The Evolution of the Apple Watch: From Unnecessary Device to Fitness Focus

That was unceremoniously dumped last fall and now with watchOS 3, it's just an app dock which again makes a lot more sense. They got rid of the um uh glances view as well and replace that with the app dock. They have a control center for quick access to uh uh you know adjusting settings and and and uh things like that um and you know switching between watch faces but really it's focused as a device that uh uh tracks your Fitness um and it uh uh it gives you notifications and makes so you can keep your phone in your pocket and then things like like uh Apple pay only require two button Taps very quick uh Hy Siri uh is done all my devices are turning on now uh is done without um having to interact with the device without having to press any buttons. So the point of the piece really was the Apple watch succeeds at tasks where you don't really have to interact with it very much.

The Fitness Stuff Throughout the Day Sends You Alerts Knows When You're Standing Knows When You're uh more active um completing your rings uh you don't have to do anything even if you're working out you press the button and then you get back to it later. It measures your heart rate it does all that stuff uh uh using Siri uh you don't have to press a button um you know all all these things that it does very well uh require very little interaction with advice and uh even the notifications you just glance down your wrist it pops up you decide whether or not you want to interact with it and then you just get back on with it you don't have to look at your phone or check anything like that. So it's very convenient and and I think that's where the Apple watch succeeds and where it's really finding its place is as this device that uh makes it so you don't have to pick up your phone or do anything and and makes it easy to interact with your devices in a in a seamless and simple way.

You know when it was first introduced it felt to me very much like no one including Apple knew exactly why you should have one they knew all the things it could do and they left it up to you to figure out which one applied to you where for all of other the other Apple devices they told you exactly what it was for and why you should have one and they they've sort of Tak their time trying to find its way I think they're they're a little closer because they're talking about Sport and Health now I don't know what I would say they've taken their time. I mean you've had three major different platforms for it in two years right.

The Hardware Has Mostly Stayed the Same Which is You Know You Look at the Second Generation Version The Only Thing That They've Changed There Really Is They Got Away From The Fashion Focused Stuff uh and they're no longer selling $110,000 on up Addition Models They Now Have It's Like $1,200 for the Ceramic Edition Model and I think that Apple Realized That The The Fashion Part of it They Thought Was Going to be a Bigger Deal Than It Was um wasn't that big of a deal but to Apple's credit they've been able to go back to the drawing board um and refine it and continue to improve it in ways and I think it it it's a very relevant platform for them yes.

So what do you like most about using your Apple watch? Your It's Great For Running With GPS And Having The Music On It And Going Completely Wireless With My W1 Headphones I Absolutely Love That Notifications Are Great um You Know We Talked A Little Earlier About Uh Uh Uh You Know Having An Always On Device To Control Smart Home Accessories That Is My Apple Watch It's On My Wrist I Can Talk To It I Can Give It Commands I Can Invoke Siri Without Pressing A Button um And I Use It All the Time For Apple Pay um If I Get a Cab all The Cabs In New York City um Have Apple Pay Support I Just Press The Button Twice Don't Have To Pull My Phone Out Of My Pocket bam I'm Paid I'm Out of the Cab I'm Good to Go um and I think that between Fitness not ifications Siri and Apple pay those are really the the the pegs upon which the platform uh is really going to stand well.

That brings us to the close of another perfectly good episode of Apple Insider Neil where can people find you on the internet you can find me on Twitter at this is Neil NE L and you can read my stuff on Apple inside and I'm Victor marks and you can find me at V marks on Twitter and also you can find me this Monday at Adorama live at 6 p.m. and we hope to see you there

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to Apple Insider podcast this is episode 118 I'm your host Victor marks and joining me is our editor and chief Neil Hughes hey Victor how's it going it's amazing and you know Neil we've got this event coming up that we were just talking about before we started recording you know this is this is a new one for us we've never held an event quite like this before but Daniel dilder I and and you will also be present I understand uh Dan and I are going to be speaking at adorama's flagship store in New York City to talk with professional Apple users discuss the current state of Apple's HED hardware and and join us you know we should have any of our listeners who are in the New York area please feel free to come to adorama's flagship store and uh disc join us for discussion uh refreshments and a chance to win great prizes like a brand new 9.7 in iPad we're going to be doing this it's exciting this a cool event I think um and a good opportunity uh for people from the community to kind of come together and uh and meet some of the folks behind Apple Insider and meet one another and talk you know Adorama is a great partner of Apple Insider and uh they reached out to us and asked if we wanted to do an event in their space they have a beautiful store in Manhattan with a great dedicated Apple area um and uh yeah so it's one of those things where we talked about it and decided what do we want to talk about and and uh Pro users seemed relevant not only because of what Adorama does um you know focusing on those types of users but also Mac's recent Mac announcements the Mac Pro iMac Mac uh that Apple has made um so it seemed relevant and like a good thing to talk about so the of course on of course on on Monday May 1st at 6 p.m. uh at Adorama store at 42 West 18th Street between 5ifth and 6th Avenues and please come there's a registration on an official Eventbrite page that we'll link to in the show notes getting right into things see here my first story that I had was about Apple working on personto person payment transfer systems to compete this is something that's been rumored for there this has been rumored for a few years um dating back to I think 2015 even um you know it's logical it seems to make a lot of sense um it seems to be kind of a no-brainer that Apple would do this um you know all you have to do is think about what is done with Apple pay and apply that same technology and convenience to peer-to-peer money transfers uh you think about how frictionless things like venmo are and square cash and what have you uh freely transfer money uh these services are interesting because it's not an area where Apple's going to get rich in fact they'll probably lose money on it but it's a way to get people into the ecosystem and so if Apple wants people to have their credit cards in there for buying stuff on iTunes buying stuff from the Apple Store using Apple pay at a merchant this is a way to get people to insert their credit card information into their iPhone for those services and it all just kind of works um so that's why you see Banks and and other uh uh organizations are are really pushing this peer-to-peer payment transfer because uh one of the big markets that they want to reach are millennials uh you know folks under the age of 35 or so who a lot of them don't have bank accounts uh don't necessarily have credit cards and they're harder to reach and they are the quote unquote underbanked um and so this is an opportunity for Apple to uh address that market and maybe hook them into their ecosystem a little bit you know we've we've used PayPal for years to do personto person transfers for you know items purchased over forums or classified kind of things and it's it's it's PayPal was cemented in people's minds as being the preferred purchase Method for eBay when eBay owned PayPal and that's what I really wanted out of Apple pay was an easy way to replace PayPal right and and being able to use it at 4 or five stores which which the number is growing but it's still a limited number of stores right uh is nice but being able to to do it for personto person transfers as well really cements it for me the you know when when people are setting up these kinds of things they'll take Paypal they'll take uh Google payments sometimes Square occasionally but if you can just say yeah I've got an iPhone and we'll do it by Apple pay it's done that's that's going to be a game changer in terms of the number of people using it I think I actually had a very weird interaction with venmo last week I don't use venmo a lot I've used it on occasion I've actually been scammed on venmo as well and we've talked about that before uh for those of you who don't know don't accept money money from people on venmo if you don't know them because the money may not actually be there you should only use it for people you know anyhow last week um I uh got a random transfer of uh like $25 or something on venmo from a woman that I didn't know I'd never heard of who she was and so I thought well maybe it's a scam or whatever and then she sent me a message about 5 minutes afterwards and she's like uh I'm sorry um I don't know who you are I typed in the wrong username and I sent you this money she's like I'm a poor college student can you transfer me back the $25 and having been ripped off by Veno before I was a little bit skeptical and so I looked into the terms of service and in there in their Q&A or whatever on there it says if somebody mistakenly transfers you money just transfer the money back and it's like wait a minute I'm scratching my head I know that when people transfer your money is not necessarily sitting in your account in the account it takes three days to to show up and all has to clear and so you yeah and so you can get screwed that way so um I reached out to venmo customer service then and I said listen I'm not going to do this I've been ripped off before and then quickly venmo customer service is like oh okay we'll just we'll take care of it on our end uh and they took care of it and gave this woman her money back but yeah she sent me a message she's like I'm a poor college student please just send me back $25 I don't know if it was a scam or not it seemed genuine to me she got her money back everybody's happy but yeah like I said I don't use venmo that much but I thought it was interesting right I I don't use Veno well I've never had occasion to use venmo because venmo it seems to me is popular in large cities it's it's one of those things that happens in New York it's one of those things that happens in San Francisco it's it's popular amongst kids too um college kids it's very popular with um and that's really where they kind of cut their teeth I I had a fellow asking me to take venmo last week and I I countered with square and and that's what we used in the end yeah yeah I I looked into all the payment services years ago because uh a friend of mine unfortunately found himself kind of on Hard Times he' been hit by a flood and we were trying to raise some money but we didn't want to do it in a embarrassing you know open a GoFundMe type page where you like tell your sad story or whatever I just wanted to keep it kind of lowkey and just text the information around to people and I looked into it and square cash was by far the easiest way to do it you just entered in your debit card number the money transferred there were no fees nothing he didn't even have to have an account set up you could just send it to his email address and then he could go and all the money would be sitting there waiting whenever he signed up um and it was very easy to use um so in my experience square cash is the easiest of them but I know venmo is the most popular option out there but I think it'll be nice when Apple gets into that space for people you know once again things that tie more into the Apple ecosystem if you're on iMessage if you're on iPhone uh and you want to transfer money easily it would be a great way to do it and it's one of those things where a Apple has people who are willing to adopt these things because they come from Apple you know there's the I'm I'm going to not get this right but I was looking the other day and something like apple has 34% of the smartphone market in the US and so that's 34% of people who can or 34% of smartphone users who can jump on board and adopt that kind of thing where for all of the competing right and for all of the competing phones you know it's a mish mash of services whether it's Android pay or Samsung's pay or whatever option else is out there um having that that ground swell of of users using consistent platform and who aggressively adopt like you say means that we're going to see this this start working what I found very interesting in this story uh that that came out uh today it is that apple is apparently also in talks with uh MasterCard uh and they are considering having a I'm sorry Visa not M card they're talking to Visa about potentially having a apple debit card that would sit in your Apple wallet and it would be part of the transfer service so uh we were talking earlier about um how it takes 3 days for the funds to settle in your bank account well if you were to use the money on a debit card then you could spend immediately so let's say you know somebody owes you 50 bucks they transfer you to you over Apple pay or apple cash or whatever they want to call it and then it shows up in your Apple wallet you can wait 3 days for it to show up in your bank account or you can spend it now on your Apple debit card and it's just sitting there waiting to be spent yeah and and this is actually something that square does today uh for instance I I when I used square like I said this last week I hadn't used it in a while and so I had to go through and and verify my existing number and stuff like that but once I'd done that it said do you want to have a virtual Visa card and I said well sure why not and I was able to add that virtual Visa card that square issued me to Apple pay so I can now pay with Apple pay out of the square balance that I've got there yeah Square does a pretty good job on this stuff I've always been impressed by uh their ability to integrate um especially being on the Apple side you know to have that Apple pay integration to put your debit card in there is really cool yeah and there's no reason that Apple can't do the same kind of thing yeah and I don't think it's going to change the game or or anything like that or be a big deal I think that it's it's one of those things that just make sense for Apple to do well what happens is it becomes like PayPal where you have a PayPal balance you can transfer to your bank account or you can pay out of it and so now you've got this this um one more thing that cements you to Apple and it's a new method for Nigerian scammers too well how's that supposed to be I know I know it's a joke but I'm just trying to think wait a minute now how how how they I'm sure they'll find a way I'm sure they'll find a way I mean I'm I'm trying to think of the 419 email um my my great uncle was a Nigerian prince who passed away and left me the secure element um I will gladly split the shares out of the secure it doesn't it's not scanning for me I tried I really tried moving on so this is this is one that's interesting to me I I've been thinking a lot and talking a lot about voice first as an interface and this progression of of you know we used to have a book Neil Stevenson wrote a book years ago called in the beginning there was the command line and it talked about the move from keyboard driven interfaces and text driven interfaces to to Mouse driven interfaces and graphical interfaces and we're experiencing we we've experienced another Revolution upon that two of them in fact one from Mouse to touch and a second one from touch to voice and so this story is about Apple finalizing or or rumored to be finalizing a design of a rival to Amazon's Echo device based on Siri you know the rumor says that it would it would be of course competitor to Amazon Echo that it would have Siri for the voice and AI would have AirPlay for the connectivity and and music transfer as opposed to Amazon's using Bluetooth and that it would have uh beats's audio technology all of that's kind of interesting there are some key differences that separate it from what Amazon's doing but I I you mean like it doesn't have a camera to judge Your Fashion on it like the latest Echo oh the echo look so echol look is a $200 Amazon Echo device that you place in your bedroom remind where I said camera so you place this internet connected camera in your bedroom yeah what could go wrong and and the use case justification for putting a camera in your bedroom is so that you can try on clothes in front of it and say do these make me look fat what could go wrong that's that's my big joke right there uh it's you know you're you're we had a case a couple of years ago where there were School admins who had placed spyware onto the school issued laptops to monitor their students and this would have been okay except that the IT people were using the computers to turn on the webcams when the students were at home in their beds in their bedrooms which is all a very bad idea and turned out to be a very bad idea for for that school district and for those those admins and this is why many people put a little piece of tape or a Post-It note or or there are even little plastic sliders made that act as lens covers for the cameras on laptops because putting a camera in your bedroom is is uh potentially a bad idea well I was going to say potentially a vulnerability if you want to say it's a bad idea that's fine and I accept it I was trying to C it's a bad idea I was trying to be so so careful it's a bad idea Apple would never be so stupid to make a product like this uh Apple would however potentially make a voice connected device that could give you the information you want from Siri allowed you to control your homekit stuff I don't know add reminders add add reminders and shopping lists kind of things set appointments to your calendar um and and the cool one that Google will ever be go ahead the cool one that Google home does the thing I really liked about Google home besides its usual kind of of answering things answering questions and controlling the lighting was that Google home understood that there was a chomecast in the house and you could tell Google home to play things on the chomecast so you could say you know okay Google play stranger things from Netflix on my TV on my chomecast name TV basically and and it would go ahead and kick off the episodes directly from the voice I liked that a lot and so one of the things that I'm hopeful and that I wanted Amazon to get this together too right they have the Alexa speakers they have Alexa integrated into the Fire TV devices there's no reason they shouldn't be able to do the same kind of interaction but they don't M MH Apple should be able to have whatever Visionary thing they have kick off something on Apple TV especially since they have an understanding of what's on all of those services is due to the Deep search that they have for all of the TV services they run as well as the TV app mhm right there were rumors before the Apple TV revamp a couple years ago with Siri that um that it might be this type of device and allinone thing um and there's been speculation since that Apple might even roll its router division into it so imagine a airport uh ex Express or AirPort Extreme or a time capsule um with uh that plugs into your TV that serves up Wi-Fi that has a speaker a microphone to give you this kind of echo like uh device I I I don't know if that's going to be the case I I see this being if this becomes a reality what what has been rumored here uh this you know beats sluh Siri SL whatever device I see this being kind of a a niche thing for Apple um I see it being you know Apple would rather sell you an iPhone they'd rather you use Siri on your iPhone they would rather that you um you know interact with a more fully featured device rather than some headless thing that you know is not going to do everything that you want or or probably not even hear you right most of the time so I I I could see this being something where they get into a market because they have to um but I I kind of like kind of like the iPad Mini you know it was like one of those things that Apple reluctantly got into and said okay well you guys want cheaper tablets here you go um and then now they've kind of given up on that market I could see this being something where uh for those that want to have an always on voice device but don't have an Apple Watch on the wrist or something um I I could see it being a market for that but I don't see this being like a huge device for Apple well so here's here's a good point and and I'm I'm very frustrated when you say that by the way but here here's the thing right me no no Amazon made the decision that voice was going to be a big deal for them and they instead of keeping it in their own product right it was it's it's not something locked in Echo they are encouraging third parties to roll it into their devices right in fact in our story we mentioned that the echo4 which is the uh the successor to echo's three version three homekit thermostat is likely to have Alexa built into it so when Amazon set out to build these things they they didn't just offer it in you know licensed partnership kind of way with these third- party manufacturers they went ahead and posted their code on GitHub and said if you've got a Raspberry Pi here are the steps that you need to take to go ahead and put an Amazon Echo speaker like thing together out of a Raspberry Pi so everyone can do it here's the code go forth have fun build your devices they also separately said here's what it takes to make a skill for Amazon Echo and you can run your own skills or you can submit it and and have it be a part of our skill store so that you can enhance and and augment what Echo can do for you so they they really made it easy to adopt Apple by comparison made it relatively difficult first of all they require a secure chip which costs money for good reason hey I'm not saying it's not without good reason but it but I'm saying that it slows adoption and it slows adoption because there's a cost for the chip there's a cost for getting in on the licensing program to get the Chip And there's an engineering cost where you have to understand how to put this thing on your board so there there are at least three different costs for trying to implement something with homekit second of all you you have to go through a huge certification process and homekit has been a moving Target it changed greatly between iOS 9 and iOS 10 and that caused a lot of people to have to go ahead and resubmit their devices that they they would have they they initially failed those tests right self-certification kind of things so it's it's very reliable it's very secure but it's also 5% of the market and that kind of feels to me like a throwback to the days of how much market share Apple had when we would say that the Mac was doomed apple is doomed right that's that's a throwback to 1997 1998 MH in terms of this segment and so Amazon has has geared things to be as open as possible and as widespread and easy to adopt as possible Apple has focused on what's secure and what's going to make the money but what is the killer app for these alwayson things because it's not checking the weather it's it's smart home stuff right so not necessarily the the biggest uses for these alwayson kind of things is music is setting timers you know my my wife shouts down says remind me in 10 minutes and so I just tell the speaker remind me in 10 minutes and yeah I could hold down the your phone you just do that so my phone doesn't have hyeri unless it's uh plugged in so I got to hold down a home button ah and the you say that there's no real difference but the the friction for digging my phone out of my pocket and pressing down the home button is a lot greater than just saying it to the speaker that's already listening don't get me wrong if Apple makes this device I will buy it and use it I am a guy who is considered trying to find a way to build a headless uh serious support Mac around my apartment so that I can more easily uh talk to it to control devices in my home I'm just looking at it logically in saying that smart home devices have not really caught on in a meaningful way anyhow um and so I don't think that uh uh this matters that much to most people I do the thing that excites me more than anything about this is the mention of AirPlay in it because AirPlay I have been a proponent of for a long time um I love it I have multiple AirPlay speakers in my home and uh I wish that there was some form of airplace support built into Siri slomit right there is no way to talk you are forgive me for interrupting but you are a unique case you are the guy that has AirPlay all over the house and and I would say that there are relatively few of you and you're saying that home automation hasn't caught on but that's the same thing there there are people who are out there doing home automation who are into it and they're they're you're looking at them and saying there's just one of them they're looking at you and saying there's just one of you this is the thing about home automation is that everyone finds their way into it slightly differently you found your way into it by using lighting right and you eventually got you got there with the door lock there are some people do start with the door lock first and that's all they ever need but the value of having the the door lock is pretty huge right never having to carry a set of house keys again is an awesome thing you know the the being able to rock up to the house and have the lights turn on as you do is a pretty awesome thing you know rock up to the house have the door unlock and the lights turn on and have the the temperature set when you're approaching right all of these things come together and there are people who are out there doing one or two of these things that becomes two or three of these things and when you have two or three of these things in combination with the ease of being able to tell the speaker to add the things on the shopping list to your shared shopping notes so that when you do get out to the shoing to the grocery store with your phone and all the items that you spoke out loud are now in your list the these are things that sound like they're not worth that much but they're nice changes they really do improve your life it's it's not a one big sweeping change it's all of these little changes together you know you're going to come to a point where you're going to start seeing these kinds of speakers in hotel rooms and instead of calling room service which is like really Antiquated you have to pick up a phone and you have to leap through a book and all this stuff you can just tell the speaker what you want with all of your modifications or substitutions and you'll get your food well I would love to see iOS 11 with support for AirPlay with Siri homekit um and I would love to see this always on connected device and I would love to see support for homekit on Siri on the Mac um there's a lot of room for improvement here and if there aren't meaningful improvements to Sira itself I don't see this speaker being that valuable uh but I have to think that that there is an overhaul for Siri coming somewhere down the pike because it's really overdue well and some of this is a chicken and egg problem right all of the the people in big data and AI say that you have to collect all of the data in order to be able to improve the AI and Apple has had their privacy SARS in place saying you know here's how we go about that right here's how we're going to do that without jeopardizing our customers data and so putting a speaker out there it seems to me like one more way to be able to figure out how to improve Siri you disagree with me no no I think that there are there are number of issues uh that that Apple faces in in improving it and I think that uh you know I think that their closed platform does them no favors in that sense like we've been talking about with security of homekit but i' still prefer Apple's approach I I want to trust a company not have my information sold not have my cameras hacked I want a platform that is going to be robust and protect against those kind of things and ensure my own privacy so if that means slower adoption of these things things that I don't really need in the first place I'm fine with that all right uh you know the camera hack is a good thing to bring up the camera hack didn't require a secure chip in each unit to protect it from the camera hack the problem with the camera hack was that there were a number of these these webcam devices that were all and routers there were other devices in the hack as well but they were all made in in China as many things are but they were all made with the same default password and they were all made in with with passwords that could not be easily updated or changed and so it became very easy for uh a u a bad actor to write a script that said go search the web and find these devices that are answering that use the same default password and and and basically own them and take over them and turn them into a botn net and so the first thing you need to do is when you're making a device is make sure that the password can be changed and the second thing that you do is that as a part of your initial setup you require the password to be changed and if you do or you could just buy a homekit camera well I suppose you you could but I'm that you know that don't the fact that there is homekit doesn't make everything else also insecure by default it means that we we can have secure things that are outside of homekit correct I just you know this whole process of going through and making sure you can change the default password on the on the you know uh and the IP address on your camera is like yeah good luck with that it's not the for the average consumer but it's it's just as you set up the thing you plug it in it finds it and you use an app on your phone to say that it's there great please enter in a password you've now assigned a new password for the thing it's not hard the you say that well here here's the issue right device manufacturers are making devices that are compatible with multiple systems here right it's not just homeit it's homekit and Amazon Alexa or it's homekit and Amazon Alexa and Google home or it's Alexa and Google home right it's it's I mean are we selling these cameras to guys who want to catch the posum that's digging up there's backyard or are we selling it to a system integrator you know like the fact that you have to go in and change the password to ensure the security of your camera is insane that's not that's not the market for this kind of stuff and if you want to see Smart Home Products catch on they have to be secure reliable and easy to use and you have to go and make sure the password can be changed on your camera stop stop you're you're I'm going to get a headache here in a minute because we we re we reviewed the ero routers right which was the simple router mesh router for home use and when you're setting up the router one of the steps is enter in a user password for this thing enter enter in the password create a password to ADM thing and it was done very simply through like four steps in an app from from plugging it in to having internet connectivity and one of the four steps I'm talking about the dlink hack though I'm talking about theing dink I'm saying that if you're going to do a camera it's no harder to have one step out of your four steps plug in your camera oh your app has found your camera please create a password it's not as hard as you're making it out to be this is for normal people issue was not a user facing thing it was not for normal people you got to look into the case you're wrong no there there L more cameras that were haed than the dink camera there were I understand but the FC the FTC sued dink for a reason because they didn't their own camer we weren't talking about the botnet that took over all the cameras and routers that were out there and I'm talking about I'm talking about Smart Home Products in general and why I trust homekit okay all right I've said all I have to say on this cuz you know you're you're uh setting up a password for a camera is not a system integrator thing it can be a user facing thing whether or not it was in the dlink case specifically is a different thing but expecting people to create a password is is not hard you know they in fact Apple does it when you set up a new iPhone they ask you to create a password don't they apple is experimenting with medium to longdistance wireless charging what do you think about this probably not happening anytime soon so what we've got here is a patent filing is is that right mhm yeah okay have you ever tried wireless charging before I don't have any devices that do it no I don't I haven't used it I mean I'm familiar with how the contact based ones work but we're talking about wireless charging here we're talking about truly Wireless which is different yeah so in the past there have been a couple of different methods for trying to wirelessly charge things and and by Wireless that's meant not having to actually physically plug something into your phone you know whether it's been the the chi charging that uses coils in a in a case or the case back of the phone to match up to coils on a charging mat kind of thing what this patent is that makes it different and unique is that it's about transferring power through the airwaves so that you don't actually have to physically place your phone on on anything specific instead what they're doing is having a transmitter and a receiver and and wirelessly using antenna to transmit the power and it's it's interesting I've seen demonstrations of this it does actually function there there is such a technology it's it's a little impractical at least in the demonstration that I saw but it's it's also pretty cool yeah this is something neat but I don't think it's coming anytime soon I think that the technolog is not ready for prime time we talked about how the uh the the rumored iPhone 8 drawings seems to have a large space for potentially a wireless charging pad in the rear case do you think we're going to get wireless charging as a part of uh the the iPhone 8 at all even if it's not this transmitter receiver thing you have to is yeah it's not going to be the transmitter receiver type of thing it's going to be just a a charging pad as an option um for those that want to use it is really what it's going to be I think that you know the expectation is iPhone 8 is going to have contact based wireless charging um and then also quick charging capabilities via USBC power over a lightning connector right you know and this we reviewed one of these uh contact based kind of charging systems in the past you know we of course you know it from your your Apple watch as well but uh we had a couple years ago some of these cases battery cases that had charging mats and it turns out that it's pretty convenient for the same reason that that I was saying that it's friction to try and pull my phone out and press down the home button to say do something it turns out that there's friction in in plugging in a lightning cable that it's it's a lot easier to just drop your phone down on the counter and have it charge yeah I I think that uh you know for certain scenarios you know bedside charging um you know I have a dock um and I just prefer to have you know that um but I could see why people would prefer uh you know this type of charging I mean it makes sense to me um I think that it's a logical feature for Apple to include um but I think that the preferred way of charging is going to remain through a lightning cable just because it's going to be more efficient well there's there's always reliability in using a cable right and it's faster yes so there's a story that we're talking about here that says that when Apple releases the iOS 11 later this year one of its features may be a new music app that better showcases uh videos yeah I mean it makes sense uh they're pushing uh original video content through the Apple music subscription um and much like iTunes before it the Apple music name is proving to be rather unfortunate because uh it's going to be more than music um and it seems like you know you pay for Apple music subscription you're going to get original video content you're going to get you know movies and documentaries and series and all that kind of stuff that apple is working on very slowly certainly not to the level of Netflix or Amazon or Hulu or anything like that but um so it would make sense for Apple to feature and give easy access to that type of content because right now there's really no way for you to get it let me ask you for your opinion has Apple music gotten easier to use when we I don't use apple music ah I'm asking the wrong person I I I prefer to own my music so I turn it off I have it disabled on my phone and I buy uh records and download the digital codes to come with it and upload them to iTunes Match which is now known as iCloud music library 25 a year right when we first started talking about Apple music on this podcast um it was at least a little cumbersome to use and then over time they refined it but uh I uh I feel like one of the things that they could do each time they make this big change to Apple music is offer another trial subscription to give people another chance to come and get reacquainted we don't suck as much now well it's it's not necessarily that we don't suck much as much now although that that's kind of true it's uh that it's not nearly complete you know Jimmy uh Jimmy iine told Bloomberg that Apple music is nowhere near complete in my head so I I understand that now that it's more complete let's see what's more complete right to give us a reason to come back I um generally like the music app on the iPhone um of course I don't have music turned on but I I wish there are certain things that I do miss about the way it was like for example I wish that playlists had their own dedicated little um menu or whatever at the bottom of the screen uh they do not um but I have a dedicated radio tab that I can that I never use that I can't get rid of so uh and a dedicated search tab that I don't really use so um I think that there are certain aspects of the interface that could be refined or improved upon or made to so you could customize it um you know I think back to and I think you can still do this on the store um where you can drag and choose which items show up in the uh tabs on the bottom of the screen um I I would like to see something like that return because I don't have a use for the radio function I don't listen to beats one uh but it would be nice to have a dedicated tab for playlist down there for when I want to access them yeah as it is now you have to tap on library and then have play if you want to delve in your music you tap library and then artist yeah it's just like it would be nice to have an artist artist Tab and a playlist tab like it used to be and I realize that's probably not for everybody um but uh that's something that I would prefer all right well there are a number of other Futures that have been rumored as well including deeper Siri integration to messages and iCloud and group video calls and FaceTime which is a a favorite of mine yeah I missed the old IAT video days where you I do to I actually after they got rid of that I switch over to Google Hangouts because it was much easier to do multiple participants there we talked about this a little bit earlier the the notion that there's the uh ability to have uh wireless charging in the uh the iPhone 8 possibly so I'm looking at the schematics for that now and uh that's a rather big charging pad and it's interesting because it's right in the center where we saw the hole last time in in the previous schematics that were rumored what's interesting about this this one like I said it contrasts with the document that came out last week is that um this one comes from a person who is generally known for the accuracy of his leaks and it uh it looks somewhat credible it's still got the the vertical camera on there what do you think is this one uh this this is one that we think is reasonably credible or is this one I think I think this one seems plausible I think that um there's some truth to a lot of these you know some of the reports that come out like Bloomberg had one a few weeks ago saying that apple is circling around a few designs um and that makes sense you know they they have to hedge their bets and if they can't get certain technology to come together um then they're going to have to explore Alternatives uh that said uh they've been pretty consistent on this vertical camera um and I think that makes sense uh because if they want to do augmented reality um capabilities to have the uh cameras be horizontal when the phone is held uh in landscape mode would make sense um and I think that uh you know that that seems logical to me um and the the rear home button Touch ID thing is is weird uh I don't think that that is accurate uh I don't think that that's going to come to be but we don't really know what's going on behind the scenes in terms of the technology and stuff and if Apple for some reason cannot integrate Touch ID into the screen they may be forced to put it on the back I would like to think that if they can't do it they would just wait another year um and say there's no point in going with an edgo edge display if we can't get touch ID on the front but I don't run Apple so nope not at this time tell me about battery yeah so um there's a few things that we know about the iPhone 8 battery life supposedly um and some of the changes that are going to be coming at least from the more reliable sources out there uh so what's really interesting about the battery in the quote unquote iPhone 8 is that it's rumored to be uh rather large battery in fact almost the size of the battery in the iPhone 7 plus and that's interesting because the iPhone 8 is going to have a a form factor uh that is expected to be closer in size to the 4.7 in iPhone 7 and its predecessors so it's kind of like apple is offering The Best of Both Worlds here with this edgo Edge display new design um and by shrinking the components inside of the phone itself uh they're able to cram in a rather massive battery into a smaller chassis um and so uh that is why one of the expectations why Apple's only going to have one flagship phone this year and not a plus version and a regular version because it's kind of The Best of Both Worlds we're talking about a smaller phone form factor uh with a larger display edge to edge uh kind of giving you both of those and uh and then when you add in other things like the fact that the parts are going to be smaller which makes them more efficient um and then you're switching to an OLED display which consumes less power and is also thinner which allows space for a larger battery uh you're really talking about uh a few things coming together that could potentially put the iPhone 8 in a position to offer pretty spectacular battery life I don't think that there's going to be any sort of like game-changing Breakthrough you know it's not like your phone's going to last a week without you charging it but I think that you'll find it more easy to get through a day on a single charge with this larger battery and more efficient Parts in the phone itself right and so what they've done here as far as I can understand it is that they've stacked batteries using the the same kind of stacking that they're doing in the MacBook the 12-in MacBook for example but they're also using an interestingly shaped battery where normally battery packs are rectangular in shape this one is an L-shaped battery pack design which allows it to use more space and taking advantage of some of the space previously occupied by the heno Jack there you are so as Apple shrinks Parts you know the the main board is expected to shrink um that leads to more efficient uh you know processors and stuff and and as we were talking um if few weeks ago about how Apple making their own chips and rolling more into the system on a chip um this all plays into that same thing where the more Apple can cram onto a smaller little main board in there the more they can put on the same chip even the more efficient it becomes the smaller the parts come the the less power it consumes and the more powerful it gets uh and that's just going to continue yeah now I know that you like using your iPhone for videography I know that you you like doing these kinds of things you you especially like doing it with the drones but um you had a chance to try out a gimbal recently yeah uh is a company that launched a Kickstarter this week and um we don't normally cover uh crowdfunding campaigns on Apple Insider because well the truth of it is they almost never ship on time and sometimes don't even do what they said they were going to do and then sometimes just run away with your money so we've had a policy for years that we we just don't cover these types of products because they just don't pan out but we do cover them if uh the company has some sort of Hardware that we can put our hands on and actually feel and see and test uh and this is one of those cases the company is called rigot I I don't know how to pronounce it it's riet um and so they sent us a a prototype of their uh camera gimbal uh that works with iPhone and other smartphones um and uh it has an app that it connects to allow some physical controls for uh for you know adjusting things while you're shooting and all that um and I came away you know pretty generally impressed I mean it's not it's not going to replace a super high-end rig but if you're looking for smoother footage and you're shooting 4k on your iPhone which is pretty crazy when you think about it um this is an affordable uh way to uh to to get some more stable footage on your phone uh right now in the kickstarter campaign if you jump in you can get uh their early bird special or whatever for 140 bucks uh when they go to market they're expecting to charge 189 at retail uh if you compare that to other gimbals on the market they're generally in the $300 $350 range if they work with your iPhone so you're saving a few bucks here it seems pretty good and how was your experience with it did you was it easy pry easy um I I don't want to uh bash on it too much because this is not a review I'm testing prototype Hardware so it's not really fair yeah it's not really fair to beat up on it but I mean I I got to say I came away pretty impressed with it um some other gimbals will only work with certain devices because they have to calibrate for the weight you know there's offsetting and all that kind of stuff this has a uh a kind of user driven way of doing it where you have to balance it yourself uh uh before it before you turn it on so you hold it up you make sure the phone is slid into the right spot based on what size it is and how much it weighs um and then when it's balanced you turn it on it starts working my test it leaned a little bit to the right I think that's something that could easily be fixed or it could even just have been a bug with the one unit that I have uh but yeah it has a joystick on it for adjusting when you're shooting um uh angling you know left and right up and down that that uh one of the nicer things about it too is you can actually physically move the gimbal to a position that you want and change the shooting mode um and it seamlessly switches between uh overhand and underhand shooting so if you want want to get like a low shot in transition um it does that very well uh it can do selfies and all sorts of other stuff too um you know some people are commas for saying you could see a lot of bouncing when you're walking around with it I mean it significantly cuts down on the bouncing that you would have if you're holding it by hand it's 1080 gimbals so I I think that uh uh for the price what you're getting um it's yeah it's it's a it's a gimbal it's not pretty it's pretty good it gets the job done it's cheaper than most of the stuff that's available on the market uh the physical controls are great uh dedicated button for you know taking a photo or starting video um you can switch between shooting modes on it um you can switch between gimbal modes with like follow or stay fixed or whatever um all without touching your phone and really for a lot of these products I've tested the the camera Focus products on an iPhone um the hardware always requires some form of software some app because it will never integrate with Apple's own camera app and it the the software is always the the deal breaker it's always the Achilles heel on these things uh and and here the software was not bad um I did have some issues when I was interacting with the touchcreen like it wasn't some of the the touch points were a little small um and I'd have to press a few times but in terms of the device connecting to the app uh it was very quick and in terms of the physical controls working while using uh the device and the app uh it it all came together very well so as far as prototype Hardware goes uh I I was pretty impressed by it okay how would you describe it to someone who's never used a gimbal before who who doesn't even know necessarily what a gimbal is for uh take your iPhone and uh try to hold it and get uh video footage um just with your hands you don't even have to be walking you could just be standing there um and if you look you will notice a lot of shaking uh even even if you're uh uh you know a former Army sniper and you have the most steady hands on the planet uh it's just going to Shake that's just the nature of it every single little movement shows up when you're shooting um and that's going to happen with pretty much any camera honestly um but especially on something as small as an iPhone where you're just kind of holding it between two fingers uh when you put a gimbal on there that kind of stuff goes away and the footage looks a lot more professional uh as you move the camera around and you get your shots um it uh is uh smooth and and it looks very cinematic um and that's accomplished through three AIS is what they call it where it offsets the movement of your hand uh balances the weight of the phone and uh accommodates accordingly based on your motion and you're also holding a handle which is a little more steady than pinching your phone between your fingers too which helps so all those things kind of come together and create a uh experience when you're shooting that just the the the footage is is much more smooth than it is if you're holding in your hand cool and and you know we we know that photography and videography is a focus of apples so having these kinds of accessories out there is going to make that uh you know make your footage really show off and apple does have stuff that that does this in the iPhone itself especially if you have the iPhone 7 plus um they have what's called Optical image stabilization in there which is uh the lens within the camera actually physically moves to offset for your hand motion and and it uses uh you know gyroscopes and images on the screen and some Advanced algorithms to to accommodate for that but when the lens is so small on a camera phone there's only so much really that it can do um so it helps but it's never going to give you the kind of quality that a gimbal like this is going to give you yeah you know I've used uh Instagram has an app called hyperlapse which what they're doing is they're I love it they're they're using the accelerometer data and matching that in into a timeline with the uh video data and then cropping and moving the footage around within their small crop to to counteract the shake and they do a really good job of it but the downside to using an app like that or or a software based approach like that is that it has post-processing time after you take the video it has to go through and and make those and you lose video uh content too you're cropping you're croing you know you can do that too even an iMovie or in Final Cut um you know Apple has stabilization software uh in there where it analyzes the image and tries to keep uh certain things in focus but even that is very imperfect because as the camera moves around things lose focus and get blurry and so while software can try to accommodate for that it can't change the actual quality of the image and so if things are blurry because of bouncing around and or getting out of focus or whatever it starts to look weird uh and it's a it's a potential solution but it's never as good as Hardware is going to be yet maybe we'll get there software eventually eats the world well it does so Apple has HED a made several hires they've made some hires from NASA the national uh Aeronautics and Space Adry it's not got anything to do in that or so well so they they've hired a fellow named Dr Jeff Norris who's an augmented in virtual reality specialist who uh founded a missions operations Innovation office at JPL mer J propulsion labs and he's working on projects to bring augmented reality to the masses at Apple mhm which is which is pretty cool um there you know there are a number of augmented reality efforts at Apple that we've we've talked about uh it's it's interesting because there's a number of people at Apple working on this and and when you s talk about someone coming from NASA to do it it it means that they're certainly well qualified they also have an interest in software quality um and you know at the JPL Ops lab Norris was working on developing human system interfaces so using augmented reality virtual reality to control robots and manipulate things with tablet interfaces um we're still not sure what he's going to be doing at Apple precisely but we know that there's this growing interest Tim Cook's made it very clear right yeah and and when Tim Cook says he's interested in something uh you know it's usually a sign of something to come you know years before the Apple watch was announced Tim Cook said that he finds the risk to be a very interesting place for devices so um I I think that that's part of their game is to tease a little bit and uh uh kind of uh send the herd in One Direction whether or not it's misdirection we will find out but I think that you know where there's smoke there's fire and it's pretty clear that they're working on some form of augmented reality as I've said before I don't think that this is something that uh is going to turn into some geeky glasses that you're going to wear I think this is more of a uh platform that Apple can create with the devices that they already sell uh and give the ability for their own apps and also for third party developers to create uh unique and interesting ways of uh using augmented reality so what we were talking before about uh this new Amazon Echo that will you know give you take your photo and make fashion recommendations or something that seems kind of silly to me but I could see an augmented reality application for fashion on an iPhone for example uh being pretty neat or interior decorating or or stuff like that where you can uh start to project things onto a person or a place um and give you a feel for what it would look like in the real world if you were to buy that outfit or or buy that couch or whatever um see how well it fits uh I think that that uh becomes a very interesting application and it's augar in reality in not maybe the the game way that people have been thinking about for years and not necessarily the headset way people have been thinking about in more of a interactive Dynamic way that you would have on a screen like your iPhone you know there there when I think about the clothing thing specifically so years ago Levis had a thing where you'd walk into a booth in the store and cameras would scan you and then tell you what the right size uh you know 501s was to wear and then they' place the order for you and your custom jeans would arrive kind of thing and so now we've got Amazon who wants to sell clothing right they sell a lot of clothing so they're placing a camera to tell you what looks good on you and recommend stuff to you eventually it's like you say you know you you could use the the cameras of devices to superimpose things upon you what's interesting to me here is is sort of this progression that we see right Apple says something's interesting and whether it gets integrated into a device we already have or it becomes a new device at some point it changes to become a hobby and at some point after it's a hobby number of years pass it becomes a business I I I don't know that it's necessarily a business for Apple in other than the sense that they could potentially roll it into their made for iPhone program with Hardware accessories for the people that really do want to have geeky headsets and stuff U but I I think that these are just things where if the tools to create augmented reality are simple and Powerful for iOS in a way that they are not on say Android uh that gives Apple a potential leg up on the competition and can tie people into their ecosystem more from a developer perspective and also from a user perspective because people want those apps so I I don't know that again I don't see Apple making Hardware or even trying to necessarily profit from this in a direct way I think that it just kind of makes it a more cohesive platform for everything that you could ever want to do on your phone going back to to this notion that they hired Dr Norris from JPL from from NASA there are other former NASA Engineers also on Apple's roles now uh there are four x Nas Engineers who've joined project Titan they're building up and uh and really kind of gung-ho on this car project now in a way that we haven't seen before because now they're at a point where uh the paperwork has been filed with the California DMV and so they have to start disclosing information so this was a interesting story to me from a journalism perspective because we got our hands on the uh PDF that was filed late last week uh with the DMV um and we posted it uh on our website uh We've redacted you know you know you go through and you do the typical thing where you uh find any information maybe they didn't redact and you may not want it out in the public just to protect people's privacy so we went through and removed addresses and locations and things like that um just out of courtesy um but I guess even that redacting was not enough for the DMV who by the way are the ones that put out this document it's a public document uh so they reached out to us and wanted us to remove the names as well uh so we said sure and we removed the pages with the the names of the engineers there um and but it turns out that some of those names that run that list are people that used to work for NASA so now that's kind of in the wild because the DMV couldn't redact the information to the extent that they wanted to why they would need to redact people's names I don't really know it's not like you know it's like it's not like it like you know it's their address or their phone number or something but anyhow uh so yeah we know that uh whatever they're doing whether it's self-driving car software or they're building in a full-fledged car or whatever it is uh they have some pretty high caliber Talent over there at Apple not surprising right and the the sorts things that have been working on are three detection of 3D objects motion planning algorithms um and also uh test yeah the kind of things that you would expect with a self-driving car um you know there's all kinds of of obstacles on the road you know even if we get to a point where all cars on the road talk to one another uh they still have to avoid objects because of things like pedestrians and road hazards and whatever else so uh that kind of technology is going to be integral to self-driving cars to uh be able to adapt think on the Fly and and make safe evasive maneuvers without uh potentially causing danger for others one of the things that's always interested me about NASA is their focus on minimizing bugs in software because you know you're you're putting people up into space and they can't just pull over on the side of the road and open the window for fresh breath of fresh air as it were so you this is it's uh you know I've been a NASA fan for a long time so looking at this kind of thing and seeing that focus and and uh you know that that concentration on bug-free software is is really interesting when it comes to soft it's exciting it's uh it's going to be real interesting to see where this goes uh and what Apple decides to do with it but I mean they're they're clearly committed this is not something they're walking away from yeah and a year ago we were talking about this and it was it was Shane who used to be on the podcast telling us that he would bet money that there was no way that Apple would actually ever prod and they may not and we still don't know we we still don't know but certainly they're putting the effort forth to do something interesting here yeah and you could see potentially an area where they just decide that building the car itself isn't worth it um and maybe that's something that they want to do further down the road you know maybe maybe the self-driving car software is going to be the Motorola rocker uh to the eventual iPhone that is the Apple car uh who know knows but um well I would say they've already opened the door for getting into the car with carplay I mean the the first wedge into the car was uh back in what 2003 or 2004 with alpine where they first got the made for iPod car stereo and they had a large amount of uptake on getting made for iPod into cars and now they've got carplay in with all of the major manufacturers except Toyota I think and uh having having crossed that bridge it's not a big step to to bring the self-driving functions after that right you use carplay as the wedge I I mean I guess infotainment system is a little different than a car operating system though well infotainment systems tend to have a lot of telematics in them anyway right for the OEM stuff you you have control your windows control your air conditioner stuff through the screen it's it's not knobs anymore right so putting putting telematics in incar and self-driving together is not a big stretch so if you're a small business owner who struggles with tax stuff don't stress because freaking out and burying your head in the sand will not solve your problems come tax time what will help is bringing fresh books into your world fresh books is the ridiculously easy to ous Cloud accounting software that's made for people who can't stand doing their taxes it will transform the way you handle your taxes because freshbooks keeps all your cash flow details in one place so you know exactly what what invoices you sent who's paid you and what your income is and their mobile app allows you to take pictures of your receipts and organizes them for later which makes claiming expenses a breeze you can even set up fresh books to import expenses directly from your bank accounts it's everything you need to stay completely Zen come tax time and not panicked for a free 30-day trial go to freshbooks.com slapple Insider and enter the code Apple Insider in the how did You Hear About Us section that's freshbooks.com slapple Insider and enter the code Apple Insider in the how did you hear about a section tell me about the Apple watch the Apple watch turned 2 years old this week uh 2 years since it launched on since it was announced uh you'll recall that it was announced about 6 months before it launched because it took some time to get the platform out um but yeah um two years on um I wrote a little piece just kind of explaining how the platform has evolved when Apple first introduced it I don't even think they knew what it was going to be or how it was going to be received uh certainly thought that it could be a new Gold Rush for developers you know on the App Store creating these apps for your wrist it turns out that uh a lot of apps that may work on a phone don't really work well on your wrist aren't really necessary uh the side button was originally dedicated to quickly drawing little scribbles to other people with apple watches uh that was unceremoniously dumped last uh fall and now with watch OS 3 it's just an app doc which again makes a lot more sense uh they got rid of the um uh glances view as well and replace that with the app dooc uh they have a control center for quick access to uh uh you know adjusting settings and and and uh things like that um and you know switching between watch faces but really uh it's focused as a device that uh uh tracks your Fitness um and it uh uh it gives you notifications and makes so you can keep your phone in your pocket and then things like like uh Apple pay only require two button Taps very quick uh Hy Siri uh is done all my devices are turning on now uh is done without um having to interact with the device without having to press any buttons so uh the point of the piece really was the Apple watch succeeds at tasks where you don't really have to interact with it very much uh the fitness stuff throughout the day sends you alerts knows when you're standing knows when you're uh more active um completing your rings uh you don't have to do anything even if you're working out you press the button and then you get back to it later it measures your heart rate it does all that stuff uh uh using Siri uh you don't have to press a button um you know all all these things that it does very well uh require very little interaction with advice and uh even the notifications you just glance down your wrist it pops up you decide whether or not you want to interact with it and then you just get back on with it you don't have to look at your phone or check anything like that so it's very convenient and and I think that's where the Apple watch succeeds and where it's really finding its place is as this device that uh makes it so you don't have to pick up your phone or do anything and and makes it easy to interact with your devices in a in a seamless and simple way you know when it when it was first introduced it felt to me very much like no one including Apple knew exactly why you should have one they knew all the things it could do and they left it up to you to figure out which one applied to you where for all of other the other Apple devices they told you exactly what it was for and why you should have one and they they've sort of Tak their time trying to find its way I think they're they're a little closer because they're talking about Sport and Health now I don't know what I would say they've taken their time I mean you've had three major different platforms for it in two years right and and and two years to to refine it to figure out what it's for and and the hardware the hardware has mostly stayed the same which is you know you know you look at the second generation version the only thing that they've changed there really is they got away from the fashion focused stuff uh and they're no longer selling $110,000 on up addition models they now have it's like $1,200 for the ceramic Edition model and I think that Apple realized that the the fashion part of it they thought was going to be a bigger deal than it was um wasn't that big of a deal but to Apple's credit they've been able to go back to the drawing board um and refine it and continue to improve it in ways and I think it it it's a very relevant platform for them yes so what do you like most about using your Apple watch your it's great for running with GPS and having the music on it and going completely wireless with my W1 headphones I absolutely love that notifications are great um you know we talked a little earlier about uh uh uh you know having an always on device to control Smart Home accessories that is my Apple watch it's on my wrist I can talk to it I can give it commands I can invoke Siri without pressing a button um and I use it all the time for Apple pay um if I get a cab all the cabs in New York City um have Apple pay support I just press the button twice don't have to pull my phone out of my pocket bam I'm paid I'm out of the cab I'm good to go um and I think that between Fitness not ifications Siri and Apple pay those are really the the the pegs upon which the platform uh is really going to stand well that brings us to the close of another perfectly good episode of Apple Insider Neil where can people find you on the internet you can find me on Twitter at this is Neil NE L and you can read my stuff on Apple inside and I'm Victor marks and you can find me at V marks on Twitter and also you can find me this Monday at Adorama live at 6 p.m. and we hope to see you thereyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to Apple Insider podcast this is episode 118 I'm your host Victor marks and joining me is our editor and chief Neil Hughes hey Victor how's it going it's amazing and you know Neil we've got this event coming up that we were just talking about before we started recording you know this is this is a new one for us we've never held an event quite like this before but Daniel dilder I and and you will also be present I understand uh Dan and I are going to be speaking at adorama's flagship store in New York City to talk with professional Apple users discuss the current state of Apple's HED hardware and and join us you know we should have any of our listeners who are in the New York area please feel free to come to adorama's flagship store and uh disc join us for discussion uh refreshments and a chance to win great prizes like a brand new 9.7 in iPad we're going to be doing this it's exciting this a cool event I think um and a good opportunity uh for people from the community to kind of come together and uh and meet some of the folks behind Apple Insider and meet one another and talk you know Adorama is a great partner of Apple Insider and uh they reached out to us and asked if we wanted to do an event in their space they have a beautiful store in Manhattan with a great dedicated Apple area um and uh yeah so it's one of those things where we talked about it and decided what do we want to talk about and and uh Pro users seemed relevant not only because of what Adorama does um you know focusing on those types of users but also Mac's recent Mac announcements the Mac Pro iMac Mac uh that Apple has made um so it seemed relevant and like a good thing to talk about so the of course on of course on on Monday May 1st at 6 p.m. uh at Adorama store at 42 West 18th Street between 5ifth and 6th Avenues and please come there's a registration on an official Eventbrite page that we'll link to in the show notes getting right into things see here my first story that I had was about Apple working on personto person payment transfer systems to compete this is something that's been rumored for there this has been rumored for a few years um dating back to I think 2015 even um you know it's logical it seems to make a lot of sense um it seems to be kind of a no-brainer that Apple would do this um you know all you have to do is think about what is done with Apple pay and apply that same technology and convenience to peer-to-peer money transfers uh you think about how frictionless things like venmo are and square cash and what have you uh freely transfer money uh these services are interesting because it's not an area where Apple's going to get rich in fact they'll probably lose money on it but it's a way to get people into the ecosystem and so if Apple wants people to have their credit cards in there for buying stuff on iTunes buying stuff from the Apple Store using Apple pay at a merchant this is a way to get people to insert their credit card information into their iPhone for those services and it all just kind of works um so that's why you see Banks and and other uh uh organizations are are really pushing this peer-to-peer payment transfer because uh one of the big markets that they want to reach are millennials uh you know folks under the age of 35 or so who a lot of them don't have bank accounts uh don't necessarily have credit cards and they're harder to reach and they are the quote unquote underbanked um and so this is an opportunity for Apple to uh address that market and maybe hook them into their ecosystem a little bit you know we've we've used PayPal for years to do personto person transfers for you know items purchased over forums or classified kind of things and it's it's it's PayPal was cemented in people's minds as being the preferred purchase Method for eBay when eBay owned PayPal and that's what I really wanted out of Apple pay was an easy way to replace PayPal right and and being able to use it at 4 or five stores which which the number is growing but it's still a limited number of stores right uh is nice but being able to to do it for personto person transfers as well really cements it for me the you know when when people are setting up these kinds of things they'll take Paypal they'll take uh Google payments sometimes Square occasionally but if you can just say yeah I've got an iPhone and we'll do it by Apple pay it's done that's that's going to be a game changer in terms of the number of people using it I think I actually had a very weird interaction with venmo last week I don't use venmo a lot I've used it on occasion I've actually been scammed on venmo as well and we've talked about that before uh for those of you who don't know don't accept money money from people on venmo if you don't know them because the money may not actually be there you should only use it for people you know anyhow last week um I uh got a random transfer of uh like $25 or something on venmo from a woman that I didn't know I'd never heard of who she was and so I thought well maybe it's a scam or whatever and then she sent me a message about 5 minutes afterwards and she's like uh I'm sorry um I don't know who you are I typed in the wrong username and I sent you this money she's like I'm a poor college student can you transfer me back the $25 and having been ripped off by Veno before I was a little bit skeptical and so I looked into the terms of service and in there in their Q&A or whatever on there it says if somebody mistakenly transfers you money just transfer the money back and it's like wait a minute I'm scratching my head I know that when people transfer your money is not necessarily sitting in your account in the account it takes three days to to show up and all has to clear and so you yeah and so you can get screwed that way so um I reached out to venmo customer service then and I said listen I'm not going to do this I've been ripped off before and then quickly venmo customer service is like oh okay we'll just we'll take care of it on our end uh and they took care of it and gave this woman her money back but yeah she sent me a message she's like I'm a poor college student please just send me back $25 I don't know if it was a scam or not it seemed genuine to me she got her money back everybody's happy but yeah like I said I don't use venmo that much but I thought it was interesting right I I don't use Veno well I've never had occasion to use venmo because venmo it seems to me is popular in large cities it's it's one of those things that happens in New York it's one of those things that happens in San Francisco it's it's popular amongst kids too um college kids it's very popular with um and that's really where they kind of cut their teeth I I had a fellow asking me to take venmo last week and I I countered with square and and that's what we used in the end yeah yeah I I looked into all the payment services years ago because uh a friend of mine unfortunately found himself kind of on Hard Times he' been hit by a flood and we were trying to raise some money but we didn't want to do it in a embarrassing you know open a GoFundMe type page where you like tell your sad story or whatever I just wanted to keep it kind of lowkey and just text the information around to people and I looked into it and square cash was by far the easiest way to do it you just entered in your debit card number the money transferred there were no fees nothing he didn't even have to have an account set up you could just send it to his email address and then he could go and all the money would be sitting there waiting whenever he signed up um and it was very easy to use um so in my experience square cash is the easiest of them but I know venmo is the most popular option out there but I think it'll be nice when Apple gets into that space for people you know once again things that tie more into the Apple ecosystem if you're on iMessage if you're on iPhone uh and you want to transfer money easily it would be a great way to do it and it's one of those things where a Apple has people who are willing to adopt these things because they come from Apple you know there's the I'm I'm going to not get this right but I was looking the other day and something like apple has 34% of the smartphone market in the US and so that's 34% of people who can or 34% of smartphone users who can jump on board and adopt that kind of thing where for all of the competing right and for all of the competing phones you know it's a mish mash of services whether it's Android pay or Samsung's pay or whatever option else is out there um having that that ground swell of of users using consistent platform and who aggressively adopt like you say means that we're going to see this this start working what I found very interesting in this story uh that that came out uh today it is that apple is apparently also in talks with uh MasterCard uh and they are considering having a I'm sorry Visa not M card they're talking to Visa about potentially having a apple debit card that would sit in your Apple wallet and it would be part of the transfer service so uh we were talking earlier about um how it takes 3 days for the funds to settle in your bank account well if you were to use the money on a debit card then you could spend immediately so let's say you know somebody owes you 50 bucks they transfer you to you over Apple pay or apple cash or whatever they want to call it and then it shows up in your Apple wallet you can wait 3 days for it to show up in your bank account or you can spend it now on your Apple debit card and it's just sitting there waiting to be spent yeah and and this is actually something that square does today uh for instance I I when I used square like I said this last week I hadn't used it in a while and so I had to go through and and verify my existing number and stuff like that but once I'd done that it said do you want to have a virtual Visa card and I said well sure why not and I was able to add that virtual Visa card that square issued me to Apple pay so I can now pay with Apple pay out of the square balance that I've got there yeah Square does a pretty good job on this stuff I've always been impressed by uh their ability to integrate um especially being on the Apple side you know to have that Apple pay integration to put your debit card in there is really cool yeah and there's no reason that Apple can't do the same kind of thing yeah and I don't think it's going to change the game or or anything like that or be a big deal I think that it's it's one of those things that just make sense for Apple to do well what happens is it becomes like PayPal where you have a PayPal balance you can transfer to your bank account or you can pay out of it and so now you've got this this um one more thing that cements you to Apple and it's a new method for Nigerian scammers too well how's that supposed to be I know I know it's a joke but I'm just trying to think wait a minute now how how how they I'm sure they'll find a way I'm sure they'll find a way I mean I'm I'm trying to think of the 419 email um my my great uncle was a Nigerian prince who passed away and left me the secure element um I will gladly split the shares out of the secure it doesn't it's not scanning for me I tried I really tried moving on so this is this is one that's interesting to me I I've been thinking a lot and talking a lot about voice first as an interface and this progression of of you know we used to have a book Neil Stevenson wrote a book years ago called in the beginning there was the command line and it talked about the move from keyboard driven interfaces and text driven interfaces to to Mouse driven interfaces and graphical interfaces and we're experiencing we we've experienced another Revolution upon that two of them in fact one from Mouse to touch and a second one from touch to voice and so this story is about Apple finalizing or or rumored to be finalizing a design of a rival to Amazon's Echo device based on Siri you know the rumor says that it would it would be of course competitor to Amazon Echo that it would have Siri for the voice and AI would have AirPlay for the connectivity and and music transfer as opposed to Amazon's using Bluetooth and that it would have uh beats's audio technology all of that's kind of interesting there are some key differences that separate it from what Amazon's doing but I I you mean like it doesn't have a camera to judge Your Fashion on it like the latest Echo oh the echo look so echol look is a $200 Amazon Echo device that you place in your bedroom remind where I said camera so you place this internet connected camera in your bedroom yeah what could go wrong and and the use case justification for putting a camera in your bedroom is so that you can try on clothes in front of it and say do these make me look fat what could go wrong that's that's my big joke right there uh it's you know you're you're we had a case a couple of years ago where there were School admins who had placed spyware onto the school issued laptops to monitor their students and this would have been okay except that the IT people were using the computers to turn on the webcams when the students were at home in their beds in their bedrooms which is all a very bad idea and turned out to be a very bad idea for for that school district and for those those admins and this is why many people put a little piece of tape or a Post-It note or or there are even little plastic sliders made that act as lens covers for the cameras on laptops because putting a camera in your bedroom is is uh potentially a bad idea well I was going to say potentially a vulnerability if you want to say it's a bad idea that's fine and I accept it I was trying to C it's a bad idea I was trying to be so so careful it's a bad idea Apple would never be so stupid to make a product like this uh Apple would however potentially make a voice connected device that could give you the information you want from Siri allowed you to control your homekit stuff I don't know add reminders add add reminders and shopping lists kind of things set appointments to your calendar um and and the cool one that Google will ever be go ahead the cool one that Google home does the thing I really liked about Google home besides its usual kind of of answering things answering questions and controlling the lighting was that Google home understood that there was a chomecast in the house and you could tell Google home to play things on the chomecast so you could say you know okay Google play stranger things from Netflix on my TV on my chomecast name TV basically and and it would go ahead and kick off the episodes directly from the voice I liked that a lot and so one of the things that I'm hopeful and that I wanted Amazon to get this together too right they have the Alexa speakers they have Alexa integrated into the Fire TV devices there's no reason they shouldn't be able to do the same kind of interaction but they don't M MH Apple should be able to have whatever Visionary thing they have kick off something on Apple TV especially since they have an understanding of what's on all of those services is due to the Deep search that they have for all of the TV services they run as well as the TV app mhm right there were rumors before the Apple TV revamp a couple years ago with Siri that um that it might be this type of device and allinone thing um and there's been speculation since that Apple might even roll its router division into it so imagine a airport uh ex Express or AirPort Extreme or a time capsule um with uh that plugs into your TV that serves up Wi-Fi that has a speaker a microphone to give you this kind of echo like uh device I I I don't know if that's going to be the case I I see this being if this becomes a reality what what has been rumored here uh this you know beats sluh Siri SL whatever device I see this being kind of a a niche thing for Apple um I see it being you know Apple would rather sell you an iPhone they'd rather you use Siri on your iPhone they would rather that you um you know interact with a more fully featured device rather than some headless thing that you know is not going to do everything that you want or or probably not even hear you right most of the time so I I I could see this being something where they get into a market because they have to um but I I kind of like kind of like the iPad Mini you know it was like one of those things that Apple reluctantly got into and said okay well you guys want cheaper tablets here you go um and then now they've kind of given up on that market I could see this being something where uh for those that want to have an always on voice device but don't have an Apple Watch on the wrist or something um I I could see it being a market for that but I don't see this being like a huge device for Apple well so here's here's a good point and and I'm I'm very frustrated when you say that by the way but here here's the thing right me no no Amazon made the decision that voice was going to be a big deal for them and they instead of keeping it in their own product right it was it's it's not something locked in Echo they are encouraging third parties to roll it into their devices right in fact in our story we mentioned that the echo4 which is the uh the successor to echo's three version three homekit thermostat is likely to have Alexa built into it so when Amazon set out to build these things they they didn't just offer it in you know licensed partnership kind of way with these third- party manufacturers they went ahead and posted their code on GitHub and said if you've got a Raspberry Pi here are the steps that you need to take to go ahead and put an Amazon Echo speaker like thing together out of a Raspberry Pi so everyone can do it here's the code go forth have fun build your devices they also separately said here's what it takes to make a skill for Amazon Echo and you can run your own skills or you can submit it and and have it be a part of our skill store so that you can enhance and and augment what Echo can do for you so they they really made it easy to adopt Apple by comparison made it relatively difficult first of all they require a secure chip which costs money for good reason hey I'm not saying it's not without good reason but it but I'm saying that it slows adoption and it slows adoption because there's a cost for the chip there's a cost for getting in on the licensing program to get the Chip And there's an engineering cost where you have to understand how to put this thing on your board so there there are at least three different costs for trying to implement something with homekit second of all you you have to go through a huge certification process and homekit has been a moving Target it changed greatly between iOS 9 and iOS 10 and that caused a lot of people to have to go ahead and resubmit their devices that they they would have they they initially failed those tests right self-certification kind of things so it's it's very reliable it's very secure but it's also 5% of the market and that kind of feels to me like a throwback to the days of how much market share Apple had when we would say that the Mac was doomed apple is doomed right that's that's a throwback to 1997 1998 MH in terms of this segment and so Amazon has has geared things to be as open as possible and as widespread and easy to adopt as possible Apple has focused on what's secure and what's going to make the money but what is the killer app for these alwayson things because it's not checking the weather it's it's smart home stuff right so not necessarily the the biggest uses for these alwayson kind of things is music is setting timers you know my my wife shouts down says remind me in 10 minutes and so I just tell the speaker remind me in 10 minutes and yeah I could hold down the your phone you just do that so my phone doesn't have hyeri unless it's uh plugged in so I got to hold down a home button ah and the you say that there's no real difference but the the friction for digging my phone out of my pocket and pressing down the home button is a lot greater than just saying it to the speaker that's already listening don't get me wrong if Apple makes this device I will buy it and use it I am a guy who is considered trying to find a way to build a headless uh serious support Mac around my apartment so that I can more easily uh talk to it to control devices in my home I'm just looking at it logically in saying that smart home devices have not really caught on in a meaningful way anyhow um and so I don't think that uh uh this matters that much to most people I do the thing that excites me more than anything about this is the mention of AirPlay in it because AirPlay I have been a proponent of for a long time um I love it I have multiple AirPlay speakers in my home and uh I wish that there was some form of airplace support built into Siri slomit right there is no way to talk you are forgive me for interrupting but you are a unique case you are the guy that has AirPlay all over the house and and I would say that there are relatively few of you and you're saying that home automation hasn't caught on but that's the same thing there there are people who are out there doing home automation who are into it and they're they're you're looking at them and saying there's just one of them they're looking at you and saying there's just one of you this is the thing about home automation is that everyone finds their way into it slightly differently you found your way into it by using lighting right and you eventually got you got there with the door lock there are some people do start with the door lock first and that's all they ever need but the value of having the the door lock is pretty huge right never having to carry a set of house keys again is an awesome thing you know the the being able to rock up to the house and have the lights turn on as you do is a pretty awesome thing you know rock up to the house have the door unlock and the lights turn on and have the the temperature set when you're approaching right all of these things come together and there are people who are out there doing one or two of these things that becomes two or three of these things and when you have two or three of these things in combination with the ease of being able to tell the speaker to add the things on the shopping list to your shared shopping notes so that when you do get out to the shoing to the grocery store with your phone and all the items that you spoke out loud are now in your list the these are things that sound like they're not worth that much but they're nice changes they really do improve your life it's it's not a one big sweeping change it's all of these little changes together you know you're going to come to a point where you're going to start seeing these kinds of speakers in hotel rooms and instead of calling room service which is like really Antiquated you have to pick up a phone and you have to leap through a book and all this stuff you can just tell the speaker what you want with all of your modifications or substitutions and you'll get your food well I would love to see iOS 11 with support for AirPlay with Siri homekit um and I would love to see this always on connected device and I would love to see support for homekit on Siri on the Mac um there's a lot of room for improvement here and if there aren't meaningful improvements to Sira itself I don't see this speaker being that valuable uh but I have to think that that there is an overhaul for Siri coming somewhere down the pike because it's really overdue well and some of this is a chicken and egg problem right all of the the people in big data and AI say that you have to collect all of the data in order to be able to improve the AI and Apple has had their privacy SARS in place saying you know here's how we go about that right here's how we're going to do that without jeopardizing our customers data and so putting a speaker out there it seems to me like one more way to be able to figure out how to improve Siri you disagree with me no no I think that there are there are number of issues uh that that Apple faces in in improving it and I think that uh you know I think that their closed platform does them no favors in that sense like we've been talking about with security of homekit but i' still prefer Apple's approach I I want to trust a company not have my information sold not have my cameras hacked I want a platform that is going to be robust and protect against those kind of things and ensure my own privacy so if that means slower adoption of these things things that I don't really need in the first place I'm fine with that all right uh you know the camera hack is a good thing to bring up the camera hack didn't require a secure chip in each unit to protect it from the camera hack the problem with the camera hack was that there were a number of these these webcam devices that were all and routers there were other devices in the hack as well but they were all made in in China as many things are but they were all made with the same default password and they were all made in with with passwords that could not be easily updated or changed and so it became very easy for uh a u a bad actor to write a script that said go search the web and find these devices that are answering that use the same default password and and and basically own them and take over them and turn them into a botn net and so the first thing you need to do is when you're making a device is make sure that the password can be changed and the second thing that you do is that as a part of your initial setup you require the password to be changed and if you do or you could just buy a homekit camera well I suppose you you could but I'm that you know that don't the fact that there is homekit doesn't make everything else also insecure by default it means that we we can have secure things that are outside of homekit correct I just you know this whole process of going through and making sure you can change the default password on the on the you know uh and the IP address on your camera is like yeah good luck with that it's not the for the average consumer but it's it's just as you set up the thing you plug it in it finds it and you use an app on your phone to say that it's there great please enter in a password you've now assigned a new password for the thing it's not hard the you say that well here here's the issue right device manufacturers are making devices that are compatible with multiple systems here right it's not just homeit it's homekit and Amazon Alexa or it's homekit and Amazon Alexa and Google home or it's Alexa and Google home right it's it's I mean are we selling these cameras to guys who want to catch the posum that's digging up there's backyard or are we selling it to a system integrator you know like the fact that you have to go in and change the password to ensure the security of your camera is insane that's not that's not the market for this kind of stuff and if you want to see Smart Home Products catch on they have to be secure reliable and easy to use and you have to go and make sure the password can be changed on your camera stop stop you're you're I'm going to get a headache here in a minute because we we re we reviewed the ero routers right which was the simple router mesh router for home use and when you're setting up the router one of the steps is enter in a user password for this thing enter enter in the password create a password to ADM thing and it was done very simply through like four steps in an app from from plugging it in to having internet connectivity and one of the four steps I'm talking about the dlink hack though I'm talking about theing dink I'm saying that if you're going to do a camera it's no harder to have one step out of your four steps plug in your camera oh your app has found your camera please create a password it's not as hard as you're making it out to be this is for normal people issue was not a user facing thing it was not for normal people you got to look into the case you're wrong no there there L more cameras that were haed than the dink camera there were I understand but the FC the FTC sued dink for a reason because they didn't their own camer we weren't talking about the botnet that took over all the cameras and routers that were out there and I'm talking about I'm talking about Smart Home Products in general and why I trust homekit okay all right I've said all I have to say on this cuz you know you're you're uh setting up a password for a camera is not a system integrator thing it can be a user facing thing whether or not it was in the dlink case specifically is a different thing but expecting people to create a password is is not hard you know they in fact Apple does it when you set up a new iPhone they ask you to create a password don't they apple is experimenting with medium to longdistance wireless charging what do you think about this probably not happening anytime soon so what we've got here is a patent filing is is that right mhm yeah okay have you ever tried wireless charging before I don't have any devices that do it no I don't I haven't used it I mean I'm familiar with how the contact based ones work but we're talking about wireless charging here we're talking about truly Wireless which is different yeah so in the past there have been a couple of different methods for trying to wirelessly charge things and and by Wireless that's meant not having to actually physically plug something into your phone you know whether it's been the the chi charging that uses coils in a in a case or the case back of the phone to match up to coils on a charging mat kind of thing what this patent is that makes it different and unique is that it's about transferring power through the airwaves so that you don't actually have to physically place your phone on on anything specific instead what they're doing is having a transmitter and a receiver and and wirelessly using antenna to transmit the power and it's it's interesting I've seen demonstrations of this it does actually function there there is such a technology it's it's a little impractical at least in the demonstration that I saw but it's it's also pretty cool yeah this is something neat but I don't think it's coming anytime soon I think that the technolog is not ready for prime time we talked about how the uh the the rumored iPhone 8 drawings seems to have a large space for potentially a wireless charging pad in the rear case do you think we're going to get wireless charging as a part of uh the the iPhone 8 at all even if it's not this transmitter receiver thing you have to is yeah it's not going to be the transmitter receiver type of thing it's going to be just a a charging pad as an option um for those that want to use it is really what it's going to be I think that you know the expectation is iPhone 8 is going to have contact based wireless charging um and then also quick charging capabilities via USBC power over a lightning connector right you know and this we reviewed one of these uh contact based kind of charging systems in the past you know we of course you know it from your your Apple watch as well but uh we had a couple years ago some of these cases battery cases that had charging mats and it turns out that it's pretty convenient for the same reason that that I was saying that it's friction to try and pull my phone out and press down the home button to say do something it turns out that there's friction in in plugging in a lightning cable that it's it's a lot easier to just drop your phone down on the counter and have it charge yeah I I think that uh you know for certain scenarios you know bedside charging um you know I have a dock um and I just prefer to have you know that um but I could see why people would prefer uh you know this type of charging I mean it makes sense to me um I think that it's a logical feature for Apple to include um but I think that the preferred way of charging is going to remain through a lightning cable just because it's going to be more efficient well there's there's always reliability in using a cable right and it's faster yes so there's a story that we're talking about here that says that when Apple releases the iOS 11 later this year one of its features may be a new music app that better showcases uh videos yeah I mean it makes sense uh they're pushing uh original video content through the Apple music subscription um and much like iTunes before it the Apple music name is proving to be rather unfortunate because uh it's going to be more than music um and it seems like you know you pay for Apple music subscription you're going to get original video content you're going to get you know movies and documentaries and series and all that kind of stuff that apple is working on very slowly certainly not to the level of Netflix or Amazon or Hulu or anything like that but um so it would make sense for Apple to feature and give easy access to that type of content because right now there's really no way for you to get it let me ask you for your opinion has Apple music gotten easier to use when we I don't use apple music ah I'm asking the wrong person I I I prefer to own my music so I turn it off I have it disabled on my phone and I buy uh records and download the digital codes to come with it and upload them to iTunes Match which is now known as iCloud music library 25 a year right when we first started talking about Apple music on this podcast um it was at least a little cumbersome to use and then over time they refined it but uh I uh I feel like one of the things that they could do each time they make this big change to Apple music is offer another trial subscription to give people another chance to come and get reacquainted we don't suck as much now well it's it's not necessarily that we don't suck much as much now although that that's kind of true it's uh that it's not nearly complete you know Jimmy uh Jimmy iine told Bloomberg that Apple music is nowhere near complete in my head so I I understand that now that it's more complete let's see what's more complete right to give us a reason to come back I um generally like the music app on the iPhone um of course I don't have music turned on but I I wish there are certain things that I do miss about the way it was like for example I wish that playlists had their own dedicated little um menu or whatever at the bottom of the screen uh they do not um but I have a dedicated radio tab that I can that I never use that I can't get rid of so uh and a dedicated search tab that I don't really use so um I think that there are certain aspects of the interface that could be refined or improved upon or made to so you could customize it um you know I think back to and I think you can still do this on the store um where you can drag and choose which items show up in the uh tabs on the bottom of the screen um I I would like to see something like that return because I don't have a use for the radio function I don't listen to beats one uh but it would be nice to have a dedicated tab for playlist down there for when I want to access them yeah as it is now you have to tap on library and then have play if you want to delve in your music you tap library and then artist yeah it's just like it would be nice to have an artist artist Tab and a playlist tab like it used to be and I realize that's probably not for everybody um but uh that's something that I would prefer all right well there are a number of other Futures that have been rumored as well including deeper Siri integration to messages and iCloud and group video calls and FaceTime which is a a favorite of mine yeah I missed the old IAT video days where you I do to I actually after they got rid of that I switch over to Google Hangouts because it was much easier to do multiple participants there we talked about this a little bit earlier the the notion that there's the uh ability to have uh wireless charging in the uh the iPhone 8 possibly so I'm looking at the schematics for that now and uh that's a rather big charging pad and it's interesting because it's right in the center where we saw the hole last time in in the previous schematics that were rumored what's interesting about this this one like I said it contrasts with the document that came out last week is that um this one comes from a person who is generally known for the accuracy of his leaks and it uh it looks somewhat credible it's still got the the vertical camera on there what do you think is this one uh this this is one that we think is reasonably credible or is this one I think I think this one seems plausible I think that um there's some truth to a lot of these you know some of the reports that come out like Bloomberg had one a few weeks ago saying that apple is circling around a few designs um and that makes sense you know they they have to hedge their bets and if they can't get certain technology to come together um then they're going to have to explore Alternatives uh that said uh they've been pretty consistent on this vertical camera um and I think that makes sense uh because if they want to do augmented reality um capabilities to have the uh cameras be horizontal when the phone is held uh in landscape mode would make sense um and I think that uh you know that that seems logical to me um and the the rear home button Touch ID thing is is weird uh I don't think that that is accurate uh I don't think that that's going to come to be but we don't really know what's going on behind the scenes in terms of the technology and stuff and if Apple for some reason cannot integrate Touch ID into the screen they may be forced to put it on the back I would like to think that if they can't do it they would just wait another year um and say there's no point in going with an edgo edge display if we can't get touch ID on the front but I don't run Apple so nope not at this time tell me about battery yeah so um there's a few things that we know about the iPhone 8 battery life supposedly um and some of the changes that are going to be coming at least from the more reliable sources out there uh so what's really interesting about the battery in the quote unquote iPhone 8 is that it's rumored to be uh rather large battery in fact almost the size of the battery in the iPhone 7 plus and that's interesting because the iPhone 8 is going to have a a form factor uh that is expected to be closer in size to the 4.7 in iPhone 7 and its predecessors so it's kind of like apple is offering The Best of Both Worlds here with this edgo Edge display new design um and by shrinking the components inside of the phone itself uh they're able to cram in a rather massive battery into a smaller chassis um and so uh that is why one of the expectations why Apple's only going to have one flagship phone this year and not a plus version and a regular version because it's kind of The Best of Both Worlds we're talking about a smaller phone form factor uh with a larger display edge to edge uh kind of giving you both of those and uh and then when you add in other things like the fact that the parts are going to be smaller which makes them more efficient um and then you're switching to an OLED display which consumes less power and is also thinner which allows space for a larger battery uh you're really talking about uh a few things coming together that could potentially put the iPhone 8 in a position to offer pretty spectacular battery life I don't think that there's going to be any sort of like game-changing Breakthrough you know it's not like your phone's going to last a week without you charging it but I think that you'll find it more easy to get through a day on a single charge with this larger battery and more efficient Parts in the phone itself right and so what they've done here as far as I can understand it is that they've stacked batteries using the the same kind of stacking that they're doing in the MacBook the 12-in MacBook for example but they're also using an interestingly shaped battery where normally battery packs are rectangular in shape this one is an L-shaped battery pack design which allows it to use more space and taking advantage of some of the space previously occupied by the heno Jack there you are so as Apple shrinks Parts you know the the main board is expected to shrink um that leads to more efficient uh you know processors and stuff and and as we were talking um if few weeks ago about how Apple making their own chips and rolling more into the system on a chip um this all plays into that same thing where the more Apple can cram onto a smaller little main board in there the more they can put on the same chip even the more efficient it becomes the smaller the parts come the the less power it consumes and the more powerful it gets uh and that's just going to continue yeah now I know that you like using your iPhone for videography I know that you you like doing these kinds of things you you especially like doing it with the drones but um you had a chance to try out a gimbal recently yeah uh is a company that launched a Kickstarter this week and um we don't normally cover uh crowdfunding campaigns on Apple Insider because well the truth of it is they almost never ship on time and sometimes don't even do what they said they were going to do and then sometimes just run away with your money so we've had a policy for years that we we just don't cover these types of products because they just don't pan out but we do cover them if uh the company has some sort of Hardware that we can put our hands on and actually feel and see and test uh and this is one of those cases the company is called rigot I I don't know how to pronounce it it's riet um and so they sent us a a prototype of their uh camera gimbal uh that works with iPhone and other smartphones um and uh it has an app that it connects to allow some physical controls for uh for you know adjusting things while you're shooting and all that um and I came away you know pretty generally impressed I mean it's not it's not going to replace a super high-end rig but if you're looking for smoother footage and you're shooting 4k on your iPhone which is pretty crazy when you think about it um this is an affordable uh way to uh to to get some more stable footage on your phone uh right now in the kickstarter campaign if you jump in you can get uh their early bird special or whatever for 140 bucks uh when they go to market they're expecting to charge 189 at retail uh if you compare that to other gimbals on the market they're generally in the $300 $350 range if they work with your iPhone so you're saving a few bucks here it seems pretty good and how was your experience with it did you was it easy pry easy um I I don't want to uh bash on it too much because this is not a review I'm testing prototype Hardware so it's not really fair yeah it's not really fair to beat up on it but I mean I I got to say I came away pretty impressed with it um some other gimbals will only work with certain devices because they have to calibrate for the weight you know there's offsetting and all that kind of stuff this has a uh a kind of user driven way of doing it where you have to balance it yourself uh uh before it before you turn it on so you hold it up you make sure the phone is slid into the right spot based on what size it is and how much it weighs um and then when it's balanced you turn it on it starts working my test it leaned a little bit to the right I think that's something that could easily be fixed or it could even just have been a bug with the one unit that I have uh but yeah it has a joystick on it for adjusting when you're shooting um uh angling you know left and right up and down that that uh one of the nicer things about it too is you can actually physically move the gimbal to a position that you want and change the shooting mode um and it seamlessly switches between uh overhand and underhand shooting so if you want want to get like a low shot in transition um it does that very well uh it can do selfies and all sorts of other stuff too um you know some people are commas for saying you could see a lot of bouncing when you're walking around with it I mean it significantly cuts down on the bouncing that you would have if you're holding it by hand it's 1080 gimbals so I I think that uh uh for the price what you're getting um it's yeah it's it's a it's a gimbal it's not pretty it's pretty good it gets the job done it's cheaper than most of the stuff that's available on the market uh the physical controls are great uh dedicated button for you know taking a photo or starting video um you can switch between shooting modes on it um you can switch between gimbal modes with like follow or stay fixed or whatever um all without touching your phone and really for a lot of these products I've tested the the camera Focus products on an iPhone um the hardware always requires some form of software some app because it will never integrate with Apple's own camera app and it the the software is always the the deal breaker it's always the Achilles heel on these things uh and and here the software was not bad um I did have some issues when I was interacting with the touchcreen like it wasn't some of the the touch points were a little small um and I'd have to press a few times but in terms of the device connecting to the app uh it was very quick and in terms of the physical controls working while using uh the device and the app uh it it all came together very well so as far as prototype Hardware goes uh I I was pretty impressed by it okay how would you describe it to someone who's never used a gimbal before who who doesn't even know necessarily what a gimbal is for uh take your iPhone and uh try to hold it and get uh video footage um just with your hands you don't even have to be walking you could just be standing there um and if you look you will notice a lot of shaking uh even even if you're uh uh you know a former Army sniper and you have the most steady hands on the planet uh it's just going to Shake that's just the nature of it every single little movement shows up when you're shooting um and that's going to happen with pretty much any camera honestly um but especially on something as small as an iPhone where you're just kind of holding it between two fingers uh when you put a gimbal on there that kind of stuff goes away and the footage looks a lot more professional uh as you move the camera around and you get your shots um it uh is uh smooth and and it looks very cinematic um and that's accomplished through three AIS is what they call it where it offsets the movement of your hand uh balances the weight of the phone and uh accommodates accordingly based on your motion and you're also holding a handle which is a little more steady than pinching your phone between your fingers too which helps so all those things kind of come together and create a uh experience when you're shooting that just the the the footage is is much more smooth than it is if you're holding in your hand cool and and you know we we know that photography and videography is a focus of apples so having these kinds of accessories out there is going to make that uh you know make your footage really show off and apple does have stuff that that does this in the iPhone itself especially if you have the iPhone 7 plus um they have what's called Optical image stabilization in there which is uh the lens within the camera actually physically moves to offset for your hand motion and and it uses uh you know gyroscopes and images on the screen and some Advanced algorithms to to accommodate for that but when the lens is so small on a camera phone there's only so much really that it can do um so it helps but it's never going to give you the kind of quality that a gimbal like this is going to give you yeah you know I've used uh Instagram has an app called hyperlapse which what they're doing is they're I love it they're they're using the accelerometer data and matching that in into a timeline with the uh video data and then cropping and moving the footage around within their small crop to to counteract the shake and they do a really good job of it but the downside to using an app like that or or a software based approach like that is that it has post-processing time after you take the video it has to go through and and make those and you lose video uh content too you're cropping you're croing you know you can do that too even an iMovie or in Final Cut um you know Apple has stabilization software uh in there where it analyzes the image and tries to keep uh certain things in focus but even that is very imperfect because as the camera moves around things lose focus and get blurry and so while software can try to accommodate for that it can't change the actual quality of the image and so if things are blurry because of bouncing around and or getting out of focus or whatever it starts to look weird uh and it's a it's a potential solution but it's never as good as Hardware is going to be yet maybe we'll get there software eventually eats the world well it does so Apple has HED a made several hires they've made some hires from NASA the national uh Aeronautics and Space Adry it's not got anything to do in that or so well so they they've hired a fellow named Dr Jeff Norris who's an augmented in virtual reality specialist who uh founded a missions operations Innovation office at JPL mer J propulsion labs and he's working on projects to bring augmented reality to the masses at Apple mhm which is which is pretty cool um there you know there are a number of augmented reality efforts at Apple that we've we've talked about uh it's it's interesting because there's a number of people at Apple working on this and and when you s talk about someone coming from NASA to do it it it means that they're certainly well qualified they also have an interest in software quality um and you know at the JPL Ops lab Norris was working on developing human system interfaces so using augmented reality virtual reality to control robots and manipulate things with tablet interfaces um we're still not sure what he's going to be doing at Apple precisely but we know that there's this growing interest Tim Cook's made it very clear right yeah and and when Tim Cook says he's interested in something uh you know it's usually a sign of something to come you know years before the Apple watch was announced Tim Cook said that he finds the risk to be a very interesting place for devices so um I I think that that's part of their game is to tease a little bit and uh uh kind of uh send the herd in One Direction whether or not it's misdirection we will find out but I think that you know where there's smoke there's fire and it's pretty clear that they're working on some form of augmented reality as I've said before I don't think that this is something that uh is going to turn into some geeky glasses that you're going to wear I think this is more of a uh platform that Apple can create with the devices that they already sell uh and give the ability for their own apps and also for third party developers to create uh unique and interesting ways of uh using augmented reality so what we were talking before about uh this new Amazon Echo that will you know give you take your photo and make fashion recommendations or something that seems kind of silly to me but I could see an augmented reality application for fashion on an iPhone for example uh being pretty neat or interior decorating or or stuff like that where you can uh start to project things onto a person or a place um and give you a feel for what it would look like in the real world if you were to buy that outfit or or buy that couch or whatever um see how well it fits uh I think that that uh becomes a very interesting application and it's augar in reality in not maybe the the game way that people have been thinking about for years and not necessarily the headset way people have been thinking about in more of a interactive Dynamic way that you would have on a screen like your iPhone you know there there when I think about the clothing thing specifically so years ago Levis had a thing where you'd walk into a booth in the store and cameras would scan you and then tell you what the right size uh you know 501s was to wear and then they' place the order for you and your custom jeans would arrive kind of thing and so now we've got Amazon who wants to sell clothing right they sell a lot of clothing so they're placing a camera to tell you what looks good on you and recommend stuff to you eventually it's like you say you know you you could use the the cameras of devices to superimpose things upon you what's interesting to me here is is sort of this progression that we see right Apple says something's interesting and whether it gets integrated into a device we already have or it becomes a new device at some point it changes to become a hobby and at some point after it's a hobby number of years pass it becomes a business I I I don't know that it's necessarily a business for Apple in other than the sense that they could potentially roll it into their made for iPhone program with Hardware accessories for the people that really do want to have geeky headsets and stuff U but I I think that these are just things where if the tools to create augmented reality are simple and Powerful for iOS in a way that they are not on say Android uh that gives Apple a potential leg up on the competition and can tie people into their ecosystem more from a developer perspective and also from a user perspective because people want those apps so I I don't know that again I don't see Apple making Hardware or even trying to necessarily profit from this in a direct way I think that it just kind of makes it a more cohesive platform for everything that you could ever want to do on your phone going back to to this notion that they hired Dr Norris from JPL from from NASA there are other former NASA Engineers also on Apple's roles now uh there are four x Nas Engineers who've joined project Titan they're building up and uh and really kind of gung-ho on this car project now in a way that we haven't seen before because now they're at a point where uh the paperwork has been filed with the California DMV and so they have to start disclosing information so this was a interesting story to me from a journalism perspective because we got our hands on the uh PDF that was filed late last week uh with the DMV um and we posted it uh on our website uh We've redacted you know you know you go through and you do the typical thing where you uh find any information maybe they didn't redact and you may not want it out in the public just to protect people's privacy so we went through and removed addresses and locations and things like that um just out of courtesy um but I guess even that redacting was not enough for the DMV who by the way are the ones that put out this document it's a public document uh so they reached out to us and wanted us to remove the names as well uh so we said sure and we removed the pages with the the names of the engineers there um and but it turns out that some of those names that run that list are people that used to work for NASA so now that's kind of in the wild because the DMV couldn't redact the information to the extent that they wanted to why they would need to redact people's names I don't really know it's not like you know it's like it's not like it like you know it's their address or their phone number or something but anyhow uh so yeah we know that uh whatever they're doing whether it's self-driving car software or they're building in a full-fledged car or whatever it is uh they have some pretty high caliber Talent over there at Apple not surprising right and the the sorts things that have been working on are three detection of 3D objects motion planning algorithms um and also uh test yeah the kind of things that you would expect with a self-driving car um you know there's all kinds of of obstacles on the road you know even if we get to a point where all cars on the road talk to one another uh they still have to avoid objects because of things like pedestrians and road hazards and whatever else so uh that kind of technology is going to be integral to self-driving cars to uh be able to adapt think on the Fly and and make safe evasive maneuvers without uh potentially causing danger for others one of the things that's always interested me about NASA is their focus on minimizing bugs in software because you know you're you're putting people up into space and they can't just pull over on the side of the road and open the window for fresh breath of fresh air as it were so you this is it's uh you know I've been a NASA fan for a long time so looking at this kind of thing and seeing that focus and and uh you know that that concentration on bug-free software is is really interesting when it comes to soft it's exciting it's uh it's going to be real interesting to see where this goes uh and what Apple decides to do with it but I mean they're they're clearly committed this is not something they're walking away from yeah and a year ago we were talking about this and it was it was Shane who used to be on the podcast telling us that he would bet money that there was no way that Apple would actually ever prod and they may not and we still don't know we we still don't know but certainly they're putting the effort forth to do something interesting here yeah and you could see potentially an area where they just decide that building the car itself isn't worth it um and maybe that's something that they want to do further down the road you know maybe maybe the self-driving car software is going to be the Motorola rocker uh to the eventual iPhone that is the Apple car uh who know knows but um well I would say they've already opened the door for getting into the car with carplay I mean the the first wedge into the car was uh back in what 2003 or 2004 with alpine where they first got the made for iPod car stereo and they had a large amount of uptake on getting made for iPod into cars and now they've got carplay in with all of the major manufacturers except Toyota I think and uh having having crossed that bridge it's not a big step to to bring the self-driving functions after that right you use carplay as the wedge I I mean I guess infotainment system is a little different than a car operating system though well infotainment systems tend to have a lot of telematics in them anyway right for the OEM stuff you you have control your windows control your air conditioner stuff through the screen it's it's not knobs anymore right so putting putting telematics in incar and self-driving together is not a big stretch so if you're a small business owner who struggles with tax stuff don't stress because freaking out and burying your head in the sand will not solve your problems come tax time what will help is bringing fresh books into your world fresh books is the ridiculously easy to ous Cloud accounting software that's made for people who can't stand doing their taxes it will transform the way you handle your taxes because freshbooks keeps all your cash flow details in one place so you know exactly what what invoices you sent who's paid you and what your income is and their mobile app allows you to take pictures of your receipts and organizes them for later which makes claiming expenses a breeze you can even set up fresh books to import expenses directly from your bank accounts it's everything you need to stay completely Zen come tax time and not panicked for a free 30-day trial go to freshbooks.com slapple Insider and enter the code Apple Insider in the how did You Hear About Us section that's freshbooks.com slapple Insider and enter the code Apple Insider in the how did you hear about a section tell me about the Apple watch the Apple watch turned 2 years old this week uh 2 years since it launched on since it was announced uh you'll recall that it was announced about 6 months before it launched because it took some time to get the platform out um but yeah um two years on um I wrote a little piece just kind of explaining how the platform has evolved when Apple first introduced it I don't even think they knew what it was going to be or how it was going to be received uh certainly thought that it could be a new Gold Rush for developers you know on the App Store creating these apps for your wrist it turns out that uh a lot of apps that may work on a phone don't really work well on your wrist aren't really necessary uh the side button was originally dedicated to quickly drawing little scribbles to other people with apple watches uh that was unceremoniously dumped last uh fall and now with watch OS 3 it's just an app doc which again makes a lot more sense uh they got rid of the um uh glances view as well and replace that with the app dooc uh they have a control center for quick access to uh uh you know adjusting settings and and and uh things like that um and you know switching between watch faces but really uh it's focused as a device that uh uh tracks your Fitness um and it uh uh it gives you notifications and makes so you can keep your phone in your pocket and then things like like uh Apple pay only require two button Taps very quick uh Hy Siri uh is done all my devices are turning on now uh is done without um having to interact with the device without having to press any buttons so uh the point of the piece really was the Apple watch succeeds at tasks where you don't really have to interact with it very much uh the fitness stuff throughout the day sends you alerts knows when you're standing knows when you're uh more active um completing your rings uh you don't have to do anything even if you're working out you press the button and then you get back to it later it measures your heart rate it does all that stuff uh uh using Siri uh you don't have to press a button um you know all all these things that it does very well uh require very little interaction with advice and uh even the notifications you just glance down your wrist it pops up you decide whether or not you want to interact with it and then you just get back on with it you don't have to look at your phone or check anything like that so it's very convenient and and I think that's where the Apple watch succeeds and where it's really finding its place is as this device that uh makes it so you don't have to pick up your phone or do anything and and makes it easy to interact with your devices in a in a seamless and simple way you know when it when it was first introduced it felt to me very much like no one including Apple knew exactly why you should have one they knew all the things it could do and they left it up to you to figure out which one applied to you where for all of other the other Apple devices they told you exactly what it was for and why you should have one and they they've sort of Tak their time trying to find its way I think they're they're a little closer because they're talking about Sport and Health now I don't know what I would say they've taken their time I mean you've had three major different platforms for it in two years right and and and two years to to refine it to figure out what it's for and and the hardware the hardware has mostly stayed the same which is you know you know you look at the second generation version the only thing that they've changed there really is they got away from the fashion focused stuff uh and they're no longer selling $110,000 on up addition models they now have it's like $1,200 for the ceramic Edition model and I think that Apple realized that the the fashion part of it they thought was going to be a bigger deal than it was um wasn't that big of a deal but to Apple's credit they've been able to go back to the drawing board um and refine it and continue to improve it in ways and I think it it it's a very relevant platform for them yes so what do you like most about using your Apple watch your it's great for running with GPS and having the music on it and going completely wireless with my W1 headphones I absolutely love that notifications are great um you know we talked a little earlier about uh uh uh you know having an always on device to control Smart Home accessories that is my Apple watch it's on my wrist I can talk to it I can give it commands I can invoke Siri without pressing a button um and I use it all the time for Apple pay um if I get a cab all the cabs in New York City um have Apple pay support I just press the button twice don't have to pull my phone out of my pocket bam I'm paid I'm out of the cab I'm good to go um and I think that between Fitness not ifications Siri and Apple pay those are really the the the pegs upon which the platform uh is really going to stand well that brings us to the close of another perfectly good episode of Apple Insider Neil where can people find you on the internet you can find me on Twitter at this is Neil NE L and you can read my stuff on Apple inside and I'm Victor marks and you can find me at V marks on Twitter and also you can find me this Monday at Adorama live at 6 p.m. and we hope to see you thereyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to Apple Insider podcast this is episode 118 I'm your host Victor marks and joining me is our editor and chief Neil Hughes hey Victor how's it going it's amazing and you know Neil we've got this event coming up that we were just talking about before we started recording you know this is this is a new one for us we've never held an event quite like this before but Daniel dilder I and and you will also be present I understand uh Dan and I are going to be speaking at adorama's flagship store in New York City to talk with professional Apple users discuss the current state of Apple's HED hardware and and join us you know we should have any of our listeners who are in the New York area please feel free to come to adorama's flagship store and uh disc join us for discussion uh refreshments and a chance to win great prizes like a brand new 9.7 in iPad we're going to be doing this it's exciting this a cool event I think um and a good opportunity uh for people from the community to kind of come together and uh and meet some of the folks behind Apple Insider and meet one another and talk you know Adorama is a great partner of Apple Insider and uh they reached out to us and asked if we wanted to do an event in their space they have a beautiful store in Manhattan with a great dedicated Apple area um and uh yeah so it's one of those things where we talked about it and decided what do we want to talk about and and uh Pro users seemed relevant not only because of what Adorama does um you know focusing on those types of users but also Mac's recent Mac announcements the Mac Pro iMac Mac uh that Apple has made um so it seemed relevant and like a good thing to talk about so the of course on of course on on Monday May 1st at 6 p.m. uh at Adorama store at 42 West 18th Street between 5ifth and 6th Avenues and please come there's a registration on an official Eventbrite page that we'll link to in the show notes getting right into things see here my first story that I had was about Apple working on personto person payment transfer systems to compete this is something that's been rumored for there this has been rumored for a few years um dating back to I think 2015 even um you know it's logical it seems to make a lot of sense um it seems to be kind of a no-brainer that Apple would do this um you know all you have to do is think about what is done with Apple pay and apply that same technology and convenience to peer-to-peer money transfers uh you think about how frictionless things like venmo are and square cash and what have you uh freely transfer money uh these services are interesting because it's not an area where Apple's going to get rich in fact they'll probably lose money on it but it's a way to get people into the ecosystem and so if Apple wants people to have their credit cards in there for buying stuff on iTunes buying stuff from the Apple Store using Apple pay at a merchant this is a way to get people to insert their credit card information into their iPhone for those services and it all just kind of works um so that's why you see Banks and and other uh uh organizations are are really pushing this peer-to-peer payment transfer because uh one of the big markets that they want to reach are millennials uh you know folks under the age of 35 or so who a lot of them don't have bank accounts uh don't necessarily have credit cards and they're harder to reach and they are the quote unquote underbanked um and so this is an opportunity for Apple to uh address that market and maybe hook them into their ecosystem a little bit you know we've we've used PayPal for years to do personto person transfers for you know items purchased over forums or classified kind of things and it's it's it's PayPal was cemented in people's minds as being the preferred purchase Method for eBay when eBay owned PayPal and that's what I really wanted out of Apple pay was an easy way to replace PayPal right and and being able to use it at 4 or five stores which which the number is growing but it's still a limited number of stores right uh is nice but being able to to do it for personto person transfers as well really cements it for me the you know when when people are setting up these kinds of things they'll take Paypal they'll take uh Google payments sometimes Square occasionally but if you can just say yeah I've got an iPhone and we'll do it by Apple pay it's done that's that's going to be a game changer in terms of the number of people using it I think I actually had a very weird interaction with venmo last week I don't use venmo a lot I've used it on occasion I've actually been scammed on venmo as well and we've talked about that before uh for those of you who don't know don't accept money money from people on venmo if you don't know them because the money may not actually be there you should only use it for people you know anyhow last week um I uh got a random transfer of uh like $25 or something on venmo from a woman that I didn't know I'd never heard of who she was and so I thought well maybe it's a scam or whatever and then she sent me a message about 5 minutes afterwards and she's like uh I'm sorry um I don't know who you are I typed in the wrong username and I sent you this money she's like I'm a poor college student can you transfer me back the $25 and having been ripped off by Veno before I was a little bit skeptical and so I looked into the terms of service and in there in their Q&A or whatever on there it says if somebody mistakenly transfers you money just transfer the money back and it's like wait a minute I'm scratching my head I know that when people transfer your money is not necessarily sitting in your account in the account it takes three days to to show up and all has to clear and so you yeah and so you can get screwed that way so um I reached out to venmo customer service then and I said listen I'm not going to do this I've been ripped off before and then quickly venmo customer service is like oh okay we'll just we'll take care of it on our end uh and they took care of it and gave this woman her money back but yeah she sent me a message she's like I'm a poor college student please just send me back $25 I don't know if it was a scam or not it seemed genuine to me she got her money back everybody's happy but yeah like I said I don't use venmo that much but I thought it was interesting right I I don't use Veno well I've never had occasion to use venmo because venmo it seems to me is popular in large cities it's it's one of those things that happens in New York it's one of those things that happens in San Francisco it's it's popular amongst kids too um college kids it's very popular with um and that's really where they kind of cut their teeth I I had a fellow asking me to take venmo last week and I I countered with square and and that's what we used in the end yeah yeah I I looked into all the payment services years ago because uh a friend of mine unfortunately found himself kind of on Hard Times he' been hit by a flood and we were trying to raise some money but we didn't want to do it in a embarrassing you know open a GoFundMe type page where you like tell your sad story or whatever I just wanted to keep it kind of lowkey and just text the information around to people and I looked into it and square cash was by far the easiest way to do it you just entered in your debit card number the money transferred there were no fees nothing he didn't even have to have an account set up you could just send it to his email address and then he could go and all the money would be sitting there waiting whenever he signed up um and it was very easy to use um so in my experience square cash is the easiest of them but I know venmo is the most popular option out there but I think it'll be nice when Apple gets into that space for people you know once again things that tie more into the Apple ecosystem if you're on iMessage if you're on iPhone uh and you want to transfer money easily it would be a great way to do it and it's one of those things where a Apple has people who are willing to adopt these things because they come from Apple you know there's the I'm I'm going to not get this right but I was looking the other day and something like apple has 34% of the smartphone market in the US and so that's 34% of people who can or 34% of smartphone users who can jump on board and adopt that kind of thing where for all of the competing right and for all of the competing phones you know it's a mish mash of services whether it's Android pay or Samsung's pay or whatever option else is out there um having that that ground swell of of users using consistent platform and who aggressively adopt like you say means that we're going to see this this start working what I found very interesting in this story uh that that came out uh today it is that apple is apparently also in talks with uh MasterCard uh and they are considering having a I'm sorry Visa not M card they're talking to Visa about potentially having a apple debit card that would sit in your Apple wallet and it would be part of the transfer service so uh we were talking earlier about um how it takes 3 days for the funds to settle in your bank account well if you were to use the money on a debit card then you could spend immediately so let's say you know somebody owes you 50 bucks they transfer you to you over Apple pay or apple cash or whatever they want to call it and then it shows up in your Apple wallet you can wait 3 days for it to show up in your bank account or you can spend it now on your Apple debit card and it's just sitting there waiting to be spent yeah and and this is actually something that square does today uh for instance I I when I used square like I said this last week I hadn't used it in a while and so I had to go through and and verify my existing number and stuff like that but once I'd done that it said do you want to have a virtual Visa card and I said well sure why not and I was able to add that virtual Visa card that square issued me to Apple pay so I can now pay with Apple pay out of the square balance that I've got there yeah Square does a pretty good job on this stuff I've always been impressed by uh their ability to integrate um especially being on the Apple side you know to have that Apple pay integration to put your debit card in there is really cool yeah and there's no reason that Apple can't do the same kind of thing yeah and I don't think it's going to change the game or or anything like that or be a big deal I think that it's it's one of those things that just make sense for Apple to do well what happens is it becomes like PayPal where you have a PayPal balance you can transfer to your bank account or you can pay out of it and so now you've got this this um one more thing that cements you to Apple and it's a new method for Nigerian scammers too well how's that supposed to be I know I know it's a joke but I'm just trying to think wait a minute now how how how they I'm sure they'll find a way I'm sure they'll find a way I mean I'm I'm trying to think of the 419 email um my my great uncle was a Nigerian prince who passed away and left me the secure element um I will gladly split the shares out of the secure it doesn't it's not scanning for me I tried I really tried moving on so this is this is one that's interesting to me I I've been thinking a lot and talking a lot about voice first as an interface and this progression of of you know we used to have a book Neil Stevenson wrote a book years ago called in the beginning there was the command line and it talked about the move from keyboard driven interfaces and text driven interfaces to to Mouse driven interfaces and graphical interfaces and we're experiencing we we've experienced another Revolution upon that two of them in fact one from Mouse to touch and a second one from touch to voice and so this story is about Apple finalizing or or rumored to be finalizing a design of a rival to Amazon's Echo device based on Siri you know the rumor says that it would it would be of course competitor to Amazon Echo that it would have Siri for the voice and AI would have AirPlay for the connectivity and and music transfer as opposed to Amazon's using Bluetooth and that it would have uh beats's audio technology all of that's kind of interesting there are some key differences that separate it from what Amazon's doing but I I you mean like it doesn't have a camera to judge Your Fashion on it like the latest Echo oh the echo look so echol look is a $200 Amazon Echo device that you place in your bedroom remind where I said camera so you place this internet connected camera in your bedroom yeah what could go wrong and and the use case justification for putting a camera in your bedroom is so that you can try on clothes in front of it and say do these make me look fat what could go wrong that's that's my big joke right there uh it's you know you're you're we had a case a couple of years ago where there were School admins who had placed spyware onto the school issued laptops to monitor their students and this would have been okay except that the IT people were using the computers to turn on the webcams when the students were at home in their beds in their bedrooms which is all a very bad idea and turned out to be a very bad idea for for that school district and for those those admins and this is why many people put a little piece of tape or a Post-It note or or there are even little plastic sliders made that act as lens covers for the cameras on laptops because putting a camera in your bedroom is is uh potentially a bad idea well I was going to say potentially a vulnerability if you want to say it's a bad idea that's fine and I accept it I was trying to C it's a bad idea I was trying to be so so careful it's a bad idea Apple would never be so stupid to make a product like this uh Apple would however potentially make a voice connected device that could give you the information you want from Siri allowed you to control your homekit stuff I don't know add reminders add add reminders and shopping lists kind of things set appointments to your calendar um and and the cool one that Google will ever be go ahead the cool one that Google home does the thing I really liked about Google home besides its usual kind of of answering things answering questions and controlling the lighting was that Google home understood that there was a chomecast in the house and you could tell Google home to play things on the chomecast so you could say you know okay Google play stranger things from Netflix on my TV on my chomecast name TV basically and and it would go ahead and kick off the episodes directly from the voice I liked that a lot and so one of the things that I'm hopeful and that I wanted Amazon to get this together too right they have the Alexa speakers they have Alexa integrated into the Fire TV devices there's no reason they shouldn't be able to do the same kind of interaction but they don't M MH Apple should be able to have whatever Visionary thing they have kick off something on Apple TV especially since they have an understanding of what's on all of those services is due to the Deep search that they have for all of the TV services they run as well as the TV app mhm right there were rumors before the Apple TV revamp a couple years ago with Siri that um that it might be this type of device and allinone thing um and there's been speculation since that Apple might even roll its router division into it so imagine a airport uh ex Express or AirPort Extreme or a time capsule um with uh that plugs into your TV that serves up Wi-Fi that has a speaker a microphone to give you this kind of echo like uh device I I I don't know if that's going to be the case I I see this being if this becomes a reality what what has been rumored here uh this you know beats sluh Siri SL whatever device I see this being kind of a a niche thing for Apple um I see it being you know Apple would rather sell you an iPhone they'd rather you use Siri on your iPhone they would rather that you um you know interact with a more fully featured device rather than some headless thing that you know is not going to do everything that you want or or probably not even hear you right most of the time so I I I could see this being something where they get into a market because they have to um but I I kind of like kind of like the iPad Mini you know it was like one of those things that Apple reluctantly got into and said okay well you guys want cheaper tablets here you go um and then now they've kind of given up on that market I could see this being something where uh for those that want to have an always on voice device but don't have an Apple Watch on the wrist or something um I I could see it being a market for that but I don't see this being like a huge device for Apple well so here's here's a good point and and I'm I'm very frustrated when you say that by the way but here here's the thing right me no no Amazon made the decision that voice was going to be a big deal for them and they instead of keeping it in their own product right it was it's it's not something locked in Echo they are encouraging third parties to roll it into their devices right in fact in our story we mentioned that the echo4 which is the uh the successor to echo's three version three homekit thermostat is likely to have Alexa built into it so when Amazon set out to build these things they they didn't just offer it in you know licensed partnership kind of way with these third- party manufacturers they went ahead and posted their code on GitHub and said if you've got a Raspberry Pi here are the steps that you need to take to go ahead and put an Amazon Echo speaker like thing together out of a Raspberry Pi so everyone can do it here's the code go forth have fun build your devices they also separately said here's what it takes to make a skill for Amazon Echo and you can run your own skills or you can submit it and and have it be a part of our skill store so that you can enhance and and augment what Echo can do for you so they they really made it easy to adopt Apple by comparison made it relatively difficult first of all they require a secure chip which costs money for good reason hey I'm not saying it's not without good reason but it but I'm saying that it slows adoption and it slows adoption because there's a cost for the chip there's a cost for getting in on the licensing program to get the Chip And there's an engineering cost where you have to understand how to put this thing on your board so there there are at least three different costs for trying to implement something with homekit second of all you you have to go through a huge certification process and homekit has been a moving Target it changed greatly between iOS 9 and iOS 10 and that caused a lot of people to have to go ahead and resubmit their devices that they they would have they they initially failed those tests right self-certification kind of things so it's it's very reliable it's very secure but it's also 5% of the market and that kind of feels to me like a throwback to the days of how much market share Apple had when we would say that the Mac was doomed apple is doomed right that's that's a throwback to 1997 1998 MH in terms of this segment and so Amazon has has geared things to be as open as possible and as widespread and easy to adopt as possible Apple has focused on what's secure and what's going to make the money but what is the killer app for these alwayson things because it's not checking the weather it's it's smart home stuff right so not necessarily the the biggest uses for these alwayson kind of things is music is setting timers you know my my wife shouts down says remind me in 10 minutes and so I just tell the speaker remind me in 10 minutes and yeah I could hold down the your phone you just do that so my phone doesn't have hyeri unless it's uh plugged in so I got to hold down a home button ah and the you say that there's no real difference but the the friction for digging my phone out of my pocket and pressing down the home button is a lot greater than just saying it to the speaker that's already listening don't get me wrong if Apple makes this device I will buy it and use it I am a guy who is considered trying to find a way to build a headless uh serious support Mac around my apartment so that I can more easily uh talk to it to control devices in my home I'm just looking at it logically in saying that smart home devices have not really caught on in a meaningful way anyhow um and so I don't think that uh uh this matters that much to most people I do the thing that excites me more than anything about this is the mention of AirPlay in it because AirPlay I have been a proponent of for a long time um I love it I have multiple AirPlay speakers in my home and uh I wish that there was some form of airplace support built into Siri slomit right there is no way to talk you are forgive me for interrupting but you are a unique case you are the guy that has AirPlay all over the house and and I would say that there are relatively few of you and you're saying that home automation hasn't caught on but that's the same thing there there are people who are out there doing home automation who are into it and they're they're you're looking at them and saying there's just one of them they're looking at you and saying there's just one of you this is the thing about home automation is that everyone finds their way into it slightly differently you found your way into it by using lighting right and you eventually got you got there with the door lock there are some people do start with the door lock first and that's all they ever need but the value of having the the door lock is pretty huge right never having to carry a set of house keys again is an awesome thing you know the the being able to rock up to the house and have the lights turn on as you do is a pretty awesome thing you know rock up to the house have the door unlock and the lights turn on and have the the temperature set when you're approaching right all of these things come together and there are people who are out there doing one or two of these things that becomes two or three of these things and when you have two or three of these things in combination with the ease of being able to tell the speaker to add the things on the shopping list to your shared shopping notes so that when you do get out to the shoing to the grocery store with your phone and all the items that you spoke out loud are now in your list the these are things that sound like they're not worth that much but they're nice changes they really do improve your life it's it's not a one big sweeping change it's all of these little changes together you know you're going to come to a point where you're going to start seeing these kinds of speakers in hotel rooms and instead of calling room service which is like really Antiquated you have to pick up a phone and you have to leap through a book and all this stuff you can just tell the speaker what you want with all of your modifications or substitutions and you'll get your food well I would love to see iOS 11 with support for AirPlay with Siri homekit um and I would love to see this always on connected device and I would love to see support for homekit on Siri on the Mac um there's a lot of room for improvement here and if there aren't meaningful improvements to Sira itself I don't see this speaker being that valuable uh but I have to think that that there is an overhaul for Siri coming somewhere down the pike because it's really overdue well and some of this is a chicken and egg problem right all of the the people in big data and AI say that you have to collect all of the data in order to be able to improve the AI and Apple has had their privacy SARS in place saying you know here's how we go about that right here's how we're going to do that without jeopardizing our customers data and so putting a speaker out there it seems to me like one more way to be able to figure out how to improve Siri you disagree with me no no I think that there are there are number of issues uh that that Apple faces in in improving it and I think that uh you know I think that their closed platform does them no favors in that sense like we've been talking about with security of homekit but i' still prefer Apple's approach I I want to trust a company not have my information sold not have my cameras hacked I want a platform that is going to be robust and protect against those kind of things and ensure my own privacy so if that means slower adoption of these things things that I don't really need in the first place I'm fine with that all right uh you know the camera hack is a good thing to bring up the camera hack didn't require a secure chip in each unit to protect it from the camera hack the problem with the camera hack was that there were a number of these these webcam devices that were all and routers there were other devices in the hack as well but they were all made in in China as many things are but they were all made with the same default password and they were all made in with with passwords that could not be easily updated or changed and so it became very easy for uh a u a bad actor to write a script that said go search the web and find these devices that are answering that use the same default password and and and basically own them and take over them and turn them into a botn net and so the first thing you need to do is when you're making a device is make sure that the password can be changed and the second thing that you do is that as a part of your initial setup you require the password to be changed and if you do or you could just buy a homekit camera well I suppose you you could but I'm that you know that don't the fact that there is homekit doesn't make everything else also insecure by default it means that we we can have secure things that are outside of homekit correct I just you know this whole process of going through and making sure you can change the default password on the on the you know uh and the IP address on your camera is like yeah good luck with that it's not the for the average consumer but it's it's just as you set up the thing you plug it in it finds it and you use an app on your phone to say that it's there great please enter in a password you've now assigned a new password for the thing it's not hard the you say that well here here's the issue right device manufacturers are making devices that are compatible with multiple systems here right it's not just homeit it's homekit and Amazon Alexa or it's homekit and Amazon Alexa and Google home or it's Alexa and Google home right it's it's I mean are we selling these cameras to guys who want to catch the posum that's digging up there's backyard or are we selling it to a system integrator you know like the fact that you have to go in and change the password to ensure the security of your camera is insane that's not that's not the market for this kind of stuff and if you want to see Smart Home Products catch on they have to be secure reliable and easy to use and you have to go and make sure the password can be changed on your camera stop stop you're you're I'm going to get a headache here in a minute because we we re we reviewed the ero routers right which was the simple router mesh router for home use and when you're setting up the router one of the steps is enter in a user password for this thing enter enter in the password create a password to ADM thing and it was done very simply through like four steps in an app from from plugging it in to having internet connectivity and one of the four steps I'm talking about the dlink hack though I'm talking about theing dink I'm saying that if you're going to do a camera it's no harder to have one step out of your four steps plug in your camera oh your app has found your camera please create a password it's not as hard as you're making it out to be this is for normal people issue was not a user facing thing it was not for normal people you got to look into the case you're wrong no there there L more cameras that were haed than the dink camera there were I understand but the FC the FTC sued dink for a reason because they didn't their own camer we weren't talking about the botnet that took over all the cameras and routers that were out there and I'm talking about I'm talking about Smart Home Products in general and why I trust homekit okay all right I've said all I have to say on this cuz you know you're you're uh setting up a password for a camera is not a system integrator thing it can be a user facing thing whether or not it was in the dlink case specifically is a different thing but expecting people to create a password is is not hard you know they in fact Apple does it when you set up a new iPhone they ask you to create a password don't they apple is experimenting with medium to longdistance wireless charging what do you think about this probably not happening anytime soon so what we've got here is a patent filing is is that right mhm yeah okay have you ever tried wireless charging before I don't have any devices that do it no I don't I haven't used it I mean I'm familiar with how the contact based ones work but we're talking about wireless charging here we're talking about truly Wireless which is different yeah so in the past there have been a couple of different methods for trying to wirelessly charge things and and by Wireless that's meant not having to actually physically plug something into your phone you know whether it's been the the chi charging that uses coils in a in a case or the case back of the phone to match up to coils on a charging mat kind of thing what this patent is that makes it different and unique is that it's about transferring power through the airwaves so that you don't actually have to physically place your phone on on anything specific instead what they're doing is having a transmitter and a receiver and and wirelessly using antenna to transmit the power and it's it's interesting I've seen demonstrations of this it does actually function there there is such a technology it's it's a little impractical at least in the demonstration that I saw but it's it's also pretty cool yeah this is something neat but I don't think it's coming anytime soon I think that the technolog is not ready for prime time we talked about how the uh the the rumored iPhone 8 drawings seems to have a large space for potentially a wireless charging pad in the rear case do you think we're going to get wireless charging as a part of uh the the iPhone 8 at all even if it's not this transmitter receiver thing you have to is yeah it's not going to be the transmitter receiver type of thing it's going to be just a a charging pad as an option um for those that want to use it is really what it's going to be I think that you know the expectation is iPhone 8 is going to have contact based wireless charging um and then also quick charging capabilities via USBC power over a lightning connector right you know and this we reviewed one of these uh contact based kind of charging systems in the past you know we of course you know it from your your Apple watch as well but uh we had a couple years ago some of these cases battery cases that had charging mats and it turns out that it's pretty convenient for the same reason that that I was saying that it's friction to try and pull my phone out and press down the home button to say do something it turns out that there's friction in in plugging in a lightning cable that it's it's a lot easier to just drop your phone down on the counter and have it charge yeah I I think that uh you know for certain scenarios you know bedside charging um you know I have a dock um and I just prefer to have you know that um but I could see why people would prefer uh you know this type of charging I mean it makes sense to me um I think that it's a logical feature for Apple to include um but I think that the preferred way of charging is going to remain through a lightning cable just because it's going to be more efficient well there's there's always reliability in using a cable right and it's faster yes so there's a story that we're talking about here that says that when Apple releases the iOS 11 later this year one of its features may be a new music app that better showcases uh videos yeah I mean it makes sense uh they're pushing uh original video content through the Apple music subscription um and much like iTunes before it the Apple music name is proving to be rather unfortunate because uh it's going to be more than music um and it seems like you know you pay for Apple music subscription you're going to get original video content you're going to get you know movies and documentaries and series and all that kind of stuff that apple is working on very slowly certainly not to the level of Netflix or Amazon or Hulu or anything like that but um so it would make sense for Apple to feature and give easy access to that type of content because right now there's really no way for you to get it let me ask you for your opinion has Apple music gotten easier to use when we I don't use apple music ah I'm asking the wrong person I I I prefer to own my music so I turn it off I have it disabled on my phone and I buy uh records and download the digital codes to come with it and upload them to iTunes Match which is now known as iCloud music library 25 a year right when we first started talking about Apple music on this podcast um it was at least a little cumbersome to use and then over time they refined it but uh I uh I feel like one of the things that they could do each time they make this big change to Apple music is offer another trial subscription to give people another chance to come and get reacquainted we don't suck as much now well it's it's not necessarily that we don't suck much as much now although that that's kind of true it's uh that it's not nearly complete you know Jimmy uh Jimmy iine told Bloomberg that Apple music is nowhere near complete in my head so I I understand that now that it's more complete let's see what's more complete right to give us a reason to come back I um generally like the music app on the iPhone um of course I don't have music turned on but I I wish there are certain things that I do miss about the way it was like for example I wish that playlists had their own dedicated little um menu or whatever at the bottom of the screen uh they do not um but I have a dedicated radio tab that I can that I never use that I can't get rid of so uh and a dedicated search tab that I don't really use so um I think that there are certain aspects of the interface that could be refined or improved upon or made to so you could customize it um you know I think back to and I think you can still do this on the store um where you can drag and choose which items show up in the uh tabs on the bottom of the screen um I I would like to see something like that return because I don't have a use for the radio function I don't listen to beats one uh but it would be nice to have a dedicated tab for playlist down there for when I want to access them yeah as it is now you have to tap on library and then have play if you want to delve in your music you tap library and then artist yeah it's just like it would be nice to have an artist artist Tab and a playlist tab like it used to be and I realize that's probably not for everybody um but uh that's something that I would prefer all right well there are a number of other Futures that have been rumored as well including deeper Siri integration to messages and iCloud and group video calls and FaceTime which is a a favorite of mine yeah I missed the old IAT video days where you I do to I actually after they got rid of that I switch over to Google Hangouts because it was much easier to do multiple participants there we talked about this a little bit earlier the the notion that there's the uh ability to have uh wireless charging in the uh the iPhone 8 possibly so I'm looking at the schematics for that now and uh that's a rather big charging pad and it's interesting because it's right in the center where we saw the hole last time in in the previous schematics that were rumored what's interesting about this this one like I said it contrasts with the document that came out last week is that um this one comes from a person who is generally known for the accuracy of his leaks and it uh it looks somewhat credible it's still got the the vertical camera on there what do you think is this one uh this this is one that we think is reasonably credible or is this one I think I think this one seems plausible I think that um there's some truth to a lot of these you know some of the reports that come out like Bloomberg had one a few weeks ago saying that apple is circling around a few designs um and that makes sense you know they they have to hedge their bets and if they can't get certain technology to come together um then they're going to have to explore Alternatives uh that said uh they've been pretty consistent on this vertical camera um and I think that makes sense uh because if they want to do augmented reality um capabilities to have the uh cameras be horizontal when the phone is held uh in landscape mode would make sense um and I think that uh you know that that seems logical to me um and the the rear home button Touch ID thing is is weird uh I don't think that that is accurate uh I don't think that that's going to come to be but we don't really know what's going on behind the scenes in terms of the technology and stuff and if Apple for some reason cannot integrate Touch ID into the screen they may be forced to put it on the back I would like to think that if they can't do it they would just wait another year um and say there's no point in going with an edgo edge display if we can't get touch ID on the front but I don't run Apple so nope not at this time tell me about battery yeah so um there's a few things that we know about the iPhone 8 battery life supposedly um and some of the changes that are going to be coming at least from the more reliable sources out there uh so what's really interesting about the battery in the quote unquote iPhone 8 is that it's rumored to be uh rather large battery in fact almost the size of the battery in the iPhone 7 plus and that's interesting because the iPhone 8 is going to have a a form factor uh that is expected to be closer in size to the 4.7 in iPhone 7 and its predecessors so it's kind of like apple is offering The Best of Both Worlds here with this edgo Edge display new design um and by shrinking the components inside of the phone itself uh they're able to cram in a rather massive battery into a smaller chassis um and so uh that is why one of the expectations why Apple's only going to have one flagship phone this year and not a plus version and a regular version because it's kind of The Best of Both Worlds we're talking about a smaller phone form factor uh with a larger display edge to edge uh kind of giving you both of those and uh and then when you add in other things like the fact that the parts are going to be smaller which makes them more efficient um and then you're switching to an OLED display which consumes less power and is also thinner which allows space for a larger battery uh you're really talking about uh a few things coming together that could potentially put the iPhone 8 in a position to offer pretty spectacular battery life I don't think that there's going to be any sort of like game-changing Breakthrough you know it's not like your phone's going to last a week without you charging it but I think that you'll find it more easy to get through a day on a single charge with this larger battery and more efficient Parts in the phone itself right and so what they've done here as far as I can understand it is that they've stacked batteries using the the same kind of stacking that they're doing in the MacBook the 12-in MacBook for example but they're also using an interestingly shaped battery where normally battery packs are rectangular in shape this one is an L-shaped battery pack design which allows it to use more space and taking advantage of some of the space previously occupied by the heno Jack there you are so as Apple shrinks Parts you know the the main board is expected to shrink um that leads to more efficient uh you know processors and stuff and and as we were talking um if few weeks ago about how Apple making their own chips and rolling more into the system on a chip um this all plays into that same thing where the more Apple can cram onto a smaller little main board in there the more they can put on the same chip even the more efficient it becomes the smaller the parts come the the less power it consumes and the more powerful it gets uh and that's just going to continue yeah now I know that you like using your iPhone for videography I know that you you like doing these kinds of things you you especially like doing it with the drones but um you had a chance to try out a gimbal recently yeah uh is a company that launched a Kickstarter this week and um we don't normally cover uh crowdfunding campaigns on Apple Insider because well the truth of it is they almost never ship on time and sometimes don't even do what they said they were going to do and then sometimes just run away with your money so we've had a policy for years that we we just don't cover these types of products because they just don't pan out but we do cover them if uh the company has some sort of Hardware that we can put our hands on and actually feel and see and test uh and this is one of those cases the company is called rigot I I don't know how to pronounce it it's riet um and so they sent us a a prototype of their uh camera gimbal uh that works with iPhone and other smartphones um and uh it has an app that it connects to allow some physical controls for uh for you know adjusting things while you're shooting and all that um and I came away you know pretty generally impressed I mean it's not it's not going to replace a super high-end rig but if you're looking for smoother footage and you're shooting 4k on your iPhone which is pretty crazy when you think about it um this is an affordable uh way to uh to to get some more stable footage on your phone uh right now in the kickstarter campaign if you jump in you can get uh their early bird special or whatever for 140 bucks uh when they go to market they're expecting to charge 189 at retail uh if you compare that to other gimbals on the market they're generally in the $300 $350 range if they work with your iPhone so you're saving a few bucks here it seems pretty good and how was your experience with it did you was it easy pry easy um I I don't want to uh bash on it too much because this is not a review I'm testing prototype Hardware so it's not really fair yeah it's not really fair to beat up on it but I mean I I got to say I came away pretty impressed with it um some other gimbals will only work with certain devices because they have to calibrate for the weight you know there's offsetting and all that kind of stuff this has a uh a kind of user driven way of doing it where you have to balance it yourself uh uh before it before you turn it on so you hold it up you make sure the phone is slid into the right spot based on what size it is and how much it weighs um and then when it's balanced you turn it on it starts working my test it leaned a little bit to the right I think that's something that could easily be fixed or it could even just have been a bug with the one unit that I have uh but yeah it has a joystick on it for adjusting when you're shooting um uh angling you know left and right up and down that that uh one of the nicer things about it too is you can actually physically move the gimbal to a position that you want and change the shooting mode um and it seamlessly switches between uh overhand and underhand shooting so if you want want to get like a low shot in transition um it does that very well uh it can do selfies and all sorts of other stuff too um you know some people are commas for saying you could see a lot of bouncing when you're walking around with it I mean it significantly cuts down on the bouncing that you would have if you're holding it by hand it's 1080 gimbals so I I think that uh uh for the price what you're getting um it's yeah it's it's a it's a gimbal it's not pretty it's pretty good it gets the job done it's cheaper than most of the stuff that's available on the market uh the physical controls are great uh dedicated button for you know taking a photo or starting video um you can switch between shooting modes on it um you can switch between gimbal modes with like follow or stay fixed or whatever um all without touching your phone and really for a lot of these products I've tested the the camera Focus products on an iPhone um the hardware always requires some form of software some app because it will never integrate with Apple's own camera app and it the the software is always the the deal breaker it's always the Achilles heel on these things uh and and here the software was not bad um I did have some issues when I was interacting with the touchcreen like it wasn't some of the the touch points were a little small um and I'd have to press a few times but in terms of the device connecting to the app uh it was very quick and in terms of the physical controls working while using uh the device and the app uh it it all came together very well so as far as prototype Hardware goes uh I I was pretty impressed by it okay how would you describe it to someone who's never used a gimbal before who who doesn't even know necessarily what a gimbal is for uh take your iPhone and uh try to hold it and get uh video footage um just with your hands you don't even have to be walking you could just be standing there um and if you look you will notice a lot of shaking uh even even if you're uh uh you know a former Army sniper and you have the most steady hands on the planet uh it's just going to Shake that's just the nature of it every single little movement shows up when you're shooting um and that's going to happen with pretty much any camera honestly um but especially on something as small as an iPhone where you're just kind of holding it between two fingers uh when you put a gimbal on there that kind of stuff goes away and the footage looks a lot more professional uh as you move the camera around and you get your shots um it uh is uh smooth and and it looks very cinematic um and that's accomplished through three AIS is what they call it where it offsets the movement of your hand uh balances the weight of the phone and uh accommodates accordingly based on your motion and you're also holding a handle which is a little more steady than pinching your phone between your fingers too which helps so all those things kind of come together and create a uh experience when you're shooting that just the the the footage is is much more smooth than it is if you're holding in your hand cool and and you know we we know that photography and videography is a focus of apples so having these kinds of accessories out there is going to make that uh you know make your footage really show off and apple does have stuff that that does this in the iPhone itself especially if you have the iPhone 7 plus um they have what's called Optical image stabilization in there which is uh the lens within the camera actually physically moves to offset for your hand motion and and it uses uh you know gyroscopes and images on the screen and some Advanced algorithms to to accommodate for that but when the lens is so small on a camera phone there's only so much really that it can do um so it helps but it's never going to give you the kind of quality that a gimbal like this is going to give you yeah you know I've used uh Instagram has an app called hyperlapse which what they're doing is they're I love it they're they're using the accelerometer data and matching that in into a timeline with the uh video data and then cropping and moving the footage around within their small crop to to counteract the shake and they do a really good job of it but the downside to using an app like that or or a software based approach like that is that it has post-processing time after you take the video it has to go through and and make those and you lose video uh content too you're cropping you're croing you know you can do that too even an iMovie or in Final Cut um you know Apple has stabilization software uh in there where it analyzes the image and tries to keep uh certain things in focus but even that is very imperfect because as the camera moves around things lose focus and get blurry and so while software can try to accommodate for that it can't change the actual quality of the image and so if things are blurry because of bouncing around and or getting out of focus or whatever it starts to look weird uh and it's a it's a potential solution but it's never as good as Hardware is going to be yet maybe we'll get there software eventually eats the world well it does so Apple has HED a made several hires they've made some hires from NASA the national uh Aeronautics and Space Adry it's not got anything to do in that or so well so they they've hired a fellow named Dr Jeff Norris who's an augmented in virtual reality specialist who uh founded a missions operations Innovation office at JPL mer J propulsion labs and he's working on projects to bring augmented reality to the masses at Apple mhm which is which is pretty cool um there you know there are a number of augmented reality efforts at Apple that we've we've talked about uh it's it's interesting because there's a number of people at Apple working on this and and when you s talk about someone coming from NASA to do it it it means that they're certainly well qualified they also have an interest in software quality um and you know at the JPL Ops lab Norris was working on developing human system interfaces so using augmented reality virtual reality to control robots and manipulate things with tablet interfaces um we're still not sure what he's going to be doing at Apple precisely but we know that there's this growing interest Tim Cook's made it very clear right yeah and and when Tim Cook says he's interested in something uh you know it's usually a sign of something to come you know years before the Apple watch was announced Tim Cook said that he finds the risk to be a very interesting place for devices so um I I think that that's part of their game is to tease a little bit and uh uh kind of uh send the herd in One Direction whether or not it's misdirection we will find out but I think that you know where there's smoke there's fire and it's pretty clear that they're working on some form of augmented reality as I've said before I don't think that this is something that uh is going to turn into some geeky glasses that you're going to wear I think this is more of a uh platform that Apple can create with the devices that they already sell uh and give the ability for their own apps and also for third party developers to create uh unique and interesting ways of uh using augmented reality so what we were talking before about uh this new Amazon Echo that will you know give you take your photo and make fashion recommendations or something that seems kind of silly to me but I could see an augmented reality application for fashion on an iPhone for example uh being pretty neat or interior decorating or or stuff like that where you can uh start to project things onto a person or a place um and give you a feel for what it would look like in the real world if you were to buy that outfit or or buy that couch or whatever um see how well it fits uh I think that that uh becomes a very interesting application and it's augar in reality in not maybe the the game way that people have been thinking about for years and not necessarily the headset way people have been thinking about in more of a interactive Dynamic way that you would have on a screen like your iPhone you know there there when I think about the clothing thing specifically so years ago Levis had a thing where you'd walk into a booth in the store and cameras would scan you and then tell you what the right size uh you know 501s was to wear and then they' place the order for you and your custom jeans would arrive kind of thing and so now we've got Amazon who wants to sell clothing right they sell a lot of clothing so they're placing a camera to tell you what looks good on you and recommend stuff to you eventually it's like you say you know you you could use the the cameras of devices to superimpose things upon you what's interesting to me here is is sort of this progression that we see right Apple says something's interesting and whether it gets integrated into a device we already have or it becomes a new device at some point it changes to become a hobby and at some point after it's a hobby number of years pass it becomes a business I I I don't know that it's necessarily a business for Apple in other than the sense that they could potentially roll it into their made for iPhone program with Hardware accessories for the people that really do want to have geeky headsets and stuff U but I I think that these are just things where if the tools to create augmented reality are simple and Powerful for iOS in a way that they are not on say Android uh that gives Apple a potential leg up on the competition and can tie people into their ecosystem more from a developer perspective and also from a user perspective because people want those apps so I I don't know that again I don't see Apple making Hardware or even trying to necessarily profit from this in a direct way I think that it just kind of makes it a more cohesive platform for everything that you could ever want to do on your phone going back to to this notion that they hired Dr Norris from JPL from from NASA there are other former NASA Engineers also on Apple's roles now uh there are four x Nas Engineers who've joined project Titan they're building up and uh and really kind of gung-ho on this car project now in a way that we haven't seen before because now they're at a point where uh the paperwork has been filed with the California DMV and so they have to start disclosing information so this was a interesting story to me from a journalism perspective because we got our hands on the uh PDF that was filed late last week uh with the DMV um and we posted it uh on our website uh We've redacted you know you know you go through and you do the typical thing where you uh find any information maybe they didn't redact and you may not want it out in the public just to protect people's privacy so we went through and removed addresses and locations and things like that um just out of courtesy um but I guess even that redacting was not enough for the DMV who by the way are the ones that put out this document it's a public document uh so they reached out to us and wanted us to remove the names as well uh so we said sure and we removed the pages with the the names of the engineers there um and but it turns out that some of those names that run that list are people that used to work for NASA so now that's kind of in the wild because the DMV couldn't redact the information to the extent that they wanted to why they would need to redact people's names I don't really know it's not like you know it's like it's not like it like you know it's their address or their phone number or something but anyhow uh so yeah we know that uh whatever they're doing whether it's self-driving car software or they're building in a full-fledged car or whatever it is uh they have some pretty high caliber Talent over there at Apple not surprising right and the the sorts things that have been working on are three detection of 3D objects motion planning algorithms um and also uh test yeah the kind of things that you would expect with a self-driving car um you know there's all kinds of of obstacles on the road you know even if we get to a point where all cars on the road talk to one another uh they still have to avoid objects because of things like pedestrians and road hazards and whatever else so uh that kind of technology is going to be integral to self-driving cars to uh be able to adapt think on the Fly and and make safe evasive maneuvers without uh potentially causing danger for others one of the things that's always interested me about NASA is their focus on minimizing bugs in software because you know you're you're putting people up into space and they can't just pull over on the side of the road and open the window for fresh breath of fresh air as it were so you this is it's uh you know I've been a NASA fan for a long time so looking at this kind of thing and seeing that focus and and uh you know that that concentration on bug-free software is is really interesting when it comes to soft it's exciting it's uh it's going to be real interesting to see where this goes uh and what Apple decides to do with it but I mean they're they're clearly committed this is not something they're walking away from yeah and a year ago we were talking about this and it was it was Shane who used to be on the podcast telling us that he would bet money that there was no way that Apple would actually ever prod and they may not and we still don't know we we still don't know but certainly they're putting the effort forth to do something interesting here yeah and you could see potentially an area where they just decide that building the car itself isn't worth it um and maybe that's something that they want to do further down the road you know maybe maybe the self-driving car software is going to be the Motorola rocker uh to the eventual iPhone that is the Apple car uh who know knows but um well I would say they've already opened the door for getting into the car with carplay I mean the the first wedge into the car was uh back in what 2003 or 2004 with alpine where they first got the made for iPod car stereo and they had a large amount of uptake on getting made for iPod into cars and now they've got carplay in with all of the major manufacturers except Toyota I think and uh having having crossed that bridge it's not a big step to to bring the self-driving functions after that right you use carplay as the wedge I I mean I guess infotainment system is a little different than a car operating system though well infotainment systems tend to have a lot of telematics in them anyway right for the OEM stuff you you have control your windows control your air conditioner stuff through the screen it's it's not knobs anymore right so putting putting telematics in incar and self-driving together is not a big stretch so if you're a small business owner who struggles with tax stuff don't stress because freaking out and burying your head in the sand will not solve your problems come tax time what will help is bringing fresh books into your world fresh books is the ridiculously easy to ous Cloud accounting software that's made for people who can't stand doing their taxes it will transform the way you handle your taxes because freshbooks keeps all your cash flow details in one place so you know exactly what what invoices you sent who's paid you and what your income is and their mobile app allows you to take pictures of your receipts and organizes them for later which makes claiming expenses a breeze you can even set up fresh books to import expenses directly from your bank accounts it's everything you need to stay completely Zen come tax time and not panicked for a free 30-day trial go to freshbooks.com slapple Insider and enter the code Apple Insider in the how did You Hear About Us section that's freshbooks.com slapple Insider and enter the code Apple Insider in the how did you hear about a section tell me about the Apple watch the Apple watch turned 2 years old this week uh 2 years since it launched on since it was announced uh you'll recall that it was announced about 6 months before it launched because it took some time to get the platform out um but yeah um two years on um I wrote a little piece just kind of explaining how the platform has evolved when Apple first introduced it I don't even think they knew what it was going to be or how it was going to be received uh certainly thought that it could be a new Gold Rush for developers you know on the App Store creating these apps for your wrist it turns out that uh a lot of apps that may work on a phone don't really work well on your wrist aren't really necessary uh the side button was originally dedicated to quickly drawing little scribbles to other people with apple watches uh that was unceremoniously dumped last uh fall and now with watch OS 3 it's just an app doc which again makes a lot more sense uh they got rid of the um uh glances view as well and replace that with the app dooc uh they have a control center for quick access to uh uh you know adjusting settings and and and uh things like that um and you know switching between watch faces but really uh it's focused as a device that uh uh tracks your Fitness um and it uh uh it gives you notifications and makes so you can keep your phone in your pocket and then things like like uh Apple pay only require two button Taps very quick uh Hy Siri uh is done all my devices are turning on now uh is done without um having to interact with the device without having to press any buttons so uh the point of the piece really was the Apple watch succeeds at tasks where you don't really have to interact with it very much uh the fitness stuff throughout the day sends you alerts knows when you're standing knows when you're uh more active um completing your rings uh you don't have to do anything even if you're working out you press the button and then you get back to it later it measures your heart rate it does all that stuff uh uh using Siri uh you don't have to press a button um you know all all these things that it does very well uh require very little interaction with advice and uh even the notifications you just glance down your wrist it pops up you decide whether or not you want to interact with it and then you just get back on with it you don't have to look at your phone or check anything like that so it's very convenient and and I think that's where the Apple watch succeeds and where it's really finding its place is as this device that uh makes it so you don't have to pick up your phone or do anything and and makes it easy to interact with your devices in a in a seamless and simple way you know when it when it was first introduced it felt to me very much like no one including Apple knew exactly why you should have one they knew all the things it could do and they left it up to you to figure out which one applied to you where for all of other the other Apple devices they told you exactly what it was for and why you should have one and they they've sort of Tak their time trying to find its way I think they're they're a little closer because they're talking about Sport and Health now I don't know what I would say they've taken their time I mean you've had three major different platforms for it in two years right and and and two years to to refine it to figure out what it's for and and the hardware the hardware has mostly stayed the same which is you know you know you look at the second generation version the only thing that they've changed there really is they got away from the fashion focused stuff uh and they're no longer selling $110,000 on up addition models they now have it's like $1,200 for the ceramic Edition model and I think that Apple realized that the the fashion part of it they thought was going to be a bigger deal than it was um wasn't that big of a deal but to Apple's credit they've been able to go back to the drawing board um and refine it and continue to improve it in ways and I think it it it's a very relevant platform for them yes so what do you like most about using your Apple watch your it's great for running with GPS and having the music on it and going completely wireless with my W1 headphones I absolutely love that notifications are great um you know we talked a little earlier about uh uh uh you know having an always on device to control Smart Home accessories that is my Apple watch it's on my wrist I can talk to it I can give it commands I can invoke Siri without pressing a button um and I use it all the time for Apple pay um if I get a cab all the cabs in New York City um have Apple pay support I just press the button twice don't have to pull my phone out of my pocket bam I'm paid I'm out of the cab I'm good to go um and I think that between Fitness not ifications Siri and Apple pay those are really the the the pegs upon which the platform uh is really going to stand well that brings us to the close of another perfectly good episode of Apple Insider Neil where can people find you on the internet you can find me on Twitter at this is Neil NE L and you can read my stuff on Apple inside and I'm Victor marks and you can find me at V marks on Twitter and also you can find me this Monday at Adorama live at 6 p.m. and we hope to see you there\n"