I've gone through a purge of all public Wi-Fi networks before I even set up my watch because I was aware of the bug, but basically what this means is if you connect to you know Starbucks WiFi or McDonald's or your local coffee shop or whatever um that requires a screen to bypass in order to get onto the Wi-Fi um this information is shared from your phone with your watch so your watch is going to defer to Wi-Fi networks when it can find them because the LTE battery life is so poor uh the problem is it doesn't know when there's a portal to access and because there's no browser on the watch itself there's no way for you to get past that portal the Gateway so the watch connects to a Wi-Fi and then hangs on to it even though it has no data so uh then what happens is your phone's away and you don't really understand why your watch isn't working and why you don't have a connection I don't see this being a big issue going forward because Apple has said they're going to put out a software update and I imagine it'll probably arrive pretty soon and that it will address that bug and that'll be the end of that and no one will remember this but other than that um the LTE connections have been fine for me I haven't had any issues anywhere I get reception with my phone I get reception with my watch um I think the the general rule I would say is if you have two or more bars on your phone you're going to get a connection on your watch and it's going to be fine obviously if you don't have a connection with your phone in that area it's not like the the watch can make up for poor areas of Lte reception you know if AT&T is doing a bad job that's not the watch's fault what has been the best Improvement what's been the best thing about this I mean I think um the fact that you can now access Siri on the go because of Lte I mean obviously everything that you can do before you can now do on the go with LTE um but you know simple things like checking sports scores and stuff um it's nice to be able to do that and not have your phone on you and it's nice to have Siri talk to you because like I said before you dictate a text you then lower your wrist and you know that it's sent you before a the processor was slow and B Siri didn't talk so you have to kind of hold your wrist up and stare and give it like a one Mississippi 2 Mississippi before you got a response now you can just it just gets out of the way it's like all right I've dictated it put your wrist down and a lot of times before you've even fully lowered your wrist it's already sent it and telling you that everything's cool but it just feels good to be able to uh get it out of the way I've said this so many times here on the podcast the best wearable devices are ones that just get out of the way and yes you can interact with the watch and yes the experience is is pretty good when you interact with the watch but uh the best situations are where you just kind of raise your wrist get what you want and then lower it and then get on with your day um it's a small wearable device for a reason it's not a big screen it's not meant to watch YouTube videos or anything like that.

Apple has said they're going to put out a software update and I imagine it'll probably arrive pretty soon and that it will address that bug and that'll be the end of that and no one will remember this but other than that um the LTE connections have been fine for me I haven't had any issues anywhere I get reception with my phone I get reception with my watch um the general rule I would say is if you have two or more bars on your phone you're going to get a connection on your watch and it's going to be fine obviously if you don't have a connection with your phone in that area it's not like the the watch can make up for poor areas of Lte reception you know if AT&T is doing a bad job that's not the watch's fault what has been the best Improvement what's been the best thing about this I mean I think um the fact that you can now access Siri on the go because of Lte I mean obviously everything that you can do before you can now do on the go with LTE um but you know simple things like checking sports scores and stuff um it's nice to be able to do that and not have your phone on you and it's nice to have Siri talk to you because like I said before you dictate a text you then lower your wrist and you know that it's sent you before a the processor was slow and B Siri didn't talk so you have to kind of hold your wrist up and stare and give it like a one Mississippi 2 Mississippi before you got a response now you can just it just gets out of the way it's like all right I've dictated it put your wrist down and a lot of times before you've even fully lowered your wrist it's already sent it and telling you that everything's cool but it just feels good to be able to uh get it out of the way I've said this so many times here on the podcast the best wearable devices are ones that just get out of the way and yes you can interact with the watch and yes the experience is is pretty good when you interact with the watch but uh the best situations are where you just kind of raise your wrist get what you want and then lower it and then get on with your day um it's a small wearable device for a reason it's not a big screen it's not meant to watch YouTube videos or anything like that.

You can access Siri on the go because of Lte I mean obviously everything that you can do before you can now do on the go with LTE um but you know simple things like checking sports scores and stuff um it's nice to be able to do that and not have your phone on you and it's nice to have Siri talk to you because like I said before you dictate a text you then lower your wrist and you know that it's sent you before a the processor was slow and B Siri didn't talk so you have to kind of hold your wrist up and stare and give it like a one Mississippi 2 Mississippi before you got a response now you can just it just gets out of the way it's like all right I've dictated it put your wrist down and a lot of times before you've even fully lowered your wrist it's already sent it and telling you that everything's cool but it just feels good to be able to uh get it out of the way I've said this so many times here on the podcast the best wearable devices are ones that just get out of the way and yes you can interact with the watch and yes the experience is is pretty good when you interact with the watch but uh the best situations are where you just kind of raise your wrist get what you want and then lower it and then get on with your day um it's a small wearable device for a reason it's not a big screen it's not meant to watch YouTube videos or anything like that.

You can access Siri on the go because of Lte I mean obviously everything that you can do before you can now do on the go with LTE um but you know simple things like checking sports scores and stuff um it's nice to be able to do that and not have your phone on you and it's nice to have Siri talk to you because like I said before you dictate a text you then lower your wrist and you know that it's sent you before a the processor was slow and B Siri didn't talk so you have to kind of hold your wrist up and stare and give it like a one Mississippi 2 Mississippi before you got a response now you can just it just gets out of the way it's like all right I've dictated it put your wrist down and a lot of times before you've even fully lowered your wrist it's already sent it and telling you that everything's cool but it just feels good to be able to uh get it out of the way I've said this so many times here on the podcast the best wearable devices are ones that just get out of the way and yes you can interact with the watch and yes the experience is is pretty good when you interact with the watch but uh the best situations are where you just kind of raise your wrist get what you want and then lower it and then get on with your day um it's a small wearable device for a reason it's not a big screen it's not meant to watch YouTube videos or anything like that.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to amazing episode of 140 of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor and joining me is Daniel Aron delure hi from San Francisco welcome it's a beautiful day here tell me about this iPhone 8 so I got the iPhone 8 thinking it was going to be the moderate Improvement of the existing 7 uh The Stand Out features are actually kind of the similar to iPhone 10 you have the similar cameras except at least in the back and the same chip so a lot of the kind of super new stuff that Apple developed for the 10 is also part of the eight so it gives you a a alternative way to get into Apple's technology without either being on The Cutting Edge of price or The Cutting Edge of um things having changed I think we kind of discussed that before or The Cutting Edge of weight times yeah it looks like the antenna is going to have a harder it's going to be harder to get so instead of it being just yet another iPhone what is it really to you well in a lot of ways it is like the new iPhone I mean it's it's very similar in uh how you use it I mean it's identical but the things that are different are kind of wearing off all the things that are difficult to do on an existing iPhone um specifically to the camera uh one of the hardest things to take pictures of is in the light photography and I'm noticing I mean I trying to take a lot of pictures back and forth between my 7 plus and the8 plus and the biggest thing that I notice is uh low light because in if you have bright light there's less of a difference uh in terms of just taking photos you really notice that when you're taking low light photos it does a much better job of balancing what's the the exposure across the uh scene that you're taking one of the examples in the review that I did if you just hold up a phone and try to take a picture of something a lot of times it will balance it out to the point where any bright lights are too bright and the dark areas are sort of visible but if you focus on if you tap to focus the exposure on the bright area it makes everything else too dark and just the faster brains of the eight have a much better job do a much better job of balancing that out so you can say I want to focus on this but I want to keep everything else together and that's particularly noticeable when you use the flash because the flash goes from being I almost never use a flash on a mobile camera because it's typically so um it's so bright that it blows out things and it's kind of an unflattering lightness yeah it's it's uncontrollable yeah because the front is so bright it also makes everything else in the background just Fade to Black and the new Flash on the eight does a sort of a test strobe and then it does an actual strobe where it does a combination of what what they're calling slow sync where they use less flat but they also slow down the exposure or um the shutter as I recall and that gives you a couple things one it does much more natural flattering lighting so you don't have you don't have the kind of washed out kind of death look of Flash and it also does a much better job of not having huge Lin flares if you have glasses or if you have any piece of glass anywhere a lot of times shooting a flash will just light that up so that makes a big difference in being able to use Flash and then also it it keeps the background from being completely just falling into darkness because the front is so so bright and so you can do things like taking a photo in the dark uh I took a couple friends up to uh Twin Peaks which is a lookout over San Francisco and you have this you know field of Lights in the background but it's very difficult to take a picture of people standing in front of the lights and get both of those together and it worked great with the with the new FL because it illuminates them in the foreground and the background is still nice and in fact you can even do tricks like moving the camera slightly while you're taking it and it will keep you in Focus because you have been brightly illuminated where the background will be sort of blurred so that's kind of a cool effect to do so you can be sort of artistic now yeah it's like a new trick to try and then of course in addition to the actual LED lighting the 8 plus also features portrait lighting which I have some questions for Apple about how exactly it works because when you take a a portrait on an 8+ and you an isync or iCloud copies it to your other phones it remains editable you get that same interface on on the seven cuz if you take pictures with the seven you only get the portrait mode which means you can turn off the okay or not the the Blurred background or the depth effect of the background right and those two things are different they're actually taking the seven I believe takes a lower resolution um depth map so it takes a photo and it also takes in conjunction with that it uses the two lenses to calculate a depth map of who's in the you know what is the foreground and what is in the background and it's not just a binary front back it's also kind of a gradient of this is closer and this is further away and on the eight I believe it's just doing that in high resolution and so you can actually have you're not just saying foreground background you're saying here's the features of your face and I believe it's also using facial recognition to to do you know this is the sides of your jaw and this is your where your eyes are and so it Maps out a a lighting scenario that's kind of based on what you would look like if you had a bounce card or if you had lighting from a different angle that give you a dramatic if you had threo lighting for example or yeah and so those effects um they're so calling it in beta sometimes it doesn't work quite as you expect sometimes there's an air that was true for the I mean that was true for the portrait mode for iPhone 7 and seven plus as well was that exactly it's true for anything on a digital camera can like mess well but they they launched it in beta for three months or something before they decided to release it as this is the public final version of it right and they keep improving upon that so it's something that once you have the data you can keep refining it and making it better because it's there's a lot of algorithms in play of how it decides what's how to crop the photo but or how to how to you interpret the depth map I guess is what it is doing so you're saying that make sure I understood you correctly if you take a photograph on the iPhone 8 plus and then that photograph is synchronized with your iCloud photo library and you check and edit that photo on your iPhone 7 or 7 plus and and please please answer make sure I understand which one of those I think it requires a plus it requires the seven I'm not sure about well I I'm not sure about that because I haven't actually tried it back to an earlier non plusus phone but that that was kind of shocking that I got that the new UI on the older phone and so that suggests that um rather than being a live effect that's calculated on the 811 it's when you take the photo it creates those variations or it somehow it it records all the data at the time that it's captured and it's all editable after the fact and that's that's what IED from the keynote right it remains editable yes it remains editable but what I'm saying is I would have I would I would have expected it to remain editable on the 11 because it's doing this big effect that requires horsepower on the the new chip but when you take a photo and you sync it to an older phone it Still Remains editable on that older phone so I new interace what yeah what I believe what it's doing is it's when you take a photo it's creating these VAR variations or it's calculating you know the effect that you would apply and then that's how you can edit it after the fact it's not reapplying and changing those it's just selecting between which one you want to be the so it's kind of like a live photo where you're picking out the key frame interesting that you think it's just toggling between things that it's already done as opposed to rerunning the calculations on the older processor I'd be interested if you can find out more information about that because definitely if if if you were able to do the calculations on the at10 7 plus they should have made it available for that and you know it should either work or it shouldn't you know should work with photos you take so the the two things I can see is one if you take a photo with the 7 plus have to that effect right but if the camera Hardware isn't there to give it enough information you don't get to see that exposed but if the camera information was recorded in a photograph that was synced over the information is there and that's why the interface shows up I mean that makes sense to me I I see how it's awkward to to try and explain you'd rather it just be it works or it doesn't but no I'm just I'm surprised because I would when I was looking at the the effect the portrait lighting I was imagining that it's doing it in real time so that when you choose it your your chip is actually like refiguring out the best way to light this whereas what I think what happens is when you first take the photo it creates those effects or creates those variations and then they're frozen into the photo so even if you put that photo somewhere else you can still edit it so live photo or something yeah I would have thought they were frozen in I would have thought that it's recalculating it and that it's the the camera sensors that can't record the correct information for it to have that ability on the 7 plus I think the sensors are kind of the same I think the biggest difference is the com ational ability of the process of the chip the ISP on the you know A1 is what's doing those kind of changes that's why you know in a parallel example if you can take a low light photo on the eight that's going to continue to look better than a lowlight photo that you took on the seven even if it sinks over to a seven it doesn't get worse because it's not recalculating anything it's just looking at something you've already but the other the other thing that that would matter about is in the future if Apple improves that portrait lighting feature it wouldn't necessarily Pro photos that have already been taken so they're not going to be recalculated um so that's something I'd like to clarify because that's kind of an interesting idea of well whether it's just taking a solid where whether it's taking a frozen you know artwork this is done it's finished you can pick between the alternative versions of it but it's it's been frozen this is the George Lucas debate all over again well it's just trying things be remastered basically yeah but uh you raised a good point about the image signal the the image processor and its role in this right you know clearly if if it's the image if the sensors are the same and it's the image signal processor in the middle that's the uh the the different part of the chain then that becomes important to know it could be doing it live on that image signal processor and and you're right it just doesn't have that on the other phone it's interesting definitely definitely look into that if you can what else did you find from using the iPhone 8 what else was a surprise for you uh let's see what's surprising I think well wireless charging is kind of a handy idea but the power delivery USB power delivery and being able to charge rapidly is so much nicer I mean it's like to me it's like such a bigger deal to be able to intently purposely get your phone up to to charge much faster and it's kind of interesting to do comparisons of here's a you know previous iPhone connected to the fastest way know how to get power into it on a you know iPad charger or something and then here's plugged into USBC and it's you can like watch it go up oh yeah no I know that experience does get warm as you charge it but I when I traveled internationally I uh use an Android phone sometimes and and I was last traveling with a Huawei made Nexus 6p which fast charges using a USBC connector and it's like you say it's it's really revelatory just how quickly you can charge a phone and when you have zero battery and can have it full in a very short period of time it makes a big difference doesn't it yeah yeah it's very frustrating to especially when you're traveling you go out and but I mean I typically carry around a battery with me that can charge it up a full charge or two yeah but what if you didn't have to do that any longer yeah I wonder if there's battery packs at support power delivery I haven't I haven't seen any that's a good question I haven't seen any because the other thing that I that I noted um is if you have the the the USBC power adapters that were created for the MacBooks uh it fits at least 29 watts and there's also some third party ones that work Ed the same power delivery format so power delivery has a couple different things and so the MacBooks are also using the same technology to power it's basically just using a higher voltage and it's delivering power so it requires a couple things one of which is a bigger wire so the the lightning skinny light lightning cables that have shipped with iPhones forever were never designed to be transmitting like 14 watts of power or 14 volts of power um so you do need to have a new cable which is not cheap and uh that's probably something that I wouldn't want to experiment with too much seeing how what kind of what kind of cables you could can you remind me does does the iPhone 8 use Quick Charge 3 do you remember power delivery is a specification that's that's part of USB and it is parallel with like USB 3 and USBC so it's not just because something is one of those doesn't mean it's the other one right but it's a part of that USB 3.1 spec okay right so having a usb3 cable doesn't necessarily mean that it's a force Power delivery and so on yeah it looks as if there are battery power banks that support power delivery yeah I would imagine so the MacBooks if you plug your phone into the MacBook I no it does not charge at a faster rate even if you use the USBC to lightning cable yeah and also MacBooks if you plug a Macbook into a MacBook Pro it it kind of trickle charges if you plug a big MacBook Pro into a Macbook you get like like two Watts yeah but um which is not enough to do anything it it says it's not charging like like when you plug an iPad into a 5V charger right it will light up that it's charging but in fact will not charge it might even drain well it says yeah says that it's plugged in but it's like not charging because it's not getting enough to charge fast if you turn the display off you'll get a little bit of charge but I mean it will it'll slowly go so the thing about these battery Banks is that many of them that have power delivery have power delivery on the port that charges the battery they don't necessarily have power power delivery on the output side of that so you could recharge your battery quickly but you may not necessarily charge your device quickly right which is the same deal is the MacBooks so they they take power delivery but they can't um pass it on so you can't daisy chain them together or power them out right yeah that's what it looks like very cool so it's you know I I found that wireless charging was very convenient on other devices but like you say it's it's not something that is nearly as much fun as as recharging quite fast you know you you plug it in and you're done versus putting it down and hoping that it's uh charged enough when you pick it up yeah the handy thing about Wireless power or Wireless induction charging is that it it's a standard so that if everyone's using the same one uh in an airport or something you don't have to have three or four different jacks or alternatively instead instead of having a USB port you just have the ability to lay your phone down on a pad and I I have I've seen a couple of these things around it it isn't quite as ubiquitous enough to be useful and us is quite useful for a lot of things so there's a lot of things you could do with USB in terms of powering different kinds of devices that you have different cables for that might not be able to power over a wireless Pad but yeah so it has some potential for convenience I mean one of the things that I found in airports is that there are sometimes USB ports that are installed in say the uh the armrests of the seats in the lounge or the armrest in the seats of the uh the gate area that don't necessarily charge all devices for example I can I can plug an iPhone into the USB port on that that charger and it won't do a thing I have to get out the USB brick and do it through the wall through regular power connection do you think that now that that Chi is a standard that's adopted by of course other phones and now the iPhone that will see it proliferate much more that uh that they'll become a botus and will start to matter I think there's sort of a a style element to it um and the other thing that's going to keep changing is how fast wireless charging charges and so the standard also like Apple's working on this idea of having multiple devices on the same pad it's kind of more for for a consumer thing but um because a pad can only charge it right now the iPhone's only support five eventually it'll support seven which is kind of it's not terribly fast it's similar to the little tiny block that they ship with and it would still be slower than the larger block that you know most people are Weare than an iPad USB block will charge faster and there's a lot of um adapters for your car or even some battery packs that will say you know this port is regular USB and this port is lightning USB it's 2.1 amps right 2.1 or 2.4 12 wats and it's noticeably faster so the same thing is going to probably happen to wireless charging to where you go to an airport and it's like wow we installed these charging pads and oh they're old old style ones that only charge at 7 watts in a couple years so I mean right now USB is you know usba is is really common and useful but we're also seeing this sort of tipping the iceberg towards USBC eventually we're going to have perhaps ports changing because the other thing is with USB a the old style USB it's also Limited in how much power it can deliver because it was only ever designed USB 2 is only designed to deliver two Watts really right but there are usba connectors for USB 3 and 3.1 it's just that and they have a lot more conductors inside of them one of the difficulties is you can't really tell what you've got when you when you're looking at those right yeah but I mean most you the big indicator for usb3 is that the are not anything yeah they're they're USB 2 at the most there's least common denominator so that's kind of the same issue for wireless charging is it's going to be the lowest common denominator kind of thing the uh most universal port at least in the United States is the AC power because you can always plug whatever you got into that but then you have to have more cables and whatever you end up with the sponsored by Samsung charging posts and airports and so on so what what has been the thing you've enjoyed the most you know you said the the charging but what else what else have you really found that has made this iPhone better than all the other iPhones that came before it for you uh well definitely the camera I mean that's what I've been spending most of my time looking at uh the just being able to take better pictures and having some of the details handled for you uh so you can kind of focus on what you're trying to take a picture of instead of trying to figure out why it's blowing out this area of the photo or why you're getting so much grain and low light or why you try to take a picture with the Flash and it kind of destroys the photo so I use my phone as a camera so much that that's a really compelling reason to upgrade there's a couple other features that in addition to the W wireless charging the true- tone display is nice it took me a while to kind of figure out what I thought of it but I'm noticing more and more it just feels kind of more natural and particularly in comparison with my previous phone which I never saw anything wrong with when I was using it but when I kind of go back and forth between them I notice that when I'm in sort of softer warmer light it it's commonly uh looks really harshly blue and so what trueone does is it keeps the uh keeps the screen looking the way a piece of paper would look in the lighting that you're in so it's doing constant color management to to look natural to kind of reflect your environment instead of just being like this cold unchanging display technology so that's kind of growing on me the uh screen looks great um I don't otherwise I don't see a big difference between I mean I don't I don't see a difference between that and the previous seven which was quite a good quality screen um the OLED screen that comes on the 10 I haven't examined it with a microscope uh but it has that like Lush black look to it it that looks glossy because the blacks are so black because it's a totally different technology instead of instead of creating a picture and Shining Light through it like an LCD does it's actually all those pixels are Illuminating so it's if if pixels are not Illuminating because they're black they're super black whereas on LCD it's it's saying this is black and then it's shining a light through it and hopefully there's not a whole lot of light coming through but there's it's still kind of like a gray black compared to OLED yeah that's one of the Hallmarks of OLED so you have that incred contrast feel to the phone I mean it looks kind of warmer and but I yeah obviously I notice it most when I'm comparing between the two phones but should anyone be concerned about that you know if they were trying to do um like things that are color dependent or color uh color critical I don't think so it's it's kind of in the same vein as um night what's it called night mode night shift where night shift is quite obviously taking all the blue out or taking a lot of the blue out so that when you first do it you notice it's like wow shockingly different but then after a minute your eyes kind of adjust to it and you don't see that uh as much and it's kind of a similar idea that once you turn on trueone it becomes sort of natural if there's some reason you don't want it on you can turn it off really easily so I wouldn't say that that would could possibly be a negative but I've never felt like I needed to turn it off okay you know I I ask because all the time I see people who are worried about the the correctness of their color you know they're they're trying to show something that they've painstakingly picked out the right panone color or they've they've photographed in such a way that they're sure that it the right representation of the colors has to come through and now they're they're concerned because they can't be positive that the iPhone will show it the same way twice depending on who's viewing it where right well the with trueone or or with yeah with trueone it doesn't change the way your camera takes photos so I mean if you were really concerned concerned about a very specific type of color you wouldn't I guess I don't see the application you're saying but it's like if I I was saying Hey I want you to see this color it's very specific way um it's it's changing it based on ambient lighting so that changes no matter what whether you change whether your screen is adjusting or not you can have a very you can give somebody a printed out Pantone color Tab and if they're looking at it in different ambient lighting colors it's going to look different it's the same same so the point of this is to to guarantee that it looks the same way depending on the light you're in yeah I mean if you had some Mission critical this has to be this color orange you would have to say you'd have to look at it in a specific light to look see the same way I do and you might both have to take an eye test to make sure that you're both perceiving it exactly the same but okay you know it's it's not that something I'm harping on so much but it's something that's come up in the past when trone was first announced and it's something I see from uh some some photographers and some designers who want to make sure that when they show something to a client the client is going to see it the same way they intended yeah and if you're if you're doing something that is like I said Mission critical like that you would say hey don't look at this with Chon turned on but um yeah I think that's probably one of the least least real problems that you could have with an iPhone 8 I don't think that's something that sounds like one of those things where when anytime anyone sees anything that Apple says they immediately start creating reasons why that could be the end of the world yes that's pretty much what it was was the sky is falling because there's this new thing that affects our colors and not even affects them negatively necessarily but oh my gosh they're monkeying with colors yeah I mean Apple does have a pretty good track record of the company certainly makes mistakes but when they're doing something like that there's usually a lot of thought that goes into making sure that it's working correctly so I mean there's a little bit of benefit of the doubt just to be like probably if they made this one the keynot features it's not halfhazard Le just like thrown out there in contrast to you know like other Hardware makers that just say like hey hey we have this TV with a super brilliant mode that just blows the color out so it looks really good in the showroom and people will buy it it's like what if it's not accurate and that's exactly what that feature was for exactly and also that feature exists so that when it gets home people say wait this looks terrible the shop that sold it can sell calibration Services yeah you need to professionally calibrated you have to have someone come out and install it for you so that'll get you let me let me ask the the iPhone 8 is the first phone that has Apple's own homegrown GPU inside it's it's not one of the power VR chipsets that came from imagination in the past have you noticed anything different about this phone using that new chipset uh apart from battery life it seems like to me they kind of said the battery life was going to be the same and it seems like it's better battery life I mean I'm also comparing a brand new phone with a year old phone so that might have some minor impact on it um but I I backed up and restored the same stuff that's on my phone so it's pretty equal situation um apart from the age of the battery um I don't think in the first year this should be like a remarkable notice in battery life uh going down but that certainly plays into the uh ability for the battery to last longer because it's faster but it's more efficient so they're saying it's 30% faster but it's you know doing the same tasks it's can last for is half as much power which is a pretty significant thing that even if you're whether you're doing heavy Graphics work like if you're you know in the middle of a video game or if you're just doing just the kind of basic things that a processor does and handling your animations and whatever um it seems like battery life is a biggest thing I noticed uh there are iPhone the 6 Plus was the first iPhone I've ever noticed it just felt kind of like a little bit slow and I think a big part of that was the fact that it had you know it went from you know the 4in iPhone or the 5in iPhones the iPhone 5 Series had what almost a million pixels or something it was like 750,000 something like that and the standard iPhone 6 had if I'm saying this right I think it's like around 1 million and then the plus is almost 2 million so it's a big jump in how many pixels you're having to push and it's the first time it ever felt like there was sort of a a little bit of a Android like pause or you know like Jitter in animations and things it felt a little bit slow sometimes you turn the phone and it's kind of like there's a little slight hesitation uh that you really notice because you're used to an iPhone being so buttery smooth all the time and every year that gets a little bit better and it feels like it's also better on the eight and there's also a lot more uh animations in iOS 11 that I notice so it feels like it's doing more work but it's doing a better job of it um there's still I mean it can still always get get faster and more dialed in but um that's another kind of interesting aspect of when we talking about the tin coming up is it has a even higher resolution but it's also has the same sort of aspect ratio it's kind of like a tall version of the seven it's a taller version of the smaller phone even though it has a higher resolution than the plus it's not like the plus format where you have sort of a wide right the wideness to it the plus is a little bit wider and and you notice since when you switch it to landscape mode where you don't necessarily get all of the same toolbars and stuff that you'd have room for on the plus- siiz device right and the the plus actually has a they call it a standard mode and a zoomed mode and the zoomed mode is basically looking like a a standard phone a standard iPhone scaled up screen right I wish they had another mode that was kind of the other direction where everything was like a little bit smaller and Tighter you know scale down so you could even see even more but sure okay so let's let's uh close out the iPhone section for a second and go ahead and give us one final thought on that iPhone and where you think the iPhone 8 fits in one of the things and I'm going to do an ad read okay one of the things that you talked about was the rumor of having a a new tin in the future that would be like a 10 plus right so there's there's a rumor that we have here that suggests that next year 2018 that Apple will launch a jumbo sized 6.4in iPhone 10 and uh this story comes from the investor who reported on Monday that that citing local Parts makers that instead of making a 5.28 in OLED phone that instead 2008 looks like a 5.85 in phone and a 6.46 in model and you know there there they also suggest that well there could be a possible insertion of a greater than 6in LCD model on the line somewhere um that Apple has reportedly signed several contracts with Samsung for multiple OLED size screens yeah I we know we know that Apple likes to change the resolution of their phones just like frantically every year that's not true but over the the sarcasm that that when you read your your sarcasm with that heavy of a veil over it it's hard to hear it at first that was not thinly veiled at all um in in the whole history of iPhone Apple has changed the resolution how many times I mean they went to um went to R there was the change between four and five well they changed right into the Flor so that was that was putting twice as many pixels on the screen to do nothing more but just make everything sharper and then the five same ratio as previous and then the five increased the changed the ratio so increased the amount of things you can see on the screen without changing the DPI then the six changed it again and the six plus so that both changed those a little bit so it was like a different ratio yeah and it was also a larger resolution in terms of size too right and and then again with the uh the 10 so I I can count that on one hand yeah and and there's a good reason for that it's not just that Apple's too slow in doing these things because Samsung is like changed the resolution on their phones like every year and they have like multiple twice multiple phones that they're changing yeah within those years and a big part of that is because Samsung makes screens and that's how they can you know the best way they can stand out from a bunch of Android phones that work the like and do are pretty much exactly the same is to frantically say you know hey we have an even bigger double plus you know Super AMOLED Plus+ display this year where you know they can't really say anything else they can't deploy a lot of Technologies they've tried to do technology before and you know all the wave stuff and the focus attention like looking at your gaze and all that kind of stuff just sort of didn't really get any any traction so they've kind of focused on Hardware features and saying hey this is a this letter acronym and that's kind of what Samsung can do CU that's all they can do um Apple doesn't really have that what Apple has the strongest thing Apple has is the platform and so Apple has to protect that in terms of they can't just like randomly make changes to the platform for a bunch of different models that would fractionalize and just dramatically increase the amount of work that developers have to do to make an app look good on each of those devices yeah I was going to say that that the you know when they make a change the change affects several different people affects users who have to get accustom to the new change and it affects developers who have to do a large amount of work to accommodate it yeah depending on how much change there is and with the 10 you know they're making change to the resolution and the the ratio of the screen is different and there's a number of things that are going to change all at once and it's uh something that developers have to account for but that's going to be a popular phone you know it's not like a a micro model that they're sort of putting out like the SE was like a small phone but it was exactly the same as all the other phones that were like it before it's just faster so it doesn't radically change what developers have to do to make phone I mean it doesn't really change anything for developers to be able to support it in the way that you know apps running on are going to look good uh whereas the 10 there's going to be a lot of people that are expecting things to change and to look good on the on the new phone and there's some people talking about you know I want my apps to look this way I want to be able to see the ears or not the Notch and those are things that are going to have an impact on what developers do or what they to do to make it look good on the the new phone that people are buying so people will want to use their apps um I I don't there was a clear reason why Apple came out with this strategy of having the six and the six plus because they're covering a couple different bases going forward they now have the most phones they've ever sold the most generations of phones that are basically you have the SE from the hold over of five era you have the sixes which are A variation of price basically based on features and then the new 10 which is sort of the future so going into the future does Apple need to have a 10 and a 10 plus well it kind of depends on how well uh whether people are really wanting to have a larger screen or just a bigger screen because this is a screen of the Plus in terms of size a larger screen but it's in a smaller I think there are two I mean I think there are two ways that people use a plus-size device and it's a broad generalization but the the first way is the way that you said right you you would prefer that there was a a uh a zoom out mode that allowed you to pack more on the screen right right there so there are people that use it in regular mode like you do that try and fit as much as they possibly can on the screen to take advantage of the larger screen but at the same time there are people uh and and sometimes the elderly fit into this category who like to zoom in or or people who have eyesight difficulties who like to use the zoomed part so they have the larger screen with everything represented larger on the screen so that they can actually see what they're looking at and use the device with and have it be accessible to them so there's definitely a utility in having a larger sized device the the question is what do you do with that screen size right and how do you accommodate those two very different types of users right there is there is a reason why you want to have larger screen sizes but those accessibility features can work on any size phone so you can even have a very small phone that has larger text on it um the six and 6 Plus both or you know those two generations those two models both support the idea of having zoomed content and you can use accessibility to zoom it up even larger so but there are tons of consumers who buy the larger one on the basis of their eyesight whether it's sensible or necessary or not that's that's the choice they're making more bigger text on a bigger phone with the 10 you can put uh similarly large text and almost as much on a phone that's the size of a a seven is the idea now whether this whether there's demand for so I think most of the demand goes towards like what you're saying for people who want to have bigger text be more readable um and kind of I'm kind of like the other side of that Spectrum right now until my eyes totally go downhill is wanting to have more on the screen at once you can read more text kind of things um whether or not people want to have a larger screen because a large you know a much larger screen is is based on having a larger device at some point you know the the size of the screen is sort of the deciding how big your device is going to be it's kind of like um spinning Optical media if you have if your music is on a CD your player can only get to be so small before the CD is like sck out the side but whether or not there's a demand for people who want larger and larger physically larger phones I think that the tin is going to I think it really hits a sweet spot in delivering a lot of the functionality of the Plus for whatever reason people want it because a big part of is not just you know bigger text it's also having your photos bigger if you look at a photo taken on a seven and you compare it to a 7 plus it just looks better the 7 plus you can see more of it and you know you're seeing across you know higher resolution so on a on a tin it's going to be slightly less wide but you're still getting resolution and and a it's physically the screen size is almost as big as the plus it's just the cas is the overall case is smaller so I'm kind of wondering if that's going to be a good compromise because before you had to kind of have two different screen sizes to prevent the phone from just getting too big because originally when the six came out the six and six plus there was only something like 10% that went for the plus and every year that's gotten bigger and this year I'm hearing people talking about that the looks like the plus is selling about half of the eight now in part I think that's because a lot of people who want to smaller phone are waiting for a 10 but just the the demand for having a a bigger screen phone is going up so it's interesting to be it will be interesting to see how much of that demand goes towards the 10 as a form factor and right now it's going to be a little bit held back because of the it's you know significantly more expensive I see all these reviews and they're saying oh the t is just a little bit more it's like $300 more that's kind of that's you know a significant amount for a lot of people shopping for phones but I think also it's kind of like the car market where if you remember in the 70s and 80s that you know the price of cars suddenly jumped upward because of all these new technologies that you needed to have on a car to be safe enough and um it created sticker shock but eventually people just got to the point where it's like oh this is how much car costs we're going to pay for it and I'm not going to pay for a cheaper car even though there are cheaper cars that I could find around the world because I know that they're not really safe because I've seen what you know a similar looking car in Mexico once it crashes it's like people inside are dead right well and cars that are sold in country have to comply with that country's safety rules so it's not like you should feel bad necessarily about buying a car in in your own country but um you're right the prices have gone up extremely you know when when you and I were kids it wasn't not even the 70s in the ' 80s and '90s um you you could buy a Hyundai Exel for you know what $6,000 that wasn't a nice car but it was not a nice car but it was basic Transportation right it was it was in fact probably the worst car that Hyundai ever made um had a reputation for terrible engine problems but you know you could get affordable transportation and drive it until it broke which was relatively quickly after you drove it off the L but now in order to to buy Transportation you end up spending what $25,000 the median prices somewhere in the 30s and for a lot of people that is an a large part of their income a large percentage of you know their income is going towards paying for a vehicle and people do it because it's you know kind of important to have a car in most places but well because your your job depends upon it right there are some places where you simply don't have access to public transport and the same kind of thing with having a phone is there's so many things that we need to do that are kind of dependent on having a phone just access to information and being able to you know get information about your flight or contact somebody immediately or you know all these things there's so much value in not just for work but it's also kind of like a car where it's a combination of need to have and also love to have and enjoy and it does all the things it allows you to do all the things that make you happy kind of thing and so I think that there's Less Price sensitivity than a lot of people think there's been a lot of there's been kind of a a narrative for for years and years talking about how apple is just in terrible trouble because the price of phones are just going to plummet to zero basically and we've seen that happening in Android land but it's not happening in iPhones iPhones just keep getting more expensive and they're getting more expensive because Apple's driving the technology to to retain that value and that's something everybody else wants to do I mean Google tried to do it Samsung is trying to do it they just haven't been able to do it and you have companies like essential you know here's Andy Rubin saying hey we're going to take this Android technology and make a good phone out of it and you know they make this fancy phone with a lot of leading technology but they can't sell 5,000 of them so it's not just getting expensive it's also being able to deliver an expensive product that people find Value in and be able to support it and have something that people find Reliable and think is going to you know to see it as something that's going to safeguard their data and and room is BET is that there was a market for a super expensive android-based phone from the person who's is the namesake for Android and that also had connectors on the back for accessory devices to attach to it and and the question is he he thought for sure that there was that market but it it's one of those things where you ask yourself okay so how do you identify who those people are and how do you find those people how do you reach those people and I I think they spent a lot of time identifying and what they wanted to have out of a phone without really identifying how they were going to reach the people that were going to buy the thing which is kind of a Google thing I mean that's kind of Google what Google has been doing over and over again is coming up with a whole lot of ideas about hey we could do this we could do this and we do this and they don't think about how are we actually going to sell this how are we going to get people to know about it before Andy Rubin did Android and and came to Google to do Android um he was one of the people behind the sidekick do you remember the sidekick device danger yeah well the danger hiptop that eventually got sold as the T-Mobile Sidekick in the US and that device was a wild success but it was a wild success because they had carriers pushing it and because they had people who spread the word about how great it was to be able to use it for email and chat it wasn't a premium phone it was a plastic phone for kids I mean it was a a very affordable phone that was being sold by like Sprint it was a variable affordable phone it was like almost free well like like I said T-Mobile and T-Mobile at the time was in fourth place right it was a very accessible device you didn't have to work to get one and it wasn't made out of Premium materials yeah it was like a a very utilitarian like was a texting phone at the height of you know texting was like where the value was wasn't like people needed a browser or you know a computer phone so it was it totally hit that kind of deliver it was like the Blackberry for younger people a great communicator it really was it really was but it it changed things and it was every phone after that that um and that was his big success so the question your team came from Apple you know Andy Rubin himself was working at Apple and so it was kind of there was this sort of original culture of how do we build things that can be sold a hardware company to you know functionally doing it at danger and then Google is sort of a hey we have technology we can just go wild in every direction we want to all at the same time we can try 20 different things at once and have it all in beta and it will just be like this experimental open source program just for everything and we don't have to worry about any of it making money because we're making money on advertising on a totally different and our customers are not even people who are starting to sell this technology to our customers are you know companies that we telling them to spend this money on advertising and that has not changed you know Google can come out with all the hardware that they want and they still can't sell it because they don't they're not a hardware company and they can buy Hardware companies and it doesn't make them into a hardware company what has changed is since they reorganized under alphabet they have been making all of their different divisions and units stand up and have to account for themselves and if they can't make money then they get put on a short leash yeah they've been cracking down a lot of that and that's why they've canceled a lot of their stuff but I don't I don't see that there's any radical difference in in terms of what they're trying to do they're still making almost all their money for advertising and you know they put out some products they you know worked with HC to build products but um they're not selling them in quantities that really matter you The Verge talks about all these products like they're you know on the same level as Apple's products but and you know on a technical level yeah you can review them in the same kind of seriousness but when people go to buy a laptop they don't say hm do I want a Macbook or do I want a Chromebook nobody's making that decision right the customer that's that would ask that question is never going to ask that question because cuz they're there are two different budgets and two different needs right and the people the people that don't have money to buy computers like schools are like yeah let's load up on Chromebooks because they're really easy to manage and people who say I want you know something that works and that you know it's flexible and does a lot of things that I already do and works with the software I want they're not going to say hm should I buy a Chromebook because maybe I can just do everything in in Chrome with some extensions yeah so it's it's a totally it's it's not an open market of you know who's going to buy this stuff and it's a very similar thing with phones that you know there's people who are just like I hate apple and I'm never going to buy anything that looks like an iPhone unless it comes from Google then I'll buy it um but that segment of the population is quite small and it's not really that important because those people also don't pay as much for apps and they don't pay for a lot of things so they're not creating that kind of market for people who buy apps or subscribe to content and so it's it's just not as um important of a product category support for today's show comes from audible audible content includes an unmatched selection of audiobooks original audio shows news comedy and more from leading Publishers broadcasters entertainers and business information providers unlike a streaming or rental service with audible you own your books so you can access them anytime time anywhere from almost any device including your iPhone iPad Android or even an Amazon and Fire tablet if you have one of those audible makes getting more books in your life easy and they have an unbeatable selection of audiobooks and incredible performances you can transform your commute and ride with Audible and they have such a huge catalog of books for example I I like reading biographies and there's one in audible by Chris Anne Brennan who was of course um had a connection with Steve Jobs let's say without giving too much away and and she wrote a book called The Bite in the Apple A Memoir of my life with Steve Jobs and that is in audible so you can go ahead and click through and and listen to this book and even better than that if you sign up for audible with uh audible.com appleinsider you get a free audiobook with a 30-day trial that's audible.com appleinsider for a free audiobook with your 30-day trial Dan tell me about the iPhone 10 and what the supply bottleneck is well we had a lot of people reporting that obviously the true the sensor bar is the most they described it Apple described it as being the most complicated stuff they've ever done and that structure sensor is difficult to build um so that keeps getting repeated I mean it's kind of obvious that that would be the the bottleneck but they keep officially repeating it as if it's as if this guy fall well I mean if it's if it's news like this is probably what's going to be hardest to make uh so it looks like there will be constrained Supply be hard to get um I think Apple obviously Apple does best when it has a product that everybody wants and it say here's here's a huge supply and everybody can buy one um but when you are pushing technology when you're innovating it's hard to do that and we've seen the last several products that Apple's had um airpods can't quite make enough to fill the demand it it would be better if Apple could it's clearly not doing it to just you know create the impression of lines it's um they talk about when you're when you're skiing if you're not falling down it means you're not trying hard enough and there's a couple expressions like that in sport so you know if you're not if you're not failing a little bit you're not really trying and the way that Apple micro fails you might say is to do things that are kind of on the edge of its ability it's not just doing things that are really simple and easy and and especially when you compare other companies you see that you know the PC industry has just been like dumping out just here's the same thing with a little bit more megahertz and a little bit more RAM and um for years I mean that's kind of an HP sort of thing that's how you a big company runs and the effect of that kind of thing that you know HP isn't doing as well as Apple has done because Apple's really pushing the boundaries in terms of like what it can deliver and with 10 it's like we're pushing it even faster because Apple could have just released the eight and said here's a new iPhone and everybody could have complained about how boring it was while they still bought it anyway um but with in shipping the 10 which is a harder thing to do so they made you know significant improvements to the eight but with the 10 they're kind of radically changing a lot of things that they didn't have to change but they're changing the those things to kind of deliver something that is um ambitious and what comes with that is being it's it's going to be more difficult to build and every year they've done stuff like that you know with the seven it was they didn't have to make it waterproof they could have gone another year without it being fully waterproof but by pushing to constantly try to do the best they can and that's what other companies are doing as well I mean Samsung is constantly also pushing but um rarely do we see the news that you know Samsung can't build enough of this to meet demand so let me ask you another problem that we've seen is the reports of crackling from the iPhone 8 speaker that there's an audio glitch during calls I haven't experienced that on my phone um but I did see the article you wrote about it they're addressing so there there are a number of people reporting it to Apple support pages and it's it seems to be a small number of people um at least that's what Apple statement says Apple statement says we're aware of the issue which is affecting customers in a small number of cases our teams at work on a fix which will be included in an upcoming software release which which sends to suggest that it's a software issue not Hardware um yeah I I have noticed a problem that I'm not sure where it's happening yet I'm going to have to do some more research but I'll take photos and I don't see any problem with the photo but when I post it to Instagram it has like a line going through it like a like a hairline vertical line that's kind of in the same place all the time and I don't know if that is being introduced by some weirdness in the new hardware or if it's a flaw on Instagram or what the issue is but it's like growing pains and there's things that can be like an issue it seems like there's some display issues in iOS 11 where it will do something a little wonky sometimes like I'll wake it up and the um I'll have the notification panel come up and then I'll immediately sign in so it'll put my apps on top of notifications instead of painting the you know wallpaper of the homepage which is like a little you know screen weirdness that is not typical for iPhone to be weird like that so Apple's also doing a lot of ambitious things about sort of rebuilding large parts of its stack I've seen people talking about um Mac OS High Sierra uh having a problem with I think it's the window server just kind of bugging outc it's well it bugs out especially I put the around the menu bar yeah so that isn't just they didn't just introduce a bug it's they've re Rewritten you know big chunks of the operating system on a regular basis and it's frustrating because things that we're working fine now have like a little weirdness to it a couple years ago that was the thing with Discovery D and was like we've changed how we've changed the structure of the network infrastructure kind of thing and here it's causing all these problems for like lots of different kinds of people but if they never changed anything then you'd have this kind of building up of CFT that you get to a problem where you're you're like the old mac7 from the early 90s where they just didn't ever fix anything and everything was just sort of patched with Band-Aids and then you just have this kind of huge mass of software that needs to be radically re overhauled on many levels and it's just a huge task and hard to do kind of the same thing with Windows or with you know I think with Android there's a lot of things that need to get patched and it's just are never going to happen because it's just so much work to try to change all this stuff without breaking all this other stuff and even if it does get patched or even if it does get Rewritten and it's never going to get rolled out to the billion or two people that are actually Android 8 rewrites a whole bunch of things because it rearchitecturing instructed it's not going to get put out there for the users give it a couple of years I'm running it on one phone but it's going to take about 2 years for everyone else to get it for a little bit and right that's how it works two years is a long time for technology to be sitting there waiting to get deployed I was being a little fous there I want to thank you so much Dan we're going to have Neil on in just a second to to talk about the watch and his experiences with the Apple Watch series 3 where can people find you and and where can they go to read more about your experiences with the iPhone 8 I been writing on Apple Insider and have a series of Technology articles we kind of look into some of the technology that is new in iPhone 8 and iOS 11 and then of course I'm on Twitter at Daniel Aaron Ean cool thanks again Dan cheers welcome back Neil thank you for coming of course now I'm going to ask you a question that's most popular with wristwatch blogs what's on your wrist right now I'm wearing the Apple Watch series 3 with cellular it is the aluminum AKA formerly known as the the sport model uh in space gray with the sport Loop band the Vel not not velcro though uh loop and hook band as they call it for yes legal re vcro is a Dupont trademark correct how are you liking the Red Dot on the crown uh I mean the Red Dot is ugly uh I think it's a misstep by Apple uh for a company that usually designs pretty well aesthetically um usually pretty impressed by their color choices and options and just those General look um the Red Dot is pretty terrible but not nearly enough to be a deal breaker um I mean if you don't like it you can put a sticker over it as we've detailed in stories or I mean I guess you could cover over it with a permanent marker if you really wanted to but you don't really see it when you're wearing the watch because the digital Crown doesn't face you but when you turn your wrist to the side to see it it's not particularly attractive and what has been the best change about having cellular on the watch so uh um you know we ran our review this week I really like this new Apple watch I think it's great um and one of the things that I really kind of Drew parallels to um in the uh review that we ran uh was kind of the history of development of iOS but more specifically the growth of the iPad from the initial promise of a device that could replace your PC to something that eventually has now gotten to the point where potentially could replace your PC depending on your workflow um and uh you know the Apple watch is not there yet um it's getting there and adding LTE is a huge step in that direction um it cannot be away from your phone all day and this is the thing that a lot of people don't realize and that they complain about and those are the people that are not really getting the point there's a reason that when you set up your Apple watch you still have to initiate it from your phone and you still have to go through the whole process and it still Tethered to your phone and it still backs up from your phone and all that stuff and that is that is the problem that is the reason that uh people are upset because you still have to use your phone for a majority of the day it's not meant to be used on its own without your phone for 24 hours a day you you could theoretically do that but you're probably not going to get the battery life especially if you work out use GPS audio streaming that sort of stuff I I know that you like to run yes tell me about what it's like to run with the Apple watch and where you're at with your review of it as it ships so yeah as it ships right now with watch OS 4 you cannot yet stream music from uh Apple music or iCloud music library what it ships with is the ability to sync music from your iPhone and store it on the watch itself and that is fine but it gets a lot better when you have a watch OS 4.1 and you can stream that's in beta yet so it wasn't mentioned in my review and it's not really fair to go into that because that's a product that's going to be forthcoming but Apple says it's going to be coming next month in October but for now um you can have your music locally stored on your watch you can go for a run which is stuff that you could do before but the difference is now you're you're in touch you're connected so um you know I went for a run uh well I've gone for a few since I got the watch but um you get a text message or you get a phone call and you're no longer missing it you no longer find out when you get back from your run it's just there it's with you you get it so things that you would do before like for example you get a text message on your watch and you would look down and you would see that you have a message and if you wanted to respond to that message it was convenient to be able to look down at your wrist and and see that but it wasn't particularly convenient unless you were in a situation where you couldn't access your phone or it was rude to access your phone it wasn't really convenient to just use the watch because you have your phone on you your phone has a bigger screen it's more luxurious it gives you the opportunity to type and do those sorts of things that you can't do on a small screen on your wrist um the the difference now is when your phone is gone you no longer have that ability and so you're kind of in a way forced to use the watch and it it it's not it's not a bad experience you have options so like texting is probably the the biggest thing I think for a lot of people that they're going to really enjoy with this cuz people don't make a lot of phone calls anymore it's mostly texting getting messages that sort of stuff so you can dictate with Siri you can uh scribble on there uh write uh letters or they have quick responses that you can scroll through just to tap on and obviously you're not going to want to um have a long conversation with a little watch like that or or as Steve Jobs said when the iPad first came out right War and Peace on it um but it is really convenient for you know you just raise your wrist talk to Siri uh send out a a text message and then just lower your wrist and go and it just kind of gets out of the way so you know I went for a run and I got a message and then I responded to it real quick or yesterday I was out running some errands that you know even have to be exercising and I just didn't bring my phone with me and you dictate the response and then if you um have airpods in it's even better um and now because Siri actually talks to you you don't even have to stare at your wrist to make sure that it's done or that that it's sent or whatever it just talks to you and and you can lower your wrist and go back to what you're doing so it just kind of gets out of your way and so when you want to do things like send a text or make a phone call or or do whatever um you can do it it's not necessarily going to be as um easy of an experience as it would be on a phone but it's certainly much easier because it's just on you you don't have to worry about it you're not like obsessively checking it it's just it's kind of like technology that gets out of the way and I find it interesting that this is happening now as the phones are getting bigger and Apple's kind of moving away from one-handed use and it almost feels like this is Apple's appeasement to people that don't necessarily want big phones or don't want to have their phone on them all the time you know I hear from a lot of women who say things like you know the pockets and their pants are too small you got to carry a purse you can't have your phone on you whatever this is a great product for somebody like that too not just somebody who wants to exercise or stream music or whatever somebody who just wants to get out of the house for 3 or 4 hours and not have their phone on them and not be checking Instagram and not have to bring a Pur or a bag or a big phone or whatever uh I think that there's a lot of use cases for a product like this that go beyond just the fitness and and and that sort of stuff um you know the the phone anxiety is a very real thing where you feel like you're you're missing out or you're um you know somebody May urgently be trying to reach you and you don't have your phone on you um and this certainly addresses that but uh there's also a more practical application to it um and that's even without the music streaming and I think that the music streaming alone is going to be a game Cher what kind of downsides have you noticed is there any downside that some of our listeners should be aware of I mean the main thing you have to be aware of is battery life uh if you were using it um in what Apple considers to be a typical use case which would be um an hour or so of working out and streaming music and then you know regularly checking throughout the day uh and when they say an hour of working out they mean without your phone nearby just on LTE um that'll get you uh about 18 hours of use which is pretty good now if you try to leave your phone at home all day and get an hour workout in and you know send texts and check the news and all that you're not going to get that much if you're doing heavy LTE use constant you're only going to get about four hours out of the watch so you'll get you know half of a workday essentially um but it's again it's not meant for that it's not the technology is not there the physics of it aren't there you know this is something that's the size of a stack of a couple silver dollars really um it is not meant to be an iPhone free experience you have to connect it to your iPhone to set it up you have to connect it to your iPhone to back it up you can't connect it to or set it up through your iPad or your iPod touch or your Mac uh and there's a reason for that and that's a very conscious effort by Apple to make it clear to the consumer that LTE is the ability to occasionally leave your phone behind but not to completely ditch your phone I mean you can't even set this thing up without having a phone to connect it to with a phone number because it shares the phone number and has a cheaper data plan and stuff so uh that that is an issue that you have to be aware of you can't think that you're going to buy this and then not have a phone or not ever use your phone but also uh you have to be aware that the data plan uh is pricey while Apple did a pretty good job of pricing the watch itself um it's only um uh $30 more for the LTE version than last year's pricing for the series 2 without LTE uh the carriers uh were not so generous and they are charging $10 a month in the US for data access which I think is pretty exorbitant I think it should be closer to $5 a month tell me about so so first of all actually I was going to ask you are personally I mean I understand you have this one for review purposes and so on but are you going to use it and pay the $10 a month I am yes I I like to run outside um and I like having all of my music on me and uh I like the idea of just leaving my phone behind sometimes I'm going out and I just don't want to have my phone I don't want to be distracted I don't want to be bugged I you know I'm on my computer all day for work I'm staring at my phone when I'm not at my computer constantly doing that kind of stuff there's something freeing about just not having your phone on you and to me that's worth the $10 a month and that's not even for exercising but when I run outside I've been using just my watch for a while um and it's nice uh it's it's liberating in some ways uh the only thing that I really found in using just the watch without the phone that I missed was uh not having a camera and and I'm not saying that they should put a camera on the watch I don't know if that's the right way to go it could be creepy it could be ugly on the watch it could be C be unusable yeah I mean there how do you I mean how do you for example uh distinguish between whether it's on the left or right wrist um and which direction the camera would face if it were a forward- facing camera that that sort of thing you know maybe this solution is an optional Smart Band or something that theoretical down the road who knows but um as it stands right now you know in my couple days of using it and just going out and not bringing my phone I could text I could get phone calls I could check and get you know news alerts uh emails you name it everything that I would want from a phone short of just wasting time on Facebook or SnapChat I could do on my watch and I could do it pretty efficiently more efficiently than you'd think um you know I don't really use Siri a lot on my phone but I use it all the time on my watch I use it to control homekit I use it to send texts um I use it to initiate you know music playback stuff like that um so I just find that it just works better when it's on your wrist and it's it just makes sort more sense it's more convenient um a lot of times talking to your phone feels a little bit unnatural when you can just pick it up and type um so those types of things having seral on the go um H getting notifications getting all that stuff everything that I wanted from my phone for the most part I could do with the exception of taking pictures and so I mean I guess if the inevitability of this is a device that is completely separate from the phone and you can leave your phone at home all day and it gets enough battery life and all that then I think at that point you inevitably have to add a camera um I don't know how you do that in a way that doesn't become unworkable but that's a future challenge for Apple to figure out I don't know that that's something that's going to happen in the near future either um so I don't mean to say all that is a it's a must have for the product or anything like that it's just more future think on my part but uh yeah I I I think that as it is right now you know one of the things I wonder about when I recommend products is like is this something that you could keep for two three four maybe even five years and be happy with it I think that if you know that you're not going to be able to ditch your phone completely uh and you're okay with that I think think that this is a very mature product that the new processor is fast the capabilities are there um there's a lot to like about this I'm I'm very very happy with the new Apple watch so how's it been using the beta so watch OS 4.1 beta came out this week I have to warn everybody if you install a watch beta and things go wrong as they have for multiple people on our staff including you right oh yes yeah uh you have to mail the you can't reset it on your own it's not like your phone where you can just reset it roll it back whatever you have to uh take your phone Hardware put it in the mail ship it off to Apple wait a few days for them to fix it and then send it back to you that's because there's no diagnostic port on the watch for you to access as a user there's no place for you to do it they have to take it and do it so I say that because don't install betas unless you really know what you're getting into because you could screw it up I do this for a living I have to especially on a especially on the watch where there's no way that you can recover it by yourself yes so I took the plunge um because obviously I'm excited about the ability stream music and also need to be able to write about it for work and stuff so I wouldn't usually install a beta one but I went for it and thankfully um fingers cross going forward but it installed okay and it works so I went out yesterday um and I ran some errands um and I uh was streaming music while I did that worked with like a charm and then I went for run last night uh about 3 miles um and it was about a cuz I had to recharge it or or put it on the charger while it was updating so I guess it was like halfway through the day it was topped off at 100% by the end of the day my battery was at 52% and that included a little over a half hour of running um and about you know another half hour to 45 minutes of running errands um without my phone on me LTE use music streaming sent a few texts uh that sort of stuff but what was really exciting to me is the music streaming was Rock Solid I went out of my way to pick albums that were not sync to my watch and I hadn't listened to in a while so I knew that it was going to be 100% dependent on LTE to to get that stuff going and as soon as the music started playing didn't cut out on the Bluetooth end didn't cut out on the data end um it sounded as good as you would imagine it was absolutely rocksolid perfect it didn't cut out of me once not once not once and and I've had a lot of people ask me things about um connectivity because when the watch reviews first came out uh there were some people that had issues because of uh public Wi-Fi networks and this is a bug in the Apple watch that Apple has said they're going to fix with a software update I have not run into this issue because I went through a purge of all public Wi-Fi networks before I even set up my watch because I was aware of the bug but basically what this means is if you connect to you know Starbucks WiFi or McDonald's or your local coffee shop or whatever um that requires a screen to bypass in order to get onto the Wi-Fi um this information is shared from your phone with your watch so your watch is going to defer to Wi-Fi networks when it can find them because the LTE battery life is so poor uh the problem is it doesn't know when there's a portal to access and because there's no browser on the watch itself there's no way for you to get B past that portal the Gateway so the watch connects to a Wi-Fi and then hangs on to it even though it has no data so uh then what happens is your phone's away and you don't really understand why your watch isn't working and why you don't have a connection I don't see this being a big issue going forward because Apple has said they're going to put out a software update and I imagine it'll probably arrive pretty soon and that it will address that bug and that'll be the end of that and no one will remember this but other than that um the LTE connections have been fine for me I haven't had any issues anywhere I get reception with my phone I get reception with my watch um I think the the general rule I would say is if you have two or more bars on your phone you're going to get a connection on your watch and it's going to be fine obviously if you don't have a connection with your phone in that area it's not like the the watch can make up for poor areas of Lte reception you know if AT&T is doing a bad job that's not the watch's fault what has been the best Improvement what's been the best thing about this I mean I think um the fact that you can now access Siri on the go because of Lte I mean obviously everything that you can do before you can now do on the go with LTE um but you know simple things like checking sports scores and stuff um it's nice to be able to do that and not have your phone on you and it's nice to have Siri talk to you because like I said before you dictate a text you then lower your wrist and you know that it's sent you before a the processor was slow and B Siri didn't talk so you have to kind of hold your wrist up and stare and give it like a one Mississippi 2 Mississippi before you got a response now you can just it just gets out of the way it's like all right I've dictated it put your wrist down and a lot of times before you've even fully lowered your wrist it's already sent it and telling you that everything's cool but it just feels good to be able to uh get it out of the way I've said this so many times here on the podcast the best wearable devices are ones that just get out of the way and yes you can interact with the watch and yes the experience is is pretty good when you interact with the watch but uh the best situations are where you just kind of raise your wrist get what you want and then lower it and then get on with your day um it's a small wearable device for a reason it's not a big screen it's not meant to watch YouTube videos or anything like that awesome Neil Hughes everybody the editor-in-chief of appleinsider.com where can people find you of course I just said it didn't I you can find me at appleinsider.com and you can follow me on Twitter at this is Neil and I would encourage everybody to check out our iPhone 8 iPhone 8 plus reviews from Dan the Apple Watch review from myself and then Mike has our Apple TV 4K review which will be running uh very soon so keep your eyes peeled for that I've been using the Apple TV for a few days now um and it's pretty nice um and I think uh people will be pretty happy with that upgrade if they have a 4K TV excellent we look forward to all of those and I want to ask our our listeners if you have used the Apple Insider app on the app store please feel free to go ahead and leave us a review for it if you haven't used it yet now is a perfectly good time to download it and check it out and stay up to date on all of your Apple news and while you're at it you can leave us a nice review on the podcast on iTunes thank you so much for listening we will be back next weekyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to amazing episode of 140 of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor and joining me is Daniel Aron delure hi from San Francisco welcome it's a beautiful day here tell me about this iPhone 8 so I got the iPhone 8 thinking it was going to be the moderate Improvement of the existing 7 uh The Stand Out features are actually kind of the similar to iPhone 10 you have the similar cameras except at least in the back and the same chip so a lot of the kind of super new stuff that Apple developed for the 10 is also part of the eight so it gives you a a alternative way to get into Apple's technology without either being on The Cutting Edge of price or The Cutting Edge of um things having changed I think we kind of discussed that before or The Cutting Edge of weight times yeah it looks like the antenna is going to have a harder it's going to be harder to get so instead of it being just yet another iPhone what is it really to you well in a lot of ways it is like the new iPhone I mean it's it's very similar in uh how you use it I mean it's identical but the things that are different are kind of wearing off all the things that are difficult to do on an existing iPhone um specifically to the camera uh one of the hardest things to take pictures of is in the light photography and I'm noticing I mean I trying to take a lot of pictures back and forth between my 7 plus and the8 plus and the biggest thing that I notice is uh low light because in if you have bright light there's less of a difference uh in terms of just taking photos you really notice that when you're taking low light photos it does a much better job of balancing what's the the exposure across the uh scene that you're taking one of the examples in the review that I did if you just hold up a phone and try to take a picture of something a lot of times it will balance it out to the point where any bright lights are too bright and the dark areas are sort of visible but if you focus on if you tap to focus the exposure on the bright area it makes everything else too dark and just the faster brains of the eight have a much better job do a much better job of balancing that out so you can say I want to focus on this but I want to keep everything else together and that's particularly noticeable when you use the flash because the flash goes from being I almost never use a flash on a mobile camera because it's typically so um it's so bright that it blows out things and it's kind of an unflattering lightness yeah it's it's uncontrollable yeah because the front is so bright it also makes everything else in the background just Fade to Black and the new Flash on the eight does a sort of a test strobe and then it does an actual strobe where it does a combination of what what they're calling slow sync where they use less flat but they also slow down the exposure or um the shutter as I recall and that gives you a couple things one it does much more natural flattering lighting so you don't have you don't have the kind of washed out kind of death look of Flash and it also does a much better job of not having huge Lin flares if you have glasses or if you have any piece of glass anywhere a lot of times shooting a flash will just light that up so that makes a big difference in being able to use Flash and then also it it keeps the background from being completely just falling into darkness because the front is so so bright and so you can do things like taking a photo in the dark uh I took a couple friends up to uh Twin Peaks which is a lookout over San Francisco and you have this you know field of Lights in the background but it's very difficult to take a picture of people standing in front of the lights and get both of those together and it worked great with the with the new FL because it illuminates them in the foreground and the background is still nice and in fact you can even do tricks like moving the camera slightly while you're taking it and it will keep you in Focus because you have been brightly illuminated where the background will be sort of blurred so that's kind of a cool effect to do so you can be sort of artistic now yeah it's like a new trick to try and then of course in addition to the actual LED lighting the 8 plus also features portrait lighting which I have some questions for Apple about how exactly it works because when you take a a portrait on an 8+ and you an isync or iCloud copies it to your other phones it remains editable you get that same interface on on the seven cuz if you take pictures with the seven you only get the portrait mode which means you can turn off the okay or not the the Blurred background or the depth effect of the background right and those two things are different they're actually taking the seven I believe takes a lower resolution um depth map so it takes a photo and it also takes in conjunction with that it uses the two lenses to calculate a depth map of who's in the you know what is the foreground and what is in the background and it's not just a binary front back it's also kind of a gradient of this is closer and this is further away and on the eight I believe it's just doing that in high resolution and so you can actually have you're not just saying foreground background you're saying here's the features of your face and I believe it's also using facial recognition to to do you know this is the sides of your jaw and this is your where your eyes are and so it Maps out a a lighting scenario that's kind of based on what you would look like if you had a bounce card or if you had lighting from a different angle that give you a dramatic if you had threo lighting for example or yeah and so those effects um they're so calling it in beta sometimes it doesn't work quite as you expect sometimes there's an air that was true for the I mean that was true for the portrait mode for iPhone 7 and seven plus as well was that exactly it's true for anything on a digital camera can like mess well but they they launched it in beta for three months or something before they decided to release it as this is the public final version of it right and they keep improving upon that so it's something that once you have the data you can keep refining it and making it better because it's there's a lot of algorithms in play of how it decides what's how to crop the photo but or how to how to you interpret the depth map I guess is what it is doing so you're saying that make sure I understood you correctly if you take a photograph on the iPhone 8 plus and then that photograph is synchronized with your iCloud photo library and you check and edit that photo on your iPhone 7 or 7 plus and and please please answer make sure I understand which one of those I think it requires a plus it requires the seven I'm not sure about well I I'm not sure about that because I haven't actually tried it back to an earlier non plusus phone but that that was kind of shocking that I got that the new UI on the older phone and so that suggests that um rather than being a live effect that's calculated on the 811 it's when you take the photo it creates those variations or it somehow it it records all the data at the time that it's captured and it's all editable after the fact and that's that's what IED from the keynote right it remains editable yes it remains editable but what I'm saying is I would have I would I would have expected it to remain editable on the 11 because it's doing this big effect that requires horsepower on the the new chip but when you take a photo and you sync it to an older phone it Still Remains editable on that older phone so I new interace what yeah what I believe what it's doing is it's when you take a photo it's creating these VAR variations or it's calculating you know the effect that you would apply and then that's how you can edit it after the fact it's not reapplying and changing those it's just selecting between which one you want to be the so it's kind of like a live photo where you're picking out the key frame interesting that you think it's just toggling between things that it's already done as opposed to rerunning the calculations on the older processor I'd be interested if you can find out more information about that because definitely if if if you were able to do the calculations on the at10 7 plus they should have made it available for that and you know it should either work or it shouldn't you know should work with photos you take so the the two things I can see is one if you take a photo with the 7 plus have to that effect right but if the camera Hardware isn't there to give it enough information you don't get to see that exposed but if the camera information was recorded in a photograph that was synced over the information is there and that's why the interface shows up I mean that makes sense to me I I see how it's awkward to to try and explain you'd rather it just be it works or it doesn't but no I'm just I'm surprised because I would when I was looking at the the effect the portrait lighting I was imagining that it's doing it in real time so that when you choose it your your chip is actually like refiguring out the best way to light this whereas what I think what happens is when you first take the photo it creates those effects or creates those variations and then they're frozen into the photo so even if you put that photo somewhere else you can still edit it so live photo or something yeah I would have thought they were frozen in I would have thought that it's recalculating it and that it's the the camera sensors that can't record the correct information for it to have that ability on the 7 plus I think the sensors are kind of the same I think the biggest difference is the com ational ability of the process of the chip the ISP on the you know A1 is what's doing those kind of changes that's why you know in a parallel example if you can take a low light photo on the eight that's going to continue to look better than a lowlight photo that you took on the seven even if it sinks over to a seven it doesn't get worse because it's not recalculating anything it's just looking at something you've already but the other the other thing that that would matter about is in the future if Apple improves that portrait lighting feature it wouldn't necessarily Pro photos that have already been taken so they're not going to be recalculated um so that's something I'd like to clarify because that's kind of an interesting idea of well whether it's just taking a solid where whether it's taking a frozen you know artwork this is done it's finished you can pick between the alternative versions of it but it's it's been frozen this is the George Lucas debate all over again well it's just trying things be remastered basically yeah but uh you raised a good point about the image signal the the image processor and its role in this right you know clearly if if it's the image if the sensors are the same and it's the image signal processor in the middle that's the uh the the different part of the chain then that becomes important to know it could be doing it live on that image signal processor and and you're right it just doesn't have that on the other phone it's interesting definitely definitely look into that if you can what else did you find from using the iPhone 8 what else was a surprise for you uh let's see what's surprising I think well wireless charging is kind of a handy idea but the power delivery USB power delivery and being able to charge rapidly is so much nicer I mean it's like to me it's like such a bigger deal to be able to intently purposely get your phone up to to charge much faster and it's kind of interesting to do comparisons of here's a you know previous iPhone connected to the fastest way know how to get power into it on a you know iPad charger or something and then here's plugged into USBC and it's you can like watch it go up oh yeah no I know that experience does get warm as you charge it but I when I traveled internationally I uh use an Android phone sometimes and and I was last traveling with a Huawei made Nexus 6p which fast charges using a USBC connector and it's like you say it's it's really revelatory just how quickly you can charge a phone and when you have zero battery and can have it full in a very short period of time it makes a big difference doesn't it yeah yeah it's very frustrating to especially when you're traveling you go out and but I mean I typically carry around a battery with me that can charge it up a full charge or two yeah but what if you didn't have to do that any longer yeah I wonder if there's battery packs at support power delivery I haven't I haven't seen any that's a good question I haven't seen any because the other thing that I that I noted um is if you have the the the USBC power adapters that were created for the MacBooks uh it fits at least 29 watts and there's also some third party ones that work Ed the same power delivery format so power delivery has a couple different things and so the MacBooks are also using the same technology to power it's basically just using a higher voltage and it's delivering power so it requires a couple things one of which is a bigger wire so the the lightning skinny light lightning cables that have shipped with iPhones forever were never designed to be transmitting like 14 watts of power or 14 volts of power um so you do need to have a new cable which is not cheap and uh that's probably something that I wouldn't want to experiment with too much seeing how what kind of what kind of cables you could can you remind me does does the iPhone 8 use Quick Charge 3 do you remember power delivery is a specification that's that's part of USB and it is parallel with like USB 3 and USBC so it's not just because something is one of those doesn't mean it's the other one right but it's a part of that USB 3.1 spec okay right so having a usb3 cable doesn't necessarily mean that it's a force Power delivery and so on yeah it looks as if there are battery power banks that support power delivery yeah I would imagine so the MacBooks if you plug your phone into the MacBook I no it does not charge at a faster rate even if you use the USBC to lightning cable yeah and also MacBooks if you plug a Macbook into a MacBook Pro it it kind of trickle charges if you plug a big MacBook Pro into a Macbook you get like like two Watts yeah but um which is not enough to do anything it it says it's not charging like like when you plug an iPad into a 5V charger right it will light up that it's charging but in fact will not charge it might even drain well it says yeah says that it's plugged in but it's like not charging because it's not getting enough to charge fast if you turn the display off you'll get a little bit of charge but I mean it will it'll slowly go so the thing about these battery Banks is that many of them that have power delivery have power delivery on the port that charges the battery they don't necessarily have power power delivery on the output side of that so you could recharge your battery quickly but you may not necessarily charge your device quickly right which is the same deal is the MacBooks so they they take power delivery but they can't um pass it on so you can't daisy chain them together or power them out right yeah that's what it looks like very cool so it's you know I I found that wireless charging was very convenient on other devices but like you say it's it's not something that is nearly as much fun as as recharging quite fast you know you you plug it in and you're done versus putting it down and hoping that it's uh charged enough when you pick it up yeah the handy thing about Wireless power or Wireless induction charging is that it it's a standard so that if everyone's using the same one uh in an airport or something you don't have to have three or four different jacks or alternatively instead instead of having a USB port you just have the ability to lay your phone down on a pad and I I have I've seen a couple of these things around it it isn't quite as ubiquitous enough to be useful and us is quite useful for a lot of things so there's a lot of things you could do with USB in terms of powering different kinds of devices that you have different cables for that might not be able to power over a wireless Pad but yeah so it has some potential for convenience I mean one of the things that I found in airports is that there are sometimes USB ports that are installed in say the uh the armrests of the seats in the lounge or the armrest in the seats of the uh the gate area that don't necessarily charge all devices for example I can I can plug an iPhone into the USB port on that that charger and it won't do a thing I have to get out the USB brick and do it through the wall through regular power connection do you think that now that that Chi is a standard that's adopted by of course other phones and now the iPhone that will see it proliferate much more that uh that they'll become a botus and will start to matter I think there's sort of a a style element to it um and the other thing that's going to keep changing is how fast wireless charging charges and so the standard also like Apple's working on this idea of having multiple devices on the same pad it's kind of more for for a consumer thing but um because a pad can only charge it right now the iPhone's only support five eventually it'll support seven which is kind of it's not terribly fast it's similar to the little tiny block that they ship with and it would still be slower than the larger block that you know most people are Weare than an iPad USB block will charge faster and there's a lot of um adapters for your car or even some battery packs that will say you know this port is regular USB and this port is lightning USB it's 2.1 amps right 2.1 or 2.4 12 wats and it's noticeably faster so the same thing is going to probably happen to wireless charging to where you go to an airport and it's like wow we installed these charging pads and oh they're old old style ones that only charge at 7 watts in a couple years so I mean right now USB is you know usba is is really common and useful but we're also seeing this sort of tipping the iceberg towards USBC eventually we're going to have perhaps ports changing because the other thing is with USB a the old style USB it's also Limited in how much power it can deliver because it was only ever designed USB 2 is only designed to deliver two Watts really right but there are usba connectors for USB 3 and 3.1 it's just that and they have a lot more conductors inside of them one of the difficulties is you can't really tell what you've got when you when you're looking at those right yeah but I mean most you the big indicator for usb3 is that the are not anything yeah they're they're USB 2 at the most there's least common denominator so that's kind of the same issue for wireless charging is it's going to be the lowest common denominator kind of thing the uh most universal port at least in the United States is the AC power because you can always plug whatever you got into that but then you have to have more cables and whatever you end up with the sponsored by Samsung charging posts and airports and so on so what what has been the thing you've enjoyed the most you know you said the the charging but what else what else have you really found that has made this iPhone better than all the other iPhones that came before it for you uh well definitely the camera I mean that's what I've been spending most of my time looking at uh the just being able to take better pictures and having some of the details handled for you uh so you can kind of focus on what you're trying to take a picture of instead of trying to figure out why it's blowing out this area of the photo or why you're getting so much grain and low light or why you try to take a picture with the Flash and it kind of destroys the photo so I use my phone as a camera so much that that's a really compelling reason to upgrade there's a couple other features that in addition to the W wireless charging the true- tone display is nice it took me a while to kind of figure out what I thought of it but I'm noticing more and more it just feels kind of more natural and particularly in comparison with my previous phone which I never saw anything wrong with when I was using it but when I kind of go back and forth between them I notice that when I'm in sort of softer warmer light it it's commonly uh looks really harshly blue and so what trueone does is it keeps the uh keeps the screen looking the way a piece of paper would look in the lighting that you're in so it's doing constant color management to to look natural to kind of reflect your environment instead of just being like this cold unchanging display technology so that's kind of growing on me the uh screen looks great um I don't otherwise I don't see a big difference between I mean I don't I don't see a difference between that and the previous seven which was quite a good quality screen um the OLED screen that comes on the 10 I haven't examined it with a microscope uh but it has that like Lush black look to it it that looks glossy because the blacks are so black because it's a totally different technology instead of instead of creating a picture and Shining Light through it like an LCD does it's actually all those pixels are Illuminating so it's if if pixels are not Illuminating because they're black they're super black whereas on LCD it's it's saying this is black and then it's shining a light through it and hopefully there's not a whole lot of light coming through but there's it's still kind of like a gray black compared to OLED yeah that's one of the Hallmarks of OLED so you have that incred contrast feel to the phone I mean it looks kind of warmer and but I yeah obviously I notice it most when I'm comparing between the two phones but should anyone be concerned about that you know if they were trying to do um like things that are color dependent or color uh color critical I don't think so it's it's kind of in the same vein as um night what's it called night mode night shift where night shift is quite obviously taking all the blue out or taking a lot of the blue out so that when you first do it you notice it's like wow shockingly different but then after a minute your eyes kind of adjust to it and you don't see that uh as much and it's kind of a similar idea that once you turn on trueone it becomes sort of natural if there's some reason you don't want it on you can turn it off really easily so I wouldn't say that that would could possibly be a negative but I've never felt like I needed to turn it off okay you know I I ask because all the time I see people who are worried about the the correctness of their color you know they're they're trying to show something that they've painstakingly picked out the right panone color or they've they've photographed in such a way that they're sure that it the right representation of the colors has to come through and now they're they're concerned because they can't be positive that the iPhone will show it the same way twice depending on who's viewing it where right well the with trueone or or with yeah with trueone it doesn't change the way your camera takes photos so I mean if you were really concerned concerned about a very specific type of color you wouldn't I guess I don't see the application you're saying but it's like if I I was saying Hey I want you to see this color it's very specific way um it's it's changing it based on ambient lighting so that changes no matter what whether you change whether your screen is adjusting or not you can have a very you can give somebody a printed out Pantone color Tab and if they're looking at it in different ambient lighting colors it's going to look different it's the same same so the point of this is to to guarantee that it looks the same way depending on the light you're in yeah I mean if you had some Mission critical this has to be this color orange you would have to say you'd have to look at it in a specific light to look see the same way I do and you might both have to take an eye test to make sure that you're both perceiving it exactly the same but okay you know it's it's not that something I'm harping on so much but it's something that's come up in the past when trone was first announced and it's something I see from uh some some photographers and some designers who want to make sure that when they show something to a client the client is going to see it the same way they intended yeah and if you're if you're doing something that is like I said Mission critical like that you would say hey don't look at this with Chon turned on but um yeah I think that's probably one of the least least real problems that you could have with an iPhone 8 I don't think that's something that sounds like one of those things where when anytime anyone sees anything that Apple says they immediately start creating reasons why that could be the end of the world yes that's pretty much what it was was the sky is falling because there's this new thing that affects our colors and not even affects them negatively necessarily but oh my gosh they're monkeying with colors yeah I mean Apple does have a pretty good track record of the company certainly makes mistakes but when they're doing something like that there's usually a lot of thought that goes into making sure that it's working correctly so I mean there's a little bit of benefit of the doubt just to be like probably if they made this one the keynot features it's not halfhazard Le just like thrown out there in contrast to you know like other Hardware makers that just say like hey hey we have this TV with a super brilliant mode that just blows the color out so it looks really good in the showroom and people will buy it it's like what if it's not accurate and that's exactly what that feature was for exactly and also that feature exists so that when it gets home people say wait this looks terrible the shop that sold it can sell calibration Services yeah you need to professionally calibrated you have to have someone come out and install it for you so that'll get you let me let me ask the the iPhone 8 is the first phone that has Apple's own homegrown GPU inside it's it's not one of the power VR chipsets that came from imagination in the past have you noticed anything different about this phone using that new chipset uh apart from battery life it seems like to me they kind of said the battery life was going to be the same and it seems like it's better battery life I mean I'm also comparing a brand new phone with a year old phone so that might have some minor impact on it um but I I backed up and restored the same stuff that's on my phone so it's pretty equal situation um apart from the age of the battery um I don't think in the first year this should be like a remarkable notice in battery life uh going down but that certainly plays into the uh ability for the battery to last longer because it's faster but it's more efficient so they're saying it's 30% faster but it's you know doing the same tasks it's can last for is half as much power which is a pretty significant thing that even if you're whether you're doing heavy Graphics work like if you're you know in the middle of a video game or if you're just doing just the kind of basic things that a processor does and handling your animations and whatever um it seems like battery life is a biggest thing I noticed uh there are iPhone the 6 Plus was the first iPhone I've ever noticed it just felt kind of like a little bit slow and I think a big part of that was the fact that it had you know it went from you know the 4in iPhone or the 5in iPhones the iPhone 5 Series had what almost a million pixels or something it was like 750,000 something like that and the standard iPhone 6 had if I'm saying this right I think it's like around 1 million and then the plus is almost 2 million so it's a big jump in how many pixels you're having to push and it's the first time it ever felt like there was sort of a a little bit of a Android like pause or you know like Jitter in animations and things it felt a little bit slow sometimes you turn the phone and it's kind of like there's a little slight hesitation uh that you really notice because you're used to an iPhone being so buttery smooth all the time and every year that gets a little bit better and it feels like it's also better on the eight and there's also a lot more uh animations in iOS 11 that I notice so it feels like it's doing more work but it's doing a better job of it um there's still I mean it can still always get get faster and more dialed in but um that's another kind of interesting aspect of when we talking about the tin coming up is it has a even higher resolution but it's also has the same sort of aspect ratio it's kind of like a tall version of the seven it's a taller version of the smaller phone even though it has a higher resolution than the plus it's not like the plus format where you have sort of a wide right the wideness to it the plus is a little bit wider and and you notice since when you switch it to landscape mode where you don't necessarily get all of the same toolbars and stuff that you'd have room for on the plus- siiz device right and the the plus actually has a they call it a standard mode and a zoomed mode and the zoomed mode is basically looking like a a standard phone a standard iPhone scaled up screen right I wish they had another mode that was kind of the other direction where everything was like a little bit smaller and Tighter you know scale down so you could even see even more but sure okay so let's let's uh close out the iPhone section for a second and go ahead and give us one final thought on that iPhone and where you think the iPhone 8 fits in one of the things and I'm going to do an ad read okay one of the things that you talked about was the rumor of having a a new tin in the future that would be like a 10 plus right so there's there's a rumor that we have here that suggests that next year 2018 that Apple will launch a jumbo sized 6.4in iPhone 10 and uh this story comes from the investor who reported on Monday that that citing local Parts makers that instead of making a 5.28 in OLED phone that instead 2008 looks like a 5.85 in phone and a 6.46 in model and you know there there they also suggest that well there could be a possible insertion of a greater than 6in LCD model on the line somewhere um that Apple has reportedly signed several contracts with Samsung for multiple OLED size screens yeah I we know we know that Apple likes to change the resolution of their phones just like frantically every year that's not true but over the the sarcasm that that when you read your your sarcasm with that heavy of a veil over it it's hard to hear it at first that was not thinly veiled at all um in in the whole history of iPhone Apple has changed the resolution how many times I mean they went to um went to R there was the change between four and five well they changed right into the Flor so that was that was putting twice as many pixels on the screen to do nothing more but just make everything sharper and then the five same ratio as previous and then the five increased the changed the ratio so increased the amount of things you can see on the screen without changing the DPI then the six changed it again and the six plus so that both changed those a little bit so it was like a different ratio yeah and it was also a larger resolution in terms of size too right and and then again with the uh the 10 so I I can count that on one hand yeah and and there's a good reason for that it's not just that Apple's too slow in doing these things because Samsung is like changed the resolution on their phones like every year and they have like multiple twice multiple phones that they're changing yeah within those years and a big part of that is because Samsung makes screens and that's how they can you know the best way they can stand out from a bunch of Android phones that work the like and do are pretty much exactly the same is to frantically say you know hey we have an even bigger double plus you know Super AMOLED Plus+ display this year where you know they can't really say anything else they can't deploy a lot of Technologies they've tried to do technology before and you know all the wave stuff and the focus attention like looking at your gaze and all that kind of stuff just sort of didn't really get any any traction so they've kind of focused on Hardware features and saying hey this is a this letter acronym and that's kind of what Samsung can do CU that's all they can do um Apple doesn't really have that what Apple has the strongest thing Apple has is the platform and so Apple has to protect that in terms of they can't just like randomly make changes to the platform for a bunch of different models that would fractionalize and just dramatically increase the amount of work that developers have to do to make an app look good on each of those devices yeah I was going to say that that the you know when they make a change the change affects several different people affects users who have to get accustom to the new change and it affects developers who have to do a large amount of work to accommodate it yeah depending on how much change there is and with the 10 you know they're making change to the resolution and the the ratio of the screen is different and there's a number of things that are going to change all at once and it's uh something that developers have to account for but that's going to be a popular phone you know it's not like a a micro model that they're sort of putting out like the SE was like a small phone but it was exactly the same as all the other phones that were like it before it's just faster so it doesn't radically change what developers have to do to make phone I mean it doesn't really change anything for developers to be able to support it in the way that you know apps running on are going to look good uh whereas the 10 there's going to be a lot of people that are expecting things to change and to look good on the on the new phone and there's some people talking about you know I want my apps to look this way I want to be able to see the ears or not the Notch and those are things that are going to have an impact on what developers do or what they to do to make it look good on the the new phone that people are buying so people will want to use their apps um I I don't there was a clear reason why Apple came out with this strategy of having the six and the six plus because they're covering a couple different bases going forward they now have the most phones they've ever sold the most generations of phones that are basically you have the SE from the hold over of five era you have the sixes which are A variation of price basically based on features and then the new 10 which is sort of the future so going into the future does Apple need to have a 10 and a 10 plus well it kind of depends on how well uh whether people are really wanting to have a larger screen or just a bigger screen because this is a screen of the Plus in terms of size a larger screen but it's in a smaller I think there are two I mean I think there are two ways that people use a plus-size device and it's a broad generalization but the the first way is the way that you said right you you would prefer that there was a a uh a zoom out mode that allowed you to pack more on the screen right right there so there are people that use it in regular mode like you do that try and fit as much as they possibly can on the screen to take advantage of the larger screen but at the same time there are people uh and and sometimes the elderly fit into this category who like to zoom in or or people who have eyesight difficulties who like to use the zoomed part so they have the larger screen with everything represented larger on the screen so that they can actually see what they're looking at and use the device with and have it be accessible to them so there's definitely a utility in having a larger sized device the the question is what do you do with that screen size right and how do you accommodate those two very different types of users right there is there is a reason why you want to have larger screen sizes but those accessibility features can work on any size phone so you can even have a very small phone that has larger text on it um the six and 6 Plus both or you know those two generations those two models both support the idea of having zoomed content and you can use accessibility to zoom it up even larger so but there are tons of consumers who buy the larger one on the basis of their eyesight whether it's sensible or necessary or not that's that's the choice they're making more bigger text on a bigger phone with the 10 you can put uh similarly large text and almost as much on a phone that's the size of a a seven is the idea now whether this whether there's demand for so I think most of the demand goes towards like what you're saying for people who want to have bigger text be more readable um and kind of I'm kind of like the other side of that Spectrum right now until my eyes totally go downhill is wanting to have more on the screen at once you can read more text kind of things um whether or not people want to have a larger screen because a large you know a much larger screen is is based on having a larger device at some point you know the the size of the screen is sort of the deciding how big your device is going to be it's kind of like um spinning Optical media if you have if your music is on a CD your player can only get to be so small before the CD is like sck out the side but whether or not there's a demand for people who want larger and larger physically larger phones I think that the tin is going to I think it really hits a sweet spot in delivering a lot of the functionality of the Plus for whatever reason people want it because a big part of is not just you know bigger text it's also having your photos bigger if you look at a photo taken on a seven and you compare it to a 7 plus it just looks better the 7 plus you can see more of it and you know you're seeing across you know higher resolution so on a on a tin it's going to be slightly less wide but you're still getting resolution and and a it's physically the screen size is almost as big as the plus it's just the cas is the overall case is smaller so I'm kind of wondering if that's going to be a good compromise because before you had to kind of have two different screen sizes to prevent the phone from just getting too big because originally when the six came out the six and six plus there was only something like 10% that went for the plus and every year that's gotten bigger and this year I'm hearing people talking about that the looks like the plus is selling about half of the eight now in part I think that's because a lot of people who want to smaller phone are waiting for a 10 but just the the demand for having a a bigger screen phone is going up so it's interesting to be it will be interesting to see how much of that demand goes towards the 10 as a form factor and right now it's going to be a little bit held back because of the it's you know significantly more expensive I see all these reviews and they're saying oh the t is just a little bit more it's like $300 more that's kind of that's you know a significant amount for a lot of people shopping for phones but I think also it's kind of like the car market where if you remember in the 70s and 80s that you know the price of cars suddenly jumped upward because of all these new technologies that you needed to have on a car to be safe enough and um it created sticker shock but eventually people just got to the point where it's like oh this is how much car costs we're going to pay for it and I'm not going to pay for a cheaper car even though there are cheaper cars that I could find around the world because I know that they're not really safe because I've seen what you know a similar looking car in Mexico once it crashes it's like people inside are dead right well and cars that are sold in country have to comply with that country's safety rules so it's not like you should feel bad necessarily about buying a car in in your own country but um you're right the prices have gone up extremely you know when when you and I were kids it wasn't not even the 70s in the ' 80s and '90s um you you could buy a Hyundai Exel for you know what $6,000 that wasn't a nice car but it was not a nice car but it was basic Transportation right it was it was in fact probably the worst car that Hyundai ever made um had a reputation for terrible engine problems but you know you could get affordable transportation and drive it until it broke which was relatively quickly after you drove it off the L but now in order to to buy Transportation you end up spending what $25,000 the median prices somewhere in the 30s and for a lot of people that is an a large part of their income a large percentage of you know their income is going towards paying for a vehicle and people do it because it's you know kind of important to have a car in most places but well because your your job depends upon it right there are some places where you simply don't have access to public transport and the same kind of thing with having a phone is there's so many things that we need to do that are kind of dependent on having a phone just access to information and being able to you know get information about your flight or contact somebody immediately or you know all these things there's so much value in not just for work but it's also kind of like a car where it's a combination of need to have and also love to have and enjoy and it does all the things it allows you to do all the things that make you happy kind of thing and so I think that there's Less Price sensitivity than a lot of people think there's been a lot of there's been kind of a a narrative for for years and years talking about how apple is just in terrible trouble because the price of phones are just going to plummet to zero basically and we've seen that happening in Android land but it's not happening in iPhones iPhones just keep getting more expensive and they're getting more expensive because Apple's driving the technology to to retain that value and that's something everybody else wants to do I mean Google tried to do it Samsung is trying to do it they just haven't been able to do it and you have companies like essential you know here's Andy Rubin saying hey we're going to take this Android technology and make a good phone out of it and you know they make this fancy phone with a lot of leading technology but they can't sell 5,000 of them so it's not just getting expensive it's also being able to deliver an expensive product that people find Value in and be able to support it and have something that people find Reliable and think is going to you know to see it as something that's going to safeguard their data and and room is BET is that there was a market for a super expensive android-based phone from the person who's is the namesake for Android and that also had connectors on the back for accessory devices to attach to it and and the question is he he thought for sure that there was that market but it it's one of those things where you ask yourself okay so how do you identify who those people are and how do you find those people how do you reach those people and I I think they spent a lot of time identifying and what they wanted to have out of a phone without really identifying how they were going to reach the people that were going to buy the thing which is kind of a Google thing I mean that's kind of Google what Google has been doing over and over again is coming up with a whole lot of ideas about hey we could do this we could do this and we do this and they don't think about how are we actually going to sell this how are we going to get people to know about it before Andy Rubin did Android and and came to Google to do Android um he was one of the people behind the sidekick do you remember the sidekick device danger yeah well the danger hiptop that eventually got sold as the T-Mobile Sidekick in the US and that device was a wild success but it was a wild success because they had carriers pushing it and because they had people who spread the word about how great it was to be able to use it for email and chat it wasn't a premium phone it was a plastic phone for kids I mean it was a a very affordable phone that was being sold by like Sprint it was a variable affordable phone it was like almost free well like like I said T-Mobile and T-Mobile at the time was in fourth place right it was a very accessible device you didn't have to work to get one and it wasn't made out of Premium materials yeah it was like a a very utilitarian like was a texting phone at the height of you know texting was like where the value was wasn't like people needed a browser or you know a computer phone so it was it totally hit that kind of deliver it was like the Blackberry for younger people a great communicator it really was it really was but it it changed things and it was every phone after that that um and that was his big success so the question your team came from Apple you know Andy Rubin himself was working at Apple and so it was kind of there was this sort of original culture of how do we build things that can be sold a hardware company to you know functionally doing it at danger and then Google is sort of a hey we have technology we can just go wild in every direction we want to all at the same time we can try 20 different things at once and have it all in beta and it will just be like this experimental open source program just for everything and we don't have to worry about any of it making money because we're making money on advertising on a totally different and our customers are not even people who are starting to sell this technology to our customers are you know companies that we telling them to spend this money on advertising and that has not changed you know Google can come out with all the hardware that they want and they still can't sell it because they don't they're not a hardware company and they can buy Hardware companies and it doesn't make them into a hardware company what has changed is since they reorganized under alphabet they have been making all of their different divisions and units stand up and have to account for themselves and if they can't make money then they get put on a short leash yeah they've been cracking down a lot of that and that's why they've canceled a lot of their stuff but I don't I don't see that there's any radical difference in in terms of what they're trying to do they're still making almost all their money for advertising and you know they put out some products they you know worked with HC to build products but um they're not selling them in quantities that really matter you The Verge talks about all these products like they're you know on the same level as Apple's products but and you know on a technical level yeah you can review them in the same kind of seriousness but when people go to buy a laptop they don't say hm do I want a Macbook or do I want a Chromebook nobody's making that decision right the customer that's that would ask that question is never going to ask that question because cuz they're there are two different budgets and two different needs right and the people the people that don't have money to buy computers like schools are like yeah let's load up on Chromebooks because they're really easy to manage and people who say I want you know something that works and that you know it's flexible and does a lot of things that I already do and works with the software I want they're not going to say hm should I buy a Chromebook because maybe I can just do everything in in Chrome with some extensions yeah so it's it's a totally it's it's not an open market of you know who's going to buy this stuff and it's a very similar thing with phones that you know there's people who are just like I hate apple and I'm never going to buy anything that looks like an iPhone unless it comes from Google then I'll buy it um but that segment of the population is quite small and it's not really that important because those people also don't pay as much for apps and they don't pay for a lot of things so they're not creating that kind of market for people who buy apps or subscribe to content and so it's it's just not as um important of a product category support for today's show comes from audible audible content includes an unmatched selection of audiobooks original audio shows news comedy and more from leading Publishers broadcasters entertainers and business information providers unlike a streaming or rental service with audible you own your books so you can access them anytime time anywhere from almost any device including your iPhone iPad Android or even an Amazon and Fire tablet if you have one of those audible makes getting more books in your life easy and they have an unbeatable selection of audiobooks and incredible performances you can transform your commute and ride with Audible and they have such a huge catalog of books for example I I like reading biographies and there's one in audible by Chris Anne Brennan who was of course um had a connection with Steve Jobs let's say without giving too much away and and she wrote a book called The Bite in the Apple A Memoir of my life with Steve Jobs and that is in audible so you can go ahead and click through and and listen to this book and even better than that if you sign up for audible with uh audible.com appleinsider you get a free audiobook with a 30-day trial that's audible.com appleinsider for a free audiobook with your 30-day trial Dan tell me about the iPhone 10 and what the supply bottleneck is well we had a lot of people reporting that obviously the true the sensor bar is the most they described it Apple described it as being the most complicated stuff they've ever done and that structure sensor is difficult to build um so that keeps getting repeated I mean it's kind of obvious that that would be the the bottleneck but they keep officially repeating it as if it's as if this guy fall well I mean if it's if it's news like this is probably what's going to be hardest to make uh so it looks like there will be constrained Supply be hard to get um I think Apple obviously Apple does best when it has a product that everybody wants and it say here's here's a huge supply and everybody can buy one um but when you are pushing technology when you're innovating it's hard to do that and we've seen the last several products that Apple's had um airpods can't quite make enough to fill the demand it it would be better if Apple could it's clearly not doing it to just you know create the impression of lines it's um they talk about when you're when you're skiing if you're not falling down it means you're not trying hard enough and there's a couple expressions like that in sport so you know if you're not if you're not failing a little bit you're not really trying and the way that Apple micro fails you might say is to do things that are kind of on the edge of its ability it's not just doing things that are really simple and easy and and especially when you compare other companies you see that you know the PC industry has just been like dumping out just here's the same thing with a little bit more megahertz and a little bit more RAM and um for years I mean that's kind of an HP sort of thing that's how you a big company runs and the effect of that kind of thing that you know HP isn't doing as well as Apple has done because Apple's really pushing the boundaries in terms of like what it can deliver and with 10 it's like we're pushing it even faster because Apple could have just released the eight and said here's a new iPhone and everybody could have complained about how boring it was while they still bought it anyway um but with in shipping the 10 which is a harder thing to do so they made you know significant improvements to the eight but with the 10 they're kind of radically changing a lot of things that they didn't have to change but they're changing the those things to kind of deliver something that is um ambitious and what comes with that is being it's it's going to be more difficult to build and every year they've done stuff like that you know with the seven it was they didn't have to make it waterproof they could have gone another year without it being fully waterproof but by pushing to constantly try to do the best they can and that's what other companies are doing as well I mean Samsung is constantly also pushing but um rarely do we see the news that you know Samsung can't build enough of this to meet demand so let me ask you another problem that we've seen is the reports of crackling from the iPhone 8 speaker that there's an audio glitch during calls I haven't experienced that on my phone um but I did see the article you wrote about it they're addressing so there there are a number of people reporting it to Apple support pages and it's it seems to be a small number of people um at least that's what Apple statement says Apple statement says we're aware of the issue which is affecting customers in a small number of cases our teams at work on a fix which will be included in an upcoming software release which which sends to suggest that it's a software issue not Hardware um yeah I I have noticed a problem that I'm not sure where it's happening yet I'm going to have to do some more research but I'll take photos and I don't see any problem with the photo but when I post it to Instagram it has like a line going through it like a like a hairline vertical line that's kind of in the same place all the time and I don't know if that is being introduced by some weirdness in the new hardware or if it's a flaw on Instagram or what the issue is but it's like growing pains and there's things that can be like an issue it seems like there's some display issues in iOS 11 where it will do something a little wonky sometimes like I'll wake it up and the um I'll have the notification panel come up and then I'll immediately sign in so it'll put my apps on top of notifications instead of painting the you know wallpaper of the homepage which is like a little you know screen weirdness that is not typical for iPhone to be weird like that so Apple's also doing a lot of ambitious things about sort of rebuilding large parts of its stack I've seen people talking about um Mac OS High Sierra uh having a problem with I think it's the window server just kind of bugging outc it's well it bugs out especially I put the around the menu bar yeah so that isn't just they didn't just introduce a bug it's they've re Rewritten you know big chunks of the operating system on a regular basis and it's frustrating because things that we're working fine now have like a little weirdness to it a couple years ago that was the thing with Discovery D and was like we've changed how we've changed the structure of the network infrastructure kind of thing and here it's causing all these problems for like lots of different kinds of people but if they never changed anything then you'd have this kind of building up of CFT that you get to a problem where you're you're like the old mac7 from the early 90s where they just didn't ever fix anything and everything was just sort of patched with Band-Aids and then you just have this kind of huge mass of software that needs to be radically re overhauled on many levels and it's just a huge task and hard to do kind of the same thing with Windows or with you know I think with Android there's a lot of things that need to get patched and it's just are never going to happen because it's just so much work to try to change all this stuff without breaking all this other stuff and even if it does get patched or even if it does get Rewritten and it's never going to get rolled out to the billion or two people that are actually Android 8 rewrites a whole bunch of things because it rearchitecturing instructed it's not going to get put out there for the users give it a couple of years I'm running it on one phone but it's going to take about 2 years for everyone else to get it for a little bit and right that's how it works two years is a long time for technology to be sitting there waiting to get deployed I was being a little fous there I want to thank you so much Dan we're going to have Neil on in just a second to to talk about the watch and his experiences with the Apple Watch series 3 where can people find you and and where can they go to read more about your experiences with the iPhone 8 I been writing on Apple Insider and have a series of Technology articles we kind of look into some of the technology that is new in iPhone 8 and iOS 11 and then of course I'm on Twitter at Daniel Aaron Ean cool thanks again Dan cheers welcome back Neil thank you for coming of course now I'm going to ask you a question that's most popular with wristwatch blogs what's on your wrist right now I'm wearing the Apple Watch series 3 with cellular it is the aluminum AKA formerly known as the the sport model uh in space gray with the sport Loop band the Vel not not velcro though uh loop and hook band as they call it for yes legal re vcro is a Dupont trademark correct how are you liking the Red Dot on the crown uh I mean the Red Dot is ugly uh I think it's a misstep by Apple uh for a company that usually designs pretty well aesthetically um usually pretty impressed by their color choices and options and just those General look um the Red Dot is pretty terrible but not nearly enough to be a deal breaker um I mean if you don't like it you can put a sticker over it as we've detailed in stories or I mean I guess you could cover over it with a permanent marker if you really wanted to but you don't really see it when you're wearing the watch because the digital Crown doesn't face you but when you turn your wrist to the side to see it it's not particularly attractive and what has been the best change about having cellular on the watch so uh um you know we ran our review this week I really like this new Apple watch I think it's great um and one of the things that I really kind of Drew parallels to um in the uh review that we ran uh was kind of the history of development of iOS but more specifically the growth of the iPad from the initial promise of a device that could replace your PC to something that eventually has now gotten to the point where potentially could replace your PC depending on your workflow um and uh you know the Apple watch is not there yet um it's getting there and adding LTE is a huge step in that direction um it cannot be away from your phone all day and this is the thing that a lot of people don't realize and that they complain about and those are the people that are not really getting the point there's a reason that when you set up your Apple watch you still have to initiate it from your phone and you still have to go through the whole process and it still Tethered to your phone and it still backs up from your phone and all that stuff and that is that is the problem that is the reason that uh people are upset because you still have to use your phone for a majority of the day it's not meant to be used on its own without your phone for 24 hours a day you you could theoretically do that but you're probably not going to get the battery life especially if you work out use GPS audio streaming that sort of stuff I I know that you like to run yes tell me about what it's like to run with the Apple watch and where you're at with your review of it as it ships so yeah as it ships right now with watch OS 4 you cannot yet stream music from uh Apple music or iCloud music library what it ships with is the ability to sync music from your iPhone and store it on the watch itself and that is fine but it gets a lot better when you have a watch OS 4.1 and you can stream that's in beta yet so it wasn't mentioned in my review and it's not really fair to go into that because that's a product that's going to be forthcoming but Apple says it's going to be coming next month in October but for now um you can have your music locally stored on your watch you can go for a run which is stuff that you could do before but the difference is now you're you're in touch you're connected so um you know I went for a run uh well I've gone for a few since I got the watch but um you get a text message or you get a phone call and you're no longer missing it you no longer find out when you get back from your run it's just there it's with you you get it so things that you would do before like for example you get a text message on your watch and you would look down and you would see that you have a message and if you wanted to respond to that message it was convenient to be able to look down at your wrist and and see that but it wasn't particularly convenient unless you were in a situation where you couldn't access your phone or it was rude to access your phone it wasn't really convenient to just use the watch because you have your phone on you your phone has a bigger screen it's more luxurious it gives you the opportunity to type and do those sorts of things that you can't do on a small screen on your wrist um the the difference now is when your phone is gone you no longer have that ability and so you're kind of in a way forced to use the watch and it it it's not it's not a bad experience you have options so like texting is probably the the biggest thing I think for a lot of people that they're going to really enjoy with this cuz people don't make a lot of phone calls anymore it's mostly texting getting messages that sort of stuff so you can dictate with Siri you can uh scribble on there uh write uh letters or they have quick responses that you can scroll through just to tap on and obviously you're not going to want to um have a long conversation with a little watch like that or or as Steve Jobs said when the iPad first came out right War and Peace on it um but it is really convenient for you know you just raise your wrist talk to Siri uh send out a a text message and then just lower your wrist and go and it just kind of gets out of the way so you know I went for a run and I got a message and then I responded to it real quick or yesterday I was out running some errands that you know even have to be exercising and I just didn't bring my phone with me and you dictate the response and then if you um have airpods in it's even better um and now because Siri actually talks to you you don't even have to stare at your wrist to make sure that it's done or that that it's sent or whatever it just talks to you and and you can lower your wrist and go back to what you're doing so it just kind of gets out of your way and so when you want to do things like send a text or make a phone call or or do whatever um you can do it it's not necessarily going to be as um easy of an experience as it would be on a phone but it's certainly much easier because it's just on you you don't have to worry about it you're not like obsessively checking it it's just it's kind of like technology that gets out of the way and I find it interesting that this is happening now as the phones are getting bigger and Apple's kind of moving away from one-handed use and it almost feels like this is Apple's appeasement to people that don't necessarily want big phones or don't want to have their phone on them all the time you know I hear from a lot of women who say things like you know the pockets and their pants are too small you got to carry a purse you can't have your phone on you whatever this is a great product for somebody like that too not just somebody who wants to exercise or stream music or whatever somebody who just wants to get out of the house for 3 or 4 hours and not have their phone on them and not be checking Instagram and not have to bring a Pur or a bag or a big phone or whatever uh I think that there's a lot of use cases for a product like this that go beyond just the fitness and and and that sort of stuff um you know the the phone anxiety is a very real thing where you feel like you're you're missing out or you're um you know somebody May urgently be trying to reach you and you don't have your phone on you um and this certainly addresses that but uh there's also a more practical application to it um and that's even without the music streaming and I think that the music streaming alone is going to be a game Cher what kind of downsides have you noticed is there any downside that some of our listeners should be aware of I mean the main thing you have to be aware of is battery life uh if you were using it um in what Apple considers to be a typical use case which would be um an hour or so of working out and streaming music and then you know regularly checking throughout the day uh and when they say an hour of working out they mean without your phone nearby just on LTE um that'll get you uh about 18 hours of use which is pretty good now if you try to leave your phone at home all day and get an hour workout in and you know send texts and check the news and all that you're not going to get that much if you're doing heavy LTE use constant you're only going to get about four hours out of the watch so you'll get you know half of a workday essentially um but it's again it's not meant for that it's not the technology is not there the physics of it aren't there you know this is something that's the size of a stack of a couple silver dollars really um it is not meant to be an iPhone free experience you have to connect it to your iPhone to set it up you have to connect it to your iPhone to back it up you can't connect it to or set it up through your iPad or your iPod touch or your Mac uh and there's a reason for that and that's a very conscious effort by Apple to make it clear to the consumer that LTE is the ability to occasionally leave your phone behind but not to completely ditch your phone I mean you can't even set this thing up without having a phone to connect it to with a phone number because it shares the phone number and has a cheaper data plan and stuff so uh that that is an issue that you have to be aware of you can't think that you're going to buy this and then not have a phone or not ever use your phone but also uh you have to be aware that the data plan uh is pricey while Apple did a pretty good job of pricing the watch itself um it's only um uh $30 more for the LTE version than last year's pricing for the series 2 without LTE uh the carriers uh were not so generous and they are charging $10 a month in the US for data access which I think is pretty exorbitant I think it should be closer to $5 a month tell me about so so first of all actually I was going to ask you are personally I mean I understand you have this one for review purposes and so on but are you going to use it and pay the $10 a month I am yes I I like to run outside um and I like having all of my music on me and uh I like the idea of just leaving my phone behind sometimes I'm going out and I just don't want to have my phone I don't want to be distracted I don't want to be bugged I you know I'm on my computer all day for work I'm staring at my phone when I'm not at my computer constantly doing that kind of stuff there's something freeing about just not having your phone on you and to me that's worth the $10 a month and that's not even for exercising but when I run outside I've been using just my watch for a while um and it's nice uh it's it's liberating in some ways uh the only thing that I really found in using just the watch without the phone that I missed was uh not having a camera and and I'm not saying that they should put a camera on the watch I don't know if that's the right way to go it could be creepy it could be ugly on the watch it could be C be unusable yeah I mean there how do you I mean how do you for example uh distinguish between whether it's on the left or right wrist um and which direction the camera would face if it were a forward- facing camera that that sort of thing you know maybe this solution is an optional Smart Band or something that theoretical down the road who knows but um as it stands right now you know in my couple days of using it and just going out and not bringing my phone I could text I could get phone calls I could check and get you know news alerts uh emails you name it everything that I would want from a phone short of just wasting time on Facebook or SnapChat I could do on my watch and I could do it pretty efficiently more efficiently than you'd think um you know I don't really use Siri a lot on my phone but I use it all the time on my watch I use it to control homekit I use it to send texts um I use it to initiate you know music playback stuff like that um so I just find that it just works better when it's on your wrist and it's it just makes sort more sense it's more convenient um a lot of times talking to your phone feels a little bit unnatural when you can just pick it up and type um so those types of things having seral on the go um H getting notifications getting all that stuff everything that I wanted from my phone for the most part I could do with the exception of taking pictures and so I mean I guess if the inevitability of this is a device that is completely separate from the phone and you can leave your phone at home all day and it gets enough battery life and all that then I think at that point you inevitably have to add a camera um I don't know how you do that in a way that doesn't become unworkable but that's a future challenge for Apple to figure out I don't know that that's something that's going to happen in the near future either um so I don't mean to say all that is a it's a must have for the product or anything like that it's just more future think on my part but uh yeah I I I think that as it is right now you know one of the things I wonder about when I recommend products is like is this something that you could keep for two three four maybe even five years and be happy with it I think that if you know that you're not going to be able to ditch your phone completely uh and you're okay with that I think think that this is a very mature product that the new processor is fast the capabilities are there um there's a lot to like about this I'm I'm very very happy with the new Apple watch so how's it been using the beta so watch OS 4.1 beta came out this week I have to warn everybody if you install a watch beta and things go wrong as they have for multiple people on our staff including you right oh yes yeah uh you have to mail the you can't reset it on your own it's not like your phone where you can just reset it roll it back whatever you have to uh take your phone Hardware put it in the mail ship it off to Apple wait a few days for them to fix it and then send it back to you that's because there's no diagnostic port on the watch for you to access as a user there's no place for you to do it they have to take it and do it so I say that because don't install betas unless you really know what you're getting into because you could screw it up I do this for a living I have to especially on a especially on the watch where there's no way that you can recover it by yourself yes so I took the plunge um because obviously I'm excited about the ability stream music and also need to be able to write about it for work and stuff so I wouldn't usually install a beta one but I went for it and thankfully um fingers cross going forward but it installed okay and it works so I went out yesterday um and I ran some errands um and I uh was streaming music while I did that worked with like a charm and then I went for run last night uh about 3 miles um and it was about a cuz I had to recharge it or or put it on the charger while it was updating so I guess it was like halfway through the day it was topped off at 100% by the end of the day my battery was at 52% and that included a little over a half hour of running um and about you know another half hour to 45 minutes of running errands um without my phone on me LTE use music streaming sent a few texts uh that sort of stuff but what was really exciting to me is the music streaming was Rock Solid I went out of my way to pick albums that were not sync to my watch and I hadn't listened to in a while so I knew that it was going to be 100% dependent on LTE to to get that stuff going and as soon as the music started playing didn't cut out on the Bluetooth end didn't cut out on the data end um it sounded as good as you would imagine it was absolutely rocksolid perfect it didn't cut out of me once not once not once and and I've had a lot of people ask me things about um connectivity because when the watch reviews first came out uh there were some people that had issues because of uh public Wi-Fi networks and this is a bug in the Apple watch that Apple has said they're going to fix with a software update I have not run into this issue because I went through a purge of all public Wi-Fi networks before I even set up my watch because I was aware of the bug but basically what this means is if you connect to you know Starbucks WiFi or McDonald's or your local coffee shop or whatever um that requires a screen to bypass in order to get onto the Wi-Fi um this information is shared from your phone with your watch so your watch is going to defer to Wi-Fi networks when it can find them because the LTE battery life is so poor uh the problem is it doesn't know when there's a portal to access and because there's no browser on the watch itself there's no way for you to get B past that portal the Gateway so the watch connects to a Wi-Fi and then hangs on to it even though it has no data so uh then what happens is your phone's away and you don't really understand why your watch isn't working and why you don't have a connection I don't see this being a big issue going forward because Apple has said they're going to put out a software update and I imagine it'll probably arrive pretty soon and that it will address that bug and that'll be the end of that and no one will remember this but other than that um the LTE connections have been fine for me I haven't had any issues anywhere I get reception with my phone I get reception with my watch um I think the the general rule I would say is if you have two or more bars on your phone you're going to get a connection on your watch and it's going to be fine obviously if you don't have a connection with your phone in that area it's not like the the watch can make up for poor areas of Lte reception you know if AT&T is doing a bad job that's not the watch's fault what has been the best Improvement what's been the best thing about this I mean I think um the fact that you can now access Siri on the go because of Lte I mean obviously everything that you can do before you can now do on the go with LTE um but you know simple things like checking sports scores and stuff um it's nice to be able to do that and not have your phone on you and it's nice to have Siri talk to you because like I said before you dictate a text you then lower your wrist and you know that it's sent you before a the processor was slow and B Siri didn't talk so you have to kind of hold your wrist up and stare and give it like a one Mississippi 2 Mississippi before you got a response now you can just it just gets out of the way it's like all right I've dictated it put your wrist down and a lot of times before you've even fully lowered your wrist it's already sent it and telling you that everything's cool but it just feels good to be able to uh get it out of the way I've said this so many times here on the podcast the best wearable devices are ones that just get out of the way and yes you can interact with the watch and yes the experience is is pretty good when you interact with the watch but uh the best situations are where you just kind of raise your wrist get what you want and then lower it and then get on with your day um it's a small wearable device for a reason it's not a big screen it's not meant to watch YouTube videos or anything like that awesome Neil Hughes everybody the editor-in-chief of appleinsider.com where can people find you of course I just said it didn't I you can find me at appleinsider.com and you can follow me on Twitter at this is Neil and I would encourage everybody to check out our iPhone 8 iPhone 8 plus reviews from Dan the Apple Watch review from myself and then Mike has our Apple TV 4K review which will be running uh very soon so keep your eyes peeled for that I've been using the Apple TV for a few days now um and it's pretty nice um and I think uh people will be pretty happy with that upgrade if they have a 4K TV excellent we look forward to all of those and I want to ask our our listeners if you have used the Apple Insider app on the app store please feel free to go ahead and leave us a review for it if you haven't used it yet now is a perfectly good time to download it and check it out and stay up to date on all of your Apple news and while you're at it you can leave us a nice review on the podcast on iTunes thank you so much for listening we will be back next weekyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to amazing episode of 140 of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor and joining me is Daniel Aron delure hi from San Francisco welcome it's a beautiful day here tell me about this iPhone 8 so I got the iPhone 8 thinking it was going to be the moderate Improvement of the existing 7 uh The Stand Out features are actually kind of the similar to iPhone 10 you have the similar cameras except at least in the back and the same chip so a lot of the kind of super new stuff that Apple developed for the 10 is also part of the eight so it gives you a a alternative way to get into Apple's technology without either being on The Cutting Edge of price or The Cutting Edge of um things having changed I think we kind of discussed that before or The Cutting Edge of weight times yeah it looks like the antenna is going to have a harder it's going to be harder to get so instead of it being just yet another iPhone what is it really to you well in a lot of ways it is like the new iPhone I mean it's it's very similar in uh how you use it I mean it's identical but the things that are different are kind of wearing off all the things that are difficult to do on an existing iPhone um specifically to the camera uh one of the hardest things to take pictures of is in the light photography and I'm noticing I mean I trying to take a lot of pictures back and forth between my 7 plus and the8 plus and the biggest thing that I notice is uh low light because in if you have bright light there's less of a difference uh in terms of just taking photos you really notice that when you're taking low light photos it does a much better job of balancing what's the the exposure across the uh scene that you're taking one of the examples in the review that I did if you just hold up a phone and try to take a picture of something a lot of times it will balance it out to the point where any bright lights are too bright and the dark areas are sort of visible but if you focus on if you tap to focus the exposure on the bright area it makes everything else too dark and just the faster brains of the eight have a much better job do a much better job of balancing that out so you can say I want to focus on this but I want to keep everything else together and that's particularly noticeable when you use the flash because the flash goes from being I almost never use a flash on a mobile camera because it's typically so um it's so bright that it blows out things and it's kind of an unflattering lightness yeah it's it's uncontrollable yeah because the front is so bright it also makes everything else in the background just Fade to Black and the new Flash on the eight does a sort of a test strobe and then it does an actual strobe where it does a combination of what what they're calling slow sync where they use less flat but they also slow down the exposure or um the shutter as I recall and that gives you a couple things one it does much more natural flattering lighting so you don't have you don't have the kind of washed out kind of death look of Flash and it also does a much better job of not having huge Lin flares if you have glasses or if you have any piece of glass anywhere a lot of times shooting a flash will just light that up so that makes a big difference in being able to use Flash and then also it it keeps the background from being completely just falling into darkness because the front is so so bright and so you can do things like taking a photo in the dark uh I took a couple friends up to uh Twin Peaks which is a lookout over San Francisco and you have this you know field of Lights in the background but it's very difficult to take a picture of people standing in front of the lights and get both of those together and it worked great with the with the new FL because it illuminates them in the foreground and the background is still nice and in fact you can even do tricks like moving the camera slightly while you're taking it and it will keep you in Focus because you have been brightly illuminated where the background will be sort of blurred so that's kind of a cool effect to do so you can be sort of artistic now yeah it's like a new trick to try and then of course in addition to the actual LED lighting the 8 plus also features portrait lighting which I have some questions for Apple about how exactly it works because when you take a a portrait on an 8+ and you an isync or iCloud copies it to your other phones it remains editable you get that same interface on on the seven cuz if you take pictures with the seven you only get the portrait mode which means you can turn off the okay or not the the Blurred background or the depth effect of the background right and those two things are different they're actually taking the seven I believe takes a lower resolution um depth map so it takes a photo and it also takes in conjunction with that it uses the two lenses to calculate a depth map of who's in the you know what is the foreground and what is in the background and it's not just a binary front back it's also kind of a gradient of this is closer and this is further away and on the eight I believe it's just doing that in high resolution and so you can actually have you're not just saying foreground background you're saying here's the features of your face and I believe it's also using facial recognition to to do you know this is the sides of your jaw and this is your where your eyes are and so it Maps out a a lighting scenario that's kind of based on what you would look like if you had a bounce card or if you had lighting from a different angle that give you a dramatic if you had threo lighting for example or yeah and so those effects um they're so calling it in beta sometimes it doesn't work quite as you expect sometimes there's an air that was true for the I mean that was true for the portrait mode for iPhone 7 and seven plus as well was that exactly it's true for anything on a digital camera can like mess well but they they launched it in beta for three months or something before they decided to release it as this is the public final version of it right and they keep improving upon that so it's something that once you have the data you can keep refining it and making it better because it's there's a lot of algorithms in play of how it decides what's how to crop the photo but or how to how to you interpret the depth map I guess is what it is doing so you're saying that make sure I understood you correctly if you take a photograph on the iPhone 8 plus and then that photograph is synchronized with your iCloud photo library and you check and edit that photo on your iPhone 7 or 7 plus and and please please answer make sure I understand which one of those I think it requires a plus it requires the seven I'm not sure about well I I'm not sure about that because I haven't actually tried it back to an earlier non plusus phone but that that was kind of shocking that I got that the new UI on the older phone and so that suggests that um rather than being a live effect that's calculated on the 811 it's when you take the photo it creates those variations or it somehow it it records all the data at the time that it's captured and it's all editable after the fact and that's that's what IED from the keynote right it remains editable yes it remains editable but what I'm saying is I would have I would I would have expected it to remain editable on the 11 because it's doing this big effect that requires horsepower on the the new chip but when you take a photo and you sync it to an older phone it Still Remains editable on that older phone so I new interace what yeah what I believe what it's doing is it's when you take a photo it's creating these VAR variations or it's calculating you know the effect that you would apply and then that's how you can edit it after the fact it's not reapplying and changing those it's just selecting between which one you want to be the so it's kind of like a live photo where you're picking out the key frame interesting that you think it's just toggling between things that it's already done as opposed to rerunning the calculations on the older processor I'd be interested if you can find out more information about that because definitely if if if you were able to do the calculations on the at10 7 plus they should have made it available for that and you know it should either work or it shouldn't you know should work with photos you take so the the two things I can see is one if you take a photo with the 7 plus have to that effect right but if the camera Hardware isn't there to give it enough information you don't get to see that exposed but if the camera information was recorded in a photograph that was synced over the information is there and that's why the interface shows up I mean that makes sense to me I I see how it's awkward to to try and explain you'd rather it just be it works or it doesn't but no I'm just I'm surprised because I would when I was looking at the the effect the portrait lighting I was imagining that it's doing it in real time so that when you choose it your your chip is actually like refiguring out the best way to light this whereas what I think what happens is when you first take the photo it creates those effects or creates those variations and then they're frozen into the photo so even if you put that photo somewhere else you can still edit it so live photo or something yeah I would have thought they were frozen in I would have thought that it's recalculating it and that it's the the camera sensors that can't record the correct information for it to have that ability on the 7 plus I think the sensors are kind of the same I think the biggest difference is the com ational ability of the process of the chip the ISP on the you know A1 is what's doing those kind of changes that's why you know in a parallel example if you can take a low light photo on the eight that's going to continue to look better than a lowlight photo that you took on the seven even if it sinks over to a seven it doesn't get worse because it's not recalculating anything it's just looking at something you've already but the other the other thing that that would matter about is in the future if Apple improves that portrait lighting feature it wouldn't necessarily Pro photos that have already been taken so they're not going to be recalculated um so that's something I'd like to clarify because that's kind of an interesting idea of well whether it's just taking a solid where whether it's taking a frozen you know artwork this is done it's finished you can pick between the alternative versions of it but it's it's been frozen this is the George Lucas debate all over again well it's just trying things be remastered basically yeah but uh you raised a good point about the image signal the the image processor and its role in this right you know clearly if if it's the image if the sensors are the same and it's the image signal processor in the middle that's the uh the the different part of the chain then that becomes important to know it could be doing it live on that image signal processor and and you're right it just doesn't have that on the other phone it's interesting definitely definitely look into that if you can what else did you find from using the iPhone 8 what else was a surprise for you uh let's see what's surprising I think well wireless charging is kind of a handy idea but the power delivery USB power delivery and being able to charge rapidly is so much nicer I mean it's like to me it's like such a bigger deal to be able to intently purposely get your phone up to to charge much faster and it's kind of interesting to do comparisons of here's a you know previous iPhone connected to the fastest way know how to get power into it on a you know iPad charger or something and then here's plugged into USBC and it's you can like watch it go up oh yeah no I know that experience does get warm as you charge it but I when I traveled internationally I uh use an Android phone sometimes and and I was last traveling with a Huawei made Nexus 6p which fast charges using a USBC connector and it's like you say it's it's really revelatory just how quickly you can charge a phone and when you have zero battery and can have it full in a very short period of time it makes a big difference doesn't it yeah yeah it's very frustrating to especially when you're traveling you go out and but I mean I typically carry around a battery with me that can charge it up a full charge or two yeah but what if you didn't have to do that any longer yeah I wonder if there's battery packs at support power delivery I haven't I haven't seen any that's a good question I haven't seen any because the other thing that I that I noted um is if you have the the the USBC power adapters that were created for the MacBooks uh it fits at least 29 watts and there's also some third party ones that work Ed the same power delivery format so power delivery has a couple different things and so the MacBooks are also using the same technology to power it's basically just using a higher voltage and it's delivering power so it requires a couple things one of which is a bigger wire so the the lightning skinny light lightning cables that have shipped with iPhones forever were never designed to be transmitting like 14 watts of power or 14 volts of power um so you do need to have a new cable which is not cheap and uh that's probably something that I wouldn't want to experiment with too much seeing how what kind of what kind of cables you could can you remind me does does the iPhone 8 use Quick Charge 3 do you remember power delivery is a specification that's that's part of USB and it is parallel with like USB 3 and USBC so it's not just because something is one of those doesn't mean it's the other one right but it's a part of that USB 3.1 spec okay right so having a usb3 cable doesn't necessarily mean that it's a force Power delivery and so on yeah it looks as if there are battery power banks that support power delivery yeah I would imagine so the MacBooks if you plug your phone into the MacBook I no it does not charge at a faster rate even if you use the USBC to lightning cable yeah and also MacBooks if you plug a Macbook into a MacBook Pro it it kind of trickle charges if you plug a big MacBook Pro into a Macbook you get like like two Watts yeah but um which is not enough to do anything it it says it's not charging like like when you plug an iPad into a 5V charger right it will light up that it's charging but in fact will not charge it might even drain well it says yeah says that it's plugged in but it's like not charging because it's not getting enough to charge fast if you turn the display off you'll get a little bit of charge but I mean it will it'll slowly go so the thing about these battery Banks is that many of them that have power delivery have power delivery on the port that charges the battery they don't necessarily have power power delivery on the output side of that so you could recharge your battery quickly but you may not necessarily charge your device quickly right which is the same deal is the MacBooks so they they take power delivery but they can't um pass it on so you can't daisy chain them together or power them out right yeah that's what it looks like very cool so it's you know I I found that wireless charging was very convenient on other devices but like you say it's it's not something that is nearly as much fun as as recharging quite fast you know you you plug it in and you're done versus putting it down and hoping that it's uh charged enough when you pick it up yeah the handy thing about Wireless power or Wireless induction charging is that it it's a standard so that if everyone's using the same one uh in an airport or something you don't have to have three or four different jacks or alternatively instead instead of having a USB port you just have the ability to lay your phone down on a pad and I I have I've seen a couple of these things around it it isn't quite as ubiquitous enough to be useful and us is quite useful for a lot of things so there's a lot of things you could do with USB in terms of powering different kinds of devices that you have different cables for that might not be able to power over a wireless Pad but yeah so it has some potential for convenience I mean one of the things that I found in airports is that there are sometimes USB ports that are installed in say the uh the armrests of the seats in the lounge or the armrest in the seats of the uh the gate area that don't necessarily charge all devices for example I can I can plug an iPhone into the USB port on that that charger and it won't do a thing I have to get out the USB brick and do it through the wall through regular power connection do you think that now that that Chi is a standard that's adopted by of course other phones and now the iPhone that will see it proliferate much more that uh that they'll become a botus and will start to matter I think there's sort of a a style element to it um and the other thing that's going to keep changing is how fast wireless charging charges and so the standard also like Apple's working on this idea of having multiple devices on the same pad it's kind of more for for a consumer thing but um because a pad can only charge it right now the iPhone's only support five eventually it'll support seven which is kind of it's not terribly fast it's similar to the little tiny block that they ship with and it would still be slower than the larger block that you know most people are Weare than an iPad USB block will charge faster and there's a lot of um adapters for your car or even some battery packs that will say you know this port is regular USB and this port is lightning USB it's 2.1 amps right 2.1 or 2.4 12 wats and it's noticeably faster so the same thing is going to probably happen to wireless charging to where you go to an airport and it's like wow we installed these charging pads and oh they're old old style ones that only charge at 7 watts in a couple years so I mean right now USB is you know usba is is really common and useful but we're also seeing this sort of tipping the iceberg towards USBC eventually we're going to have perhaps ports changing because the other thing is with USB a the old style USB it's also Limited in how much power it can deliver because it was only ever designed USB 2 is only designed to deliver two Watts really right but there are usba connectors for USB 3 and 3.1 it's just that and they have a lot more conductors inside of them one of the difficulties is you can't really tell what you've got when you when you're looking at those right yeah but I mean most you the big indicator for usb3 is that the are not anything yeah they're they're USB 2 at the most there's least common denominator so that's kind of the same issue for wireless charging is it's going to be the lowest common denominator kind of thing the uh most universal port at least in the United States is the AC power because you can always plug whatever you got into that but then you have to have more cables and whatever you end up with the sponsored by Samsung charging posts and airports and so on so what what has been the thing you've enjoyed the most you know you said the the charging but what else what else have you really found that has made this iPhone better than all the other iPhones that came before it for you uh well definitely the camera I mean that's what I've been spending most of my time looking at uh the just being able to take better pictures and having some of the details handled for you uh so you can kind of focus on what you're trying to take a picture of instead of trying to figure out why it's blowing out this area of the photo or why you're getting so much grain and low light or why you try to take a picture with the Flash and it kind of destroys the photo so I use my phone as a camera so much that that's a really compelling reason to upgrade there's a couple other features that in addition to the W wireless charging the true- tone display is nice it took me a while to kind of figure out what I thought of it but I'm noticing more and more it just feels kind of more natural and particularly in comparison with my previous phone which I never saw anything wrong with when I was using it but when I kind of go back and forth between them I notice that when I'm in sort of softer warmer light it it's commonly uh looks really harshly blue and so what trueone does is it keeps the uh keeps the screen looking the way a piece of paper would look in the lighting that you're in so it's doing constant color management to to look natural to kind of reflect your environment instead of just being like this cold unchanging display technology so that's kind of growing on me the uh screen looks great um I don't otherwise I don't see a big difference between I mean I don't I don't see a difference between that and the previous seven which was quite a good quality screen um the OLED screen that comes on the 10 I haven't examined it with a microscope uh but it has that like Lush black look to it it that looks glossy because the blacks are so black because it's a totally different technology instead of instead of creating a picture and Shining Light through it like an LCD does it's actually all those pixels are Illuminating so it's if if pixels are not Illuminating because they're black they're super black whereas on LCD it's it's saying this is black and then it's shining a light through it and hopefully there's not a whole lot of light coming through but there's it's still kind of like a gray black compared to OLED yeah that's one of the Hallmarks of OLED so you have that incred contrast feel to the phone I mean it looks kind of warmer and but I yeah obviously I notice it most when I'm comparing between the two phones but should anyone be concerned about that you know if they were trying to do um like things that are color dependent or color uh color critical I don't think so it's it's kind of in the same vein as um night what's it called night mode night shift where night shift is quite obviously taking all the blue out or taking a lot of the blue out so that when you first do it you notice it's like wow shockingly different but then after a minute your eyes kind of adjust to it and you don't see that uh as much and it's kind of a similar idea that once you turn on trueone it becomes sort of natural if there's some reason you don't want it on you can turn it off really easily so I wouldn't say that that would could possibly be a negative but I've never felt like I needed to turn it off okay you know I I ask because all the time I see people who are worried about the the correctness of their color you know they're they're trying to show something that they've painstakingly picked out the right panone color or they've they've photographed in such a way that they're sure that it the right representation of the colors has to come through and now they're they're concerned because they can't be positive that the iPhone will show it the same way twice depending on who's viewing it where right well the with trueone or or with yeah with trueone it doesn't change the way your camera takes photos so I mean if you were really concerned concerned about a very specific type of color you wouldn't I guess I don't see the application you're saying but it's like if I I was saying Hey I want you to see this color it's very specific way um it's it's changing it based on ambient lighting so that changes no matter what whether you change whether your screen is adjusting or not you can have a very you can give somebody a printed out Pantone color Tab and if they're looking at it in different ambient lighting colors it's going to look different it's the same same so the point of this is to to guarantee that it looks the same way depending on the light you're in yeah I mean if you had some Mission critical this has to be this color orange you would have to say you'd have to look at it in a specific light to look see the same way I do and you might both have to take an eye test to make sure that you're both perceiving it exactly the same but okay you know it's it's not that something I'm harping on so much but it's something that's come up in the past when trone was first announced and it's something I see from uh some some photographers and some designers who want to make sure that when they show something to a client the client is going to see it the same way they intended yeah and if you're if you're doing something that is like I said Mission critical like that you would say hey don't look at this with Chon turned on but um yeah I think that's probably one of the least least real problems that you could have with an iPhone 8 I don't think that's something that sounds like one of those things where when anytime anyone sees anything that Apple says they immediately start creating reasons why that could be the end of the world yes that's pretty much what it was was the sky is falling because there's this new thing that affects our colors and not even affects them negatively necessarily but oh my gosh they're monkeying with colors yeah I mean Apple does have a pretty good track record of the company certainly makes mistakes but when they're doing something like that there's usually a lot of thought that goes into making sure that it's working correctly so I mean there's a little bit of benefit of the doubt just to be like probably if they made this one the keynot features it's not halfhazard Le just like thrown out there in contrast to you know like other Hardware makers that just say like hey hey we have this TV with a super brilliant mode that just blows the color out so it looks really good in the showroom and people will buy it it's like what if it's not accurate and that's exactly what that feature was for exactly and also that feature exists so that when it gets home people say wait this looks terrible the shop that sold it can sell calibration Services yeah you need to professionally calibrated you have to have someone come out and install it for you so that'll get you let me let me ask the the iPhone 8 is the first phone that has Apple's own homegrown GPU inside it's it's not one of the power VR chipsets that came from imagination in the past have you noticed anything different about this phone using that new chipset uh apart from battery life it seems like to me they kind of said the battery life was going to be the same and it seems like it's better battery life I mean I'm also comparing a brand new phone with a year old phone so that might have some minor impact on it um but I I backed up and restored the same stuff that's on my phone so it's pretty equal situation um apart from the age of the battery um I don't think in the first year this should be like a remarkable notice in battery life uh going down but that certainly plays into the uh ability for the battery to last longer because it's faster but it's more efficient so they're saying it's 30% faster but it's you know doing the same tasks it's can last for is half as much power which is a pretty significant thing that even if you're whether you're doing heavy Graphics work like if you're you know in the middle of a video game or if you're just doing just the kind of basic things that a processor does and handling your animations and whatever um it seems like battery life is a biggest thing I noticed uh there are iPhone the 6 Plus was the first iPhone I've ever noticed it just felt kind of like a little bit slow and I think a big part of that was the fact that it had you know it went from you know the 4in iPhone or the 5in iPhones the iPhone 5 Series had what almost a million pixels or something it was like 750,000 something like that and the standard iPhone 6 had if I'm saying this right I think it's like around 1 million and then the plus is almost 2 million so it's a big jump in how many pixels you're having to push and it's the first time it ever felt like there was sort of a a little bit of a Android like pause or you know like Jitter in animations and things it felt a little bit slow sometimes you turn the phone and it's kind of like there's a little slight hesitation uh that you really notice because you're used to an iPhone being so buttery smooth all the time and every year that gets a little bit better and it feels like it's also better on the eight and there's also a lot more uh animations in iOS 11 that I notice so it feels like it's doing more work but it's doing a better job of it um there's still I mean it can still always get get faster and more dialed in but um that's another kind of interesting aspect of when we talking about the tin coming up is it has a even higher resolution but it's also has the same sort of aspect ratio it's kind of like a tall version of the seven it's a taller version of the smaller phone even though it has a higher resolution than the plus it's not like the plus format where you have sort of a wide right the wideness to it the plus is a little bit wider and and you notice since when you switch it to landscape mode where you don't necessarily get all of the same toolbars and stuff that you'd have room for on the plus- siiz device right and the the plus actually has a they call it a standard mode and a zoomed mode and the zoomed mode is basically looking like a a standard phone a standard iPhone scaled up screen right I wish they had another mode that was kind of the other direction where everything was like a little bit smaller and Tighter you know scale down so you could even see even more but sure okay so let's let's uh close out the iPhone section for a second and go ahead and give us one final thought on that iPhone and where you think the iPhone 8 fits in one of the things and I'm going to do an ad read okay one of the things that you talked about was the rumor of having a a new tin in the future that would be like a 10 plus right so there's there's a rumor that we have here that suggests that next year 2018 that Apple will launch a jumbo sized 6.4in iPhone 10 and uh this story comes from the investor who reported on Monday that that citing local Parts makers that instead of making a 5.28 in OLED phone that instead 2008 looks like a 5.85 in phone and a 6.46 in model and you know there there they also suggest that well there could be a possible insertion of a greater than 6in LCD model on the line somewhere um that Apple has reportedly signed several contracts with Samsung for multiple OLED size screens yeah I we know we know that Apple likes to change the resolution of their phones just like frantically every year that's not true but over the the sarcasm that that when you read your your sarcasm with that heavy of a veil over it it's hard to hear it at first that was not thinly veiled at all um in in the whole history of iPhone Apple has changed the resolution how many times I mean they went to um went to R there was the change between four and five well they changed right into the Flor so that was that was putting twice as many pixels on the screen to do nothing more but just make everything sharper and then the five same ratio as previous and then the five increased the changed the ratio so increased the amount of things you can see on the screen without changing the DPI then the six changed it again and the six plus so that both changed those a little bit so it was like a different ratio yeah and it was also a larger resolution in terms of size too right and and then again with the uh the 10 so I I can count that on one hand yeah and and there's a good reason for that it's not just that Apple's too slow in doing these things because Samsung is like changed the resolution on their phones like every year and they have like multiple twice multiple phones that they're changing yeah within those years and a big part of that is because Samsung makes screens and that's how they can you know the best way they can stand out from a bunch of Android phones that work the like and do are pretty much exactly the same is to frantically say you know hey we have an even bigger double plus you know Super AMOLED Plus+ display this year where you know they can't really say anything else they can't deploy a lot of Technologies they've tried to do technology before and you know all the wave stuff and the focus attention like looking at your gaze and all that kind of stuff just sort of didn't really get any any traction so they've kind of focused on Hardware features and saying hey this is a this letter acronym and that's kind of what Samsung can do CU that's all they can do um Apple doesn't really have that what Apple has the strongest thing Apple has is the platform and so Apple has to protect that in terms of they can't just like randomly make changes to the platform for a bunch of different models that would fractionalize and just dramatically increase the amount of work that developers have to do to make an app look good on each of those devices yeah I was going to say that that the you know when they make a change the change affects several different people affects users who have to get accustom to the new change and it affects developers who have to do a large amount of work to accommodate it yeah depending on how much change there is and with the 10 you know they're making change to the resolution and the the ratio of the screen is different and there's a number of things that are going to change all at once and it's uh something that developers have to account for but that's going to be a popular phone you know it's not like a a micro model that they're sort of putting out like the SE was like a small phone but it was exactly the same as all the other phones that were like it before it's just faster so it doesn't radically change what developers have to do to make phone I mean it doesn't really change anything for developers to be able to support it in the way that you know apps running on are going to look good uh whereas the 10 there's going to be a lot of people that are expecting things to change and to look good on the on the new phone and there's some people talking about you know I want my apps to look this way I want to be able to see the ears or not the Notch and those are things that are going to have an impact on what developers do or what they to do to make it look good on the the new phone that people are buying so people will want to use their apps um I I don't there was a clear reason why Apple came out with this strategy of having the six and the six plus because they're covering a couple different bases going forward they now have the most phones they've ever sold the most generations of phones that are basically you have the SE from the hold over of five era you have the sixes which are A variation of price basically based on features and then the new 10 which is sort of the future so going into the future does Apple need to have a 10 and a 10 plus well it kind of depends on how well uh whether people are really wanting to have a larger screen or just a bigger screen because this is a screen of the Plus in terms of size a larger screen but it's in a smaller I think there are two I mean I think there are two ways that people use a plus-size device and it's a broad generalization but the the first way is the way that you said right you you would prefer that there was a a uh a zoom out mode that allowed you to pack more on the screen right right there so there are people that use it in regular mode like you do that try and fit as much as they possibly can on the screen to take advantage of the larger screen but at the same time there are people uh and and sometimes the elderly fit into this category who like to zoom in or or people who have eyesight difficulties who like to use the zoomed part so they have the larger screen with everything represented larger on the screen so that they can actually see what they're looking at and use the device with and have it be accessible to them so there's definitely a utility in having a larger sized device the the question is what do you do with that screen size right and how do you accommodate those two very different types of users right there is there is a reason why you want to have larger screen sizes but those accessibility features can work on any size phone so you can even have a very small phone that has larger text on it um the six and 6 Plus both or you know those two generations those two models both support the idea of having zoomed content and you can use accessibility to zoom it up even larger so but there are tons of consumers who buy the larger one on the basis of their eyesight whether it's sensible or necessary or not that's that's the choice they're making more bigger text on a bigger phone with the 10 you can put uh similarly large text and almost as much on a phone that's the size of a a seven is the idea now whether this whether there's demand for so I think most of the demand goes towards like what you're saying for people who want to have bigger text be more readable um and kind of I'm kind of like the other side of that Spectrum right now until my eyes totally go downhill is wanting to have more on the screen at once you can read more text kind of things um whether or not people want to have a larger screen because a large you know a much larger screen is is based on having a larger device at some point you know the the size of the screen is sort of the deciding how big your device is going to be it's kind of like um spinning Optical media if you have if your music is on a CD your player can only get to be so small before the CD is like sck out the side but whether or not there's a demand for people who want larger and larger physically larger phones I think that the tin is going to I think it really hits a sweet spot in delivering a lot of the functionality of the Plus for whatever reason people want it because a big part of is not just you know bigger text it's also having your photos bigger if you look at a photo taken on a seven and you compare it to a 7 plus it just looks better the 7 plus you can see more of it and you know you're seeing across you know higher resolution so on a on a tin it's going to be slightly less wide but you're still getting resolution and and a it's physically the screen size is almost as big as the plus it's just the cas is the overall case is smaller so I'm kind of wondering if that's going to be a good compromise because before you had to kind of have two different screen sizes to prevent the phone from just getting too big because originally when the six came out the six and six plus there was only something like 10% that went for the plus and every year that's gotten bigger and this year I'm hearing people talking about that the looks like the plus is selling about half of the eight now in part I think that's because a lot of people who want to smaller phone are waiting for a 10 but just the the demand for having a a bigger screen phone is going up so it's interesting to be it will be interesting to see how much of that demand goes towards the 10 as a form factor and right now it's going to be a little bit held back because of the it's you know significantly more expensive I see all these reviews and they're saying oh the t is just a little bit more it's like $300 more that's kind of that's you know a significant amount for a lot of people shopping for phones but I think also it's kind of like the car market where if you remember in the 70s and 80s that you know the price of cars suddenly jumped upward because of all these new technologies that you needed to have on a car to be safe enough and um it created sticker shock but eventually people just got to the point where it's like oh this is how much car costs we're going to pay for it and I'm not going to pay for a cheaper car even though there are cheaper cars that I could find around the world because I know that they're not really safe because I've seen what you know a similar looking car in Mexico once it crashes it's like people inside are dead right well and cars that are sold in country have to comply with that country's safety rules so it's not like you should feel bad necessarily about buying a car in in your own country but um you're right the prices have gone up extremely you know when when you and I were kids it wasn't not even the 70s in the ' 80s and '90s um you you could buy a Hyundai Exel for you know what $6,000 that wasn't a nice car but it was not a nice car but it was basic Transportation right it was it was in fact probably the worst car that Hyundai ever made um had a reputation for terrible engine problems but you know you could get affordable transportation and drive it until it broke which was relatively quickly after you drove it off the L but now in order to to buy Transportation you end up spending what $25,000 the median prices somewhere in the 30s and for a lot of people that is an a large part of their income a large percentage of you know their income is going towards paying for a vehicle and people do it because it's you know kind of important to have a car in most places but well because your your job depends upon it right there are some places where you simply don't have access to public transport and the same kind of thing with having a phone is there's so many things that we need to do that are kind of dependent on having a phone just access to information and being able to you know get information about your flight or contact somebody immediately or you know all these things there's so much value in not just for work but it's also kind of like a car where it's a combination of need to have and also love to have and enjoy and it does all the things it allows you to do all the things that make you happy kind of thing and so I think that there's Less Price sensitivity than a lot of people think there's been a lot of there's been kind of a a narrative for for years and years talking about how apple is just in terrible trouble because the price of phones are just going to plummet to zero basically and we've seen that happening in Android land but it's not happening in iPhones iPhones just keep getting more expensive and they're getting more expensive because Apple's driving the technology to to retain that value and that's something everybody else wants to do I mean Google tried to do it Samsung is trying to do it they just haven't been able to do it and you have companies like essential you know here's Andy Rubin saying hey we're going to take this Android technology and make a good phone out of it and you know they make this fancy phone with a lot of leading technology but they can't sell 5,000 of them so it's not just getting expensive it's also being able to deliver an expensive product that people find Value in and be able to support it and have something that people find Reliable and think is going to you know to see it as something that's going to safeguard their data and and room is BET is that there was a market for a super expensive android-based phone from the person who's is the namesake for Android and that also had connectors on the back for accessory devices to attach to it and and the question is he he thought for sure that there was that market but it it's one of those things where you ask yourself okay so how do you identify who those people are and how do you find those people how do you reach those people and I I think they spent a lot of time identifying and what they wanted to have out of a phone without really identifying how they were going to reach the people that were going to buy the thing which is kind of a Google thing I mean that's kind of Google what Google has been doing over and over again is coming up with a whole lot of ideas about hey we could do this we could do this and we do this and they don't think about how are we actually going to sell this how are we going to get people to know about it before Andy Rubin did Android and and came to Google to do Android um he was one of the people behind the sidekick do you remember the sidekick device danger yeah well the danger hiptop that eventually got sold as the T-Mobile Sidekick in the US and that device was a wild success but it was a wild success because they had carriers pushing it and because they had people who spread the word about how great it was to be able to use it for email and chat it wasn't a premium phone it was a plastic phone for kids I mean it was a a very affordable phone that was being sold by like Sprint it was a variable affordable phone it was like almost free well like like I said T-Mobile and T-Mobile at the time was in fourth place right it was a very accessible device you didn't have to work to get one and it wasn't made out of Premium materials yeah it was like a a very utilitarian like was a texting phone at the height of you know texting was like where the value was wasn't like people needed a browser or you know a computer phone so it was it totally hit that kind of deliver it was like the Blackberry for younger people a great communicator it really was it really was but it it changed things and it was every phone after that that um and that was his big success so the question your team came from Apple you know Andy Rubin himself was working at Apple and so it was kind of there was this sort of original culture of how do we build things that can be sold a hardware company to you know functionally doing it at danger and then Google is sort of a hey we have technology we can just go wild in every direction we want to all at the same time we can try 20 different things at once and have it all in beta and it will just be like this experimental open source program just for everything and we don't have to worry about any of it making money because we're making money on advertising on a totally different and our customers are not even people who are starting to sell this technology to our customers are you know companies that we telling them to spend this money on advertising and that has not changed you know Google can come out with all the hardware that they want and they still can't sell it because they don't they're not a hardware company and they can buy Hardware companies and it doesn't make them into a hardware company what has changed is since they reorganized under alphabet they have been making all of their different divisions and units stand up and have to account for themselves and if they can't make money then they get put on a short leash yeah they've been cracking down a lot of that and that's why they've canceled a lot of their stuff but I don't I don't see that there's any radical difference in in terms of what they're trying to do they're still making almost all their money for advertising and you know they put out some products they you know worked with HC to build products but um they're not selling them in quantities that really matter you The Verge talks about all these products like they're you know on the same level as Apple's products but and you know on a technical level yeah you can review them in the same kind of seriousness but when people go to buy a laptop they don't say hm do I want a Macbook or do I want a Chromebook nobody's making that decision right the customer that's that would ask that question is never going to ask that question because cuz they're there are two different budgets and two different needs right and the people the people that don't have money to buy computers like schools are like yeah let's load up on Chromebooks because they're really easy to manage and people who say I want you know something that works and that you know it's flexible and does a lot of things that I already do and works with the software I want they're not going to say hm should I buy a Chromebook because maybe I can just do everything in in Chrome with some extensions yeah so it's it's a totally it's it's not an open market of you know who's going to buy this stuff and it's a very similar thing with phones that you know there's people who are just like I hate apple and I'm never going to buy anything that looks like an iPhone unless it comes from Google then I'll buy it um but that segment of the population is quite small and it's not really that important because those people also don't pay as much for apps and they don't pay for a lot of things so they're not creating that kind of market for people who buy apps or subscribe to content and so it's it's just not as um important of a product category support for today's show comes from audible audible content includes an unmatched selection of audiobooks original audio shows news comedy and more from leading Publishers broadcasters entertainers and business information providers unlike a streaming or rental service with audible you own your books so you can access them anytime time anywhere from almost any device including your iPhone iPad Android or even an Amazon and Fire tablet if you have one of those audible makes getting more books in your life easy and they have an unbeatable selection of audiobooks and incredible performances you can transform your commute and ride with Audible and they have such a huge catalog of books for example I I like reading biographies and there's one in audible by Chris Anne Brennan who was of course um had a connection with Steve Jobs let's say without giving too much away and and she wrote a book called The Bite in the Apple A Memoir of my life with Steve Jobs and that is in audible so you can go ahead and click through and and listen to this book and even better than that if you sign up for audible with uh audible.com appleinsider you get a free audiobook with a 30-day trial that's audible.com appleinsider for a free audiobook with your 30-day trial Dan tell me about the iPhone 10 and what the supply bottleneck is well we had a lot of people reporting that obviously the true the sensor bar is the most they described it Apple described it as being the most complicated stuff they've ever done and that structure sensor is difficult to build um so that keeps getting repeated I mean it's kind of obvious that that would be the the bottleneck but they keep officially repeating it as if it's as if this guy fall well I mean if it's if it's news like this is probably what's going to be hardest to make uh so it looks like there will be constrained Supply be hard to get um I think Apple obviously Apple does best when it has a product that everybody wants and it say here's here's a huge supply and everybody can buy one um but when you are pushing technology when you're innovating it's hard to do that and we've seen the last several products that Apple's had um airpods can't quite make enough to fill the demand it it would be better if Apple could it's clearly not doing it to just you know create the impression of lines it's um they talk about when you're when you're skiing if you're not falling down it means you're not trying hard enough and there's a couple expressions like that in sport so you know if you're not if you're not failing a little bit you're not really trying and the way that Apple micro fails you might say is to do things that are kind of on the edge of its ability it's not just doing things that are really simple and easy and and especially when you compare other companies you see that you know the PC industry has just been like dumping out just here's the same thing with a little bit more megahertz and a little bit more RAM and um for years I mean that's kind of an HP sort of thing that's how you a big company runs and the effect of that kind of thing that you know HP isn't doing as well as Apple has done because Apple's really pushing the boundaries in terms of like what it can deliver and with 10 it's like we're pushing it even faster because Apple could have just released the eight and said here's a new iPhone and everybody could have complained about how boring it was while they still bought it anyway um but with in shipping the 10 which is a harder thing to do so they made you know significant improvements to the eight but with the 10 they're kind of radically changing a lot of things that they didn't have to change but they're changing the those things to kind of deliver something that is um ambitious and what comes with that is being it's it's going to be more difficult to build and every year they've done stuff like that you know with the seven it was they didn't have to make it waterproof they could have gone another year without it being fully waterproof but by pushing to constantly try to do the best they can and that's what other companies are doing as well I mean Samsung is constantly also pushing but um rarely do we see the news that you know Samsung can't build enough of this to meet demand so let me ask you another problem that we've seen is the reports of crackling from the iPhone 8 speaker that there's an audio glitch during calls I haven't experienced that on my phone um but I did see the article you wrote about it they're addressing so there there are a number of people reporting it to Apple support pages and it's it seems to be a small number of people um at least that's what Apple statement says Apple statement says we're aware of the issue which is affecting customers in a small number of cases our teams at work on a fix which will be included in an upcoming software release which which sends to suggest that it's a software issue not Hardware um yeah I I have noticed a problem that I'm not sure where it's happening yet I'm going to have to do some more research but I'll take photos and I don't see any problem with the photo but when I post it to Instagram it has like a line going through it like a like a hairline vertical line that's kind of in the same place all the time and I don't know if that is being introduced by some weirdness in the new hardware or if it's a flaw on Instagram or what the issue is but it's like growing pains and there's things that can be like an issue it seems like there's some display issues in iOS 11 where it will do something a little wonky sometimes like I'll wake it up and the um I'll have the notification panel come up and then I'll immediately sign in so it'll put my apps on top of notifications instead of painting the you know wallpaper of the homepage which is like a little you know screen weirdness that is not typical for iPhone to be weird like that so Apple's also doing a lot of ambitious things about sort of rebuilding large parts of its stack I've seen people talking about um Mac OS High Sierra uh having a problem with I think it's the window server just kind of bugging outc it's well it bugs out especially I put the around the menu bar yeah so that isn't just they didn't just introduce a bug it's they've re Rewritten you know big chunks of the operating system on a regular basis and it's frustrating because things that we're working fine now have like a little weirdness to it a couple years ago that was the thing with Discovery D and was like we've changed how we've changed the structure of the network infrastructure kind of thing and here it's causing all these problems for like lots of different kinds of people but if they never changed anything then you'd have this kind of building up of CFT that you get to a problem where you're you're like the old mac7 from the early 90s where they just didn't ever fix anything and everything was just sort of patched with Band-Aids and then you just have this kind of huge mass of software that needs to be radically re overhauled on many levels and it's just a huge task and hard to do kind of the same thing with Windows or with you know I think with Android there's a lot of things that need to get patched and it's just are never going to happen because it's just so much work to try to change all this stuff without breaking all this other stuff and even if it does get patched or even if it does get Rewritten and it's never going to get rolled out to the billion or two people that are actually Android 8 rewrites a whole bunch of things because it rearchitecturing instructed it's not going to get put out there for the users give it a couple of years I'm running it on one phone but it's going to take about 2 years for everyone else to get it for a little bit and right that's how it works two years is a long time for technology to be sitting there waiting to get deployed I was being a little fous there I want to thank you so much Dan we're going to have Neil on in just a second to to talk about the watch and his experiences with the Apple Watch series 3 where can people find you and and where can they go to read more about your experiences with the iPhone 8 I been writing on Apple Insider and have a series of Technology articles we kind of look into some of the technology that is new in iPhone 8 and iOS 11 and then of course I'm on Twitter at Daniel Aaron Ean cool thanks again Dan cheers welcome back Neil thank you for coming of course now I'm going to ask you a question that's most popular with wristwatch blogs what's on your wrist right now I'm wearing the Apple Watch series 3 with cellular it is the aluminum AKA formerly known as the the sport model uh in space gray with the sport Loop band the Vel not not velcro though uh loop and hook band as they call it for yes legal re vcro is a Dupont trademark correct how are you liking the Red Dot on the crown uh I mean the Red Dot is ugly uh I think it's a misstep by Apple uh for a company that usually designs pretty well aesthetically um usually pretty impressed by their color choices and options and just those General look um the Red Dot is pretty terrible but not nearly enough to be a deal breaker um I mean if you don't like it you can put a sticker over it as we've detailed in stories or I mean I guess you could cover over it with a permanent marker if you really wanted to but you don't really see it when you're wearing the watch because the digital Crown doesn't face you but when you turn your wrist to the side to see it it's not particularly attractive and what has been the best change about having cellular on the watch so uh um you know we ran our review this week I really like this new Apple watch I think it's great um and one of the things that I really kind of Drew parallels to um in the uh review that we ran uh was kind of the history of development of iOS but more specifically the growth of the iPad from the initial promise of a device that could replace your PC to something that eventually has now gotten to the point where potentially could replace your PC depending on your workflow um and uh you know the Apple watch is not there yet um it's getting there and adding LTE is a huge step in that direction um it cannot be away from your phone all day and this is the thing that a lot of people don't realize and that they complain about and those are the people that are not really getting the point there's a reason that when you set up your Apple watch you still have to initiate it from your phone and you still have to go through the whole process and it still Tethered to your phone and it still backs up from your phone and all that stuff and that is that is the problem that is the reason that uh people are upset because you still have to use your phone for a majority of the day it's not meant to be used on its own without your phone for 24 hours a day you you could theoretically do that but you're probably not going to get the battery life especially if you work out use GPS audio streaming that sort of stuff I I know that you like to run yes tell me about what it's like to run with the Apple watch and where you're at with your review of it as it ships so yeah as it ships right now with watch OS 4 you cannot yet stream music from uh Apple music or iCloud music library what it ships with is the ability to sync music from your iPhone and store it on the watch itself and that is fine but it gets a lot better when you have a watch OS 4.1 and you can stream that's in beta yet so it wasn't mentioned in my review and it's not really fair to go into that because that's a product that's going to be forthcoming but Apple says it's going to be coming next month in October but for now um you can have your music locally stored on your watch you can go for a run which is stuff that you could do before but the difference is now you're you're in touch you're connected so um you know I went for a run uh well I've gone for a few since I got the watch but um you get a text message or you get a phone call and you're no longer missing it you no longer find out when you get back from your run it's just there it's with you you get it so things that you would do before like for example you get a text message on your watch and you would look down and you would see that you have a message and if you wanted to respond to that message it was convenient to be able to look down at your wrist and and see that but it wasn't particularly convenient unless you were in a situation where you couldn't access your phone or it was rude to access your phone it wasn't really convenient to just use the watch because you have your phone on you your phone has a bigger screen it's more luxurious it gives you the opportunity to type and do those sorts of things that you can't do on a small screen on your wrist um the the difference now is when your phone is gone you no longer have that ability and so you're kind of in a way forced to use the watch and it it it's not it's not a bad experience you have options so like texting is probably the the biggest thing I think for a lot of people that they're going to really enjoy with this cuz people don't make a lot of phone calls anymore it's mostly texting getting messages that sort of stuff so you can dictate with Siri you can uh scribble on there uh write uh letters or they have quick responses that you can scroll through just to tap on and obviously you're not going to want to um have a long conversation with a little watch like that or or as Steve Jobs said when the iPad first came out right War and Peace on it um but it is really convenient for you know you just raise your wrist talk to Siri uh send out a a text message and then just lower your wrist and go and it just kind of gets out of the way so you know I went for a run and I got a message and then I responded to it real quick or yesterday I was out running some errands that you know even have to be exercising and I just didn't bring my phone with me and you dictate the response and then if you um have airpods in it's even better um and now because Siri actually talks to you you don't even have to stare at your wrist to make sure that it's done or that that it's sent or whatever it just talks to you and and you can lower your wrist and go back to what you're doing so it just kind of gets out of your way and so when you want to do things like send a text or make a phone call or or do whatever um you can do it it's not necessarily going to be as um easy of an experience as it would be on a phone but it's certainly much easier because it's just on you you don't have to worry about it you're not like obsessively checking it it's just it's kind of like technology that gets out of the way and I find it interesting that this is happening now as the phones are getting bigger and Apple's kind of moving away from one-handed use and it almost feels like this is Apple's appeasement to people that don't necessarily want big phones or don't want to have their phone on them all the time you know I hear from a lot of women who say things like you know the pockets and their pants are too small you got to carry a purse you can't have your phone on you whatever this is a great product for somebody like that too not just somebody who wants to exercise or stream music or whatever somebody who just wants to get out of the house for 3 or 4 hours and not have their phone on them and not be checking Instagram and not have to bring a Pur or a bag or a big phone or whatever uh I think that there's a lot of use cases for a product like this that go beyond just the fitness and and and that sort of stuff um you know the the phone anxiety is a very real thing where you feel like you're you're missing out or you're um you know somebody May urgently be trying to reach you and you don't have your phone on you um and this certainly addresses that but uh there's also a more practical application to it um and that's even without the music streaming and I think that the music streaming alone is going to be a game Cher what kind of downsides have you noticed is there any downside that some of our listeners should be aware of I mean the main thing you have to be aware of is battery life uh if you were using it um in what Apple considers to be a typical use case which would be um an hour or so of working out and streaming music and then you know regularly checking throughout the day uh and when they say an hour of working out they mean without your phone nearby just on LTE um that'll get you uh about 18 hours of use which is pretty good now if you try to leave your phone at home all day and get an hour workout in and you know send texts and check the news and all that you're not going to get that much if you're doing heavy LTE use constant you're only going to get about four hours out of the watch so you'll get you know half of a workday essentially um but it's again it's not meant for that it's not the technology is not there the physics of it aren't there you know this is something that's the size of a stack of a couple silver dollars really um it is not meant to be an iPhone free experience you have to connect it to your iPhone to set it up you have to connect it to your iPhone to back it up you can't connect it to or set it up through your iPad or your iPod touch or your Mac uh and there's a reason for that and that's a very conscious effort by Apple to make it clear to the consumer that LTE is the ability to occasionally leave your phone behind but not to completely ditch your phone I mean you can't even set this thing up without having a phone to connect it to with a phone number because it shares the phone number and has a cheaper data plan and stuff so uh that that is an issue that you have to be aware of you can't think that you're going to buy this and then not have a phone or not ever use your phone but also uh you have to be aware that the data plan uh is pricey while Apple did a pretty good job of pricing the watch itself um it's only um uh $30 more for the LTE version than last year's pricing for the series 2 without LTE uh the carriers uh were not so generous and they are charging $10 a month in the US for data access which I think is pretty exorbitant I think it should be closer to $5 a month tell me about so so first of all actually I was going to ask you are personally I mean I understand you have this one for review purposes and so on but are you going to use it and pay the $10 a month I am yes I I like to run outside um and I like having all of my music on me and uh I like the idea of just leaving my phone behind sometimes I'm going out and I just don't want to have my phone I don't want to be distracted I don't want to be bugged I you know I'm on my computer all day for work I'm staring at my phone when I'm not at my computer constantly doing that kind of stuff there's something freeing about just not having your phone on you and to me that's worth the $10 a month and that's not even for exercising but when I run outside I've been using just my watch for a while um and it's nice uh it's it's liberating in some ways uh the only thing that I really found in using just the watch without the phone that I missed was uh not having a camera and and I'm not saying that they should put a camera on the watch I don't know if that's the right way to go it could be creepy it could be ugly on the watch it could be C be unusable yeah I mean there how do you I mean how do you for example uh distinguish between whether it's on the left or right wrist um and which direction the camera would face if it were a forward- facing camera that that sort of thing you know maybe this solution is an optional Smart Band or something that theoretical down the road who knows but um as it stands right now you know in my couple days of using it and just going out and not bringing my phone I could text I could get phone calls I could check and get you know news alerts uh emails you name it everything that I would want from a phone short of just wasting time on Facebook or SnapChat I could do on my watch and I could do it pretty efficiently more efficiently than you'd think um you know I don't really use Siri a lot on my phone but I use it all the time on my watch I use it to control homekit I use it to send texts um I use it to initiate you know music playback stuff like that um so I just find that it just works better when it's on your wrist and it's it just makes sort more sense it's more convenient um a lot of times talking to your phone feels a little bit unnatural when you can just pick it up and type um so those types of things having seral on the go um H getting notifications getting all that stuff everything that I wanted from my phone for the most part I could do with the exception of taking pictures and so I mean I guess if the inevitability of this is a device that is completely separate from the phone and you can leave your phone at home all day and it gets enough battery life and all that then I think at that point you inevitably have to add a camera um I don't know how you do that in a way that doesn't become unworkable but that's a future challenge for Apple to figure out I don't know that that's something that's going to happen in the near future either um so I don't mean to say all that is a it's a must have for the product or anything like that it's just more future think on my part but uh yeah I I I think that as it is right now you know one of the things I wonder about when I recommend products is like is this something that you could keep for two three four maybe even five years and be happy with it I think that if you know that you're not going to be able to ditch your phone completely uh and you're okay with that I think think that this is a very mature product that the new processor is fast the capabilities are there um there's a lot to like about this I'm I'm very very happy with the new Apple watch so how's it been using the beta so watch OS 4.1 beta came out this week I have to warn everybody if you install a watch beta and things go wrong as they have for multiple people on our staff including you right oh yes yeah uh you have to mail the you can't reset it on your own it's not like your phone where you can just reset it roll it back whatever you have to uh take your phone Hardware put it in the mail ship it off to Apple wait a few days for them to fix it and then send it back to you that's because there's no diagnostic port on the watch for you to access as a user there's no place for you to do it they have to take it and do it so I say that because don't install betas unless you really know what you're getting into because you could screw it up I do this for a living I have to especially on a especially on the watch where there's no way that you can recover it by yourself yes so I took the plunge um because obviously I'm excited about the ability stream music and also need to be able to write about it for work and stuff so I wouldn't usually install a beta one but I went for it and thankfully um fingers cross going forward but it installed okay and it works so I went out yesterday um and I ran some errands um and I uh was streaming music while I did that worked with like a charm and then I went for run last night uh about 3 miles um and it was about a cuz I had to recharge it or or put it on the charger while it was updating so I guess it was like halfway through the day it was topped off at 100% by the end of the day my battery was at 52% and that included a little over a half hour of running um and about you know another half hour to 45 minutes of running errands um without my phone on me LTE use music streaming sent a few texts uh that sort of stuff but what was really exciting to me is the music streaming was Rock Solid I went out of my way to pick albums that were not sync to my watch and I hadn't listened to in a while so I knew that it was going to be 100% dependent on LTE to to get that stuff going and as soon as the music started playing didn't cut out on the Bluetooth end didn't cut out on the data end um it sounded as good as you would imagine it was absolutely rocksolid perfect it didn't cut out of me once not once not once and and I've had a lot of people ask me things about um connectivity because when the watch reviews first came out uh there were some people that had issues because of uh public Wi-Fi networks and this is a bug in the Apple watch that Apple has said they're going to fix with a software update I have not run into this issue because I went through a purge of all public Wi-Fi networks before I even set up my watch because I was aware of the bug but basically what this means is if you connect to you know Starbucks WiFi or McDonald's or your local coffee shop or whatever um that requires a screen to bypass in order to get onto the Wi-Fi um this information is shared from your phone with your watch so your watch is going to defer to Wi-Fi networks when it can find them because the LTE battery life is so poor uh the problem is it doesn't know when there's a portal to access and because there's no browser on the watch itself there's no way for you to get B past that portal the Gateway so the watch connects to a Wi-Fi and then hangs on to it even though it has no data so uh then what happens is your phone's away and you don't really understand why your watch isn't working and why you don't have a connection I don't see this being a big issue going forward because Apple has said they're going to put out a software update and I imagine it'll probably arrive pretty soon and that it will address that bug and that'll be the end of that and no one will remember this but other than that um the LTE connections have been fine for me I haven't had any issues anywhere I get reception with my phone I get reception with my watch um I think the the general rule I would say is if you have two or more bars on your phone you're going to get a connection on your watch and it's going to be fine obviously if you don't have a connection with your phone in that area it's not like the the watch can make up for poor areas of Lte reception you know if AT&T is doing a bad job that's not the watch's fault what has been the best Improvement what's been the best thing about this I mean I think um the fact that you can now access Siri on the go because of Lte I mean obviously everything that you can do before you can now do on the go with LTE um but you know simple things like checking sports scores and stuff um it's nice to be able to do that and not have your phone on you and it's nice to have Siri talk to you because like I said before you dictate a text you then lower your wrist and you know that it's sent you before a the processor was slow and B Siri didn't talk so you have to kind of hold your wrist up and stare and give it like a one Mississippi 2 Mississippi before you got a response now you can just it just gets out of the way it's like all right I've dictated it put your wrist down and a lot of times before you've even fully lowered your wrist it's already sent it and telling you that everything's cool but it just feels good to be able to uh get it out of the way I've said this so many times here on the podcast the best wearable devices are ones that just get out of the way and yes you can interact with the watch and yes the experience is is pretty good when you interact with the watch but uh the best situations are where you just kind of raise your wrist get what you want and then lower it and then get on with your day um it's a small wearable device for a reason it's not a big screen it's not meant to watch YouTube videos or anything like that awesome Neil Hughes everybody the editor-in-chief of appleinsider.com where can people find you of course I just said it didn't I you can find me at appleinsider.com and you can follow me on Twitter at this is Neil and I would encourage everybody to check out our iPhone 8 iPhone 8 plus reviews from Dan the Apple Watch review from myself and then Mike has our Apple TV 4K review which will be running uh very soon so keep your eyes peeled for that I've been using the Apple TV for a few days now um and it's pretty nice um and I think uh people will be pretty happy with that upgrade if they have a 4K TV excellent we look forward to all of those and I want to ask our our listeners if you have used the Apple Insider app on the app store please feel free to go ahead and leave us a review for it if you haven't used it yet now is a perfectly good time to download it and check it out and stay up to date on all of your Apple news and while you're at it you can leave us a nice review on the podcast on iTunes thank you so much for listening we will be back next week\n"