptop sitting on your desk is that you could potentially if you wanted to have the same amount of battery just make it thinner because now you can spread out just that much further around the edges you know the the other thing you could do is Cape it the same thickness and just increase the amount of battery you get which would be a very Apple thing to do or you could just go crazy and make it thicker so that we can have a longer travel keyboard but I accept that's not going to happen so yeah in in the pantheon of unlikely things that are to happen proposed by William that's one of them okay I wasn't keeping a list but okay yes yes I I'm not sure what to think about this because it all makes sense of course what you say I follow that I hadn't thought about the bezel on the MacBook but yes of course it's just I used to have a 17inch uh Power book and in retrospect that was like carrying a sale around with me um I don't remember finding it awkward but now compared to you know like my well frankly to my iPhone it would feel ludicrous well I mean there was the netbook that was the smallest form factor of a laptop there there was the old if you really want to go back to it the IBM 701 CS that was the butterfly keyboard where it wasn't a butterfly key switch like we use today it was a keyboard that was split down the middle and literally puzzle pieced in so that it could fit under a very small screen and when you open it up it spread its wings and the keyboard hung off the edges of the laptop base IBM in the UK absolutely beautiful site uh has a small little Museum of previous IBM products and I I was shown one of those in there absolutely gorgeous thing yeah I have two of them they were such beloved machines that people would take the 46 processor out of them and sent the mother birds off to have them upgraded to pentiums okay I never it worked I never got one of those ones I still have the 46 model but it was um it was a thing where people would upgrade them and upgrade their processors inside and so how'd you get Mac OS on them uh sheep shaer right wasn't expecting a serious answer there not sure I got a serious answer but okay sheep shaver and vmac yeah sheep shaver and vmac were one of those old emulators so VM Marx uses vmac okay well you used to back in the old days it's not really been used in a long time but that was one of the ways you could get System 7 or system you know to to to run on those kinds of things the classics yeah but the the beauty of let's see where our MacBook Pro could go is that obviously if you had 32 G Max you would probably be talking about U lpddr Ram or or ddr4 Ram which is faster and a little more power hungry you'd also probably be looking at trying to get a 10 nanometer Intel chip so that you could uh go that much faster now don't know the difference between these different types of ram but I'm guessing uh faster generally yeah possibly more capacity more expensive yes okay right oh I'm up to date there then okay um you also said new processes and things but okay what's what's interesting about this note is that this note says that these laptops are going to be aimed at designers and Gamers and gaming is is one of those areas where Apple has never quite succeeded you know they've tried for years they had John carac work with them on things they had you know they they they tried to get openg GL to be a thing they have done a large number of attempts at gaming including metal and and metal to right and mhm the uptake has never been there on Mac and and to be fair they sort of failed at gaming on Apple TV as well it's U for for a myriad of reasons so part of it is Hardware right Apple tends to ship gpus that are not exactly the gpus that gamers are looking for you know a gamer these days wants like an RTX 208 you know 2080 or whatever the newest thing from Nvidia is or or something shiny like that and you know apple apple will ship a GPU but it's it's not going to be the one that a gamer will find in a dedicated uh you know a dedicated like uh HP Omen laptop or something like that I will cheerily confess that I have zero interest in gaming but it does seem to me that whatever gamer is using now is stuff that you what do you call me a regular productivity kind of user will benefit from later so I like to see these things coming through but apart from being addicted to uh suduku on my iPad i' never play games at all right okay we'll just move on from that just been fired haven't I why are you so nervous and paranoid about being fired William in the history a in the history of this podcast have we ever fired someone don't answer don't know no and and I have I have never actually fired anyone from the podcast just saying so that because I know we'll get comments years and years of being freelanced with BBC where uh you had no contract per se and it was you could be gone next week for you know and actually I liked that uh but I see it's affected my psyche and it has you're you're getting from it what if I throw in the fact that I have played chess quite a bit as well very very badly but I've played it so that's two games I'm surely officially a gamer now I need one of these Nvidia RT thingies that you mentioned yes give me one of those absolutely yeah yeah all right now quo also talked about the possibility of the 2019 iPhone and what it's going to be like and and so what he was talking about is he expects that the true depth camera will see an update that there will be a higher power flood Illuminator for better face ID recognition that the 6.1in LCD model might get 4 gig of RAM up from the current 3 gig that it has in the iPhone 10r the uh the the top end iPhone will get a triple lens camera system with a wide telephoto and Ultra wide option we don't know whether or not that would would be in both the 5.8 and 6.5 in OLED models we have no idea about exactly where that goes but that's what they're looking at uh now all of the lineup may get Ultra wideband which is useful for indoor positioning and navigation you know how sometimes you go indoors and you lose your GPS signal Ultra wideband is the cure for that I thought staying outside was the secure but okay it seems more workable will these phones be foldable though isn't that really what we want no okay so Samsung released a folding phone and Samsung's foldable phone is ridiculous money very very version one very very thick now I'm kind of glad it exists as a version ones because if it's ever to become practical then someone needs to make a rough version one so that they can make make a better version too but this thing is is very very rough now there are a bunch of different ideas for what foldable should be should it be something that folds in half vertically like a folio case and then you open it up and you've got bigger screen to work with should it be something that folds backwards Across The Binding so that it's a small display in your hand like a normal phone and then you open it up for more or should it be a clamshell kind of like the old uh the old flip phones no one's exactly positive what these things should should be but Samsung has gone ahead and released one and they're the first manufacturer with a big name to go ahead and do it we we saw one back in January at CES but this is really the first real one and uh you know there there are valid concerns first of all how the operating system handles it now Google said that they're going to make Android work with folding phones um the other thing is you know I worry a little bit about stress right anytime that you have a joint that moves eventually that joint is going to wear out and break but Samsung did go to some lengths to talk about I can't remember the system of Gears that they used for it it's actually the whole presentation was very Apple like apart from the lack of Applause when expected other than that it was very Apple showing design and the inard bit for the hinge well I don't know how to design anything but it looked very impressive to me one of the things about giving a presentation like that is that with apple they never waited for Applause they kept talking and when the Applause happened then they'd pause for it but they they could have gone on and given the whole presentation without a single bit of Applause you know I do remember what was the Apple presentation in New York where it was they were practically thrown by how the audience were reacting so much to it and you could see they were trying to press through uh was yes I was watching the Samsung thing and it was like and it folds Tada no nobody wants to appla nope I think this is really interesting phone I mean no use to me cuz it runs Android and it's Android that I don't like uh but otherwise what what do you dislike about Android pretty much every bit of it it feels unfinished to me still I find it clunky uh there are so many options in it when I don't really care about option so what what Android were you using what version of Android were you using I have absolutely like was this on a pixel was it some Samsung thing what was this no idea can't remember a single thing except instantly thinking really seriously what was the thing that threw me go it was this thing where I thought oh this is really good and then it wasn't it's like it was half good I like you couldn't be bother I remember the person showing it to me uh blamed Apple for it uh Apple has some some rights to something and therefore this Android maker couldn't do something and it was all just oh come on yeah work don't work fed up so I've I've used uh Android in every iteration of it and you know I try and use things like the Nexus or the pixel or or something that's a sterile build a real build from Android as opposed to from Apple from Google sorry a real build from Google as opposed to being a uh a modified version like Samsung would do and it's uh you know it's one of those things where you use it for a week or two and it this could quite work this could be all right but I do like coming back to Apple knowing that it's a secure phone that it can be restored to a secure state that it's that it's um reliable where Android I always question how how reliable is this how secure is this should I really feel comfortable using it kind of thing but if I were I think of nothing of that if I were completely ignorant I mean it would be probably okay well I might as well be completely ignorant because I do know about the security concerns but I don't think about them very much CU I'm so used to using Mac stuff but if I use uh Android if I use quite often have to use a Windows PC and it just ticks me off the number of things I have to think about other than my work uh when getting it done I just uh can't bear it so y I come back yeah now there's also word about a modular Mac Pro and you know they they've talked about the Mac Pro being modular in the past they also talked about uh when they talked about the Mac mini earlier last year about it being something that could be stacked and and of course it can be so the idea here is that a modular Mac Pro would be units that could stack and would have a connector going between them so that you could get your Tower of of stackable modules to the configuration you needed we should say that this is all coming from uh one YouTube channel yeah um which I can't pronounce the name of I'm not trying to hide it can you pronounce it telosian te something TS Tech right I am certain that was a race in Star Trek but whoever uh they I mean I don't know the uh Providence of this I don't know how likely it is to be accurate but they have an amazing amount of detail and it most of it all seems kind of very plausible including this stackability I mean all Apple has actually said is 2019 modular there be a display um and this Builds on all of that and kind of confirms bits of it except that there's a claim as well that it might be delayed to next year everything seems terribly plausible um and if it is all right well I'm a bit disappointed in way because it's like spoilers you know let Apple show me this stuff rather than whoever they are unpronouncable yeah and it's it's one of those things where that's the problem with rumors all the time is that you sort of want to know and at the same time you want to hold back yes yes now this this is something that's more important and we should really pay attention to is the concept of what's going to happen with Macos and iOS and I say that because Mac OS has for years used what's called appkit as the framework for UI and things like that and iOS used UI kit which was meant for iPhones and then iPads and so forth and last year at WWDC they showed us UI kit on Mac OS and called it marzipan and the idea was that you could bring iOS apps to Mac OS and that's great one of the things that some people wanted and thought about was the idea of Mac OS apps being Rewritten to use uiit that appkit would go away and that when that happened that Mac apps could then be put on iOS and and of course the big example that people use for this the concept of let's put Final Cut Pro on iOS because where is the good Final Cut Pro app for iOS and what I have to say is I think that's not going to happen or certainly not going to happen anytime soon partly because just how how tied to appkit Final Cut Is and rewriting it for UI kit would would be very difficult there would be things that simply wouldn't translate now certainly Apple could throw those out as they did with moving to Final Cut Pro 10 from previous versions but I don't know that that's what they really want to do at this time this just seems to me like a way to get people who weren't developing for the Mac to effectively develop for the Mac um at the cost of I don't know one more email or one more tick boox or something rather than uh and a way to shed the Mac of its old things and move over right so the I would like find look on iPad that's absolutely true but there is one isn't there I forgot the name of it but Apple used it in that um iPad Pro videoed it yeah Adobe premere no something with an L Luminosity or something like that forgive me I will look it up uh for the show notes but I can't remember what it is now it just I thought oh that looks rather nice right so the goal is like you say to to allow doers to make a single binary that can be submitted to a unified App Store the the thing is is that it's not clear how well that will work out you know it's a nice idea to make it so that the app stores are merged as far as users is concerned but it's it's not really sure that that will actually take place the way people hope you know Windows tried to do this and they ended up having Windows phone and Windows RT for the uh the RT Arm based tablets and also for the the regular surface and laptops for Windows 10 and they thought that people would then write those unified apps it didn't really work out and it end uping off the fact that Windows phone just didn't take off why was it wor anybody well Windows phone could have taken off they they failed with Windows phone in part because they didn't do enough to support their development community and by that I mean one of the steps they made was they they initially started their app store without an age ranging or or age rating system you know in in the IOS app store it will say this app is meant for people who are 17 and above right contains contains that you know know contains themes that are more mature or contains violence or whatever you know if you've got a game like Infinity Blade and it shows blood as you slash a sword through someone okay so maybe that's uh one that that at least mentions that in the store well Windows store didn't really do that initially and so then they patched it to to add that category to it and then wanted every developer to create and submit a new build rather than just going and editing their metadata and they didn't have enough user base so that all the developers that were were out there said you know what we're not going to submit a new build just for this give us a break and Microsoft took out every app that did not submit a new build when asked to to account for that change in the app store and they shot themselves in the foot because they basically took every app out of their App Store well whoops this doesn't really fit with the the Steve B developers develop developers thing a few years ago I was thought um an advantage of Windows is that they have these this amazing development pool well that didn't exactly work out in their favor let's say okay and uh so it'll be interesting you see that happening with Apple if they do this I mean they've been known to pull things well before but I can't see them doing something quite like that I mean they they've sort of had uh a bit of a difficult time with the Mac app store right the Mac App Store initially had people come to it but then left it because it's sandboxing rules and difficulties and things like that and so now people distribute outside the Mac App Store and apple would like everyone to be Distributing through the App Store no for no small reason because they also get that 30% cut but also because it's a nice unified way for people to find software and be secure that the you know be be sure that the software they're loading is from a secure Source it's authenticated and Apple would very much like for that for their users so this kind of change would make good sense for Apple but does it make good sense for those developers that are currently Distributing outside the Mac App Store maybe not okay I I mean I like the redesign of the Mac App Store but it has problems I dislike it vehemently well if have you tried to get back previous purchases there are times when it simply doesn't work um well ask on app inside of I had to get around most of it but still finding problems the problem with the App Store is the same problem with the App Store on Apple TV which is trying to search for things is bad trying to search for prior purchases is very bad my purchases in the old version of the Mac App Store used to be in a long list that I could scroll and then install and what it really needed at the top was a search field so I could search that list and that would break it to you but there was search field yeah now yeah soar bear with me ah hard to find well so if it's hard to find then they haven't done their job right now sure now if you're in the Mac App Store and you go to your prior purchases and I'm doing this as we do it just so that no one can say I haven't uh hate to break it to you just like you did okay so I have my purchase list and there is no search field among my purchase list there's a search field in the left column but that searches the whole store yes I just want to search my prior purchases because Lord knows I have like uh a long list of scrolling through them especially now that they're no longer presented in list form they're now presented in two columns it is so much harder yeah you say that but clearly you have not appreciated or at least not suffered from the greater problem which is uh there are many times when you will find for some reason genely I cannot fathom out why that list of previous purchases is wrong uh for the longest time I had apparently only ever purchased one app and I'd never even heard of it I must have downloaded it for something uh I went through contortions to get them all back and I believed I did but I'm still every now and again finding one that does just simply doesn't list for it even though it hasn't been removed I did legitimately buy it I can find it through my iTunes receipts and all of this there's something very very screwy about the database for previous purchases so that problem have not been able to find them just on the list um my heart doesn't bleed it might Hemorrhage a tiny amount for you yeah well they have problems yeah that's problem the wait wait we're talking about app stores actually so this is this is relevant so you remember you remember what was like trying to find software before a Mac app store right well it was it was very difficult you you you know you'd look around you'd search the internet maybe you'd find a CNET download page or you'd you know you'd go to Mac update.com and you'd search things and try and figure out what what on Earth application is going to actually meet your needs right really hard to do and I don't know how we coped I genuinely can't remember how we did it at all but yes okay it was another world and trying to find software is still actually a challeng all and so there's a site called capa.com and capa.com is a free online resource to help you find the very best software solutions for your business and they have over 700,000 reviews of products from real users so you can kind of discover everything you need to make an informed decision they have 700 specific categories of software everything from project management to email marketing to yoga studio management software so no matter what kind of software your business needs they make it easy to find the right solution fast there are millions of people who use Capa each month to find the right tools for their business and you can join them you can be among them visit capa.com appleinsider for free today to find the right tools to make 2019 the year for Your Business capa.com apppp Insider Capa that's cap a p t raa.com slapple inssider and I I I think it really is relevant you know we we how do you find good software that's going to actually meet your needs and the Mac App Store doesn't really help you do that you still end up searching the web and a resource like Capa actually fixes this problem okay sorry my mind has gone partly I'm back trying to remember how in the world we have a coat of this but now summ all the stuff I've read about uh Apple's merging of things took about it from the developer point of view that I as a developer will just submit once and it will propagate out um that doesn't necessarily follow then that there will be one single App Store um for as far as users are concerned well I mean the interface for the Mac App Store now mirrors very much the interface for the IOS app store these things are coming closer together although the content isn't Al although you can search your purchases on the Mac on the uh the apple and TV and the iPhone app store so there's that oh true but um it's it's sort of becoming this unification and they would like for you to be able to submit once and have it be everywhere but what that means is if you're designing an app for iOS you create your UI for that if you're designing it for Mac you have to go ahead and create it again now if you're using storyboards maybe you can avoid that but really if you're trying to make an that lives up to the best of what you want it to be then you have to put in some work for it for both platforms now there will people who say look at the current stocks app and say no apple clearly didn't and they're not wrong but you know or or the news app for that matter you know these these don't feel as much like good Mac applications as they do like electron apps or node.js apps you know react kind of things which are are portable but if if you don't have applications that really show off and take advantage of what the platform can do then the platform is sort of wasted right if if all of your applications are web- based why would you own a Mac is a valid question sure it's always been the same thing with final draft which is built for Windows and PCs and always comes out on the Windows is looking like a 1980s PC app I mean it there's lots to love in final draft but the look is not one of them yes and the feature list isn't as much as it could be you know you wrote you wrote that final draft review and I I pointed out and you you protested but I pointed out that I really like using um Highland and Fountain yeah Highland's great it doesn't do quite everything I might want but what it does it's really really good out yes right and it's also a Mac app it's a proper application as opposed to a port from Windows true yes you know granted the work is what's what matters right but but using the tools can make making the work more pleasurable and uh I I I I long ago gave up touching final draft of course I don't do it nearly as professionally as you do so it's uh sort of a moot point I'm not exactly their ideal customer but that's what I get I'm not in the writer's Guild William I'm sorry okay you can apply to be if you have sufficient um credits and things let's just do a plug for The Writers Guild of America West and East fine organizations I'm uh just to be clear I'm Deputy chair of the Writers Guild of Great Britain which is of course Affiliated but it's not the same thing I think you would have to have british-based credits to have a hope of joining The Guild here but you know you're already in America that gives you a head start yeah you've just got to write things a lot right that are made o how do we get on to that from final trft uh app stores then we it looks like uh apple apple is actually said haven't they uh that the ones they did so far stocks home news that's their kind of internal testing thing and that in a year's time they will do whatever it is they do to let developers uh do more so I'm assuming WWDC we'll see more details about that sensible don't know that's the idea yeah yeah now we we should discuss the financials for a moment you know we we talked about how they had made their earnings adjust and and you know the stock price was affected by that things like that well the holiday quarter results revealed that iphon Revenue was down 15% compared to last year but unit Figures were not provided by the company under the new policy so Gartner went ahead and tried to compile some data and according to Gartner's data the number of units did go down but at a lower percentage of 11.8% which is believed to be the worst quarterly decline for the company since the first quarter of 2016 but their CLA claing that iPhone unit sales reached 64.5 million for the quarter down from 73.2 in the fourth quarter of 17 so for 2018 as a whole iPhone sales are down just 2.7% or 209 million units now I'm sorry I got so lost you got lost all that's why I capped it with the year right 2.7% doesn't sound that bad does it uh no I 2.7% of a very very big number isn't wonderful but yes proportionately uh I I'm not panicking for Apple should we say but the rest of it um yeah yeah seems like you could add those numbers up and get any result you want which may be true the the thing is that it really looks as if the weaker demand was that it was it was a little bit weaker across most regions with the exception of North America and the mature asia-pacific markets um China saw the biggest Decline and that's that's what it comes down to so so that's of the basically that's sort of what we thought we already knew but Gartner's numbers tend to agree with it and we agree with Gartner well maybe not always but it it certainly seems to jib with the rest of what we know all right so on average it's a good sour because you hear of so many analysts so many things I I never quite keep up with uh who has accurate data and I don't know how they're getting this data anyway so there must be some intelligence and guess work in there somewhere yeah but I'm sure they're very very good at it yes yes now Goldman Sachs and apple are working on a credit card we've had this rumor before but it looks as if they're continuing work on this project that resint result in a jointly produced credit card that offers extra functions in the wallet app so you could potentially use it to manage your spending and your accounts more effectively without requiring a separate credit card app all right I can see that yes uh I actually think America is better off for financial apps than the UK because you have mint.com which always looks great and keeps not coming uh to the UK at all so I don't tend to use an app for it I go straight to my bank accounts uh online banking all of them every now and again and manage them that way so the idea of something on my phone uh helping me spend more money that really does that works for me I can follow that yeah now there's also some suggestion that the Rings concept that's used on the Apple watch could be ported into this and no one's really sure exactly for what yet although I kind of wonder if it would be around Financial Health right you know use the Rings for your spending activity or or your saving activity or you know your saving towards goals kind of thing would be good uh William you're so close to going into overdraft a little 7 pound purchase would put you right over yeah okay yeah actually I wonder if there also do the sharing thing cuz um I really just like the health sharing activity bit because everybody I'm sharing with is doing better than I am uh but the idea of actually having uh your your financial details shared with say your partner or bookkeeper maybe something like that if that isn't the same person then that could actually be really quite motivating um and that' be a useful thing yeah maybe yeah I'm just making it up now the the idea here is that this would also of course do tail on Apple pay and maybe it would help push some Apple pay adoption which I generally keep forgetting that there's even an issue about Apple P adopting because we covered this before the compli as much as I think you us has better uh financial apps your financial system as a whole is so complicated compared to here where the moment Apple pay existed it was accepted everywhere because of other systems we have I pay with it so much that I forget the an issue that anybody can't so yeah Target Target retail big retail in America just turned on tap to pay at all of their terminals only just now they have not enabled Apple pay for their own Target Red Card their branded card now the Branded card from them gives you 5% discount on your entire purchase so it's there's there's a value to using it but it's not an Apple pay approved card it doesn't work in Apple pay so if you want to use that card in an you end up using the target app and scanning a barcode as opposed to as opposed to being able to put it in your your wallet and tap to pay that way that's thought you will know this um certainly more than I do in the UK there is um uh a kind of notional limit uh of30 when you're paying through Apple pay uh or or any kind of uh contactless system lots of places if you're paying through Apple pay they don't care they'll take anything they kind of trust it but in Theory it enough places limit you to 30 that we've kind of trained ourselves to not go over 30 when we're doing this is it the same no in America because right 5% of30 is less uh of a bigger deal than 5% of a thousand isn't it so yeah uh is there no limit No Limit okay no no limit you but it does make me uh understand more why people would be fuss I mean I might be wrong to not want a 5% discount or not be fussed about a 5% discount if I'm buying a F's worth of food or something uh but it doesn't hurt me as much as a larger amount would so yes I get that if if you're shopping for groceries and clothing and personal hygiene goods and stuff like that and you walk out with a basket that's full of uh you know $150 worth of product you want your 5% yeah absolutely yeah and that it's just sort of this weird state that they're in where they they accept tap to pay but their own product for that gives you that discount is not in the tap to pay stuff so you can't you have to use their barcode app or swipe the physical cardly when you say tap to pay that's what I would call um uh contact L the same and that means that's not specifically for Apple pay it's for any type of correct correct so that means none of the contact ones have the the Target Card system the Target Card does not contactless yeah right so it's possible since Apple I don't I've never used this apple does add some sort of loyalty cards doesn't it they do they do yeah they so if they were to switch on target that would actually put them ahead of every other contactless uh thing in the states it's it's so they should do that Target that has to make that decision and they have as yet no plans oh I see right okay yeah now you know how sometimes you have a product a hardware product and you have an app for it and the app will say hey there's an update for your Hardware product would you like to update it and it will actually update the firmware of that Hardware product yeah yes okay and frequently it says things like hold the phone close and don't leave the app when you're doing this so that nothing happens and goes wrong when you're updating right uh I guess this sounds like what I used to get with the Apple watch a lot that's the only I can think of does this but yes I've been through this process so Nike has a shoe called the Nike adapt BB and these are self-lacing sneakers that can be tightened and loosened via the smartphone app I know you're you're you're you're stunned right you're shocked struggling to judge I just uh I can't quite see how these where you're going with this how these two things join up together well so because they can be controlled by the app there's the communication between the two now Engineers like to leave themselves doors so that they can update things if they need to right if a product is shipped and finished and can't be updated then if they have a bug they can't fix it later so they leave you know leave themselves an opening to update and in this case if you have the Android version of the Nike adapt app it will deliver a faulty version of the new firmware and brick your shoes brick your shoes yeah okay what does that actually look like I mean do the shoes close up no but they they won't respond to the app any longer and they won't and it's possible that they also won't respond to adjusting the shoes so what happens if you break your shoe while wearing it well that's the thing is that we don't actually know because Nike has yet to provide a solution or even comment on the issue okay but it's definitely an issue so so so here here's the thing right if you used the IOS app you were okay but if you were using the Android app the uh the the shoe stops responding and cannot be updated and if you perform a hard reset on your shoe it doesn't appear to solve the problem I'm sorry a hard reset on your shoe I don't know why it's tickling me I need to reboot my shoe excuse me oh imagine if it was boots you had to reboot your boots uh and you bought them from boots which is a yes yes okay all righty but really this boils down to this Ison yet another difference between Android and iPhone uh the iPhone uh has some sort of satorial uh safety measure to stop your feet getting trapped so here's the problem is that Nike so when you do a firmware update when when you design a product and the product can't have a firmware update if you were really concerned about what you were doing if you were smart you would put in an extra bit of flash RAM and have it partitioned and the partition will have a duplicate copy of the firmware and when you update it should copy to the second part of the partition and then update from that and then copy it to the recovery partition so basically there is there is always always a good F of the firm where to boot so if it tries to to start from the failed update it can fall back to the good one except uh that's presumably more expense uh for the hardware manufactures and all this stuff but if that's what's happened here how has it not been an issue for iPhone no it didn't it didn't happen here they didn't they didn't build that into the shoe the iPhone simply just loaded the firmware correctly and maintained the connection with the device correctly the Android app did not now this is a mistake that firm that that engineers make all the time this this cost part saving or whatever you know I uh I had to flash the power management computer in my car last summer and when I was flashing it I was using a laptop and it got about 30% across and then failed and now I had a failed firmware flash on my car and couldn't start my car and had they built in the extra flash memory as I said and had a recovery partition for it then I would have been able to contined starting the car we truly are two countries divided by a Common Language cuz if you tell somebody you're at flashing in your car here yeah you'd be arrested would you yeah no I program I was programming the computer in my car as you do okay yes now is that a typical operation for most people no is programming the firmware updating your shoe going to be typical yeah probably yeah can't question that but okay yes if you're a Nike adapt BB owner yes yes it will okay how this idea of Bluetooth presum it's Bluetooth Bluetooth enabl choose catching on with any other manufacturers actually we've been doing bluetooth enabled shoes for quite some time you just haven't really thought about it they tend to be for runners or footy players football players oh okay so there some sort of data monitoring it's very much data monitoring in in running it's you know step counting it's pressure as your foot hits the ground it's gate analysis it's it's things like that and some of the same stuff that you use in the sub football stuff too and okay you know you know it's it's possible to detect if you're injured by noticing the difference in your gate it's possible to advise on your running or keep track of your running and synchronize those with apps that help you manage you know your preparation for a marathon for example you know or or apps like straa for example where Strava was going ahead and Reporting geolocation on troop movements and stuff like that a year ago so straa I haven't heard that oh yeah right so there are all kinds of of things we've been doing with foot pods for years you know the original Nike Foot pod Nike run was a was a footp pod that worked with an iPod and that was using Bluetooth sorry my mind's just gone back to all these Android owning Footwear users uh how many formal garas and I don't know funerals are there where somebody cannot get out of their their pumps and has to be there in their finery and athletic footwear as well you know you this is not exactly the podcast where we comment on sorial fashion this is not you're right we should wait for the next season of Dancing With the Stars well I mean I mean I I sometimes host another podcast where we talk about luxury items and and and fashion and things like this and if if you'd like to be on that one we can do that one I have absolutely no knowledge or skill or experience so yeah I'm definitely up for that I was just waiting for he you say interest I didn't hear it so yeah you're on well actually interest I I was very careful to say Dancing with the Stars there uh the version we have here is called Strictly Come Dancing historical reasons and honestly a part of it is frogwatch I was at uh BBC Birmingham uh last week and in the reception area they have some of the most gorgeous frocks from the show and I admit my first thought is no human being is Slim enough to wear those but beyond that I mean the use of materials and stuff it's really interesting so all right well we'll arrange that and uh when we do we'll go ahead when we host an episode we'll go ahead and tell you all about it here on the Apple Insider podcast now security is still one of those things that we talk about over here and Nest secure a product owned by Google is a uh security system that works with Google assistant and nest and things like that and and what happened was that apparently it was out for 18 months and Google announced an update that said hey there's a mic in it now and you can use it for Google assistant and people are upset because they didn't realize that their security system had a microphone in it for the past 18 months that they weren't ever told about right so that means a security system is arguably insecure well I mean one could certainly think about that now uh obviously Google's saying that the mic had not been enabled previously and that using it is an opt-in feature that can be activated or disabled at any time via the app uh but that doesn't really Comfort people because people didn't really like the idea that their home security system had the potential to record them what could possibly go wrong well so Google says the on device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs that was an error on our part the microphone has never been on and is only activated when the users specifically enable the option but people are already distrustful of this stuff right yes absolutely uh there is a worry for it I I quite I mean it doesn't sound very likely that make a mistake but I can completely buy that it did so you know we've all made mistakes for it so yeah I think I think the issue here is that Google Google should not have done this when they're sort of operating at a trust deficit right people distrust Google and distrust Amazon and and for that matter distrust Facebook and one of the things that I think is that sometimes the employees there don't even realize that they're operating in in this sort of trust deficit that they they have a bubble around them that thinks well we're doing good stuff people should trust us absolutely we're fine and we saw that from Facebook employees who made comments to that effect when Apple yanked their certificate a few weeks back right this is just Apple trying to have revenge against Facebook this is this is not serious and and apple is just grandstanding again on privacy where were those kinds of comments so people really don't realize that that their company is not necessarily seen in the best of light you know Google probably thought they could go ahead and issue this release and that it'll just blow over and it probably will blow over but but it's not a good situation is it except if you're listening to the Apple Insider podcast I think you're uh unless you stumbled across this by accident and stayed for the comedy which would be very nice you you're you're conscious of this stuff more than the average average consumer and there are a lot of average consumers I would have said actually I'm an average consumer most of the time but I know about this one the majority of people who buy Google things I suspect are not as fuss as we know they should be so yes I think it will blow over I think I think you're right about go Google's perception of themselves but they're also aware that for the greater majority of the market uh so what and why should they be fussed about something as terrible as this we we should be absolutely clear right there's no evidence that this was a working microphone there there's no evidence there was actually EES dropping on anyone and Google announced this update enabled the microphone there there was no blogger that discovered a nefarious activity there was no one that that found this out and discovered it it just was they announced it everyone said wait a minute what do you mean you're announcing that how how is that even possible right so we we have to really look a little bit harder for find something really nefarious The Nest secure product came out four years after Google acquired Nest most people that would be concerned about this would have already been suspicious of the nest secure product a little bit right you know that's I can't believe it's that long but yes okay I agree yeah it it really is uh Tony Fidel is kind of out over there and Matt Rogers hasn't been doing a whole lot over there and and they Founders have moved on yes should we wrap it up with a Qualcomm story a qualcom story yeah really is there anything going on well previously on Qualcomm Qualcomm has has tried to get product banss around the world they' tried to get product banss in the US they tried to get product banss in Germany they tried to get them in uh in China and so Qualcomm was seeking a ban from the uness International Trade Commission after the judge in September made an initial ruling against that action saying it'd be against public interest and he declared Apple in violation of one of three contested patents leaving the door open for for action but there was not an induction he said a ban with on iPhones with Intel chips would effectively give Qualcomm a monopoly over the wireless modem Market um so Apple revealed that they discovered a software workaround to qualcomm's design something that they originally deemed impossible in Prior arguments Qualcomm believes that this Revelation undermines Pender's previous decision and so Qualcomm thinks that that by Apple discovering this software workaround it opens the door again to number the temporary ban and so it looks like by March 26th the ITC is going to have to make a final ruling that that decides whether or not there's going to be a ban did you get lost in that the last thing I remember about this story is uh Apple saying um all that time ago last week that they we're reintroducing the iPhone 7 and 8 with uh Qualcomm Hardware in Germany to get around that pan uh is this saying nah need bother just update iOS and everything's fine right so that's what they're they're saying is that they they begin selling the modified iPhone 78 models with Qualcomm modom to skirt the ban in Germany but they found over here that they could go ahead and do a software update as a work around to to get around the patent problem and so now call com saying wait a minute if you do that then you absolutely are in violation give us the ban give us the injunction so right we will kind that but um my mind's still on Germany if Apple in the US has figured they can get or believes they can get around the patent with software uh are whoever it is that decided to buy some more Qualcomm chips in Germany going do I expect not in part because of speed to getting back in Market all right that makes sense good point yes I I think you know the very worst case is being under a legal cloud and not having product for sale because that's where people begin to lose confidence and then don't want to take the product back on the shelves and of course Apple because they're Apple they don't run that risk nearly as badly but there's never a time when you want to not have product on the Shelf when you when you don't want it available and so because it's it's lost sales it's missing out and it's it's that cloud and that's the cloud not only with consumers but with retailers and so getting back on market with the modified fast was the right answer the real right answer is going to be resolving This legal case the real right answer is going to be making all of these things go away and having a settlement but um having a judgment and a settlement but that that's not where we're at yet presumably that's not going to happen on this March 26 date I remember you telling me that uh there's a case in April as well do with all of this the March 26th date is just a judgment on the uh the injunction I believe okay well I dare say you might be following that um got that impression yes a little bit Yeah excuse me okay right y you follow qualcon I'll follow FRS uh and the design of satorial apparatus for iPhones and we'll see what happens next William where can people find you on the internet I am pretty much always on Twitter at w gallago and oh there's also obviously Apple inside email address William apple insider.com and I particularly enjoy getting emails uh there I'm at V marks on Twitter and I write over wristwatch review as well as here and we will be back next week with more of the Apple Insider frock cast with William all right excellent I like frogs FR as yeah yeah all right it's been lovely having you here it's been lovely having all of you join us and listen and we'll see you back next weekyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor and joining me is my good friend friend to all mankind William gallager see I spend the week worrying how you're going to describe that I don't know why actually cuz uh this is your show and I'm just a kind of stand in stunt guest aren't I so at any moment you could have somebody better on but every week I'm wondering what you going to do to me well have I ever ever I have never come on and introduced you saying this is my friend William a very little brain no you could better have done this is William because no one else is available I would have accepted that one okay no no William you're always welcome okay that's very nice and I do look forward to when we get to do this especially on weeks like this when there does seem to be quite a lot going on isn't there just a little bit not much actually yeah right okay well let's let's start talking about some of this because I know exactly what it is you want out of life more than anything please tell me cuz I'm not sure more than anything yes you want a 16 to 16 and 1 12 inch MacBook Pro not not ESP Healy here but not so much I know no I want to finish the play I'm working on but in terms of Hardware you want an iMac I'm aware but go with me for a second because there's the possibility that the MacBook as we know it could change entirely well into Windows machine or well I mean you can do that with boot camp anyway but currently we've had for a long time we've had machines that were 13in that were 15in that were occasionally 17in and since 2015 we'd have had the current models of 13 and 15 that were very slim with the uh the the new style butterfly keyboard and along the way we've had rumors of of different things that were going to happen to the keyboard whether it was putting in extra rubber cups to try and prevent dust and dirt from getting into the keyboard for the butterfly keyboard to the idea that the whole keyboard could be replaced with a glass panel that would have haptic feedback and that it would feel like a keyboard and now we have a rumor from TF International Securities analyst minki quo who says that sometime in 2019 that there will be an upgraded 13-in MacBook Pro with 32 GB of RAM and the 15-in models will become 16 and 16 and 12 inch models now one of the ways that that can happen is if you look at a convert MacBook Pro there's a rather large bezel around the screen there's a black border right and yes and you can push the screen to the edges now that that's since about 2018 it's been possible to get screens that go to the edges and so okay this is when I should confess that only a couple days ago as we record this I got out my tape measure and measured my old iMac to see just how big the screen could potentially be so um you're saying you've done that with MacBooks and you think this is how it's going to work I I think that so the the the the screen is what dictates the size of the actual laptop because you can't have a screen that overlaps the uh the the the base the Palm rest the the keys right the screen dictates the size of the Palm rest and they don't really I mean the 15in size is a good size it's a size a lot of people use it fits in bags well and if you grow that then everyone's got to go ahead and buy new bags which isn't necessarily a bad problem but it's not necessarily a good problem either you know this is a good form factor and so my expectation is that they would do a little bit of both they would grow screen to the edge and maybe increase the overall size just a little bit okay resulting in a 16 to 16 and a bit inch MacBook Pro right and the one of the nice things about when you grow the the size in terms of width and depth of the laptop sitting on your desk is that you could potentially if you wanted to have the same amount of battery just make it thinner because now you can spread out just that much further around the edges you know the the other thing you could do is Cape it the same thickness and just increase the amount of battery you get which would be a very Apple thing to do or you could just go crazy and make it thicker so that we can have a longer travel keyboard but I accept that's not going to happen so yeah in in the pantheon of unlikely things that are to happen proposed by William that's one of them okay I wasn't keeping a list but okay yes yes I I'm not sure what to think about this because it all makes sense of course what you say I follow that I hadn't thought about the bezel on the MacBook but yes of course it's just I used to have a 17inch uh Power book and in retrospect that was like carrying a sale around with me um I don't remember finding it awkward but now compared to you know like my well frankly to my iPhone it would feel ludicrous well I mean there was the netbook that was the smallest form factor of a laptop there there was the old if you really want to go back to it the IBM 701 CS that was the butterfly keyboard where it wasn't a butterfly key switch like we use today it was a keyboard that was split down the middle and literally puzzle pieced in so that it could fit under a very small screen and when you open it up it spread its wings and the keyboard hung off the edges of the laptop base IBM in the UK absolutely beautiful site uh has a small little Museum of previous IBM products and I I was shown one of those in there absolutely gorgeous thing yeah I have two of them they were such beloved machines that people would take the 46 processor out of them and sent the mother birds off to have them upgraded to pentiums okay I never it worked I never got one of those ones I still have the 46 model but it was um it was a thing where people would upgrade them and upgrade their processors inside and so how'd you get Mac OS on them uh sheep shaer right wasn't expecting a serious answer there not sure I got a serious answer but okay sheep shaver and vmac yeah sheep shaver and vmac were one of those old emulators so VM Marx uses vmac okay well you used to back in the old days it's not really been used in a long time but that was one of the ways you could get System 7 or system you know to to to run on those kinds of things the classics yeah but the the beauty of let's see where our MacBook Pro could go is that obviously if you had 32 G Max you would probably be talking about U lpddr Ram or or ddr4 Ram which is faster and a little more power hungry you'd also probably be looking at trying to get a 10 nanometer Intel chip so that you could uh go that much faster now don't know the difference between these different types of ram but I'm guessing uh faster generally yeah possibly more capacity more expensive yes okay right oh I'm up to date there then okay um you also said new processes and things but okay what's what's interesting about this note is that this note says that these laptops are going to be aimed at designers and Gamers and gaming is is one of those areas where Apple has never quite succeeded you know they've tried for years they had John carac work with them on things they had you know they they they tried to get openg GL to be a thing they have done a large number of attempts at gaming including metal and and metal to right and mhm the uptake has never been there on Mac and and to be fair they sort of failed at gaming on Apple TV as well it's U for for a myriad of reasons so part of it is Hardware right Apple tends to ship gpus that are not exactly the gpus that gamers are looking for you know a gamer these days wants like an RTX 208 you know 2080 or whatever the newest thing from Nvidia is or or something shiny like that and you know apple apple will ship a GPU but it's it's not going to be the one that a gamer will find in a dedicated uh you know a dedicated like uh HP Omen laptop or something like that I will cheerily confess that I have zero interest in gaming but it does seem to me that whatever gamer is using now is stuff that you what do you call me a regular productivity kind of user will benefit from later so I like to see these things coming through but apart from being addicted to uh suduku on my iPad i' never play games at all right okay we'll just move on from that just been fired haven't I why are you so nervous and paranoid about being fired William in the history a in the history of this podcast have we ever fired someone don't answer don't know no and and I have I have never actually fired anyone from the podcast just saying so that because I know we'll get comments years and years of being freelanced with BBC where uh you had no contract per se and it was you could be gone next week for you know and actually I liked that uh but I see it's affected my psyche and it has you're you're getting from it what if I throw in the fact that I have played chess quite a bit as well very very badly but I've played it so that's two games I'm surely officially a gamer now I need one of these Nvidia RT thingies that you mentioned yes give me one of those absolutely yeah yeah all right now quo also talked about the possibility of the 2019 iPhone and what it's going to be like and and so what he was talking about is he expects that the true depth camera will see an update that there will be a higher power flood Illuminator for better face ID recognition that the 6.1in LCD model might get 4 gig of RAM up from the current 3 gig that it has in the iPhone 10r the uh the the top end iPhone will get a triple lens camera system with a wide telephoto and Ultra wide option we don't know whether or not that would would be in both the 5.8 and 6.5 in OLED models we have no idea about exactly where that goes but that's what they're looking at uh now all of the lineup may get Ultra wideband which is useful for indoor positioning and navigation you know how sometimes you go indoors and you lose your GPS signal Ultra wideband is the cure for that I thought staying outside was the secure but okay it seems more workable will these phones be foldable though isn't that really what we want no okay so Samsung released a folding phone and Samsung's foldable phone is ridiculous money very very version one very very thick now I'm kind of glad it exists as a version ones because if it's ever to become practical then someone needs to make a rough version one so that they can make make a better version too but this thing is is very very rough now there are a bunch of different ideas for what foldable should be should it be something that folds in half vertically like a folio case and then you open it up and you've got bigger screen to work with should it be something that folds backwards Across The Binding so that it's a small display in your hand like a normal phone and then you open it up for more or should it be a clamshell kind of like the old uh the old flip phones no one's exactly positive what these things should should be but Samsung has gone ahead and released one and they're the first manufacturer with a big name to go ahead and do it we we saw one back in January at CES but this is really the first real one and uh you know there there are valid concerns first of all how the operating system handles it now Google said that they're going to make Android work with folding phones um the other thing is you know I worry a little bit about stress right anytime that you have a joint that moves eventually that joint is going to wear out and break but Samsung did go to some lengths to talk about I can't remember the system of Gears that they used for it it's actually the whole presentation was very Apple like apart from the lack of Applause when expected other than that it was very Apple showing design and the inard bit for the hinge well I don't know how to design anything but it looked very impressive to me one of the things about giving a presentation like that is that with apple they never waited for Applause they kept talking and when the Applause happened then they'd pause for it but they they could have gone on and given the whole presentation without a single bit of Applause you know I do remember what was the Apple presentation in New York where it was they were practically thrown by how the audience were reacting so much to it and you could see they were trying to press through uh was yes I was watching the Samsung thing and it was like and it folds Tada no nobody wants to appla nope I think this is really interesting phone I mean no use to me cuz it runs Android and it's Android that I don't like uh but otherwise what what do you dislike about Android pretty much every bit of it it feels unfinished to me still I find it clunky uh there are so many options in it when I don't really care about option so what what Android were you using what version of Android were you using I have absolutely like was this on a pixel was it some Samsung thing what was this no idea can't remember a single thing except instantly thinking really seriously what was the thing that threw me go it was this thing where I thought oh this is really good and then it wasn't it's like it was half good I like you couldn't be bother I remember the person showing it to me uh blamed Apple for it uh Apple has some some rights to something and therefore this Android maker couldn't do something and it was all just oh come on yeah work don't work fed up so I've I've used uh Android in every iteration of it and you know I try and use things like the Nexus or the pixel or or something that's a sterile build a real build from Android as opposed to from Apple from Google sorry a real build from Google as opposed to being a uh a modified version like Samsung would do and it's uh you know it's one of those things where you use it for a week or two and it this could quite work this could be all right but I do like coming back to Apple knowing that it's a secure phone that it can be restored to a secure state that it's that it's um reliable where Android I always question how how reliable is this how secure is this should I really feel comfortable using it kind of thing but if I were I think of nothing of that if I were completely ignorant I mean it would be probably okay well I might as well be completely ignorant because I do know about the security concerns but I don't think about them very much CU I'm so used to using Mac stuff but if I use uh Android if I use quite often have to use a Windows PC and it just ticks me off the number of things I have to think about other than my work uh when getting it done I just uh can't bear it so y I come back yeah now there's also word about a modular Mac Pro and you know they they've talked about the Mac Pro being modular in the past they also talked about uh when they talked about the Mac mini earlier last year about it being something that could be stacked and and of course it can be so the idea here is that a modular Mac Pro would be units that could stack and would have a connector going between them so that you could get your Tower of of stackable modules to the configuration you needed we should say that this is all coming from uh one YouTube channel yeah um which I can't pronounce the name of I'm not trying to hide it can you pronounce it telosian te something TS Tech right I am certain that was a race in Star Trek but whoever uh they I mean I don't know the uh Providence of this I don't know how likely it is to be accurate but they have an amazing amount of detail and it most of it all seems kind of very plausible including this stackability I mean all Apple has actually said is 2019 modular there be a display um and this Builds on all of that and kind of confirms bits of it except that there's a claim as well that it might be delayed to next year everything seems terribly plausible um and if it is all right well I'm a bit disappointed in way because it's like spoilers you know let Apple show me this stuff rather than whoever they are unpronouncable yeah and it's it's one of those things where that's the problem with rumors all the time is that you sort of want to know and at the same time you want to hold back yes yes now this this is something that's more important and we should really pay attention to is the concept of what's going to happen with Macos and iOS and I say that because Mac OS has for years used what's called appkit as the framework for UI and things like that and iOS used UI kit which was meant for iPhones and then iPads and so forth and last year at WWDC they showed us UI kit on Mac OS and called it marzipan and the idea was that you could bring iOS apps to Mac OS and that's great one of the things that some people wanted and thought about was the idea of Mac OS apps being Rewritten to use uiit that appkit would go away and that when that happened that Mac apps could then be put on iOS and and of course the big example that people use for this the concept of let's put Final Cut Pro on iOS because where is the good Final Cut Pro app for iOS and what I have to say is I think that's not going to happen or certainly not going to happen anytime soon partly because just how how tied to appkit Final Cut Is and rewriting it for UI kit would would be very difficult there would be things that simply wouldn't translate now certainly Apple could throw those out as they did with moving to Final Cut Pro 10 from previous versions but I don't know that that's what they really want to do at this time this just seems to me like a way to get people who weren't developing for the Mac to effectively develop for the Mac um at the cost of I don't know one more email or one more tick boox or something rather than uh and a way to shed the Mac of its old things and move over right so the I would like find look on iPad that's absolutely true but there is one isn't there I forgot the name of it but Apple used it in that um iPad Pro videoed it yeah Adobe premere no something with an L Luminosity or something like that forgive me I will look it up uh for the show notes but I can't remember what it is now it just I thought oh that looks rather nice right so the goal is like you say to to allow doers to make a single binary that can be submitted to a unified App Store the the thing is is that it's not clear how well that will work out you know it's a nice idea to make it so that the app stores are merged as far as users is concerned but it's it's not really sure that that will actually take place the way people hope you know Windows tried to do this and they ended up having Windows phone and Windows RT for the uh the RT Arm based tablets and also for the the regular surface and laptops for Windows 10 and they thought that people would then write those unified apps it didn't really work out and it end uping off the fact that Windows phone just didn't take off why was it wor anybody well Windows phone could have taken off they they failed with Windows phone in part because they didn't do enough to support their development community and by that I mean one of the steps they made was they they initially started their app store without an age ranging or or age rating system you know in in the IOS app store it will say this app is meant for people who are 17 and above right contains contains that you know know contains themes that are more mature or contains violence or whatever you know if you've got a game like Infinity Blade and it shows blood as you slash a sword through someone okay so maybe that's uh one that that at least mentions that in the store well Windows store didn't really do that initially and so then they patched it to to add that category to it and then wanted every developer to create and submit a new build rather than just going and editing their metadata and they didn't have enough user base so that all the developers that were were out there said you know what we're not going to submit a new build just for this give us a break and Microsoft took out every app that did not submit a new build when asked to to account for that change in the app store and they shot themselves in the foot because they basically took every app out of their App Store well whoops this doesn't really fit with the the Steve B developers develop developers thing a few years ago I was thought um an advantage of Windows is that they have these this amazing development pool well that didn't exactly work out in their favor let's say okay and uh so it'll be interesting you see that happening with Apple if they do this I mean they've been known to pull things well before but I can't see them doing something quite like that I mean they they've sort of had uh a bit of a difficult time with the Mac app store right the Mac App Store initially had people come to it but then left it because it's sandboxing rules and difficulties and things like that and so now people distribute outside the Mac App Store and apple would like everyone to be Distributing through the App Store no for no small reason because they also get that 30% cut but also because it's a nice unified way for people to find software and be secure that the you know be be sure that the software they're loading is from a secure Source it's authenticated and Apple would very much like for that for their users so this kind of change would make good sense for Apple but does it make good sense for those developers that are currently Distributing outside the Mac App Store maybe not okay I I mean I like the redesign of the Mac App Store but it has problems I dislike it vehemently well if have you tried to get back previous purchases there are times when it simply doesn't work um well ask on app inside of I had to get around most of it but still finding problems the problem with the App Store is the same problem with the App Store on Apple TV which is trying to search for things is bad trying to search for prior purchases is very bad my purchases in the old version of the Mac App Store used to be in a long list that I could scroll and then install and what it really needed at the top was a search field so I could search that list and that would break it to you but there was search field yeah now yeah soar bear with me ah hard to find well so if it's hard to find then they haven't done their job right now sure now if you're in the Mac App Store and you go to your prior purchases and I'm doing this as we do it just so that no one can say I haven't uh hate to break it to you just like you did okay so I have my purchase list and there is no search field among my purchase list there's a search field in the left column but that searches the whole store yes I just want to search my prior purchases because Lord knows I have like uh a long list of scrolling through them especially now that they're no longer presented in list form they're now presented in two columns it is so much harder yeah you say that but clearly you have not appreciated or at least not suffered from the greater problem which is uh there are many times when you will find for some reason genely I cannot fathom out why that list of previous purchases is wrong uh for the longest time I had apparently only ever purchased one app and I'd never even heard of it I must have downloaded it for something uh I went through contortions to get them all back and I believed I did but I'm still every now and again finding one that does just simply doesn't list for it even though it hasn't been removed I did legitimately buy it I can find it through my iTunes receipts and all of this there's something very very screwy about the database for previous purchases so that problem have not been able to find them just on the list um my heart doesn't bleed it might Hemorrhage a tiny amount for you yeah well they have problems yeah that's problem the wait wait we're talking about app stores actually so this is this is relevant so you remember you remember what was like trying to find software before a Mac app store right well it was it was very difficult you you you know you'd look around you'd search the internet maybe you'd find a CNET download page or you'd you know you'd go to Mac update.com and you'd search things and try and figure out what what on Earth application is going to actually meet your needs right really hard to do and I don't know how we coped I genuinely can't remember how we did it at all but yes okay it was another world and trying to find software is still actually a challeng all and so there's a site called capa.com and capa.com is a free online resource to help you find the very best software solutions for your business and they have over 700,000 reviews of products from real users so you can kind of discover everything you need to make an informed decision they have 700 specific categories of software everything from project management to email marketing to yoga studio management software so no matter what kind of software your business needs they make it easy to find the right solution fast there are millions of people who use Capa each month to find the right tools for their business and you can join them you can be among them visit capa.com appleinsider for free today to find the right tools to make 2019 the year for Your Business capa.com apppp Insider Capa that's cap a p t raa.com slapple inssider and I I I think it really is relevant you know we we how do you find good software that's going to actually meet your needs and the Mac App Store doesn't really help you do that you still end up searching the web and a resource like Capa actually fixes this problem okay sorry my mind has gone partly I'm back trying to remember how in the world we have a coat of this but now summ all the stuff I've read about uh Apple's merging of things took about it from the developer point of view that I as a developer will just submit once and it will propagate out um that doesn't necessarily follow then that there will be one single App Store um for as far as users are concerned well I mean the interface for the Mac App Store now mirrors very much the interface for the IOS app store these things are coming closer together although the content isn't Al although you can search your purchases on the Mac on the uh the apple and TV and the iPhone app store so there's that oh true but um it's it's sort of becoming this unification and they would like for you to be able to submit once and have it be everywhere but what that means is if you're designing an app for iOS you create your UI for that if you're designing it for Mac you have to go ahead and create it again now if you're using storyboards maybe you can avoid that but really if you're trying to make an that lives up to the best of what you want it to be then you have to put in some work for it for both platforms now there will people who say look at the current stocks app and say no apple clearly didn't and they're not wrong but you know or or the news app for that matter you know these these don't feel as much like good Mac applications as they do like electron apps or node.js apps you know react kind of things which are are portable but if if you don't have applications that really show off and take advantage of what the platform can do then the platform is sort of wasted right if if all of your applications are web- based why would you own a Mac is a valid question sure it's always been the same thing with final draft which is built for Windows and PCs and always comes out on the Windows is looking like a 1980s PC app I mean it there's lots to love in final draft but the look is not one of them yes and the feature list isn't as much as it could be you know you wrote you wrote that final draft review and I I pointed out and you you protested but I pointed out that I really like using um Highland and Fountain yeah Highland's great it doesn't do quite everything I might want but what it does it's really really good out yes right and it's also a Mac app it's a proper application as opposed to a port from Windows true yes you know granted the work is what's what matters right but but using the tools can make making the work more pleasurable and uh I I I I long ago gave up touching final draft of course I don't do it nearly as professionally as you do so it's uh sort of a moot point I'm not exactly their ideal customer but that's what I get I'm not in the writer's Guild William I'm sorry okay you can apply to be if you have sufficient um credits and things let's just do a plug for The Writers Guild of America West and East fine organizations I'm uh just to be clear I'm Deputy chair of the Writers Guild of Great Britain which is of course Affiliated but it's not the same thing I think you would have to have british-based credits to have a hope of joining The Guild here but you know you're already in America that gives you a head start yeah you've just got to write things a lot right that are made o how do we get on to that from final trft uh app stores then we it looks like uh apple apple is actually said haven't they uh that the ones they did so far stocks home news that's their kind of internal testing thing and that in a year's time they will do whatever it is they do to let developers uh do more so I'm assuming WWDC we'll see more details about that sensible don't know that's the idea yeah yeah now we we should discuss the financials for a moment you know we we talked about how they had made their earnings adjust and and you know the stock price was affected by that things like that well the holiday quarter results revealed that iphon Revenue was down 15% compared to last year but unit Figures were not provided by the company under the new policy so Gartner went ahead and tried to compile some data and according to Gartner's data the number of units did go down but at a lower percentage of 11.8% which is believed to be the worst quarterly decline for the company since the first quarter of 2016 but their CLA claing that iPhone unit sales reached 64.5 million for the quarter down from 73.2 in the fourth quarter of 17 so for 2018 as a whole iPhone sales are down just 2.7% or 209 million units now I'm sorry I got so lost you got lost all that's why I capped it with the year right 2.7% doesn't sound that bad does it uh no I 2.7% of a very very big number isn't wonderful but yes proportionately uh I I'm not panicking for Apple should we say but the rest of it um yeah yeah seems like you could add those numbers up and get any result you want which may be true the the thing is that it really looks as if the weaker demand was that it was it was a little bit weaker across most regions with the exception of North America and the mature asia-pacific markets um China saw the biggest Decline and that's that's what it comes down to so so that's of the basically that's sort of what we thought we already knew but Gartner's numbers tend to agree with it and we agree with Gartner well maybe not always but it it certainly seems to jib with the rest of what we know all right so on average it's a good sour because you hear of so many analysts so many things I I never quite keep up with uh who has accurate data and I don't know how they're getting this data anyway so there must be some intelligence and guess work in there somewhere yeah but I'm sure they're very very good at it yes yes now Goldman Sachs and apple are working on a credit card we've had this rumor before but it looks as if they're continuing work on this project that resint result in a jointly produced credit card that offers extra functions in the wallet app so you could potentially use it to manage your spending and your accounts more effectively without requiring a separate credit card app all right I can see that yes uh I actually think America is better off for financial apps than the UK because you have mint.com which always looks great and keeps not coming uh to the UK at all so I don't tend to use an app for it I go straight to my bank accounts uh online banking all of them every now and again and manage them that way so the idea of something on my phone uh helping me spend more money that really does that works for me I can follow that yeah now there's also some suggestion that the Rings concept that's used on the Apple watch could be ported into this and no one's really sure exactly for what yet although I kind of wonder if it would be around Financial Health right you know use the Rings for your spending activity or or your saving activity or you know your saving towards goals kind of thing would be good uh William you're so close to going into overdraft a little 7 pound purchase would put you right over yeah okay yeah actually I wonder if there also do the sharing thing cuz um I really just like the health sharing activity bit because everybody I'm sharing with is doing better than I am uh but the idea of actually having uh your your financial details shared with say your partner or bookkeeper maybe something like that if that isn't the same person then that could actually be really quite motivating um and that' be a useful thing yeah maybe yeah I'm just making it up now the the idea here is that this would also of course do tail on Apple pay and maybe it would help push some Apple pay adoption which I generally keep forgetting that there's even an issue about Apple P adopting because we covered this before the compli as much as I think you us has better uh financial apps your financial system as a whole is so complicated compared to here where the moment Apple pay existed it was accepted everywhere because of other systems we have I pay with it so much that I forget the an issue that anybody can't so yeah Target Target retail big retail in America just turned on tap to pay at all of their terminals only just now they have not enabled Apple pay for their own Target Red Card their branded card now the Branded card from them gives you 5% discount on your entire purchase so it's there's there's a value to using it but it's not an Apple pay approved card it doesn't work in Apple pay so if you want to use that card in an you end up using the target app and scanning a barcode as opposed to as opposed to being able to put it in your your wallet and tap to pay that way that's thought you will know this um certainly more than I do in the UK there is um uh a kind of notional limit uh of30 when you're paying through Apple pay uh or or any kind of uh contactless system lots of places if you're paying through Apple pay they don't care they'll take anything they kind of trust it but in Theory it enough places limit you to 30 that we've kind of trained ourselves to not go over 30 when we're doing this is it the same no in America because right 5% of30 is less uh of a bigger deal than 5% of a thousand isn't it so yeah uh is there no limit No Limit okay no no limit you but it does make me uh understand more why people would be fuss I mean I might be wrong to not want a 5% discount or not be fussed about a 5% discount if I'm buying a F's worth of food or something uh but it doesn't hurt me as much as a larger amount would so yes I get that if if you're shopping for groceries and clothing and personal hygiene goods and stuff like that and you walk out with a basket that's full of uh you know $150 worth of product you want your 5% yeah absolutely yeah and that it's just sort of this weird state that they're in where they they accept tap to pay but their own product for that gives you that discount is not in the tap to pay stuff so you can't you have to use their barcode app or swipe the physical cardly when you say tap to pay that's what I would call um uh contact L the same and that means that's not specifically for Apple pay it's for any type of correct correct so that means none of the contact ones have the the Target Card system the Target Card does not contactless yeah right so it's possible since Apple I don't I've never used this apple does add some sort of loyalty cards doesn't it they do they do yeah they so if they were to switch on target that would actually put them ahead of every other contactless uh thing in the states it's it's so they should do that Target that has to make that decision and they have as yet no plans oh I see right okay yeah now you know how sometimes you have a product a hardware product and you have an app for it and the app will say hey there's an update for your Hardware product would you like to update it and it will actually update the firmware of that Hardware product yeah yes okay and frequently it says things like hold the phone close and don't leave the app when you're doing this so that nothing happens and goes wrong when you're updating right uh I guess this sounds like what I used to get with the Apple watch a lot that's the only I can think of does this but yes I've been through this process so Nike has a shoe called the Nike adapt BB and these are self-lacing sneakers that can be tightened and loosened via the smartphone app I know you're you're you're you're stunned right you're shocked struggling to judge I just uh I can't quite see how these where you're going with this how these two things join up together well so because they can be controlled by the app there's the communication between the two now Engineers like to leave themselves doors so that they can update things if they need to right if a product is shipped and finished and can't be updated then if they have a bug they can't fix it later so they leave you know leave themselves an opening to update and in this case if you have the Android version of the Nike adapt app it will deliver a faulty version of the new firmware and brick your shoes brick your shoes yeah okay what does that actually look like I mean do the shoes close up no but they they won't respond to the app any longer and they won't and it's possible that they also won't respond to adjusting the shoes so what happens if you break your shoe while wearing it well that's the thing is that we don't actually know because Nike has yet to provide a solution or even comment on the issue okay but it's definitely an issue so so so here here's the thing right if you used the IOS app you were okay but if you were using the Android app the uh the the shoe stops responding and cannot be updated and if you perform a hard reset on your shoe it doesn't appear to solve the problem I'm sorry a hard reset on your shoe I don't know why it's tickling me I need to reboot my shoe excuse me oh imagine if it was boots you had to reboot your boots uh and you bought them from boots which is a yes yes okay all righty but really this boils down to this Ison yet another difference between Android and iPhone uh the iPhone uh has some sort of satorial uh safety measure to stop your feet getting trapped so here's the problem is that Nike so when you do a firmware update when when you design a product and the product can't have a firmware update if you were really concerned about what you were doing if you were smart you would put in an extra bit of flash RAM and have it partitioned and the partition will have a duplicate copy of the firmware and when you update it should copy to the second part of the partition and then update from that and then copy it to the recovery partition so basically there is there is always always a good F of the firm where to boot so if it tries to to start from the failed update it can fall back to the good one except uh that's presumably more expense uh for the hardware manufactures and all this stuff but if that's what's happened here how has it not been an issue for iPhone no it didn't it didn't happen here they didn't they didn't build that into the shoe the iPhone simply just loaded the firmware correctly and maintained the connection with the device correctly the Android app did not now this is a mistake that firm that that engineers make all the time this this cost part saving or whatever you know I uh I had to flash the power management computer in my car last summer and when I was flashing it I was using a laptop and it got about 30% across and then failed and now I had a failed firmware flash on my car and couldn't start my car and had they built in the extra flash memory as I said and had a recovery partition for it then I would have been able to contined starting the car we truly are two countries divided by a Common Language cuz if you tell somebody you're at flashing in your car here yeah you'd be arrested would you yeah no I program I was programming the computer in my car as you do okay yes now is that a typical operation for most people no is programming the firmware updating your shoe going to be typical yeah probably yeah can't question that but okay yes if you're a Nike adapt BB owner yes yes it will okay how this idea of Bluetooth presum it's Bluetooth Bluetooth enabl choose catching on with any other manufacturers actually we've been doing bluetooth enabled shoes for quite some time you just haven't really thought about it they tend to be for runners or footy players football players oh okay so there some sort of data monitoring it's very much data monitoring in in running it's you know step counting it's pressure as your foot hits the ground it's gate analysis it's it's things like that and some of the same stuff that you use in the sub football stuff too and okay you know you know it's it's possible to detect if you're injured by noticing the difference in your gate it's possible to advise on your running or keep track of your running and synchronize those with apps that help you manage you know your preparation for a marathon for example you know or or apps like straa for example where Strava was going ahead and Reporting geolocation on troop movements and stuff like that a year ago so straa I haven't heard that oh yeah right so there are all kinds of of things we've been doing with foot pods for years you know the original Nike Foot pod Nike run was a was a footp pod that worked with an iPod and that was using Bluetooth sorry my mind's just gone back to all these Android owning Footwear users uh how many formal garas and I don't know funerals are there where somebody cannot get out of their their pumps and has to be there in their finery and athletic footwear as well you know you this is not exactly the podcast where we comment on sorial fashion this is not you're right we should wait for the next season of Dancing With the Stars well I mean I mean I I sometimes host another podcast where we talk about luxury items and and and fashion and things like this and if if you'd like to be on that one we can do that one I have absolutely no knowledge or skill or experience so yeah I'm definitely up for that I was just waiting for he you say interest I didn't hear it so yeah you're on well actually interest I I was very careful to say Dancing with the Stars there uh the version we have here is called Strictly Come Dancing historical reasons and honestly a part of it is frogwatch I was at uh BBC Birmingham uh last week and in the reception area they have some of the most gorgeous frocks from the show and I admit my first thought is no human being is Slim enough to wear those but beyond that I mean the use of materials and stuff it's really interesting so all right well we'll arrange that and uh when we do we'll go ahead when we host an episode we'll go ahead and tell you all about it here on the Apple Insider podcast now security is still one of those things that we talk about over here and Nest secure a product owned by Google is a uh security system that works with Google assistant and nest and things like that and and what happened was that apparently it was out for 18 months and Google announced an update that said hey there's a mic in it now and you can use it for Google assistant and people are upset because they didn't realize that their security system had a microphone in it for the past 18 months that they weren't ever told about right so that means a security system is arguably insecure well I mean one could certainly think about that now uh obviously Google's saying that the mic had not been enabled previously and that using it is an opt-in feature that can be activated or disabled at any time via the app uh but that doesn't really Comfort people because people didn't really like the idea that their home security system had the potential to record them what could possibly go wrong well so Google says the on device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs that was an error on our part the microphone has never been on and is only activated when the users specifically enable the option but people are already distrustful of this stuff right yes absolutely uh there is a worry for it I I quite I mean it doesn't sound very likely that make a mistake but I can completely buy that it did so you know we've all made mistakes for it so yeah I think I think the issue here is that Google Google should not have done this when they're sort of operating at a trust deficit right people distrust Google and distrust Amazon and and for that matter distrust Facebook and one of the things that I think is that sometimes the employees there don't even realize that they're operating in in this sort of trust deficit that they they have a bubble around them that thinks well we're doing good stuff people should trust us absolutely we're fine and we saw that from Facebook employees who made comments to that effect when Apple yanked their certificate a few weeks back right this is just Apple trying to have revenge against Facebook this is this is not serious and and apple is just grandstanding again on privacy where were those kinds of comments so people really don't realize that that their company is not necessarily seen in the best of light you know Google probably thought they could go ahead and issue this release and that it'll just blow over and it probably will blow over but but it's not a good situation is it except if you're listening to the Apple Insider podcast I think you're uh unless you stumbled across this by accident and stayed for the comedy which would be very nice you you're you're conscious of this stuff more than the average average consumer and there are a lot of average consumers I would have said actually I'm an average consumer most of the time but I know about this one the majority of people who buy Google things I suspect are not as fuss as we know they should be so yes I think it will blow over I think I think you're right about go Google's perception of themselves but they're also aware that for the greater majority of the market uh so what and why should they be fussed about something as terrible as this we we should be absolutely clear right there's no evidence that this was a working microphone there there's no evidence there was actually EES dropping on anyone and Google announced this update enabled the microphone there there was no blogger that discovered a nefarious activity there was no one that that found this out and discovered it it just was they announced it everyone said wait a minute what do you mean you're announcing that how how is that even possible right so we we have to really look a little bit harder for find something really nefarious The Nest secure product came out four years after Google acquired Nest most people that would be concerned about this would have already been suspicious of the nest secure product a little bit right you know that's I can't believe it's that long but yes okay I agree yeah it it really is uh Tony Fidel is kind of out over there and Matt Rogers hasn't been doing a whole lot over there and and they Founders have moved on yes should we wrap it up with a Qualcomm story a qualcom story yeah really is there anything going on well previously on Qualcomm Qualcomm has has tried to get product banss around the world they' tried to get product banss in the US they tried to get product banss in Germany they tried to get them in uh in China and so Qualcomm was seeking a ban from the uness International Trade Commission after the judge in September made an initial ruling against that action saying it'd be against public interest and he declared Apple in violation of one of three contested patents leaving the door open for for action but there was not an induction he said a ban with on iPhones with Intel chips would effectively give Qualcomm a monopoly over the wireless modem Market um so Apple revealed that they discovered a software workaround to qualcomm's design something that they originally deemed impossible in Prior arguments Qualcomm believes that this Revelation undermines Pender's previous decision and so Qualcomm thinks that that by Apple discovering this software workaround it opens the door again to number the temporary ban and so it looks like by March 26th the ITC is going to have to make a final ruling that that decides whether or not there's going to be a ban did you get lost in that the last thing I remember about this story is uh Apple saying um all that time ago last week that they we're reintroducing the iPhone 7 and 8 with uh Qualcomm Hardware in Germany to get around that pan uh is this saying nah need bother just update iOS and everything's fine right so that's what they're they're saying is that they they begin selling the modified iPhone 78 models with Qualcomm modom to skirt the ban in Germany but they found over here that they could go ahead and do a software update as a work around to to get around the patent problem and so now call com saying wait a minute if you do that then you absolutely are in violation give us the ban give us the injunction so right we will kind that but um my mind's still on Germany if Apple in the US has figured they can get or believes they can get around the patent with software uh are whoever it is that decided to buy some more Qualcomm chips in Germany going do I expect not in part because of speed to getting back in Market all right that makes sense good point yes I I think you know the very worst case is being under a legal cloud and not having product for sale because that's where people begin to lose confidence and then don't want to take the product back on the shelves and of course Apple because they're Apple they don't run that risk nearly as badly but there's never a time when you want to not have product on the Shelf when you when you don't want it available and so because it's it's lost sales it's missing out and it's it's that cloud and that's the cloud not only with consumers but with retailers and so getting back on market with the modified fast was the right answer the real right answer is going to be resolving This legal case the real right answer is going to be making all of these things go away and having a settlement but um having a judgment and a settlement but that that's not where we're at yet presumably that's not going to happen on this March 26 date I remember you telling me that uh there's a case in April as well do with all of this the March 26th date is just a judgment on the uh the injunction I believe okay well I dare say you might be following that um got that impression yes a little bit Yeah excuse me okay right y you follow qualcon I'll follow FRS uh and the design of satorial apparatus for iPhones and we'll see what happens next William where can people find you on the internet I am pretty much always on Twitter at w gallago and oh there's also obviously Apple inside email address William apple insider.com and I particularly enjoy getting emails uh there I'm at V marks on Twitter and I write over wristwatch review as well as here and we will be back next week with more of the Apple Insider frock cast with William all right excellent I like frogs FR as yeah yeah all right it's been lovely having you here it's been lovely having all of you join us and listen and we'll see you back next weekyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor and joining me is my good friend friend to all mankind William gallager see I spend the week worrying how you're going to describe that I don't know why actually cuz uh this is your show and I'm just a kind of stand in stunt guest aren't I so at any moment you could have somebody better on but every week I'm wondering what you going to do to me well have I ever ever I have never come on and introduced you saying this is my friend William a very little brain no you could better have done this is William because no one else is available I would have accepted that one okay no no William you're always welcome okay that's very nice and I do look forward to when we get to do this especially on weeks like this when there does seem to be quite a lot going on isn't there just a little bit not much actually yeah right okay well let's let's start talking about some of this because I know exactly what it is you want out of life more than anything please tell me cuz I'm not sure more than anything yes you want a 16 to 16 and 1 12 inch MacBook Pro not not ESP Healy here but not so much I know no I want to finish the play I'm working on but in terms of Hardware you want an iMac I'm aware but go with me for a second because there's the possibility that the MacBook as we know it could change entirely well into Windows machine or well I mean you can do that with boot camp anyway but currently we've had for a long time we've had machines that were 13in that were 15in that were occasionally 17in and since 2015 we'd have had the current models of 13 and 15 that were very slim with the uh the the new style butterfly keyboard and along the way we've had rumors of of different things that were going to happen to the keyboard whether it was putting in extra rubber cups to try and prevent dust and dirt from getting into the keyboard for the butterfly keyboard to the idea that the whole keyboard could be replaced with a glass panel that would have haptic feedback and that it would feel like a keyboard and now we have a rumor from TF International Securities analyst minki quo who says that sometime in 2019 that there will be an upgraded 13-in MacBook Pro with 32 GB of RAM and the 15-in models will become 16 and 16 and 12 inch models now one of the ways that that can happen is if you look at a convert MacBook Pro there's a rather large bezel around the screen there's a black border right and yes and you can push the screen to the edges now that that's since about 2018 it's been possible to get screens that go to the edges and so okay this is when I should confess that only a couple days ago as we record this I got out my tape measure and measured my old iMac to see just how big the screen could potentially be so um you're saying you've done that with MacBooks and you think this is how it's going to work I I think that so the the the the screen is what dictates the size of the actual laptop because you can't have a screen that overlaps the uh the the the base the Palm rest the the keys right the screen dictates the size of the Palm rest and they don't really I mean the 15in size is a good size it's a size a lot of people use it fits in bags well and if you grow that then everyone's got to go ahead and buy new bags which isn't necessarily a bad problem but it's not necessarily a good problem either you know this is a good form factor and so my expectation is that they would do a little bit of both they would grow screen to the edge and maybe increase the overall size just a little bit okay resulting in a 16 to 16 and a bit inch MacBook Pro right and the one of the nice things about when you grow the the size in terms of width and depth of the laptop sitting on your desk is that you could potentially if you wanted to have the same amount of battery just make it thinner because now you can spread out just that much further around the edges you know the the other thing you could do is Cape it the same thickness and just increase the amount of battery you get which would be a very Apple thing to do or you could just go crazy and make it thicker so that we can have a longer travel keyboard but I accept that's not going to happen so yeah in in the pantheon of unlikely things that are to happen proposed by William that's one of them okay I wasn't keeping a list but okay yes yes I I'm not sure what to think about this because it all makes sense of course what you say I follow that I hadn't thought about the bezel on the MacBook but yes of course it's just I used to have a 17inch uh Power book and in retrospect that was like carrying a sale around with me um I don't remember finding it awkward but now compared to you know like my well frankly to my iPhone it would feel ludicrous well I mean there was the netbook that was the smallest form factor of a laptop there there was the old if you really want to go back to it the IBM 701 CS that was the butterfly keyboard where it wasn't a butterfly key switch like we use today it was a keyboard that was split down the middle and literally puzzle pieced in so that it could fit under a very small screen and when you open it up it spread its wings and the keyboard hung off the edges of the laptop base IBM in the UK absolutely beautiful site uh has a small little Museum of previous IBM products and I I was shown one of those in there absolutely gorgeous thing yeah I have two of them they were such beloved machines that people would take the 46 processor out of them and sent the mother birds off to have them upgraded to pentiums okay I never it worked I never got one of those ones I still have the 46 model but it was um it was a thing where people would upgrade them and upgrade their processors inside and so how'd you get Mac OS on them uh sheep shaer right wasn't expecting a serious answer there not sure I got a serious answer but okay sheep shaver and vmac yeah sheep shaver and vmac were one of those old emulators so VM Marx uses vmac okay well you used to back in the old days it's not really been used in a long time but that was one of the ways you could get System 7 or system you know to to to run on those kinds of things the classics yeah but the the beauty of let's see where our MacBook Pro could go is that obviously if you had 32 G Max you would probably be talking about U lpddr Ram or or ddr4 Ram which is faster and a little more power hungry you'd also probably be looking at trying to get a 10 nanometer Intel chip so that you could uh go that much faster now don't know the difference between these different types of ram but I'm guessing uh faster generally yeah possibly more capacity more expensive yes okay right oh I'm up to date there then okay um you also said new processes and things but okay what's what's interesting about this note is that this note says that these laptops are going to be aimed at designers and Gamers and gaming is is one of those areas where Apple has never quite succeeded you know they've tried for years they had John carac work with them on things they had you know they they they tried to get openg GL to be a thing they have done a large number of attempts at gaming including metal and and metal to right and mhm the uptake has never been there on Mac and and to be fair they sort of failed at gaming on Apple TV as well it's U for for a myriad of reasons so part of it is Hardware right Apple tends to ship gpus that are not exactly the gpus that gamers are looking for you know a gamer these days wants like an RTX 208 you know 2080 or whatever the newest thing from Nvidia is or or something shiny like that and you know apple apple will ship a GPU but it's it's not going to be the one that a gamer will find in a dedicated uh you know a dedicated like uh HP Omen laptop or something like that I will cheerily confess that I have zero interest in gaming but it does seem to me that whatever gamer is using now is stuff that you what do you call me a regular productivity kind of user will benefit from later so I like to see these things coming through but apart from being addicted to uh suduku on my iPad i' never play games at all right okay we'll just move on from that just been fired haven't I why are you so nervous and paranoid about being fired William in the history a in the history of this podcast have we ever fired someone don't answer don't know no and and I have I have never actually fired anyone from the podcast just saying so that because I know we'll get comments years and years of being freelanced with BBC where uh you had no contract per se and it was you could be gone next week for you know and actually I liked that uh but I see it's affected my psyche and it has you're you're getting from it what if I throw in the fact that I have played chess quite a bit as well very very badly but I've played it so that's two games I'm surely officially a gamer now I need one of these Nvidia RT thingies that you mentioned yes give me one of those absolutely yeah yeah all right now quo also talked about the possibility of the 2019 iPhone and what it's going to be like and and so what he was talking about is he expects that the true depth camera will see an update that there will be a higher power flood Illuminator for better face ID recognition that the 6.1in LCD model might get 4 gig of RAM up from the current 3 gig that it has in the iPhone 10r the uh the the top end iPhone will get a triple lens camera system with a wide telephoto and Ultra wide option we don't know whether or not that would would be in both the 5.8 and 6.5 in OLED models we have no idea about exactly where that goes but that's what they're looking at uh now all of the lineup may get Ultra wideband which is useful for indoor positioning and navigation you know how sometimes you go indoors and you lose your GPS signal Ultra wideband is the cure for that I thought staying outside was the secure but okay it seems more workable will these phones be foldable though isn't that really what we want no okay so Samsung released a folding phone and Samsung's foldable phone is ridiculous money very very version one very very thick now I'm kind of glad it exists as a version ones because if it's ever to become practical then someone needs to make a rough version one so that they can make make a better version too but this thing is is very very rough now there are a bunch of different ideas for what foldable should be should it be something that folds in half vertically like a folio case and then you open it up and you've got bigger screen to work with should it be something that folds backwards Across The Binding so that it's a small display in your hand like a normal phone and then you open it up for more or should it be a clamshell kind of like the old uh the old flip phones no one's exactly positive what these things should should be but Samsung has gone ahead and released one and they're the first manufacturer with a big name to go ahead and do it we we saw one back in January at CES but this is really the first real one and uh you know there there are valid concerns first of all how the operating system handles it now Google said that they're going to make Android work with folding phones um the other thing is you know I worry a little bit about stress right anytime that you have a joint that moves eventually that joint is going to wear out and break but Samsung did go to some lengths to talk about I can't remember the system of Gears that they used for it it's actually the whole presentation was very Apple like apart from the lack of Applause when expected other than that it was very Apple showing design and the inard bit for the hinge well I don't know how to design anything but it looked very impressive to me one of the things about giving a presentation like that is that with apple they never waited for Applause they kept talking and when the Applause happened then they'd pause for it but they they could have gone on and given the whole presentation without a single bit of Applause you know I do remember what was the Apple presentation in New York where it was they were practically thrown by how the audience were reacting so much to it and you could see they were trying to press through uh was yes I was watching the Samsung thing and it was like and it folds Tada no nobody wants to appla nope I think this is really interesting phone I mean no use to me cuz it runs Android and it's Android that I don't like uh but otherwise what what do you dislike about Android pretty much every bit of it it feels unfinished to me still I find it clunky uh there are so many options in it when I don't really care about option so what what Android were you using what version of Android were you using I have absolutely like was this on a pixel was it some Samsung thing what was this no idea can't remember a single thing except instantly thinking really seriously what was the thing that threw me go it was this thing where I thought oh this is really good and then it wasn't it's like it was half good I like you couldn't be bother I remember the person showing it to me uh blamed Apple for it uh Apple has some some rights to something and therefore this Android maker couldn't do something and it was all just oh come on yeah work don't work fed up so I've I've used uh Android in every iteration of it and you know I try and use things like the Nexus or the pixel or or something that's a sterile build a real build from Android as opposed to from Apple from Google sorry a real build from Google as opposed to being a uh a modified version like Samsung would do and it's uh you know it's one of those things where you use it for a week or two and it this could quite work this could be all right but I do like coming back to Apple knowing that it's a secure phone that it can be restored to a secure state that it's that it's um reliable where Android I always question how how reliable is this how secure is this should I really feel comfortable using it kind of thing but if I were I think of nothing of that if I were completely ignorant I mean it would be probably okay well I might as well be completely ignorant because I do know about the security concerns but I don't think about them very much CU I'm so used to using Mac stuff but if I use uh Android if I use quite often have to use a Windows PC and it just ticks me off the number of things I have to think about other than my work uh when getting it done I just uh can't bear it so y I come back yeah now there's also word about a modular Mac Pro and you know they they've talked about the Mac Pro being modular in the past they also talked about uh when they talked about the Mac mini earlier last year about it being something that could be stacked and and of course it can be so the idea here is that a modular Mac Pro would be units that could stack and would have a connector going between them so that you could get your Tower of of stackable modules to the configuration you needed we should say that this is all coming from uh one YouTube channel yeah um which I can't pronounce the name of I'm not trying to hide it can you pronounce it telosian te something TS Tech right I am certain that was a race in Star Trek but whoever uh they I mean I don't know the uh Providence of this I don't know how likely it is to be accurate but they have an amazing amount of detail and it most of it all seems kind of very plausible including this stackability I mean all Apple has actually said is 2019 modular there be a display um and this Builds on all of that and kind of confirms bits of it except that there's a claim as well that it might be delayed to next year everything seems terribly plausible um and if it is all right well I'm a bit disappointed in way because it's like spoilers you know let Apple show me this stuff rather than whoever they are unpronouncable yeah and it's it's one of those things where that's the problem with rumors all the time is that you sort of want to know and at the same time you want to hold back yes yes now this this is something that's more important and we should really pay attention to is the concept of what's going to happen with Macos and iOS and I say that because Mac OS has for years used what's called appkit as the framework for UI and things like that and iOS used UI kit which was meant for iPhones and then iPads and so forth and last year at WWDC they showed us UI kit on Mac OS and called it marzipan and the idea was that you could bring iOS apps to Mac OS and that's great one of the things that some people wanted and thought about was the idea of Mac OS apps being Rewritten to use uiit that appkit would go away and that when that happened that Mac apps could then be put on iOS and and of course the big example that people use for this the concept of let's put Final Cut Pro on iOS because where is the good Final Cut Pro app for iOS and what I have to say is I think that's not going to happen or certainly not going to happen anytime soon partly because just how how tied to appkit Final Cut Is and rewriting it for UI kit would would be very difficult there would be things that simply wouldn't translate now certainly Apple could throw those out as they did with moving to Final Cut Pro 10 from previous versions but I don't know that that's what they really want to do at this time this just seems to me like a way to get people who weren't developing for the Mac to effectively develop for the Mac um at the cost of I don't know one more email or one more tick boox or something rather than uh and a way to shed the Mac of its old things and move over right so the I would like find look on iPad that's absolutely true but there is one isn't there I forgot the name of it but Apple used it in that um iPad Pro videoed it yeah Adobe premere no something with an L Luminosity or something like that forgive me I will look it up uh for the show notes but I can't remember what it is now it just I thought oh that looks rather nice right so the goal is like you say to to allow doers to make a single binary that can be submitted to a unified App Store the the thing is is that it's not clear how well that will work out you know it's a nice idea to make it so that the app stores are merged as far as users is concerned but it's it's not really sure that that will actually take place the way people hope you know Windows tried to do this and they ended up having Windows phone and Windows RT for the uh the RT Arm based tablets and also for the the regular surface and laptops for Windows 10 and they thought that people would then write those unified apps it didn't really work out and it end uping off the fact that Windows phone just didn't take off why was it wor anybody well Windows phone could have taken off they they failed with Windows phone in part because they didn't do enough to support their development community and by that I mean one of the steps they made was they they initially started their app store without an age ranging or or age rating system you know in in the IOS app store it will say this app is meant for people who are 17 and above right contains contains that you know know contains themes that are more mature or contains violence or whatever you know if you've got a game like Infinity Blade and it shows blood as you slash a sword through someone okay so maybe that's uh one that that at least mentions that in the store well Windows store didn't really do that initially and so then they patched it to to add that category to it and then wanted every developer to create and submit a new build rather than just going and editing their metadata and they didn't have enough user base so that all the developers that were were out there said you know what we're not going to submit a new build just for this give us a break and Microsoft took out every app that did not submit a new build when asked to to account for that change in the app store and they shot themselves in the foot because they basically took every app out of their App Store well whoops this doesn't really fit with the the Steve B developers develop developers thing a few years ago I was thought um an advantage of Windows is that they have these this amazing development pool well that didn't exactly work out in their favor let's say okay and uh so it'll be interesting you see that happening with Apple if they do this I mean they've been known to pull things well before but I can't see them doing something quite like that I mean they they've sort of had uh a bit of a difficult time with the Mac app store right the Mac App Store initially had people come to it but then left it because it's sandboxing rules and difficulties and things like that and so now people distribute outside the Mac App Store and apple would like everyone to be Distributing through the App Store no for no small reason because they also get that 30% cut but also because it's a nice unified way for people to find software and be secure that the you know be be sure that the software they're loading is from a secure Source it's authenticated and Apple would very much like for that for their users so this kind of change would make good sense for Apple but does it make good sense for those developers that are currently Distributing outside the Mac App Store maybe not okay I I mean I like the redesign of the Mac App Store but it has problems I dislike it vehemently well if have you tried to get back previous purchases there are times when it simply doesn't work um well ask on app inside of I had to get around most of it but still finding problems the problem with the App Store is the same problem with the App Store on Apple TV which is trying to search for things is bad trying to search for prior purchases is very bad my purchases in the old version of the Mac App Store used to be in a long list that I could scroll and then install and what it really needed at the top was a search field so I could search that list and that would break it to you but there was search field yeah now yeah soar bear with me ah hard to find well so if it's hard to find then they haven't done their job right now sure now if you're in the Mac App Store and you go to your prior purchases and I'm doing this as we do it just so that no one can say I haven't uh hate to break it to you just like you did okay so I have my purchase list and there is no search field among my purchase list there's a search field in the left column but that searches the whole store yes I just want to search my prior purchases because Lord knows I have like uh a long list of scrolling through them especially now that they're no longer presented in list form they're now presented in two columns it is so much harder yeah you say that but clearly you have not appreciated or at least not suffered from the greater problem which is uh there are many times when you will find for some reason genely I cannot fathom out why that list of previous purchases is wrong uh for the longest time I had apparently only ever purchased one app and I'd never even heard of it I must have downloaded it for something uh I went through contortions to get them all back and I believed I did but I'm still every now and again finding one that does just simply doesn't list for it even though it hasn't been removed I did legitimately buy it I can find it through my iTunes receipts and all of this there's something very very screwy about the database for previous purchases so that problem have not been able to find them just on the list um my heart doesn't bleed it might Hemorrhage a tiny amount for you yeah well they have problems yeah that's problem the wait wait we're talking about app stores actually so this is this is relevant so you remember you remember what was like trying to find software before a Mac app store right well it was it was very difficult you you you know you'd look around you'd search the internet maybe you'd find a CNET download page or you'd you know you'd go to Mac update.com and you'd search things and try and figure out what what on Earth application is going to actually meet your needs right really hard to do and I don't know how we coped I genuinely can't remember how we did it at all but yes okay it was another world and trying to find software is still actually a challeng all and so there's a site called capa.com and capa.com is a free online resource to help you find the very best software solutions for your business and they have over 700,000 reviews of products from real users so you can kind of discover everything you need to make an informed decision they have 700 specific categories of software everything from project management to email marketing to yoga studio management software so no matter what kind of software your business needs they make it easy to find the right solution fast there are millions of people who use Capa each month to find the right tools for their business and you can join them you can be among them visit capa.com appleinsider for free today to find the right tools to make 2019 the year for Your Business capa.com apppp Insider Capa that's cap a p t raa.com slapple inssider and I I I think it really is relevant you know we we how do you find good software that's going to actually meet your needs and the Mac App Store doesn't really help you do that you still end up searching the web and a resource like Capa actually fixes this problem okay sorry my mind has gone partly I'm back trying to remember how in the world we have a coat of this but now summ all the stuff I've read about uh Apple's merging of things took about it from the developer point of view that I as a developer will just submit once and it will propagate out um that doesn't necessarily follow then that there will be one single App Store um for as far as users are concerned well I mean the interface for the Mac App Store now mirrors very much the interface for the IOS app store these things are coming closer together although the content isn't Al although you can search your purchases on the Mac on the uh the apple and TV and the iPhone app store so there's that oh true but um it's it's sort of becoming this unification and they would like for you to be able to submit once and have it be everywhere but what that means is if you're designing an app for iOS you create your UI for that if you're designing it for Mac you have to go ahead and create it again now if you're using storyboards maybe you can avoid that but really if you're trying to make an that lives up to the best of what you want it to be then you have to put in some work for it for both platforms now there will people who say look at the current stocks app and say no apple clearly didn't and they're not wrong but you know or or the news app for that matter you know these these don't feel as much like good Mac applications as they do like electron apps or node.js apps you know react kind of things which are are portable but if if you don't have applications that really show off and take advantage of what the platform can do then the platform is sort of wasted right if if all of your applications are web- based why would you own a Mac is a valid question sure it's always been the same thing with final draft which is built for Windows and PCs and always comes out on the Windows is looking like a 1980s PC app I mean it there's lots to love in final draft but the look is not one of them yes and the feature list isn't as much as it could be you know you wrote you wrote that final draft review and I I pointed out and you you protested but I pointed out that I really like using um Highland and Fountain yeah Highland's great it doesn't do quite everything I might want but what it does it's really really good out yes right and it's also a Mac app it's a proper application as opposed to a port from Windows true yes you know granted the work is what's what matters right but but using the tools can make making the work more pleasurable and uh I I I I long ago gave up touching final draft of course I don't do it nearly as professionally as you do so it's uh sort of a moot point I'm not exactly their ideal customer but that's what I get I'm not in the writer's Guild William I'm sorry okay you can apply to be if you have sufficient um credits and things let's just do a plug for The Writers Guild of America West and East fine organizations I'm uh just to be clear I'm Deputy chair of the Writers Guild of Great Britain which is of course Affiliated but it's not the same thing I think you would have to have british-based credits to have a hope of joining The Guild here but you know you're already in America that gives you a head start yeah you've just got to write things a lot right that are made o how do we get on to that from final trft uh app stores then we it looks like uh apple apple is actually said haven't they uh that the ones they did so far stocks home news that's their kind of internal testing thing and that in a year's time they will do whatever it is they do to let developers uh do more so I'm assuming WWDC we'll see more details about that sensible don't know that's the idea yeah yeah now we we should discuss the financials for a moment you know we we talked about how they had made their earnings adjust and and you know the stock price was affected by that things like that well the holiday quarter results revealed that iphon Revenue was down 15% compared to last year but unit Figures were not provided by the company under the new policy so Gartner went ahead and tried to compile some data and according to Gartner's data the number of units did go down but at a lower percentage of 11.8% which is believed to be the worst quarterly decline for the company since the first quarter of 2016 but their CLA claing that iPhone unit sales reached 64.5 million for the quarter down from 73.2 in the fourth quarter of 17 so for 2018 as a whole iPhone sales are down just 2.7% or 209 million units now I'm sorry I got so lost you got lost all that's why I capped it with the year right 2.7% doesn't sound that bad does it uh no I 2.7% of a very very big number isn't wonderful but yes proportionately uh I I'm not panicking for Apple should we say but the rest of it um yeah yeah seems like you could add those numbers up and get any result you want which may be true the the thing is that it really looks as if the weaker demand was that it was it was a little bit weaker across most regions with the exception of North America and the mature asia-pacific markets um China saw the biggest Decline and that's that's what it comes down to so so that's of the basically that's sort of what we thought we already knew but Gartner's numbers tend to agree with it and we agree with Gartner well maybe not always but it it certainly seems to jib with the rest of what we know all right so on average it's a good sour because you hear of so many analysts so many things I I never quite keep up with uh who has accurate data and I don't know how they're getting this data anyway so there must be some intelligence and guess work in there somewhere yeah but I'm sure they're very very good at it yes yes now Goldman Sachs and apple are working on a credit card we've had this rumor before but it looks as if they're continuing work on this project that resint result in a jointly produced credit card that offers extra functions in the wallet app so you could potentially use it to manage your spending and your accounts more effectively without requiring a separate credit card app all right I can see that yes uh I actually think America is better off for financial apps than the UK because you have mint.com which always looks great and keeps not coming uh to the UK at all so I don't tend to use an app for it I go straight to my bank accounts uh online banking all of them every now and again and manage them that way so the idea of something on my phone uh helping me spend more money that really does that works for me I can follow that yeah now there's also some suggestion that the Rings concept that's used on the Apple watch could be ported into this and no one's really sure exactly for what yet although I kind of wonder if it would be around Financial Health right you know use the Rings for your spending activity or or your saving activity or you know your saving towards goals kind of thing would be good uh William you're so close to going into overdraft a little 7 pound purchase would put you right over yeah okay yeah actually I wonder if there also do the sharing thing cuz um I really just like the health sharing activity bit because everybody I'm sharing with is doing better than I am uh but the idea of actually having uh your your financial details shared with say your partner or bookkeeper maybe something like that if that isn't the same person then that could actually be really quite motivating um and that' be a useful thing yeah maybe yeah I'm just making it up now the the idea here is that this would also of course do tail on Apple pay and maybe it would help push some Apple pay adoption which I generally keep forgetting that there's even an issue about Apple P adopting because we covered this before the compli as much as I think you us has better uh financial apps your financial system as a whole is so complicated compared to here where the moment Apple pay existed it was accepted everywhere because of other systems we have I pay with it so much that I forget the an issue that anybody can't so yeah Target Target retail big retail in America just turned on tap to pay at all of their terminals only just now they have not enabled Apple pay for their own Target Red Card their branded card now the Branded card from them gives you 5% discount on your entire purchase so it's there's there's a value to using it but it's not an Apple pay approved card it doesn't work in Apple pay so if you want to use that card in an you end up using the target app and scanning a barcode as opposed to as opposed to being able to put it in your your wallet and tap to pay that way that's thought you will know this um certainly more than I do in the UK there is um uh a kind of notional limit uh of30 when you're paying through Apple pay uh or or any kind of uh contactless system lots of places if you're paying through Apple pay they don't care they'll take anything they kind of trust it but in Theory it enough places limit you to 30 that we've kind of trained ourselves to not go over 30 when we're doing this is it the same no in America because right 5% of30 is less uh of a bigger deal than 5% of a thousand isn't it so yeah uh is there no limit No Limit okay no no limit you but it does make me uh understand more why people would be fuss I mean I might be wrong to not want a 5% discount or not be fussed about a 5% discount if I'm buying a F's worth of food or something uh but it doesn't hurt me as much as a larger amount would so yes I get that if if you're shopping for groceries and clothing and personal hygiene goods and stuff like that and you walk out with a basket that's full of uh you know $150 worth of product you want your 5% yeah absolutely yeah and that it's just sort of this weird state that they're in where they they accept tap to pay but their own product for that gives you that discount is not in the tap to pay stuff so you can't you have to use their barcode app or swipe the physical cardly when you say tap to pay that's what I would call um uh contact L the same and that means that's not specifically for Apple pay it's for any type of correct correct so that means none of the contact ones have the the Target Card system the Target Card does not contactless yeah right so it's possible since Apple I don't I've never used this apple does add some sort of loyalty cards doesn't it they do they do yeah they so if they were to switch on target that would actually put them ahead of every other contactless uh thing in the states it's it's so they should do that Target that has to make that decision and they have as yet no plans oh I see right okay yeah now you know how sometimes you have a product a hardware product and you have an app for it and the app will say hey there's an update for your Hardware product would you like to update it and it will actually update the firmware of that Hardware product yeah yes okay and frequently it says things like hold the phone close and don't leave the app when you're doing this so that nothing happens and goes wrong when you're updating right uh I guess this sounds like what I used to get with the Apple watch a lot that's the only I can think of does this but yes I've been through this process so Nike has a shoe called the Nike adapt BB and these are self-lacing sneakers that can be tightened and loosened via the smartphone app I know you're you're you're you're stunned right you're shocked struggling to judge I just uh I can't quite see how these where you're going with this how these two things join up together well so because they can be controlled by the app there's the communication between the two now Engineers like to leave themselves doors so that they can update things if they need to right if a product is shipped and finished and can't be updated then if they have a bug they can't fix it later so they leave you know leave themselves an opening to update and in this case if you have the Android version of the Nike adapt app it will deliver a faulty version of the new firmware and brick your shoes brick your shoes yeah okay what does that actually look like I mean do the shoes close up no but they they won't respond to the app any longer and they won't and it's possible that they also won't respond to adjusting the shoes so what happens if you break your shoe while wearing it well that's the thing is that we don't actually know because Nike has yet to provide a solution or even comment on the issue okay but it's definitely an issue so so so here here's the thing right if you used the IOS app you were okay but if you were using the Android app the uh the the shoe stops responding and cannot be updated and if you perform a hard reset on your shoe it doesn't appear to solve the problem I'm sorry a hard reset on your shoe I don't know why it's tickling me I need to reboot my shoe excuse me oh imagine if it was boots you had to reboot your boots uh and you bought them from boots which is a yes yes okay all righty but really this boils down to this Ison yet another difference between Android and iPhone uh the iPhone uh has some sort of satorial uh safety measure to stop your feet getting trapped so here's the problem is that Nike so when you do a firmware update when when you design a product and the product can't have a firmware update if you were really concerned about what you were doing if you were smart you would put in an extra bit of flash RAM and have it partitioned and the partition will have a duplicate copy of the firmware and when you update it should copy to the second part of the partition and then update from that and then copy it to the recovery partition so basically there is there is always always a good F of the firm where to boot so if it tries to to start from the failed update it can fall back to the good one except uh that's presumably more expense uh for the hardware manufactures and all this stuff but if that's what's happened here how has it not been an issue for iPhone no it didn't it didn't happen here they didn't they didn't build that into the shoe the iPhone simply just loaded the firmware correctly and maintained the connection with the device correctly the Android app did not now this is a mistake that firm that that engineers make all the time this this cost part saving or whatever you know I uh I had to flash the power management computer in my car last summer and when I was flashing it I was using a laptop and it got about 30% across and then failed and now I had a failed firmware flash on my car and couldn't start my car and had they built in the extra flash memory as I said and had a recovery partition for it then I would have been able to contined starting the car we truly are two countries divided by a Common Language cuz if you tell somebody you're at flashing in your car here yeah you'd be arrested would you yeah no I program I was programming the computer in my car as you do okay yes now is that a typical operation for most people no is programming the firmware updating your shoe going to be typical yeah probably yeah can't question that but okay yes if you're a Nike adapt BB owner yes yes it will okay how this idea of Bluetooth presum it's Bluetooth Bluetooth enabl choose catching on with any other manufacturers actually we've been doing bluetooth enabled shoes for quite some time you just haven't really thought about it they tend to be for runners or footy players football players oh okay so there some sort of data monitoring it's very much data monitoring in in running it's you know step counting it's pressure as your foot hits the ground it's gate analysis it's it's things like that and some of the same stuff that you use in the sub football stuff too and okay you know you know it's it's possible to detect if you're injured by noticing the difference in your gate it's possible to advise on your running or keep track of your running and synchronize those with apps that help you manage you know your preparation for a marathon for example you know or or apps like straa for example where Strava was going ahead and Reporting geolocation on troop movements and stuff like that a year ago so straa I haven't heard that oh yeah right so there are all kinds of of things we've been doing with foot pods for years you know the original Nike Foot pod Nike run was a was a footp pod that worked with an iPod and that was using Bluetooth sorry my mind's just gone back to all these Android owning Footwear users uh how many formal garas and I don't know funerals are there where somebody cannot get out of their their pumps and has to be there in their finery and athletic footwear as well you know you this is not exactly the podcast where we comment on sorial fashion this is not you're right we should wait for the next season of Dancing With the Stars well I mean I mean I I sometimes host another podcast where we talk about luxury items and and and fashion and things like this and if if you'd like to be on that one we can do that one I have absolutely no knowledge or skill or experience so yeah I'm definitely up for that I was just waiting for he you say interest I didn't hear it so yeah you're on well actually interest I I was very careful to say Dancing with the Stars there uh the version we have here is called Strictly Come Dancing historical reasons and honestly a part of it is frogwatch I was at uh BBC Birmingham uh last week and in the reception area they have some of the most gorgeous frocks from the show and I admit my first thought is no human being is Slim enough to wear those but beyond that I mean the use of materials and stuff it's really interesting so all right well we'll arrange that and uh when we do we'll go ahead when we host an episode we'll go ahead and tell you all about it here on the Apple Insider podcast now security is still one of those things that we talk about over here and Nest secure a product owned by Google is a uh security system that works with Google assistant and nest and things like that and and what happened was that apparently it was out for 18 months and Google announced an update that said hey there's a mic in it now and you can use it for Google assistant and people are upset because they didn't realize that their security system had a microphone in it for the past 18 months that they weren't ever told about right so that means a security system is arguably insecure well I mean one could certainly think about that now uh obviously Google's saying that the mic had not been enabled previously and that using it is an opt-in feature that can be activated or disabled at any time via the app uh but that doesn't really Comfort people because people didn't really like the idea that their home security system had the potential to record them what could possibly go wrong well so Google says the on device microphone was never intended to be a secret and should have been listed in the tech specs that was an error on our part the microphone has never been on and is only activated when the users specifically enable the option but people are already distrustful of this stuff right yes absolutely uh there is a worry for it I I quite I mean it doesn't sound very likely that make a mistake but I can completely buy that it did so you know we've all made mistakes for it so yeah I think I think the issue here is that Google Google should not have done this when they're sort of operating at a trust deficit right people distrust Google and distrust Amazon and and for that matter distrust Facebook and one of the things that I think is that sometimes the employees there don't even realize that they're operating in in this sort of trust deficit that they they have a bubble around them that thinks well we're doing good stuff people should trust us absolutely we're fine and we saw that from Facebook employees who made comments to that effect when Apple yanked their certificate a few weeks back right this is just Apple trying to have revenge against Facebook this is this is not serious and and apple is just grandstanding again on privacy where were those kinds of comments so people really don't realize that that their company is not necessarily seen in the best of light you know Google probably thought they could go ahead and issue this release and that it'll just blow over and it probably will blow over but but it's not a good situation is it except if you're listening to the Apple Insider podcast I think you're uh unless you stumbled across this by accident and stayed for the comedy which would be very nice you you're you're conscious of this stuff more than the average average consumer and there are a lot of average consumers I would have said actually I'm an average consumer most of the time but I know about this one the majority of people who buy Google things I suspect are not as fuss as we know they should be so yes I think it will blow over I think I think you're right about go Google's perception of themselves but they're also aware that for the greater majority of the market uh so what and why should they be fussed about something as terrible as this we we should be absolutely clear right there's no evidence that this was a working microphone there there's no evidence there was actually EES dropping on anyone and Google announced this update enabled the microphone there there was no blogger that discovered a nefarious activity there was no one that that found this out and discovered it it just was they announced it everyone said wait a minute what do you mean you're announcing that how how is that even possible right so we we have to really look a little bit harder for find something really nefarious The Nest secure product came out four years after Google acquired Nest most people that would be concerned about this would have already been suspicious of the nest secure product a little bit right you know that's I can't believe it's that long but yes okay I agree yeah it it really is uh Tony Fidel is kind of out over there and Matt Rogers hasn't been doing a whole lot over there and and they Founders have moved on yes should we wrap it up with a Qualcomm story a qualcom story yeah really is there anything going on well previously on Qualcomm Qualcomm has has tried to get product banss around the world they' tried to get product banss in the US they tried to get product banss in Germany they tried to get them in uh in China and so Qualcomm was seeking a ban from the uness International Trade Commission after the judge in September made an initial ruling against that action saying it'd be against public interest and he declared Apple in violation of one of three contested patents leaving the door open for for action but there was not an induction he said a ban with on iPhones with Intel chips would effectively give Qualcomm a monopoly over the wireless modem Market um so Apple revealed that they discovered a software workaround to qualcomm's design something that they originally deemed impossible in Prior arguments Qualcomm believes that this Revelation undermines Pender's previous decision and so Qualcomm thinks that that by Apple discovering this software workaround it opens the door again to number the temporary ban and so it looks like by March 26th the ITC is going to have to make a final ruling that that decides whether or not there's going to be a ban did you get lost in that the last thing I remember about this story is uh Apple saying um all that time ago last week that they we're reintroducing the iPhone 7 and 8 with uh Qualcomm Hardware in Germany to get around that pan uh is this saying nah need bother just update iOS and everything's fine right so that's what they're they're saying is that they they begin selling the modified iPhone 78 models with Qualcomm modom to skirt the ban in Germany but they found over here that they could go ahead and do a software update as a work around to to get around the patent problem and so now call com saying wait a minute if you do that then you absolutely are in violation give us the ban give us the injunction so right we will kind that but um my mind's still on Germany if Apple in the US has figured they can get or believes they can get around the patent with software uh are whoever it is that decided to buy some more Qualcomm chips in Germany going do I expect not in part because of speed to getting back in Market all right that makes sense good point yes I I think you know the very worst case is being under a legal cloud and not having product for sale because that's where people begin to lose confidence and then don't want to take the product back on the shelves and of course Apple because they're Apple they don't run that risk nearly as badly but there's never a time when you want to not have product on the Shelf when you when you don't want it available and so because it's it's lost sales it's missing out and it's it's that cloud and that's the cloud not only with consumers but with retailers and so getting back on market with the modified fast was the right answer the real right answer is going to be resolving This legal case the real right answer is going to be making all of these things go away and having a settlement but um having a judgment and a settlement but that that's not where we're at yet presumably that's not going to happen on this March 26 date I remember you telling me that uh there's a case in April as well do with all of this the March 26th date is just a judgment on the uh the injunction I believe okay well I dare say you might be following that um got that impression yes a little bit Yeah excuse me okay right y you follow qualcon I'll follow FRS uh and the design of satorial apparatus for iPhones and we'll see what happens next William where can people find you on the internet I am pretty much always on Twitter at w gallago and oh there's also obviously Apple inside email address William apple insider.com and I particularly enjoy getting emails uh there I'm at V marks on Twitter and I write over wristwatch review as well as here and we will be back next week with more of the Apple Insider frock cast with William all right excellent I like frogs FR as yeah yeah all right it's been lovely having you here it's been lovely having all of you join us and listen and we'll see you back next week\n"