The Push-Pull Relationship with Apple

As we navigate the complex world of technology, there's one company that stands out - Apple. With its sleek designs and innovative products, Apple has become a staple in many people's lives. However, like any other company, Apple is not immune to criticism and controversies. In fact, the experts and analysts have been vocal about their concerns regarding Apple's direction and performance.

One of the main areas of debate is the reliability and durability of Apple's products. Specifically, the iPad has been a point of contention. Despite being considered a real Computing device by some users, including William, who uses his iPad as a major part of his workflow, there have been issues with battery life and structural integrity. The company's statement about allowing for an A4 mm tolerance of bend in their products has also sparked controversy. While the intention behind this statement may be to minimize returns due to manufacturing tolerances, it's hard not to feel that Apple is downplaying the issue.

The debate about Apple's reliability is not a new one. Going back to the old Power books and aluminum PowerBooks, there have been instances of these products warping or rocking on tables, leading to complaints from users. It's interesting to note that this is not an isolated incident, but rather a symptom of a broader issue - the push-pull relationship between Apple and its users.

On one hand, Apple has done many things right. The company has consistently pushed the boundaries of innovation, introducing products like the Apple Watch, which has revolutionized the way we track our health and fitness. Additionally, the iPad has become an essential tool for many professionals, providing a powerful and portable computing experience.

On the other hand, there are areas where Apple falls short. The keyboard debacle on Mac OS and the battery life issues with the iPhone are just two examples of the problems that have plagued the company in recent years. These issues highlight the importance of user feedback and criticism in helping Apple improve its products.

Ultimately, the relationship between Apple and its users is complex and multifaceted. While there are many reasons to criticize the company, it's also clear that Apple has done many things right. As we move forward into 2019, one thing is certain - Apple will continue to be a major player in the tech industry, and its products will remain popular among consumers.

In Las Vegas, at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES), Apple will undoubtedly have a presence, showcasing some of its latest innovations and products. While it's impossible to predict which ones will make an impact, one thing is certain - Apple will continue to push the boundaries of technology, and we'll be there to report on all the excitement.

For now, though, our focus remains on engaging with you, our readers. We want to hear from you - what are your thoughts on Apple's direction? What do you like about their products, and what areas would you like to see improvement in? Your feedback is invaluable, and we'll be sharing it with the experts at Apple.

To share your thoughts, simply visit our website at appleinsider.com or follow us on Twitter @William, @Vmarks. We're always eager to hear from you, and we look forward to continuing this conversation in 2019.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this our yearend episode of the Apple Insider podcast and what a year it's been William well you say that I suppose there was the odd gigantic International crisis of China spy Gates that didn't happen there might have been the product or two but really otherwise no just a quiet one huh I thought so yes okay so then then let's do this because it's it's been a big year I think what have been the biggest stories of the year for you let's let's just go quickly you know like uh in in 30 seconds what do you think the biggest story was oh the lack of an iMac I keep coming back to that one but um uh Bloomberg and the uh the grain of rice sized microprocessor added to the super micro boards that weren't that one yep uh plus all the products I was excited about the Mac Mini for example so so you are into intern in a little bit stories of spy and Espionage and and and things that of course were complete fiction yes I was just going to say that yes I'm into the spy fiction Yes actually no hang on let me just say this to this minute I am waiting for Bloomberg to actually prove stuff because a journalism output says something company Apple Amazon all of these mentions of course they're going to deny it of course Bloomberg is going to protect its sources but we're three months in every major International um intelligence agency is saying this isn't happening and Bloomberg is just going but did so uh yeah I'm waiting for Bloomberg to you know call it one way or the other uh but at the moment it looks like so much baloney that um I find it offensive there go and if it were true the companies would have a responsibility to disclose this kind of thing oh yes in in so many ways um uh Bloomberg even claims that Apple did uh everybody's picking on Apple there was several other companies mentioned Amazon notably yes and Amazon is pretty much the same as Apple uh like what he uh to be clear Bloomberg says that there is this extra thing added to certain boards certain motherboards in certain servers um they don't have one to show us they appear to have an artist's rendition of this so you know stacking up the evidence here uh is that is that well what they're saying is that super micro motherboards yes which Apple has purchased so has Amazon so have others for their servers because you know it doesn't make sense to purchase fancy Mac Pros for servers when there are completely suitable motherboards that are just stock generic boards that can run whatever software you run to run on them for servers sure and you know this is what organizations do right Google runs a on stock Hardware that for years wasn't even in in Fancy cases or hard drives they would just put motherboards on pieces of cardboard and have the hard drive sitting alongside them and when a hard drive would die they wouldn't even take it out of service they just leave it there to die and add another one to the rack I didn't know that I knew cheap I didn't know that's okay that makes sense it cost too much to diagnose when they could just throw more Hardware at it right okay and you know with with with Amazon and with apple they're both buying these motherboards and then they'll run the whatever version of Linux or or Unix or whatever else they need to run on it doesn't make sense to rebuild OS 10 for them completely since they're just running file Services they can secure their own distribution of Linux modified the way they need to Windows can do that yeah well you know and and that's a good question is what is Microsoft using for their Azure Services I I would expect that they're also using some forms of Windows and some mix of Linux as well but uh these are not these are common parts right and Apple buying them off the shelf says that the Bloomberg story says they being modified after the fact which is not easy to do unless you're replacing a chip and doing one in such a way that's part compatible it's much easier to actually just burn new firmware to a chip than it is to replace a whole chip or to add one and all the circuitry to embed it in the rest of it yes absolutely yeah now there there were stories a few years ago of people like the NSA National Security Administration or gchq gcq modifying products you know cap taking capture of stuff in shipping process you know Amazon ships something to a customer before it gets to the customer they seize it they modify it bug it and then box back up and send it the rest of the way are they more reliable than the Royal Male this is the real question surprisingly because they actually want to get the surveillance from doing something like that but but so there so there is some notion that some of this kind of Espionage does happen there's also the reverse accusation that the United States has made against people like Huawei that Huawei bugs their products and then sells them into to places which is why Huawei products are not allowed to be sold to the US government for example right so there's a kernel of truth to this kind of story in the broadest of Senses but there is no truth yes to this specific story uh we can determine exactly that yes did I get there for you okay what what other stories do you think this year have really made 2018 a a year that's distinguished or different from the years before well I'm surprised actually when you my first word wasn't homepod because I remember at the start of the year I suppose I just I didn't think I could afford one at the time and the end of the year I realized no I can't but I bought one anyway uh so but the home pod for me was an end of 2018 but that's still 2018 and it's a it's a lovely thing I quite enjoyed Steve wnac being taken for a scam in Bitcoin I mean sorry for the guy but it was still quite entertaining the way it was done um well tell us about that story if you're going to go ahead and recap it like that go go ahead well previously uh Steve osnc bought some Bitcoins uh quite a while ago I think he may have paid around a total of $75 for uh seven that he then these many years on uh went to sell them and uh he did sell them and somebody paid for them using a credit card having paid for it they then canceled the credit card uh so this brand new crypto currency was defeated by the old-fashioned credit card systems and they got the Bitcoins he didn't get his money and he says actually I mean he's still in favor of cryptocurrencies because of the fact that they should be free from interference free from all the old regulations uh but in the the difference how many years he had them the value did go up enormously um I'm not sure now that I was right about $75 because I got a feeling what he actually lost was uh something like $75,000 or the equivalent of if you'd been able to get it um I think that what entertains me is that the parallel streams of uh This brilliant new free currency being undermined by people being very clever at using the older technology that still underpins it that's what I that would been back February I think by the way you know there's there's something about that story that doesn't quite add up in that normally when you you transfer cryptocurrency you transfer it from one wallet or digital wallet to another digital wallet and so when he made that sale he would have had to have transferred it to another wallet now there's no way to unwind these transactions which some people who were looking for Consumer Protections call a bug but other people who are looking for a a system of exchange that's unfettered by regulation and unfed by monitorings things like that call that a feature in a way um then that's a philosophical difference about what a system of exchange should have or shouldn't have that's that's what this was really about is the idea of experimenting with what money is and what money could be in the future and there are so many different competing cryptocurrencies because of that because each one has their own idea of what distributed means or what decentralized means or what protections should be in place or not and so he he would have had to transferred these to a wallet and then accepted payment separately for them and had he done it through an exchange which is something like a a sort of semi- centralized place where you put yours in and put theirs in and you you make the trade through a site then you get the funds because the exchange doesn't allow that to take place without the funds being paid for and then they're responsible for dealing with the credit card being canceled or not um a modern day equivalent to escro kind of except that it all takes place nearly instantaneously too okay you know that's expect St wnc of all people to know about any of that stuff I mean that's the downside of a coinbase or something that's that's a coinbase or Mount gox or or any one of these kinds of things acting as an exchange and um what was that last one I M that sounds yeah so that that one so that one's another this is where nerds have fun right so magic the Gathering online exchange sorry sorry wait a minute that sounded like clingo but now Magic the Gathering this is Highlander what's going on Magic the Gathering online exchange was a site founded by a fell in Japan who created an exchange site for people to trade Magic the Gathering cards assets and then cryptocurrency became a thing and he turned it into a cryptocurrency exchange site where people could trade the currency okay and they they got scammed and went down and and the uh fellow who was running that has been arrested three or four times now by Japanese authorities um because you know basically they want they want their money back people wants money back out of it and it's it's almost impossible at this point but um that was you know that was an exchange where people were able to trade these kinds of things and and so is coinbase and so are others and if you're if you're doing these kinds of Trades there's some safety in using an exchange versus using just you know taking someone's credit card except what I don't understand is this if I want to sell Bitcoins to somebody I I I don't want them to pay pay me back in Bitcoins do I because then I might as well just keep got think think about what you're really doing I mean what you want to do if you're selling Bitcoins you're selling them so that you can get pounds in your case yes and so what you want to do is you want to sell your Bitcoins to an exchange for pounds they will give you pounds minus fee of course and then the other party can go ahead and buy from the exchange and turn their pounds into Bitcoins currency Traders man currency Traders are like this this the quote from Steve foret that I remember reading was that it was free of Banks and things but this sounds like Banks under a different name so is the new technology pretty much the same as the old technology well I mean it doesn't have to be that way but that is one way of doing it now obviously I could take your money directly if you wanted to do that if I had pounds and you had Bitcoins and we wanted to trade then we could go Ahad and exchange directly without anyone in the middle but that would be somewhat more RIS right so if you think of it right this right there's there's currency trading at a big investment level there is currency trading and at the I need to go change currency at the kiosk because I'm a tourist kind of level yes right where that's you're still dealing with a business whose business it is to exchange things for you and then there's the level where um you and I are both tourists and we happen to be walking along and and going somewhere to eat and I've got dollars and you've got pounds and we need to pay in pounds and so I ask you to to kindly sell me some pounds for my dollars across the coffee table and I don't just ping you with Apple pay between our Apple watches you know like normal people right right so there but that's what Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are still sort of discovering is what are the different transactions that people can have here and you know the the whole aspect of it is to be very decentralized and be very liberated and not rely on any Central Organization for this kind of stuff what they're doing that makes it unique is that every transaction can be verified and is built off of the previous transactions that something called the blockchain oh yes each transaction is a block and therefore you can't unwind transactions because you unwind everyone's transactions but would bead that would be bad but the other side of that is that everything is verifiable which is good okay because it says that in in a situation where you don't trust anyone that you have all of these transaction history built upon it that can be verified and it's a little bit more complex than that because there's there's basically there are multiple nodes where everyone who's running a node is storing a copy of the blockchain and so if if you question a block if you query a block it not just queries yours it also queries everyone else's nodes and they have to all come back in agreement and if the majority agrees that that transaction took place then that's verifiably that it did well I sorry I feel like I'm as ever leading you down ACH technical tunnel here but why wouldn't all of them agree why well if if someone were trying to do something dastardly like keep a second Ledger right cook the books not yeah what in this new modern technology world that isn't in any way like the old one yes if somebody were to do that right so so someone could alter their copy of the blockchain and oh right but they couldn't get away with it because of all those pesky kids who've got their own copies modify everyone else's so yeah if you wanted to do that you'd have to have 51% of all of the servers and nodes under your control in order to be able to get away with a modified copy okay challenge accepted um and rejected right all right okay so let's move on let's move on because I don't want to talk all day about blockchain I know no one else wants to listen either so it's I mean there's been a bunch of big things you know Qualcomm was a good story I had a feeling somehow in my bones that you might uh be interested in Qualcomm we talked about this before on the podcast and and you know this story backwards where are we now and when did it start oh I you know I don't even want to get into when it started but the the short version is that Qualcomm makes chipsets it's actually if you want to go back to when it really started go back to the iPhone 4 when the iPhone 4 had a new model introduced midlife of the phone and that new model supported Verizon okay and that new model required a different modem chip set from Qualcomm in order to be able to support Verizon and it actually had a slightly different form factor the the mute switch and volume keys moved around a little bit on that phone so that they had room to to rearrange stuff inside there and very unique situation because it's very rare that they would introduce midlife a whole new model that's different internally and externally and that was when they started doing business with Qualcomm for this modem chip set and over time what happened is that there was concern that they were taking that Qualcomm was demanding too much in terms of royalty payments both from manufacturers and from Apple and apple doesn't like being pushed into a corner so Apple began looking for other suppliers Qualcomm didn't like that either so there's been lawsuits going back and forth and and various ones right now we're at a point where Qualcomm is seeking injunctions around the world to prevent Apple from selling iPhone oh and has succeeded in Germany I was just uh as record I was just hearing about that yeah no iPhone 7 and eight I think it is in Germany yeah wow and and you say well seven and eight how does that hurt apple and the the answer is does because those are the affordable phones that Apple was continuing to sell yes but there's also this thing isn't there um forgive me I know this is story you know better than I do but I've just heard this bit so uh correct me if I'm wrong uh qualcom had to um guarantee that should their legal challenge fail they will pay Apple for the loss of income they would have had so they've actually put in is a billion dollars or something into a funny enough an escrow account ready for the courts to take if necessary so so quacc is not exactly ping about here this is kind of a Gusty move huh well yes it's um they're rolling the hard six it's a Hail Mary pass I've been studying americanisms you see I like all of these ones but that's what they're going for yes yeah and it's it's going to be interesting to see what happens here at the same time Apple has been hiring for the expertise required to make their own modems and they've been hiring in qualcomm's backyard okay I feel unsur surprised about that because Apple wants to do everything itself and and you can argue against that but it's done very well for them in the past so I'm not I'm only surprised it's taken them this long to be building their own modems because when was the iPhone 4 I can't even put a date on that but sometime in the last 11 years so yeah yeah so that's the story there and and basically what's going to happen is we're going to watch this court thing wind its way around we're going to see if they get more injunctions or not yeah it's it's going to be a big deal it's going to be a bigger deal in about 2020 or so when Apple does do their own modem that's my guess that's my speculation for when this actually happens you think that's um how soon they'll be able to do their own modems I think so and the the thing that I'm counting upon there the reason that I'm really looking forward to that is that the Qualcomm modem you know like Qualcomm don't like Qualcomm the product gives faster data transfer on the LTE chipsets than the uh than the competing Intel part if you have an Intel based phone versus a qualcom phone your speed tests will not be as fast now will it be slow enough that you'll notice or be upset by it maybe maybe not but but it's one of those things where once you know it it's kind of irksome and when they do their own I fully expect that they'll get it right that they won't have this problem now of course in the interven time 5G is also going to become a thing and so speeds will be exponentially faster anyway but uh and and of course qualcomm's been out boasting how they're going to have 5G in every Android handset so this is this is what we call an interesting moment in history I'm sorry my mind split in two different directions there one is 5G in every Android hands up yeah sure uh but the other one is Apple goes from not making a modem at all to making a 5G one to my mind that seems like a very big move but I suppose you can't really have baby steps with this you either do it or you don't um you confidence that Apple will have a 5G modem in 2020 well let me ask you does it make sense in 2020 to make a 4G LTE modem could you ask me again in in about month that would be good yes yeah but I will have the answer for you oh yes yes when when 2019 is going to have all of the major Flagship Android handsets with a 5G chipset you can have a phone that's an LTE handset in 2019 and it won't matter because it's still a transition year and towers are still going up and things like that but in 2020 that's going to be a little a little harder to get away with they could still do it but it would be late and I can't imagine them wanting to be late they get it beaten up enough about all kinds of things that it doesn't make sense they they really if they're going to do it they they really really need to have a 5G chip set now what they could do is they could buy in 5G for one more year from an Intel or one of those and then launch their own after that yeah but Apple's always taking lumps for something um so they are so they are seems to ignore it until they're ready for things arance or discipline yeah I mean speak speaking of taking lumps what about this 10r sales uh yeah you mean somebody's bought one is that well nice but I mean the the concept that Apple must not be doing well in sales that that Apple must be slowing down in sales that's been what all of the analysts have been saying right yes it is but uh they pick on the 10r this year last year it was the iPhone 10 disaster uh and nobody buying it at all except they were so ordinarily I I just kind of blank out this stuff but you've pointed out to me recently this issue of there being notifications sent um Apple basically Selling Stuff plugging the iPhone 10r and that's the first time I actually thought it smells like maybe there is an issue it does but at the same time you know just just anecdotally poking around and asking around everyone I can find everyone I've talked to says that when they try and go and buy an iPhone 10r they are sold out well that's that that you know you go to a Verizon store oh we got a shipment in and we're sold out that you that you if you wanted to find one you would have difficulty that it is not just walk up and get as many as you want cheap as chips they are in in shorter Supply so that's the question is it possible that all these analysts have got their story wrong surely not perish the thought sometimes I mean I know this is this is this is wrong but you some I just sometimes wonder uh whether analysts are talking stuff down and because they want to go buy Apple shares I I mean is that just uh conspiracy nutty of me I don't know but well now if you say something like that they have to disclose what their Holdings are because otherwise if they are doing that they get in in huge trouble with the Securities Exchange Commission all right so I was not only wrong I was bad there they would never it is it is a big deal to do that now I have some apple Holdings I have some small amounts of Apple Holdings um I don't pay attention to it I really don't I haven't sold or bought it in ages um it just kind of sits there for me so you know full full disclosure I have some shares but I'm not telling anyone what to do with their shares I'm not giving anyone advice about to go or buy or to go or sell I'm not saying any of that would you like me to look after the shares for you not at all I'm I'm content with them staying exactly where they are and doing exactly whatever it is they're doing I was just trying to help I Know Myself yes you know I I think I may have gotten a dividend check from them at some point and and it just reinvests I I it's I think it's become a running joke now apple announc is incredible sales figures stock price goes down because analysts are go W this is terrible news uh analysts are clearly looking at something else and they're not looking at sales figures today they're looking at what will happen next and things and that doesn't seem unreasonable it's just it never quite seems to work out even in the medium time isn't it that like Tim Cook said at least once this year I remember reading him saying uh he finds it bizarre that people focus on the 90-day sales business when Apple is really looking many many years ahead now there's part of me that thinks that makes sense but also Apple can afford but that's the same thing that that Jeff Bezos says right Jeff Bezos says that the results that are in this quarter were baked to years ago everything that's happening now is it was done two years ago and that's what led us to this point that he's focused on what's going on two years from this point again a big company can reasonably afford to do this I mean I'm self-employed I can't uh I have to deal in the now where they can't that's why you're selfemployed right because you got blinders on you got blinders on you you're too focused at this one moment you're not focused thinking ahead and if I weren't I'd be employed by somebody I think I'll I didn't say that part but if that's how you feel about it okay anyway long time somebody Blood by somebody I'm sure it's fun um okay so yes uh yeah what was the answer then we don't know we we don't really know what what else was a big story for you this year what do you think really opened things up oh I love that you put it quite that way because series shortcuts I mean I was a a workflow user before I love series shortcuts are are you a big user you know not a big user I I had been using them a while ago and before that I was using pythonista and really I I didn't take advantage of them in a big way I'm just looking at my shortcuts now I have about 30 gracious uh for things um mind you some of them are absolutely rubbish but I just love it there's one project I do where I need to account uh for every article that was published um and I could write it down but instead every couple of days I tap the shortcut it goes to the site grabs the RSS feed looks for what I wrote what other people wrote uh sorts the stuff I did and presents me in a nice little list that I email off to hers what's it worth I'll give it for you for an Apple share or a Bitcoin or or or something like that right yeah we'll see about that anyway what opened it up for you what end up the world in 2018 for you I really think and and you're going to laugh at this but I think think the Apple Watch series 4 oh Griff you're kidding why would I laugh at that the only thing about I've got against that is I haven't got one I really want one it looks brilliant what what appeals to you I think that it delivers on on sort of the promise of where things were going leading up to it you know we we'd been talking for ages about health care and making health care personal both through the Apple health records and the integration of actual Health charts and lab tests and so forth into Apple Health but also with the fitness and heart monitoring that we saw earlier and the diabetes monitoring those those were big deals the idea that series 4 takes that forward and can do the uh the the echocardiogram and can actually record results into Apple Health you know it it it seems like that goes further that where we're going to is is a point where I think in the future tell Health can be really enabled with these kinds of personal tests tele medicine is is one of those things where insurance companies are trying to push this now you know instead of having to go into a doctor you can just call one of their doctors and get consult and get you know things prescriptions sent out to the lab or you know prescription sent to the mail order pharmacy that then delivers it kind of thing and I think it ties it together where if you have the test results on a device that you already have in your home that can be shared with the doctor practicing tele medicine then it closes the loop there's been a report in the last few days here in the UK uh a study proving that um some sort of U machine learning artificial intelligence is proving to be demonstrably regularly more effective at diagnosing uh patients than doctors are and part of me thinks that that's wonderful um no actually pretty much all of me does I still want uh a human being to interpret the data but I mean that kind of news is not new there was for years uh going on in Chicago a I I believe I think I would remember was Chicago um you know one of the things that happens is that when people come in to an emergency room with potential heart condition triaging them as immediately needing attention or being okay and can wait to to be you know taken and as a part of triage um was a hard decision and that doctors would occasionally get it wrong or more than occasionally get it wrong and so they implemented a flowchart and if you followed the flowchart for the steps then your accuracy went up and you detected heart conditions that needed attention immediately that would have otherwise gone undetected much faster with with a higher accuracy rate and you know that's the same kind of thing that could be done computerized as as opposed to just following the flowchart that says do these things and you know that's that's where this kind of stuff comes from is that humans make errors and humans misread signs and humans weigh things and Overlook them whereas if you just follow these these steps and pick up on all of the signs and account for them properly other then you can diagnose with higher accuracy someday NBC is going to reboot ER and it's going to be the dullest hospital drama everwhere it's people watching screens and the odd bleep I mean it's it's it's not going to have Noah Wy and it's not going to have George Clooney and it's not it's going to be more like nurse um Nurse Jackie all right did you that one you didn't see that I saw the pilot for Nurse Jackie and I liked it but I don't remember seeing an awful lot of push notifications and there was a pusher or two I suppose I H you found it now one of the most exciting things for me this year is about is I met one of the writers of and he wrote Love labor lost one of the most famous episodes of it and I've read that script a couple times over the years I was I was slightly in awe as I shook that guy's hand incidents are inevitable and it comes down to how your company responds incidents require complex coordination between operations and software development teams who are the unsung heroes putting out fires every day and getting alerts immediately is critical when incident occurs like we were just talking about and that's why there's opsin by atlassian OBS empowers Devon Ops teams to plan for service disruptions and stay in control during incidents and it gives teams the power to respond quickly and efficiently to unplanned issues helps to notify all the right people through a smart combination of scheduling escalation paths that take into account things like time zones and holidays and allows for deep flexibility in how when and where alerts are deployed supported by over 200 inte Creations like Jura Amazon cloudwatch data dog New Relic and more and tracks all activity and provides useful insights to improve future innocent responses with Ops gen your next inocent doesn't stand a chance visit Ops gen.com to sign up to get a free company account and add up to five team members that's Ops geni.com never miss a critical alert again with Ops geni you know one of the things that I think really was was big for me this year was the iOS 12 and I was goingon to say the the iPhone 10s and 10s Max and 10r but I'm I'm altering that and I'm saying iOS 12 well clearly series shortcuts was part of iOS 12 so for me that's the that's an add-on that's that's not really well I also think it shouldn't be an add-on I think it should be part of the system per se but that for me that dominates iOS 12 uh what is it about 12 that uh so gets you so this past week I've had the experience of switching off my iPhone 6 and switching on an iPhone 10s Max 256 gig phone welome to the 10s Max World you've joined us temporarily only temporarily oh and what I'm seeing is just how good a job Apple did on iOS 12 you know I was you didn't have IOS 12 on your six oh I did I did and I encouraged you to get it don't you recall yes I just it made it sound like you'd sent me out there into the wild and you hadn't followed I'm right no I I put it on my phone and was impressed with its performance and these these past few weeks I've been a little bit bummed at it because it's been slower at some things or Crasher just a few things but but mostly that's not the OS as much as it is the applications on the OS uh you know it it will reboot overnight basically or occasionally reboot spontaneously but for the most part the phone is okay and the speed of it comes down to Apple Engineers having been issued the phone when they were developing iOS 12 and my hope is that those same Engineers still use that phone when they're developing the updates for it because if they don't then that phone is going to be left by the wayside again but it really is is a good example of what apple is going to do when they do things right where they they insist on developing as that as the target years and years ago they had something called apple apple compatibility labs and they maintained a lab of a huge number of machines old and current and as a developer you could run your software in the compatibility lab and prove how it ran on all of those machines they got rid of that a long time ago and with phones they don't do that you're pretty much expected to maintain your own but for the OS it's really a good thing that they did this and I hope that they continue this practice because the the iPhone 6 and 6s are going to be supporting Ed for a while longer to come and I I really do believe they need to make sure that it runs as well as it does on those running it on 10s and 10s Max has been eye opening for how smooth it is and how how fluid it is how responsive it is but it's not that distant a cousin from the way it runs on the six and I I think they as much as they know that iOS is the crown jewel of their properties at the moment they need to keep they need to keep that in mind and protect it and I think lost that plot with iOS 11 and and that's why iOS 12 is so important I've realized for some reason you're saying that I once you've moved onto a new iOS I think after a while you forget what you didn't have before and for some reason something they said reminded me of this glorious feature in iOS 12 uh to do with passwords um I I'm a one password user so if I go to a site uh on my phone face ID opens it up it will offer me a password from iCloud keychain or one password password and just squirts it in straight away I rarely have to open one password now and it's not like it was a burden to but the smoothness of that I me all these months in it's the one thing of iOS 12 where I still go oh every time it happens well and it's not that it's also the speed with which you're doing it on that new handset it switches to one password uses face ID to unlock it and gives you that password for the correct thing very quickly the old routine uh using iOS 12 on an older handset is it takes some time to switch the application then it takes some time to register Touch ID and then it gives you that it's a lot more uh like molasses Stone Age I know well you just went for glass I went for Stone Age yes uh what do you think of face ID um while you're using the 10s Max you know I I like it very much but it doesn't work as well for me as I'd hoped off Axis or in the dark it does do it but it's it's there are times when I have to pick up the phone and re aim it well I I'm fine in the dark but um I've noticed that I think I'm very conscious of the fact that the new iPads can look at you from any angle uh I am aware that I having to uh it's usually when I'm in the car and I put the phone uh into its holder uh landscape uh to do Apple Maps on it and stuff and I haven't got ready before the thing footes off and I have to take it off or twist my head at a funny angle so I'm hoping next year Well actually no I'm not cuz I can't afford to buy another phone but I'm hoping the next time I can get an iPhone it'll be like the iPad and recognize me oh and the other thing is uh is connecting it to carplay so connecting the iPhone 6 to carplay takes a while you see a black carplay screen loading on the phone and then it it connects eventually plugging this thing into the carplay like seen I I understand what it does but um you obviously like carplay what is getting off point again sorry but um what do you use carplay for uh carplay is for maps it's for incar entertainment it's for receiving text messages and answering them all right I just get sir Siri to read out my text messages yeah through the dashboard little little notification at the top of the carplay screen pops down saying William texted this or William sent an iMessage and you tap on it and it reads it aloud and asks if you'd like to reply actually is that this is coming back to iOS 12 because the thing I really like is I think didn't this come in at 11 they do not disturb while driving thing I found out weirdly um uh inconsistent uh it always seems to be the messages that I don't want to get you know the ones where uh I got to respond right now but I'm driving for another hour those get through but others don't so there's obviously a setting somewhere a meanness filter somewhere in the settings preferences well I don't want to go on for too much longer so what is the last thing you'd like to to leave our listeners with for the year oh this is it we're closing out 2018 and I want to thank everyone by the way who reached out about my comments on batteries and and having Jason applebomb on the show and if there are more experts you'd like to have on feel free to recommend them or feel free to recommend topics that you'd like us to find experts for and we will do that I I really appreciate that that was some good feedback from you guys I love that you do that by the way it's so interesting when you get these people on um I there's so much to say about 2018 and there are things I'm looking forward doing 2019 but the one that just pops into my head is is a slightly silly one um do you remember back in March people were reporting that the Amazon Echo would suddenly laugh at them that kind I recall that yeah yeah yeah and it's gone on since that um other Amazon echos have sent audio recordings of conversations to other people uh in some cases a lot of these conversations and it's always traced back down to a misheard uh command but still there's something intriguing about that to me and so far my homod hasn't betrayed me in that way at all speaking of betrayal in in Europe you have this thing called gdpr okay and and one of the things that it allows you to do is ask companies to share the information they've collected on you with person right yes you can say hey give me all the information you've got on me so that I can review it and what happens do you think when you ask Amazon for that oh I don't know uh Apple gives it to you what does Amazon do well a Amazon responds to the request by giving you someone else's information oh fair enough really like 1.7 gigabytes worth of stuff from an entirely different person okay I did resar have a company send me um an invoice for something I bought in 2013 yeah and when I asked them about it it turns out it was human error another user with my name was having trouble retrieving their license code or something to help him they done this so uh I love all this technology and it comes down to this isn't this is like the Bitcoin stuff isn't it you have all of this fantastic technology it is the future but behind it there are some clever or some slightly distracted people doing things human beings defeating technology bias but it should never be the case that you get audio recordings of another user you you should never never be in that situation where you get the actual audio of someone else's Amazon Echo I can't imagine any circumstance in which that would be in any way a problem or embarrassing not at all no yeah also I don't have any Amazon products in the bedroom because my goodness can you imagine what happens when that user gets that 1.7 gig of that other user stuff it's just disastrous it really is can I just distance myself here I didn't leak to the bedroom with this at all you did so you're out there on your own uh with this one you're the one who wanted to replace your homepod with the echo for Angela no uh Angela's being given an echo as a late birthday present and I was very happy to hear that because I can steal my home part back yeah right very different same words different sequence something like that anyway we will be back in 2019 I have loved having you here joining us for this time and and seriously please let us know who you want to hear from and I I you know for all the talk that we give about Apple being doomed or apple not doing the right things or what these analysts are saying there's there's tons of room for Apple to improve at the same time there are a number of things they've done right and so that's why we're in this tug uh that that's this pushpull relationship with them of things that we like and things that we want them to get better at and and the reason that we criticize apple is because we want them to get better at them I I I'm very optimistic about things like health and watch and where that goes I you know I keep hoping that they'll let iPad become a real Computing platform and of course there are people that say it is a real Computing platform and they're they're all right also it comes down to uses um you know the the keyboard debacles the battery debacles the the marzipan apps on Mac OS all of these things are worthy things to criticize but I have to believe and I have to hope that they're all going to get better and continue and improve William I I'm just stunned into Dison there because I am one of those iPad users who considers it a real Computing device in fact my iPad is next to me now I think I said this to you before in the three years whatever it is since I had since I first bought the 12.9 I doubt there's been a day that I haven't run the battery down to zero uh through working on it um this is a major part of my workflow even though um I'm frankly botted with my my betraying me iMac yeah well don't bend your iPad okay I'm a very good go not you know we talked about that the last episode where uh where where you know if you've got one take it back get one that's not bent but I was a little upset with the Dan richo statement so there's there's a VP at named Dan richo who issued a statement saying that that's not a defect that they allow for A4 mm tolerance of Bend and that it feels a little bit insulting I mean I understand that they have design tolerances and engineering tolerances and things like that but to be able to say this is not a defect I understand why they're saying that they're saying that so they don't have to take anything back but at the same time who you going to believe me or Your Lying Eyes right it's clearly bent always right it's clearly bent if you put it down on a flat table and it rocks it's bent and this is not the first time Apple's ever had to deal with situation like this if you go back to the old Power books the aluminum power books they warped and they rocked on tables and people complained I did not know that why yeah yeah so this is this is power books I okay so in that case saying is it's never going to get any better there's always going to be something like this and after such a cheery end you you've now made 2019 seemed a little bit more miserable well apple is not one thing apple is a multitude of things apple apple makes a multitude of products and apple gets many things right at the same time as getting some things wrong and and that's all we can do is is try and in our small way hold their feet to the fire whilst giving them quite a lot of money for individual devices that frankly are worth it every time yes I agree something like that we will be back in 2019 when we do we will be at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and we'll be reporting on all kinds of weird and wonderful things some of which will actually come and get released some will see the light of day we will be back then thank you so much give us your feedback email William appleinsider.com or Victor appleinsider.com I'm V marks on Twitter William your W galago on Twitter very good thank you for saying that and we will see you in the new yearyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this our yearend episode of the Apple Insider podcast and what a year it's been William well you say that I suppose there was the odd gigantic International crisis of China spy Gates that didn't happen there might have been the product or two but really otherwise no just a quiet one huh I thought so yes okay so then then let's do this because it's it's been a big year I think what have been the biggest stories of the year for you let's let's just go quickly you know like uh in in 30 seconds what do you think the biggest story was oh the lack of an iMac I keep coming back to that one but um uh Bloomberg and the uh the grain of rice sized microprocessor added to the super micro boards that weren't that one yep uh plus all the products I was excited about the Mac Mini for example so so you are into intern in a little bit stories of spy and Espionage and and and things that of course were complete fiction yes I was just going to say that yes I'm into the spy fiction Yes actually no hang on let me just say this to this minute I am waiting for Bloomberg to actually prove stuff because a journalism output says something company Apple Amazon all of these mentions of course they're going to deny it of course Bloomberg is going to protect its sources but we're three months in every major International um intelligence agency is saying this isn't happening and Bloomberg is just going but did so uh yeah I'm waiting for Bloomberg to you know call it one way or the other uh but at the moment it looks like so much baloney that um I find it offensive there go and if it were true the companies would have a responsibility to disclose this kind of thing oh yes in in so many ways um uh Bloomberg even claims that Apple did uh everybody's picking on Apple there was several other companies mentioned Amazon notably yes and Amazon is pretty much the same as Apple uh like what he uh to be clear Bloomberg says that there is this extra thing added to certain boards certain motherboards in certain servers um they don't have one to show us they appear to have an artist's rendition of this so you know stacking up the evidence here uh is that is that well what they're saying is that super micro motherboards yes which Apple has purchased so has Amazon so have others for their servers because you know it doesn't make sense to purchase fancy Mac Pros for servers when there are completely suitable motherboards that are just stock generic boards that can run whatever software you run to run on them for servers sure and you know this is what organizations do right Google runs a on stock Hardware that for years wasn't even in in Fancy cases or hard drives they would just put motherboards on pieces of cardboard and have the hard drive sitting alongside them and when a hard drive would die they wouldn't even take it out of service they just leave it there to die and add another one to the rack I didn't know that I knew cheap I didn't know that's okay that makes sense it cost too much to diagnose when they could just throw more Hardware at it right okay and you know with with with Amazon and with apple they're both buying these motherboards and then they'll run the whatever version of Linux or or Unix or whatever else they need to run on it doesn't make sense to rebuild OS 10 for them completely since they're just running file Services they can secure their own distribution of Linux modified the way they need to Windows can do that yeah well you know and and that's a good question is what is Microsoft using for their Azure Services I I would expect that they're also using some forms of Windows and some mix of Linux as well but uh these are not these are common parts right and Apple buying them off the shelf says that the Bloomberg story says they being modified after the fact which is not easy to do unless you're replacing a chip and doing one in such a way that's part compatible it's much easier to actually just burn new firmware to a chip than it is to replace a whole chip or to add one and all the circuitry to embed it in the rest of it yes absolutely yeah now there there were stories a few years ago of people like the NSA National Security Administration or gchq gcq modifying products you know cap taking capture of stuff in shipping process you know Amazon ships something to a customer before it gets to the customer they seize it they modify it bug it and then box back up and send it the rest of the way are they more reliable than the Royal Male this is the real question surprisingly because they actually want to get the surveillance from doing something like that but but so there so there is some notion that some of this kind of Espionage does happen there's also the reverse accusation that the United States has made against people like Huawei that Huawei bugs their products and then sells them into to places which is why Huawei products are not allowed to be sold to the US government for example right so there's a kernel of truth to this kind of story in the broadest of Senses but there is no truth yes to this specific story uh we can determine exactly that yes did I get there for you okay what what other stories do you think this year have really made 2018 a a year that's distinguished or different from the years before well I'm surprised actually when you my first word wasn't homepod because I remember at the start of the year I suppose I just I didn't think I could afford one at the time and the end of the year I realized no I can't but I bought one anyway uh so but the home pod for me was an end of 2018 but that's still 2018 and it's a it's a lovely thing I quite enjoyed Steve wnac being taken for a scam in Bitcoin I mean sorry for the guy but it was still quite entertaining the way it was done um well tell us about that story if you're going to go ahead and recap it like that go go ahead well previously uh Steve osnc bought some Bitcoins uh quite a while ago I think he may have paid around a total of $75 for uh seven that he then these many years on uh went to sell them and uh he did sell them and somebody paid for them using a credit card having paid for it they then canceled the credit card uh so this brand new crypto currency was defeated by the old-fashioned credit card systems and they got the Bitcoins he didn't get his money and he says actually I mean he's still in favor of cryptocurrencies because of the fact that they should be free from interference free from all the old regulations uh but in the the difference how many years he had them the value did go up enormously um I'm not sure now that I was right about $75 because I got a feeling what he actually lost was uh something like $75,000 or the equivalent of if you'd been able to get it um I think that what entertains me is that the parallel streams of uh This brilliant new free currency being undermined by people being very clever at using the older technology that still underpins it that's what I that would been back February I think by the way you know there's there's something about that story that doesn't quite add up in that normally when you you transfer cryptocurrency you transfer it from one wallet or digital wallet to another digital wallet and so when he made that sale he would have had to have transferred it to another wallet now there's no way to unwind these transactions which some people who were looking for Consumer Protections call a bug but other people who are looking for a a system of exchange that's unfettered by regulation and unfed by monitorings things like that call that a feature in a way um then that's a philosophical difference about what a system of exchange should have or shouldn't have that's that's what this was really about is the idea of experimenting with what money is and what money could be in the future and there are so many different competing cryptocurrencies because of that because each one has their own idea of what distributed means or what decentralized means or what protections should be in place or not and so he he would have had to transferred these to a wallet and then accepted payment separately for them and had he done it through an exchange which is something like a a sort of semi- centralized place where you put yours in and put theirs in and you you make the trade through a site then you get the funds because the exchange doesn't allow that to take place without the funds being paid for and then they're responsible for dealing with the credit card being canceled or not um a modern day equivalent to escro kind of except that it all takes place nearly instantaneously too okay you know that's expect St wnc of all people to know about any of that stuff I mean that's the downside of a coinbase or something that's that's a coinbase or Mount gox or or any one of these kinds of things acting as an exchange and um what was that last one I M that sounds yeah so that that one so that one's another this is where nerds have fun right so magic the Gathering online exchange sorry sorry wait a minute that sounded like clingo but now Magic the Gathering this is Highlander what's going on Magic the Gathering online exchange was a site founded by a fell in Japan who created an exchange site for people to trade Magic the Gathering cards assets and then cryptocurrency became a thing and he turned it into a cryptocurrency exchange site where people could trade the currency okay and they they got scammed and went down and and the uh fellow who was running that has been arrested three or four times now by Japanese authorities um because you know basically they want they want their money back people wants money back out of it and it's it's almost impossible at this point but um that was you know that was an exchange where people were able to trade these kinds of things and and so is coinbase and so are others and if you're if you're doing these kinds of Trades there's some safety in using an exchange versus using just you know taking someone's credit card except what I don't understand is this if I want to sell Bitcoins to somebody I I I don't want them to pay pay me back in Bitcoins do I because then I might as well just keep got think think about what you're really doing I mean what you want to do if you're selling Bitcoins you're selling them so that you can get pounds in your case yes and so what you want to do is you want to sell your Bitcoins to an exchange for pounds they will give you pounds minus fee of course and then the other party can go ahead and buy from the exchange and turn their pounds into Bitcoins currency Traders man currency Traders are like this this the quote from Steve foret that I remember reading was that it was free of Banks and things but this sounds like Banks under a different name so is the new technology pretty much the same as the old technology well I mean it doesn't have to be that way but that is one way of doing it now obviously I could take your money directly if you wanted to do that if I had pounds and you had Bitcoins and we wanted to trade then we could go Ahad and exchange directly without anyone in the middle but that would be somewhat more RIS right so if you think of it right this right there's there's currency trading at a big investment level there is currency trading and at the I need to go change currency at the kiosk because I'm a tourist kind of level yes right where that's you're still dealing with a business whose business it is to exchange things for you and then there's the level where um you and I are both tourists and we happen to be walking along and and going somewhere to eat and I've got dollars and you've got pounds and we need to pay in pounds and so I ask you to to kindly sell me some pounds for my dollars across the coffee table and I don't just ping you with Apple pay between our Apple watches you know like normal people right right so there but that's what Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies are still sort of discovering is what are the different transactions that people can have here and you know the the whole aspect of it is to be very decentralized and be very liberated and not rely on any Central Organization for this kind of stuff what they're doing that makes it unique is that every transaction can be verified and is built off of the previous transactions that something called the blockchain oh yes each transaction is a block and therefore you can't unwind transactions because you unwind everyone's transactions but would bead that would be bad but the other side of that is that everything is verifiable which is good okay because it says that in in a situation where you don't trust anyone that you have all of these transaction history built upon it that can be verified and it's a little bit more complex than that because there's there's basically there are multiple nodes where everyone who's running a node is storing a copy of the blockchain and so if if you question a block if you query a block it not just queries yours it also queries everyone else's nodes and they have to all come back in agreement and if the majority agrees that that transaction took place then that's verifiably that it did well I sorry I feel like I'm as ever leading you down ACH technical tunnel here but why wouldn't all of them agree why well if if someone were trying to do something dastardly like keep a second Ledger right cook the books not yeah what in this new modern technology world that isn't in any way like the old one yes if somebody were to do that right so so someone could alter their copy of the blockchain and oh right but they couldn't get away with it because of all those pesky kids who've got their own copies modify everyone else's so yeah if you wanted to do that you'd have to have 51% of all of the servers and nodes under your control in order to be able to get away with a modified copy okay challenge accepted um and rejected right all right okay so let's move on let's move on because I don't want to talk all day about blockchain I know no one else wants to listen either so it's I mean there's been a bunch of big things you know Qualcomm was a good story I had a feeling somehow in my bones that you might uh be interested in Qualcomm we talked about this before on the podcast and and you know this story backwards where are we now and when did it start oh I you know I don't even want to get into when it started but the the short version is that Qualcomm makes chipsets it's actually if you want to go back to when it really started go back to the iPhone 4 when the iPhone 4 had a new model introduced midlife of the phone and that new model supported Verizon okay and that new model required a different modem chip set from Qualcomm in order to be able to support Verizon and it actually had a slightly different form factor the the mute switch and volume keys moved around a little bit on that phone so that they had room to to rearrange stuff inside there and very unique situation because it's very rare that they would introduce midlife a whole new model that's different internally and externally and that was when they started doing business with Qualcomm for this modem chip set and over time what happened is that there was concern that they were taking that Qualcomm was demanding too much in terms of royalty payments both from manufacturers and from Apple and apple doesn't like being pushed into a corner so Apple began looking for other suppliers Qualcomm didn't like that either so there's been lawsuits going back and forth and and various ones right now we're at a point where Qualcomm is seeking injunctions around the world to prevent Apple from selling iPhone oh and has succeeded in Germany I was just uh as record I was just hearing about that yeah no iPhone 7 and eight I think it is in Germany yeah wow and and you say well seven and eight how does that hurt apple and the the answer is does because those are the affordable phones that Apple was continuing to sell yes but there's also this thing isn't there um forgive me I know this is story you know better than I do but I've just heard this bit so uh correct me if I'm wrong uh qualcom had to um guarantee that should their legal challenge fail they will pay Apple for the loss of income they would have had so they've actually put in is a billion dollars or something into a funny enough an escrow account ready for the courts to take if necessary so so quacc is not exactly ping about here this is kind of a Gusty move huh well yes it's um they're rolling the hard six it's a Hail Mary pass I've been studying americanisms you see I like all of these ones but that's what they're going for yes yeah and it's it's going to be interesting to see what happens here at the same time Apple has been hiring for the expertise required to make their own modems and they've been hiring in qualcomm's backyard okay I feel unsur surprised about that because Apple wants to do everything itself and and you can argue against that but it's done very well for them in the past so I'm not I'm only surprised it's taken them this long to be building their own modems because when was the iPhone 4 I can't even put a date on that but sometime in the last 11 years so yeah yeah so that's the story there and and basically what's going to happen is we're going to watch this court thing wind its way around we're going to see if they get more injunctions or not yeah it's it's going to be a big deal it's going to be a bigger deal in about 2020 or so when Apple does do their own modem that's my guess that's my speculation for when this actually happens you think that's um how soon they'll be able to do their own modems I think so and the the thing that I'm counting upon there the reason that I'm really looking forward to that is that the Qualcomm modem you know like Qualcomm don't like Qualcomm the product gives faster data transfer on the LTE chipsets than the uh than the competing Intel part if you have an Intel based phone versus a qualcom phone your speed tests will not be as fast now will it be slow enough that you'll notice or be upset by it maybe maybe not but but it's one of those things where once you know it it's kind of irksome and when they do their own I fully expect that they'll get it right that they won't have this problem now of course in the interven time 5G is also going to become a thing and so speeds will be exponentially faster anyway but uh and and of course qualcomm's been out boasting how they're going to have 5G in every Android handset so this is this is what we call an interesting moment in history I'm sorry my mind split in two different directions there one is 5G in every Android hands up yeah sure uh but the other one is Apple goes from not making a modem at all to making a 5G one to my mind that seems like a very big move but I suppose you can't really have baby steps with this you either do it or you don't um you confidence that Apple will have a 5G modem in 2020 well let me ask you does it make sense in 2020 to make a 4G LTE modem could you ask me again in in about month that would be good yes yeah but I will have the answer for you oh yes yes when when 2019 is going to have all of the major Flagship Android handsets with a 5G chipset you can have a phone that's an LTE handset in 2019 and it won't matter because it's still a transition year and towers are still going up and things like that but in 2020 that's going to be a little a little harder to get away with they could still do it but it would be late and I can't imagine them wanting to be late they get it beaten up enough about all kinds of things that it doesn't make sense they they really if they're going to do it they they really really need to have a 5G chip set now what they could do is they could buy in 5G for one more year from an Intel or one of those and then launch their own after that yeah but Apple's always taking lumps for something um so they are so they are seems to ignore it until they're ready for things arance or discipline yeah I mean speak speaking of taking lumps what about this 10r sales uh yeah you mean somebody's bought one is that well nice but I mean the the concept that Apple must not be doing well in sales that that Apple must be slowing down in sales that's been what all of the analysts have been saying right yes it is but uh they pick on the 10r this year last year it was the iPhone 10 disaster uh and nobody buying it at all except they were so ordinarily I I just kind of blank out this stuff but you've pointed out to me recently this issue of there being notifications sent um Apple basically Selling Stuff plugging the iPhone 10r and that's the first time I actually thought it smells like maybe there is an issue it does but at the same time you know just just anecdotally poking around and asking around everyone I can find everyone I've talked to says that when they try and go and buy an iPhone 10r they are sold out well that's that that you know you go to a Verizon store oh we got a shipment in and we're sold out that you that you if you wanted to find one you would have difficulty that it is not just walk up and get as many as you want cheap as chips they are in in shorter Supply so that's the question is it possible that all these analysts have got their story wrong surely not perish the thought sometimes I mean I know this is this is this is wrong but you some I just sometimes wonder uh whether analysts are talking stuff down and because they want to go buy Apple shares I I mean is that just uh conspiracy nutty of me I don't know but well now if you say something like that they have to disclose what their Holdings are because otherwise if they are doing that they get in in huge trouble with the Securities Exchange Commission all right so I was not only wrong I was bad there they would never it is it is a big deal to do that now I have some apple Holdings I have some small amounts of Apple Holdings um I don't pay attention to it I really don't I haven't sold or bought it in ages um it just kind of sits there for me so you know full full disclosure I have some shares but I'm not telling anyone what to do with their shares I'm not giving anyone advice about to go or buy or to go or sell I'm not saying any of that would you like me to look after the shares for you not at all I'm I'm content with them staying exactly where they are and doing exactly whatever it is they're doing I was just trying to help I Know Myself yes you know I I think I may have gotten a dividend check from them at some point and and it just reinvests I I it's I think it's become a running joke now apple announc is incredible sales figures stock price goes down because analysts are go W this is terrible news uh analysts are clearly looking at something else and they're not looking at sales figures today they're looking at what will happen next and things and that doesn't seem unreasonable it's just it never quite seems to work out even in the medium time isn't it that like Tim Cook said at least once this year I remember reading him saying uh he finds it bizarre that people focus on the 90-day sales business when Apple is really looking many many years ahead now there's part of me that thinks that makes sense but also Apple can afford but that's the same thing that that Jeff Bezos says right Jeff Bezos says that the results that are in this quarter were baked to years ago everything that's happening now is it was done two years ago and that's what led us to this point that he's focused on what's going on two years from this point again a big company can reasonably afford to do this I mean I'm self-employed I can't uh I have to deal in the now where they can't that's why you're selfemployed right because you got blinders on you got blinders on you you're too focused at this one moment you're not focused thinking ahead and if I weren't I'd be employed by somebody I think I'll I didn't say that part but if that's how you feel about it okay anyway long time somebody Blood by somebody I'm sure it's fun um okay so yes uh yeah what was the answer then we don't know we we don't really know what what else was a big story for you this year what do you think really opened things up oh I love that you put it quite that way because series shortcuts I mean I was a a workflow user before I love series shortcuts are are you a big user you know not a big user I I had been using them a while ago and before that I was using pythonista and really I I didn't take advantage of them in a big way I'm just looking at my shortcuts now I have about 30 gracious uh for things um mind you some of them are absolutely rubbish but I just love it there's one project I do where I need to account uh for every article that was published um and I could write it down but instead every couple of days I tap the shortcut it goes to the site grabs the RSS feed looks for what I wrote what other people wrote uh sorts the stuff I did and presents me in a nice little list that I email off to hers what's it worth I'll give it for you for an Apple share or a Bitcoin or or or something like that right yeah we'll see about that anyway what opened it up for you what end up the world in 2018 for you I really think and and you're going to laugh at this but I think think the Apple Watch series 4 oh Griff you're kidding why would I laugh at that the only thing about I've got against that is I haven't got one I really want one it looks brilliant what what appeals to you I think that it delivers on on sort of the promise of where things were going leading up to it you know we we'd been talking for ages about health care and making health care personal both through the Apple health records and the integration of actual Health charts and lab tests and so forth into Apple Health but also with the fitness and heart monitoring that we saw earlier and the diabetes monitoring those those were big deals the idea that series 4 takes that forward and can do the uh the the echocardiogram and can actually record results into Apple Health you know it it it seems like that goes further that where we're going to is is a point where I think in the future tell Health can be really enabled with these kinds of personal tests tele medicine is is one of those things where insurance companies are trying to push this now you know instead of having to go into a doctor you can just call one of their doctors and get consult and get you know things prescriptions sent out to the lab or you know prescription sent to the mail order pharmacy that then delivers it kind of thing and I think it ties it together where if you have the test results on a device that you already have in your home that can be shared with the doctor practicing tele medicine then it closes the loop there's been a report in the last few days here in the UK uh a study proving that um some sort of U machine learning artificial intelligence is proving to be demonstrably regularly more effective at diagnosing uh patients than doctors are and part of me thinks that that's wonderful um no actually pretty much all of me does I still want uh a human being to interpret the data but I mean that kind of news is not new there was for years uh going on in Chicago a I I believe I think I would remember was Chicago um you know one of the things that happens is that when people come in to an emergency room with potential heart condition triaging them as immediately needing attention or being okay and can wait to to be you know taken and as a part of triage um was a hard decision and that doctors would occasionally get it wrong or more than occasionally get it wrong and so they implemented a flowchart and if you followed the flowchart for the steps then your accuracy went up and you detected heart conditions that needed attention immediately that would have otherwise gone undetected much faster with with a higher accuracy rate and you know that's the same kind of thing that could be done computerized as as opposed to just following the flowchart that says do these things and you know that's that's where this kind of stuff comes from is that humans make errors and humans misread signs and humans weigh things and Overlook them whereas if you just follow these these steps and pick up on all of the signs and account for them properly other then you can diagnose with higher accuracy someday NBC is going to reboot ER and it's going to be the dullest hospital drama everwhere it's people watching screens and the odd bleep I mean it's it's it's not going to have Noah Wy and it's not going to have George Clooney and it's not it's going to be more like nurse um Nurse Jackie all right did you that one you didn't see that I saw the pilot for Nurse Jackie and I liked it but I don't remember seeing an awful lot of push notifications and there was a pusher or two I suppose I H you found it now one of the most exciting things for me this year is about is I met one of the writers of and he wrote Love labor lost one of the most famous episodes of it and I've read that script a couple times over the years I was I was slightly in awe as I shook that guy's hand incidents are inevitable and it comes down to how your company responds incidents require complex coordination between operations and software development teams who are the unsung heroes putting out fires every day and getting alerts immediately is critical when incident occurs like we were just talking about and that's why there's opsin by atlassian OBS empowers Devon Ops teams to plan for service disruptions and stay in control during incidents and it gives teams the power to respond quickly and efficiently to unplanned issues helps to notify all the right people through a smart combination of scheduling escalation paths that take into account things like time zones and holidays and allows for deep flexibility in how when and where alerts are deployed supported by over 200 inte Creations like Jura Amazon cloudwatch data dog New Relic and more and tracks all activity and provides useful insights to improve future innocent responses with Ops gen your next inocent doesn't stand a chance visit Ops gen.com to sign up to get a free company account and add up to five team members that's Ops geni.com never miss a critical alert again with Ops geni you know one of the things that I think really was was big for me this year was the iOS 12 and I was goingon to say the the iPhone 10s and 10s Max and 10r but I'm I'm altering that and I'm saying iOS 12 well clearly series shortcuts was part of iOS 12 so for me that's the that's an add-on that's that's not really well I also think it shouldn't be an add-on I think it should be part of the system per se but that for me that dominates iOS 12 uh what is it about 12 that uh so gets you so this past week I've had the experience of switching off my iPhone 6 and switching on an iPhone 10s Max 256 gig phone welome to the 10s Max World you've joined us temporarily only temporarily oh and what I'm seeing is just how good a job Apple did on iOS 12 you know I was you didn't have IOS 12 on your six oh I did I did and I encouraged you to get it don't you recall yes I just it made it sound like you'd sent me out there into the wild and you hadn't followed I'm right no I I put it on my phone and was impressed with its performance and these these past few weeks I've been a little bit bummed at it because it's been slower at some things or Crasher just a few things but but mostly that's not the OS as much as it is the applications on the OS uh you know it it will reboot overnight basically or occasionally reboot spontaneously but for the most part the phone is okay and the speed of it comes down to Apple Engineers having been issued the phone when they were developing iOS 12 and my hope is that those same Engineers still use that phone when they're developing the updates for it because if they don't then that phone is going to be left by the wayside again but it really is is a good example of what apple is going to do when they do things right where they they insist on developing as that as the target years and years ago they had something called apple apple compatibility labs and they maintained a lab of a huge number of machines old and current and as a developer you could run your software in the compatibility lab and prove how it ran on all of those machines they got rid of that a long time ago and with phones they don't do that you're pretty much expected to maintain your own but for the OS it's really a good thing that they did this and I hope that they continue this practice because the the iPhone 6 and 6s are going to be supporting Ed for a while longer to come and I I really do believe they need to make sure that it runs as well as it does on those running it on 10s and 10s Max has been eye opening for how smooth it is and how how fluid it is how responsive it is but it's not that distant a cousin from the way it runs on the six and I I think they as much as they know that iOS is the crown jewel of their properties at the moment they need to keep they need to keep that in mind and protect it and I think lost that plot with iOS 11 and and that's why iOS 12 is so important I've realized for some reason you're saying that I once you've moved onto a new iOS I think after a while you forget what you didn't have before and for some reason something they said reminded me of this glorious feature in iOS 12 uh to do with passwords um I I'm a one password user so if I go to a site uh on my phone face ID opens it up it will offer me a password from iCloud keychain or one password password and just squirts it in straight away I rarely have to open one password now and it's not like it was a burden to but the smoothness of that I me all these months in it's the one thing of iOS 12 where I still go oh every time it happens well and it's not that it's also the speed with which you're doing it on that new handset it switches to one password uses face ID to unlock it and gives you that password for the correct thing very quickly the old routine uh using iOS 12 on an older handset is it takes some time to switch the application then it takes some time to register Touch ID and then it gives you that it's a lot more uh like molasses Stone Age I know well you just went for glass I went for Stone Age yes uh what do you think of face ID um while you're using the 10s Max you know I I like it very much but it doesn't work as well for me as I'd hoped off Axis or in the dark it does do it but it's it's there are times when I have to pick up the phone and re aim it well I I'm fine in the dark but um I've noticed that I think I'm very conscious of the fact that the new iPads can look at you from any angle uh I am aware that I having to uh it's usually when I'm in the car and I put the phone uh into its holder uh landscape uh to do Apple Maps on it and stuff and I haven't got ready before the thing footes off and I have to take it off or twist my head at a funny angle so I'm hoping next year Well actually no I'm not cuz I can't afford to buy another phone but I'm hoping the next time I can get an iPhone it'll be like the iPad and recognize me oh and the other thing is uh is connecting it to carplay so connecting the iPhone 6 to carplay takes a while you see a black carplay screen loading on the phone and then it it connects eventually plugging this thing into the carplay like seen I I understand what it does but um you obviously like carplay what is getting off point again sorry but um what do you use carplay for uh carplay is for maps it's for incar entertainment it's for receiving text messages and answering them all right I just get sir Siri to read out my text messages yeah through the dashboard little little notification at the top of the carplay screen pops down saying William texted this or William sent an iMessage and you tap on it and it reads it aloud and asks if you'd like to reply actually is that this is coming back to iOS 12 because the thing I really like is I think didn't this come in at 11 they do not disturb while driving thing I found out weirdly um uh inconsistent uh it always seems to be the messages that I don't want to get you know the ones where uh I got to respond right now but I'm driving for another hour those get through but others don't so there's obviously a setting somewhere a meanness filter somewhere in the settings preferences well I don't want to go on for too much longer so what is the last thing you'd like to to leave our listeners with for the year oh this is it we're closing out 2018 and I want to thank everyone by the way who reached out about my comments on batteries and and having Jason applebomb on the show and if there are more experts you'd like to have on feel free to recommend them or feel free to recommend topics that you'd like us to find experts for and we will do that I I really appreciate that that was some good feedback from you guys I love that you do that by the way it's so interesting when you get these people on um I there's so much to say about 2018 and there are things I'm looking forward doing 2019 but the one that just pops into my head is is a slightly silly one um do you remember back in March people were reporting that the Amazon Echo would suddenly laugh at them that kind I recall that yeah yeah yeah and it's gone on since that um other Amazon echos have sent audio recordings of conversations to other people uh in some cases a lot of these conversations and it's always traced back down to a misheard uh command but still there's something intriguing about that to me and so far my homod hasn't betrayed me in that way at all speaking of betrayal in in Europe you have this thing called gdpr okay and and one of the things that it allows you to do is ask companies to share the information they've collected on you with person right yes you can say hey give me all the information you've got on me so that I can review it and what happens do you think when you ask Amazon for that oh I don't know uh Apple gives it to you what does Amazon do well a Amazon responds to the request by giving you someone else's information oh fair enough really like 1.7 gigabytes worth of stuff from an entirely different person okay I did resar have a company send me um an invoice for something I bought in 2013 yeah and when I asked them about it it turns out it was human error another user with my name was having trouble retrieving their license code or something to help him they done this so uh I love all this technology and it comes down to this isn't this is like the Bitcoin stuff isn't it you have all of this fantastic technology it is the future but behind it there are some clever or some slightly distracted people doing things human beings defeating technology bias but it should never be the case that you get audio recordings of another user you you should never never be in that situation where you get the actual audio of someone else's Amazon Echo I can't imagine any circumstance in which that would be in any way a problem or embarrassing not at all no yeah also I don't have any Amazon products in the bedroom because my goodness can you imagine what happens when that user gets that 1.7 gig of that other user stuff it's just disastrous it really is can I just distance myself here I didn't leak to the bedroom with this at all you did so you're out there on your own uh with this one you're the one who wanted to replace your homepod with the echo for Angela no uh Angela's being given an echo as a late birthday present and I was very happy to hear that because I can steal my home part back yeah right very different same words different sequence something like that anyway we will be back in 2019 I have loved having you here joining us for this time and and seriously please let us know who you want to hear from and I I you know for all the talk that we give about Apple being doomed or apple not doing the right things or what these analysts are saying there's there's tons of room for Apple to improve at the same time there are a number of things they've done right and so that's why we're in this tug uh that that's this pushpull relationship with them of things that we like and things that we want them to get better at and and the reason that we criticize apple is because we want them to get better at them I I I'm very optimistic about things like health and watch and where that goes I you know I keep hoping that they'll let iPad become a real Computing platform and of course there are people that say it is a real Computing platform and they're they're all right also it comes down to uses um you know the the keyboard debacles the battery debacles the the marzipan apps on Mac OS all of these things are worthy things to criticize but I have to believe and I have to hope that they're all going to get better and continue and improve William I I'm just stunned into Dison there because I am one of those iPad users who considers it a real Computing device in fact my iPad is next to me now I think I said this to you before in the three years whatever it is since I had since I first bought the 12.9 I doubt there's been a day that I haven't run the battery down to zero uh through working on it um this is a major part of my workflow even though um I'm frankly botted with my my betraying me iMac yeah well don't bend your iPad okay I'm a very good go not you know we talked about that the last episode where uh where where you know if you've got one take it back get one that's not bent but I was a little upset with the Dan richo statement so there's there's a VP at named Dan richo who issued a statement saying that that's not a defect that they allow for A4 mm tolerance of Bend and that it feels a little bit insulting I mean I understand that they have design tolerances and engineering tolerances and things like that but to be able to say this is not a defect I understand why they're saying that they're saying that so they don't have to take anything back but at the same time who you going to believe me or Your Lying Eyes right it's clearly bent always right it's clearly bent if you put it down on a flat table and it rocks it's bent and this is not the first time Apple's ever had to deal with situation like this if you go back to the old Power books the aluminum power books they warped and they rocked on tables and people complained I did not know that why yeah yeah so this is this is power books I okay so in that case saying is it's never going to get any better there's always going to be something like this and after such a cheery end you you've now made 2019 seemed a little bit more miserable well apple is not one thing apple is a multitude of things apple apple makes a multitude of products and apple gets many things right at the same time as getting some things wrong and and that's all we can do is is try and in our small way hold their feet to the fire whilst giving them quite a lot of money for individual devices that frankly are worth it every time yes I agree something like that we will be back in 2019 when we do we will be at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas and we'll be reporting on all kinds of weird and wonderful things some of which will actually come and get released some will see the light of day we will be back then thank you so much give us your feedback email William appleinsider.com or Victor appleinsider.com I'm V marks on Twitter William your W galago on Twitter very good thank you for saying that and we will see you in the new year\n"