The Future of Smart Home Technology: A Review of Apple's Support and HomeKit Compatibility

As I sit here with my Apple TV 4, I find myself pondering the limitations of my current smart home setup. While I have invested in some excellent products, such as Elgato's Bluetooth-enabled devices, I am still waiting for a more comprehensive solution that integrates seamlessly across all my devices. One area that particularly interests me is the use of Bluetooth and Wi-Fi in conjunction with HomeKit.

HomeKit, Apple's smart home platform, has been around for several years now, but it wasn't until recently that we saw the introduction of Bluetooth-enabled products, such as those from Eve Systems. These devices are designed to communicate with each other using a bridge to talk to Ethernet, which is an interesting choice. I'm not entirely sure why Apple didn't adopt Wi-Fi as the primary connectivity method for HomeKit, but it's clear that their attention has been focused elsewhere.

One area where Apple has shown great interest is in supporting devices that use the Wi-Fi standard, particularly those that require a bridge to connect to Ethernet. Elgato's products are a prime example of this, with many of their Bluetooth-enabled devices being fully compatible with HomeKit. However, it's worth noting that not all products have received the same level of support from Apple, and some remain HomeKit-compatible only by virtue of their hardware design rather than any specific software features.

My own experience with Eve Systems' products has been mixed. While I was able to see what they were reading when outside my home using Bluetooth to connect to my Apple TV 4, I was disappointed to find that they didn't quite meet my expectations in terms of reliability and performance. The same can be said for other products I've tested, which often struggle with connectivity issues or fail to integrate seamlessly into the Home app.

Despite these challenges, I remain hopeful that future developments will address some of these issues. With iOS 10 and the Home app, Apple has laid the groundwork for a more comprehensive smart home experience. However, I would love to see more devices come online that can handle multiple tasks at once, much like the example of Siri's voice dictation capabilities. This is an area where smart home technology truly excels, offering the ability to automate complex tasks with ease.

As I look to the future, I'm eager for products that can make my life easier and more convenient. Whether it's controlling my air conditioning or managing my smart home scenes, I want a solution that can handle multiple devices and commands at once. The current state of HomeKit compatibility is certainly not where I'd like it to be, but with time and innovation, I'm confident that we'll see significant advancements.

For now, I'll continue to hold out hope for products that can bridge the gap between my existing smart home setup and the vision Apple has outlined for HomeKit. As someone who wants to make their life easier and more convenient, I'll be keeping a close eye on developments in this area.

In conclusion, the future of smart home technology is bright, but it still faces significant challenges. With ongoing innovation and development, we can expect to see more products that seamlessly integrate with HomeKit, offering the convenience and automation that we all desire. Until then, I'll continue to explore options and advocate for a more comprehensive smart home solution.

**About the Author**

If you'd like to learn more about my thoughts on smart home technology or follow along with my latest endeavors, be sure to check out my articles at AppleInsider.com and join me on Twitter at @thisisNeilNEL.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this the 75th Diamond Jubilee episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor marks and joining me is Apple Insider's editor-in Chief Neil Hughes hey Victor how's it going it's fantastic how are you I'm all right that's kind of a let down you're brilliant always I know it so let's begin I wanted to begin by talking a little bit about gosh I think I wanted to talk about the rumors let's do rumors well we had a bunch of things right we had we had iPhone we had display stuff and things like that but but first of all you've been running the beta version of iOS 10 I have you're on beta 1 is that right yes unfortunately why is there no beta 2 that's a good question uh it's going to be coming up on three weeks next week since uh the launch of beta one typically Apple uh would do a two week Gap in between releases um and I think that was the expectation that we would see a new beta either on Monday or Tuesday of this week and so we do not have one and that pains me a very great deal because uh in order to do my day job I have to be running um iOS 10 and watch OS 3 on my devices and uh they are buggy and you should not be running them uh anyone who is not doing this for a living who writes about Apple should not be running the beta software on their main phone because this is meant for Developers for testing unfortunately I don't have a spare Apple watch and if I want to continue wearing my Apple watch um then I have to be connected to a phone running iOS 10 so I'm carrying both with me everywhere and dealing with a lot of crashes we do not yet have a beta 2 but hopefully next week well I know you're looking forward to it I wisely have chosen to not run the betas this time so that is a wise decision I I as much as I like the change in iOS 10 um and watchos 3 they're both fantastic um not for general public consumption well you remember that every time I've tried a new release right whether it was the iOS 8 betas or the iOS 9 betas I have encountered bizarre problems that no one can EXP La I know and I can say that I had a bizarre problem that has lasted since iOS 7 with copy and paste not working properly and I don't know what the heck happened but installing iOS 10 beta fixed copy and paste it actually works properly for me now so Hallelujah that alone is quite an accomplishment and almost makes almost makes the issues of the beta worth it for me I am glad to hear that your longtime suffering is at an end indeed um what I what I'm at a loss for is is how this issue persisted across so many different phones and releases for you it's probably something corrupt inside your your iCloud backup that's killing it yeah it must be I have no idea this phone was um uh it was not a fresh install it was a overthe a install of beta 10 and it fixed it and I have no idea why but again this persisted over phones and Os releases and everything and I continue to have an issue where I would copy something go to another app hit paste and it would paste something not that I had copied something from prior and then I would have to go back and hit copy again sometimes a third time so uh I am extremely thankful that it has apparently been fixed with iOS 10 and I've Googled it in many attempts to fix it and found that other people were having similar problems so uh hopefully this is something that Apple quietly fixed uh in the new release that will fix that issue for everybody else that was experiencing it cool now let me let me talk about this for a second because I I as you know am a fan of all things historical including technology history right right and if you've been watching my Twitter feed you've seen that I've been posting things under the the hashtag computer Museum lately M I have been digging through and I have been unearthing crazy crazy old stuff in terms of technology and we wrote an article about how the iPhone is turning nine this year MH right so F first of all did you write that article I did what was in it tell us for it because you wrote it you can tell us best well it was just kind of how the iPhone um is at a crossroads right now and it was a little bit of a history lesson as to what happened with the first generation iPhone and some of the mistakes that were made that Apple course corrected in in some cases like adjusting the pricing almost immediately um and some a little more over time such as um well the addition of copy and paste for example took a little while uh the the app store didn't launch for another year but um it was just kind of putting all that in perspective for where apple is now having just come off of their first ever quarter with year-over-year decline in iPhone sales where obviously the iPhone is an astronomical success and continues to be especially if you're not someone who's focused on growth and just looking at the dollars and cents of it the iPhone is is a cash printing machine for Apple um so you know it's interesting place where Apple's at right now where if the company wants to stimulate growth and return to growth uh what are they going to do to make that happen as we're kind of on the cusp of the launch of the I so-called iPhone 7 which is expected to look largely like the iPhone 6s um just kind of talking about um those those things that Apple did in the beginning like the $200 price cut two months after it launched to address some of the issues that they had right out of the gate you know it's easy for people to forget that the first iPhone which came out in 2007 um June of 2007 so we just celebrated the anniversary on 29th 2007 uh the first iPhone only sold like 6 million units in its entire lifetime that first generation model I mean 6 million units is nothing today like apple sells that many phones in a couple weeks consider that a failure these days yeah we're talking about a a years worth of sales after they finally replaced it with the iPhone 3G but that first generation iPhone let put some perspective on that right with the landscape at the time was that before the iPhone mobile phones were either uh dumb phones or feature phones as we call them today you know the hottest phone back then the the phone that everyone wanted to have back then was the Motorola Razor yes which was which was at the top of the Heap for years I mean it was not as quickly evolving of it IND back then is it is now certain it's not exactly I mean there were definitely Revolutions in terms of what you were able to do back then things like the uh the Nokia Symbian S60 Series where it was a a smartphone platform and you could totally run applications from the Nokia App Store on it or or the Sony versions that were uiq which was similar there there were definitely smartphones out there and I'm not even mentioning Blackberry or uh or Moto Q but I mean compare like think about uh Windows mobile 20 2002 2003 and then think about how little it had changed by 2007 when the iPhone came out I mean let's put it got color I had a Windows I had a I had a Windows mobile 2003 device that was color um it was a Dell axom PDA I remember I remember that and uh that platform really did not evolve in that span from 2003 when the OS shipped until like 2007 when the iPhone came out really was still looking the same was still a start button based interface stylus based interface I mean and to put that in perspective think about the iPhone here we are in 2016 think about four years ago what your iPhone was wait wait wait just because I I want to BR go back to Palm for a second because Palm was the originator of a lot of this right palm was the original pocket assistant Palm was the the first stylus base and the whole Palm interface was predicated on copying um Macintosh system six or Bas Windows mobile was the market leader at that time well so here's an interesting piece that I wanted to bring up is that if you remember in 2005 so Palm had this history and and our own Daniel Aon Diller wrote about this years ago it roughly drafted the um Palm had this history of being the hardware and software company and then selling off the software and being just the hardware right and Licensing the software back from the the other company and they did this off and on repeatedly and and the benefit of doing it like this was that the software company could license the Palm OS out to Sony Qualcomm Kera and others and and therefore there would be more palmos devices and the last time they did this exercise access bought the software bought the OS and was giving them a hard time about doing it because Palm had bought a Boos and was going to run BOS we were going to have our first true um multi-threaded multitasking smart phone via Palm running BOS that future never came to be because access said if you do that we will no longer license you to Palm OS and by the way we're going to Stop Licensing to Palm OS and you're going to have to pick up Linux from us and it's going to be access Linux on Palm MH and so their answer was a a screw me screw you move where they said we will license in Windows mobile and they sold half of the Palm trios with palm OS and the other half with Windows mobile mhm and all of this was happening in January of 2007 yeah I mean don't forget that the best uh phone OS you could get that time was HTC Sense was doing their own uh skin over Windows Diamond interface which was basically saying Windows mobile is terrible it's not finger friendly you need a stylus it uses a start button it's a nightmare let's well the problem with the H interface was that it was beautiful for about the first layer and a half and as soon as you tried to do anything you dumped right back into Windows mobile and that's one of the problems that uh you know still persists on many Android devices to this day I mean not every company has the uh resources of Samsung and even Samsung is not really a software company but you end up with these you know unique user interfaces on uh Android that lead to inconsistencies within the platform Google would rather that you didn't do that at all they would rather you just ship stock Android and deal with it right but you're not going to be able to Samsung from doing that because they have to differentiate their phones so what was once a problem continues to be a problem just different companies and the names have changed but um yeah you know if you look back on that and how stagnant the smartphone industry was before the iPhone came in it took a little while and certainly until the iPhone 3G hit for things to really start to accelerate the way that they did I don't think it was stagnant at all there were a lot of interesting attempts at doing things but they were all within a a well boundar sort of um space right you know there there were the Nokia S40 phones that were music players also there were the Sony wman phones that were music players like the wman 880 um there there were a number of attempts at doing things to differentiate from what phones had been I I mean clearly you're nostalgic for this era era but those phones were all garbage they some of them were actually quite good but not none of them were as interesting or good as the first iPhone right the iPhone was a paradigm changer without question and you got to remember too back then nobody owned a smartphone nobody had a data plan they were expensive I mean now you're looking at you know most I had GPRS data and I had a Nokia I had a couple of different you are not not most people Victor you are an early adopter Enthusiast your mom did not own a Windows phone smartphone or Palm or anything like that my dad had the Kera Palm phone and before that and after that he had the handspring Trio phone with the smartphone mod was his company paying for it or was he buying it himself um IBM paid for at least one of those yeah I mean people weren't buying smartphones the way they are now you know most phone sales now of all phones are smartphones remember back you know Nokio was the worldwide leader oh the communicator do you remember the communicator Nokia controlled 90% of the smartphone market up until like 201 when when things really started to shift globally but um for those first few years of the iPhone smartphones were still a very small share of the overall mobile phone business certainly in the years yeah certainly in the years since it's it's changed quite a bit but um really the the iPhone was the Tipping Point in so many ways in terms of accessibility in terms of demand in terms of um adoption uh without the iPhone the whole I mean the iPhone literally change the entire world of computing and Technology um you know the iPhone your first iPhone I bought my first iPhone in September of 2007 uh the day that Apple announced the price drop so you still have it I do I was a uh very poor newspaper reporter at the time um and repeat yourself I um they announced the price drop and I was a T-Mobile customer at the time so I might if uh if if T-Mobile you had jailbreak to be able to get it to work on I had to go to an AT&T store because technically it was a subsidized phone so there was a weird thing where AT&T wanted to set it up in the store because Apple wanted them to do it to make sure that everything was good but then they backed off of that because it was they because the activation servers were crashing so they just let people start taking their phones home so so here's what happened originally right I bought it on day one and the way that I bought it on day one was I I I just I couldn't handle waiting in line so I had a friend who lived in Oregon and waited in line in Oregon and then shipped it to me overnight after he waited in line and got it MH and so he he was in Portland I think and or somewhere outside Beaverton who knows and he shipped me the iPhone and I had it the next day basically and when the price drop hit which as you said was was September mhm I bought it in June price drop happened in September they gave out uh $100 gift cards card gift cards to everyone and those gift cards came in great useful for many many users because when it came time for the 3G people who had that gift card ready used it to go towards the purchas of 3G yeah except you paid $200 more than the phone was worth two months later so H but you had it you had so they when they launched the there was an 8 gig model that sold for $600 and there was a 4 gig model that sold for $500 uh both of them um launched on June 29th in September Apple cut the price by 200 bucks and basically discontinued the 4 Gig sold the remaining inventory that day that it was announced um was also about the same time that they had first jailbroken the iPhone so I knew that I could run it on T-Mobile I was not a AT&T customer and since it was a subsidized phone you technically had to be an AT&T customer to buy the well it was sim locked I went into a AT&T store they wanted to activate it I told them that I was buying it for a GI for somebody and that they would bring it back um so yes I lied to the AT&T store somebody come get me um and then uh because I couldn't afford a data plan on a on a uh on you know the prices they had at that time I had the at& data plan you were going to get was the the unlimited data plan at that time well it was expensive and I couldn't afford it so I Mike still has his unlimited data plan grandfathered from that time I was on T-Mobile and I hacked it to run and then I had um a T-Mobile WAP a WAP plan which basically allowed limited internet but there was a jailbreak install that you could do it wasn't uh what it later became with like their own app store and stuff like you had to do everything kind of coded by hand with the you know tutorials online but yeah C was not originally an app store it became one right so I had to hack it so that it would reroute all internet traffic through the single port that T-Mobile allowed cuz it turned out that T-Mobile at the time when they were selling these it was like I think it was $3 a month for data uh and it was slow as hell but um first of all all data at that time was right you were using GPRS right so they weren't checking the type of data that was going through so you you would forward all data through a specific port and then the phone worked you could browse the web on the go you could uh the only thing you couldn't get when I did that was visual voicemail but everything else uh T-Mobile didn't run Visual Voicemail servers at that time right it was an AT&T exclusive it required their servers and all that but other than that um the phone worked great and I kept it for until the iPhone 4 came out so I stuck around with the OG iPhone for a long time um and that was actually I got the iPhone 4 because I just started working at Apple Insider um and so that was the only reason that I had upgrade at that point was I kind of had to um but prior to that um you know just in terms of trying to save save money and being a poor reporter at a newspaper that was uh that was how I scratched by nice I had the the iPhone that I bought on day one and um I was at Ma when it was announced I was at Mack again the year later when iOS 2 was announced now early on there was no app store and Maps were not turn BYT with with the use of the GPS they were sort of assisted GPS and you you could step through the steps on the turns but it wouldn't recognize where you were and adjust the turns for you at that time right and there like I said there was no app store you had the apps that were there and you had the internet you had Safari yep and web apps web apps and they were surprisingly capable you could do a lot with them you know openg let you do cool transforms where you could do animations to to flip cards kind of thing and and really make the web app feel like a native app in a lot of ways right it was really cool and and the you know beauty of that is okay fine you're using the network resource to pull it down but it could store it in some cash on the phone and that you always had the app up to date you never had to worry about updates you always had you know it was it was either available or it wasn't and it was going to be great because there was no worry about viruses or other vulnerabilities it was it was just its own thing but we you know the the the outcry and and the hackers and uh people like Erica sedun who is a developer who used to work for uh tuaw The Unofficial Apple web blog when it was a thing um you know she wrote about along with people like Craig hackenberry behind icon Factory and Twitter Ric they they wrote about how to unofficially write applications for the iPhone at that time and people made really cool jailbroken applications before you could install um you know app before there was an app right using the work laid down by sedun and and hackenberry there was actually one app that was kind of mindblowing at the time it's funny to look back and be like you know who cares but um one of the early demos for the Microsoft Surface not the surface that we know now but no no the coffee table the coffee table which was announced before the iPhone or around the same time one of the demos they had was a series of photos laying on a table and they were like kind of stacking them and resizing them and moving them around and so someone made an app for the iPhone before there was an app store on Cydia that you could install that was you could take photos from your collection and move them around on the screen and resize them and put them in front of each other and stuff like that and I remember showing that to people and like it blew their mind because it was using multitouch and there were all these items on the screen at once and the screen was essentially just a blank canvas to do something with and it's funny to look back and and realize you know how how silly that was today that would be a technology demo not an app right but you know at the time that was like you know especially when you were thinking about Microsoft Surface and it was this giant table and all that stuff like this was something in your pocket that was doing that exact same capability it was it was really quite incredible well so the the original Blackberry quote was one of the founders of blackberry got an iPhone and took it apart and his response was my God they they they somehow shrunk down and shoved a Mac inside a phone and and that was literally what we'd arrived at yeah I still have my original iPhone I still have I still have I think I have two iPhone 3GS hanging around right now maybe three of them um I I think the the greatest Testament you could give to the original iPhone is how much how many of the design principles not only remain in the current iPhone in terms of where everything's located and how it works Etc but also in how Apple has Revisited them and come back to them over the years for example the iPhone 3G went with the plastic back the iPhone 4 switched to a glass back and uh they kept those uh uh sharp edges on the four and the five and the 5S but now you look at the iPhone wait look at your Apple watch in profile and look at your original iPhone right now look at your iPhone 5S or I'm sorry look at your iPhone 6s and your iPhone 6 metal back curved edges a very very very similar design to the first iPhone when you break it down in that way obviously not as thin and not as elegant no but your Apple watch is every bit as thick oh yeah it is so um yeah it's it's um it's it's interesting to look back and realize how much foresight Apple had in the design of the iPhone in something that was not only iconic but that could last and you could pick up an iPhone right now and and and I have my original classic iPhone and when I feel it in my hand it just feels right it's it's well construed Ed um yeah it's thick and uh but I mean honestly if they sold a phone like that right now that had like a great camera and a thick battery that would last a couple days I'd probably buy it they've come a long way maybe a 10th Generation iPhone next year right yeah you know I I I've been digging through and and posting things like I said on Twitter and I found the uh all of the Mac magazines from back then of the Mac world and some of the others Mac User from from the announcement of the original iPhone with the with the first one on the cover story yeah yeah it's um you know the first question is why on Earth did I save all that stuff but the second thing is is it's it's really like you say it's interesting to look back at what we what has been MH and where we've been and I still you know Mikey laughs at me for this but but a time to time I power on the uh the iPhone 3G and the original iPhone and some of the apps are still able to work you know the the servers that they talked to for things on the internet are still there and in some cases still alive and still talking the same language now a lot of that's going to change real soon because iOS 10 uh requires https for all connections so I I fully expect that many of the things that I was using on those old iPhones are are pretty much dead I think the last OS you can install is 3.1.2 on the first iPhone I think that's the most up-to-date it can be that's correct and 313 and four were allowed on the 3G I actually after I got my iPhone 4 and still my old iPhone hanging around because I like to do fun stuff with technology just for the heck of it I did a hack where I installed Android on my uh first gen iPhone uh and there was also a mod on Cydia that took iOS 4 features and ported them back to uh 3.1.2 yeah um so that was pretty cool yeah one of these days I'm going to try and roll back my original iPhone to to iOS 1.0 or rather iPhone OS 1.0 and I I have the you know I have the original Apple TV right MH and I've rolled that the hot plate and I've rolled that back to Apple TV os1 and I actually then had to use it I had I had a requirement where I actually had to use it so I had to go ahead and update it to Apple TV OS 2 to be able to use it again and um the nice thing about the current version of iTunes you know it's it's kind of incredible here we are in 2016 and iTunes 12 is able to talk to the original Apple TV who says Apple doesn't offer Legacy support they totally offer Legacy support and it it updated and it synchronized the movies that I had to have on it so here's what I was doing I I know all of our listeners think I'm nuts and wish I would move on to something interesting by promise I will but I I had a movie that had been edited in iMovie for an event and there were a series of projectors on a wall pointing at different screens that had come down motorized and I needed something that could run the movie reliably on demand and I didn't want to use a laptop M because laptops have a thousand things that can go wrong right and so I couldn't do it with the modern Apple TV because the modern Apple TV even though it has storage doesn't really have a way to save movies to it locally that I could think of mhm someone's going to tell me that I'm wrong that there's an app for that and everything and I I appreciate it if they do but at the time I couldn't think of how the answer was but the the original Apple TV was essentially an iPod with an HDMI port on it and and synced the same way and so I I loaded the current new 2016 movie onto the 2007 Apple TV connected it to the the port in the wall that ran the projectors in the ceiling and used the infrared remote to press play and it just worked which is just what it should do that's pretty cool it was excellent the event went off without a hitch that's awesome brilliant so we talked about that you know a couple weeks ago couple weeks ago we were talking before WWDC about how Apple was going to make a display and it was going to have Thunderbolt and it was going to have an external graphic unit in it and and we were totally wrong well I we I didn't think they were going to do that that was just a rumor that was out there um what happened was WWDC came and passed and not only did they not release one but uh they also the week after WWDC discontinued the uh Thunderbolt display it is no more um they are no longer they're selling their available inventory and then that's it now according to yet another rumor apple is still working on the supposed model with an integrated graphics card uh and as we've discussed before this makes sense uh for a variety of reasons but the biggest one is if you were to invest in a 12-in Macbook which is underpowered uh to allow for its thin design and battery life uh you couldn't drive all the pixels on a big monitor uh which is a problem uh that would limit Apple's ability to sell that especially as they're pushing for thinner and lighter devices so the expectation is that apple is going to release a new Thunderbolt display that is going to have an integrated graphics card in the display itself that will act as an external graphics card for a MacBook MacBook Pro whatever uh this is technically possible and has been done with mac and is currently being done commercially on Windows PCS because the speed of Thunderbolt is fast enough that it actually has the bandwidth to allow graphics card to work externally now I wouldn't um expect this external graphics card capability to be some sort of superpowered gaming rig uh I think this is more about just driving the pixels on a retina display uh for a 27in thunderbolt Retina Display I don't see this turning into you know some high-end GeForce GTX graphics card we're not playing crisis or Warcraft or whatever you're not going to be buying this machine for halflife 3 if it ever comes out so oh come on I wish um I I am uh a former PC Gamer I guess is the way I would put it I used to build recovering recovering if you will I just don't have the space and the time really building a Windows PC was a lot of fun for somebody like myself who's nerdy and likes working with gadgets and I liked upgrading the components and you know it was it was a lot of time and back then I had a lot of time in my hands you know and you're counting frame rates and uh and checking temperatures and doing all that kind of stuff and it was fun uh but nowadays if I want a game I'm mostly playing games on my TV just because it's easier because you just kind of plug it in and it works uh so wait why not steam box you know I thought about it I I I PC games with controllers are not something that you know uh valve has done a pretty good job with their Big Picture Mode to try to address that but there's still something about using a game console uh where it's just designed for that so-called Leanback experience with a controller um that does not work as well on PC games now having said that if I could get a high-end graphics card and plug it into my Mac over uh Thunderbolt or buy a monitor with an integrated graphics card that was you know or or have something that was swappable even potentially I would be all over that uh I would if I had to you know uh God forbid boot camp uh dual boot Windows on my Mac and be able to play PC games that I currently cannot play that I'm missing out on because of you know being only Mac but I just don't have the space to build a PC Tower and I don't really have the motivation to buy a um a a steam box uh you know maybe if halflife 3 ever launches or something I would do that but I what I am hoping is cu realistically let's be honest this Thunderbolt display with graphics card is not going to have a high-end graphics card it'll be enough to push the pixels which is fine that's what Apple wants it for what would be nice to see is if Apple uses its launch as an opportunity to allow thirdparty manufacturers to introduce their own Thunderbolt graphics cards to market for official support for OS 10 and not just some hack being put together as it is right now and so if I as somebody who maybe wants to push pixels get some more power not even for gaming like just running Final Cut Pro and stuff like that uh to be able to take a small 12-in MacBook and dock it and have it turn into a super powerful workstation at home and then be able to take it on the go and have nice portability and Battery let's temper that a little bit right super power for all in terms of the graphics card that would be attached to it the processor is going to the processor inside true that is that is true yes um it it doesn't magically become a core i7 no but it would greatly enhance the ability of it to do things like edit video um the exporting of the video is tends to be more more CPU intensive so that would probably still be pretty slow but uh in terms of uh you know um transferring the video files and that sort of thing and you could you could make that a much more efficient experience with Thunderbolt and docking it and turning it into something more powerful um and we've talked about this with the iPad to right this ability to turn your personal Computing device into the device that you need at that moment if you need an ultra portable laptop you got it if you need more of a workstation you can do it you love that SMART connector I I think that well it doesn't even have to be a SMART connector it could be lightning it could be USB C in the case of the 12-in MacBook um whatever it's done over uh we have the bandwidth in the technology now to get the best of both worlds with these devices you don't have to make those kinds of sacrifices you don't have to make those kinds of compromises and so it would be nice to see if os10 offers some sort of official support for that with third party manufacturers to allow me to maybe put a high-end GeForce graphics card connect to my Mac and have it work so so what do you think the likelihood is of this rumor coming true uh it came from John pitchkowski uh formally of all things D now known as recode he's a BuzzFeed of all places now um he has where you get hired man he he has a pretty good track record on this stuff so I went from not thinking it was going to happen to thinking it's probably going to happen and I'm excited um even if it is not a high-end gaming thing and it just pushes the pixels to have that option to be able to have a super portable laptop and then dock it with a gorgeous 27in Retina Display that's awesome you know I mean if you care at all about this kind of stuff if if technology excites you that's really really cool so in the meantime there is no Apple display they're selling out whatever stock they have on hand which knowing that they manage stock well is probably not much right can we talk about the best Alternatives so that our dear listeners who are actually going out and buying monitors know what to get yeah I mean um you have a lot of options out there there's a lot of um 4K 4K and 5K displays that you can get um and they're pretty reasonably price I mean if you think about Apple's Thunderbolt display was like 1,000 bucks right so so ad Dell ultr sharp 27 in the uh the u2717d infinity edge monitor is uh get that for 500 bucks yeah Amazon 510 yeah I mean that's half the price of a thunderbolt display and it's the same size at 27 in so uh and that's you know um that's not a 4K one though that's a a it's a what is it it's it's 2560 X 1440 yeah that's not 4K okay well let's keep going then yeah the the there's a 32 in I was going to go for the 43 in next yeah that's pretty big though we have a Roundup on Apple Insider for people that are curious there's an Asus 32 in okay it's 990 but it's 990 yeah still cheaper than a thunderbolt display was okay what about the LG the ultrawide I mean if you really want to screen that wide I I wouldn't really be interested in something like that but certainly that is an option well it's a 21 to9 ratio and the 21 to9 aspect ratio is a movie theater aspect ratio yeah and it has two Thunderbolt 2.0 ports on it which is pretty awesome and it has USB 3 for quick charging too so and it's it it's cheaper than the other I mean it's $787 yeah I mean you got to remember the the Thunderbolt display that Apple discontinued was not a retina display this was not the 5K iMac display that Apple's been using for the last year so right um you know the comparable uh standard resolution displays like that Dell 27in Ultra sharp for 500 bucks it's a pretty good deal it's comparable I mean it does not have the design of the Thunderbolt display which is admittedly gorgeous although thick by modern standards uh and heavy but a really nice uh nicely designed piece of equipment that apple had and hopefully you know when we get something later this year it's along those same lines uh you know thin and and really great panel I would imagine they'd use the same 5K panel that's in the 27in iMac let's we we we posted on our site a picture of a purported iPhone 7 enclosure mhm right the case back and the shot that we had that I saw showed the lightning port in the middle and speaker Grill holes on one side and speaker Grill holes on the other side of that lightning Port yeah what does it mean what does it all mean I mean my guess is either one of the speaker Grill holes on the left side serves as a m a mic or all of them serve as a mic and it's just an aesthetic change um I can't see a lot of benefit to uh stereo sound on an iPhone uh particularly on the bottom of is held in portrait mode dude I want I want speakers in four corners on the phone and I want it to be like the iPad Pro but mini I I mean I guess you could do that I don't really point but um yeah I I uh I I think that that's just an aesthetic change that they want to do uh getting rid of the headphone jack um it just looks cleaner to have the same holes on each side of the lightning Port uh but I wouldn't read too much into it you know I I had a friend asking me about it the other day and saying what are they going to do with the space now they got rid of the iPhone jacket I'm like I don't know put another speaker there and he's like what's the point like the people that are focusing on that are missing the point the the additional speakers are not why they're getting rid of the headphone jack they're getting rid of the headphone jack because because it's a legacy item that Apple wants to encourage the death of and it allows for thinner phones I was going to go with the latter half of that answer it chews up space that could other be used for more cool stuff right that's really that's really what it comes down to well so traditionally in iPhones the batteries have been rectangular in shape correct with squared off Corners basically and we know that for the MacBook they have been and and even for some of the MacBook Pros for a little while they've they've been making their own battery cells that are layered in such a way that they take advantage of even the curved space so that there's there's really no room left for air it's just battery right right so by getting rid of that Port they now have more space in theory battery potentially in theory in theory people don't realize yes the phones are Getting Thinner but the batteries in many cases on new phones are actually larger than they were before because the components inside the phone are so much smaller the things that used to take up a lot of space like the memory and the processor and all that stuff are now actually much smaller components they're they're built smaller they're more efficient they're cooler and so therefore there's more space in there to put in a battery well let's let's talk about this for a second so on the original iPhone I I have a bad habit of taking apart iPhones right the original iPhone I haven't done it in a little while but but the the original iPhone the battery was about a little larger than the size of a compact flash card or or another way of thinking of is if you took a deck of cards and you took out a a a playing card and cut it in half splitting it right down the center vertic you know so that it was it was you had two horizontal halves yeah right um it was about that size and the rest of it the top part was all phone motherboard a strip down the left was all phone motherboard and at the bottom was the antenna and the home button and speaker and mic package right right and that was pretty consistent with with some changes through the 3Gs the 3Gs was a little easier to disassemble the the 3Gs was um a more elongated battery and more of the and and sort of the progression of this over time was that the motherboard became a strip of printed circuit card that ran pretty much down the left side of things and the battery grew taller and the battery grew wider over time and now so we're left with the phone where you just have a very thin strip of a printed circuit card and a lot of battery and that's the same across Apple's product lines You Take A Part a 12-in Macbook You Take A Part A any iPad any iPhone and it's basically all battery in there um and that is a testament to how far the rest of our technology has come and how not far our battery technology has come well true and I'm I'm very hopeful that our Battery Technology keeps going somebody one day is going to come through with a major breakthrough in Battery Technology and they're going to be the richest person on Earth it'll happen hopefully pray it'll happen so there are a number of vendors out there that are suppliers for parts for the iPhone and I'm thinking of tsmc who we know make the processor chips for the iPhone Samsung who've made processor chips have made memory have supplied the displays and and in this case I think the rumor is that they're supplying the OLED display yeah uh everybody's gearing up for an OLED display for next year's iPhone not this year it sounds to me all these suppliers are banking on their their revenue from the iPhone 7 they're they're basically counting on the iPhone 7 to keep them in the black is that right well you're conflating two different things I'm I've got a couple of different stories going on there but I was thinking about the tsmc story yeah so I mean everybody's ramping up for the iPhone 7 uh as it's known colloquially at least um that is supposed to launch in September um and you know there's a hope that uh you'll definitely get the seasonal spike in sales with a product launch but um there's hope that it will be able to return to growth uh as we kind of talked about earlier uh and outperform the iPhone 6s um but separately uh sharp which is now owned by foxcon and Samsung which are both key display suppliers for apple have been ramping up OLED production and anticipation of a new design for the iPhone in 2017 which is expected to have an all glass chassis and an LED display among many other changes I mean I have a report here saying that tsmc is forecasting to grow revenues by 20% in third quarter yeah they're gearing up doing chip production because they think an A10 is coming yeah they're gearing up chip production and they're getting back in the game uh tsmc was an exclusive chip Builder um a few years ago for Apple that changed as they couldn't necessarily meet the demands that apple had with uh growing products so Samsung kind of edged their way back into the chip production business and so uh the rumor here is is that tsmc is going to be the exclusive for for most or all of the A10 orders that's the rumor we'll see how it plays out you never really know um and it's certainly possible that Samsung stays in there I mean let's not you know for as much as uh our listeners and readers of Apple andc don't like Samsung for being a competitor to Apple they're also uh one of the largest chipm companies on the planet uh able capable of producing the capacity of arm-based processors for apple is there any practical reason not not just uh emotional or or otherwise but is there a practical reason for preferring a phone with one chip in it versus the other from the supplier from Apple's perspective from from a user's perspective the A10 from tsmc or the A9 or whatever it is oh don't go down this road don't go down this road uh there was a thing last year with the A9 processor where people found that if it was built by tsmc or Samsung there was a different um uh level of cap different power level for each one while one was more powerful than the other but that was with a benchmark test it wasn't with real world performance there are going to be slight variances in parts coming from different suppliers in every facet of the iPhone camera screen processor the overall experience is supposed to be nearly identical and seamless from phone to phone depending on the user some people got really worked up over where they had the tsmc chip or the Sam the Samsung chip last year because of Benchmark reports but that was nonsense in terms of actual real world performance is exactly the same thank you thank you so we talked about Samsung gearing up OLED production is there anything we forgot to say about that no Samsung and sharp are the ones gearing up okay and uh and flexium yeah I mean suppliers are gearing up for the next iPhone that's seasonal suppliers going to supply mhm um what what's what's what's going on with Spotify I mean do do you use Spotify first of all I use spotify's free uh account cuz I prefer to buy my music I don't rent it so I'll sample something on Spotify and then if I like the album I'll either buy it on iTunes or if I really like it I'll I'll buy it on vinyl and get a digital download code with it okay um so we we ran a story that says that Spotify is bumping up against the App Store that that they want to issue an update and that they're being told that they cannot update the app because it would compete with apple music they want or at least that's what they said go go into this unpack this for me a little bit nobody really knows what the app update has but the presumption is that they're giving people a link to go to their website to to sign up for Spotify so that they save $3 Apple takes a 30% cut of all sales on the App Store including inapp purchases and subscriptions that will soon change slightly where if you have a subscription over a year long then the Apple's cut will drop to 15% however um Spotify charges $13 uh per month for new users who sign up through their app on the iPhone and the reason for the higher price is solely because Apple's 30% cut if you were to go to spotify's website or sign up through their app on the Mac or something like that you would pay $10 a month instead of 13 so they're raising a stink saying it's unfair that Apple takes a 30% cut of all subscriptions uh through their app on the iPhone uh they don't think Apple's policy is fair so they claim that they tried to push through an update to their app the other day and it was rejected by Apple because of their uh rules for inapp purchases so the only thing I can guess is they probably included a link to leave the app go to the website and save three bucks which apple does not allow um they sent a letter to Apple they leaked it to the Press they gave it to members of Congress um they're raising a stink saying that apple is engaged in anti-competitive practices uh to keep apple music cheaper to sign up for than Spotify right now this is not the first time that the app store has has used this uh reasoning that you cannot compete against an built-in app it used to be that Apple did not allow you to charged less outside of the App Store you had to have pricing parody so that you know you wouldn't be able to for example um go through uh the website and you know save money that way or they they wanted to make sure that everything was priced the same and then they would still get their 30% cut they eventually backed off of that and so now that's why you can see Spotify charging $3 more on iPhone uh than they do elsewhere right I'm I'm thinking back to the days where some of Google's apps were not updated for a long period of time because Apple was rejecting the the updates I'm thinking of that I'm thinking of the VoIP apps things like that there was there were some yeah some issues with apple had policies about replicating the core functions of the phone so they didn't like apps that made allowed you to make calls for softened on softened on pretty much all that stuff the policies are not as Arcane as they once were um but I mean there are still some issues and you know there's there's different things like for example you can download the eBay app or the Amazon app and buy goods and services through those apps and uh not and apple doesn't take a 30% cut um it's it's but if it's content being sold then Apple takes 30% cut and 30% cut of ongoing subscriptions is a little high we've talked about that before it's a little too much and uh certainly would think that uh uh Apple will hopefully revisit that again cuz I think even 15% is too much what do you think the right number is I don't think that they should have uh a cut of sales in perpetuity especially if uh the service being provided is all hosted by you know Spotify or whoever I mean if you're paying for a Microsoft Office subscription for example and you buy it through iTunes does Apple deserve to get a 30% cut of that uh forever it's it's a valid question what do you think the counterargument is the counter argument is Apple has to maintain the servers and they serve up a lot of apps that are free or freemium and for them to maintain the quality of the App Store and the review process and all that costs money there's upkeep and they have to make money so that's where where they're going to take their pound of Flesh so to speak I understand where Apple's coming from I just don't think ongoing 30% cut or even a 15% cut is fair when Apple at that point is not really involved in it at all I wonder of Wonders actually had a story this week that we published do you remember what it was you talked about how we do this podcast I talked about how we do this podcast so this is this is the ultimate in in Naval gazing I suppose but um the as our listeners know and are are welcome to remind me we have had some hiccups in our quality over the year and we've made a lot of progress towards getting better about that and we the prog process that we use right now is sort of multi-layered right it's multifaceted with a lot of different apps we have we start by using zenc Caster or sometimes Skype but today we we open up zenc caster and started zenc caster and we've been using Zen Caster's Voiceover IP to hold this call well I should back up a step what microphone are you using I am using the iRig studio right and that's a mic that has a number of different connections you can use it with lightning you can use it with uh USB you're using it with USB because lightning audio isn't quite perfect for this kind of calls lightning audio does not work with VoIP or anything like that it only works with recording apps but not personto person calls because of iOS coding weirdness it's annoying because I would love to do this podcast on my iPad Pro um because this is exactly the type of task that an iPad I think is great for where I don't want a million things in my face I want to be able to focus on what we're talking about I want to be able to focus on the podcast and have all my attention on it and I think that's a great use for an iPad can't do it and it's what's even stranger is that it used to function like this it used to be possible to do lightning audio Skype used to work with lightning audio and then they released an update at some point last year where they switched to the iOS Core Audio recommendations that Apple has uh which defaults to um either the built-in microphone or if you plug in headphones to the headphone jack it'll default to the microphone on the headphones that you plug in but there and it will also use a Bluetooth Source yeah but there is no way to do a uh FaceTime audio call for example or a Skype call over lightning although I have not tested with iOS 10 yet maybe Apple fixed that but I think that's more of a developer thing than an apple thing at that point but Apple's recommended course of action for uh audio calls uh person to person is to not use lighting audio so the reason I mentioned that is that the the sound all begins with the microphone and you know you're using a nice microphone I'm using a microphone and and it turns out my microphone is very affordable my microphone cost $50 on Amazon and my travel mic that I take with me was $12 and then I get it into the computer using a mic interface from uh centrance which is a really nice mic interface uh I'm very pleased with it sound and and one of the things that I do to compare mic interfaces is that I'll use the same microphone and make that I set my levels the same using audacity to monitor my levels and just switching out the mic interfaces I can tell which ones have different sounds to them and whether or not they introduced more noise into the signal so from there we go into zenc Caster now zenc Caster is currently a web application that runs in Firefox and chrome and I've I've asked and inquired and I'm going to say it without having asked permission to say it but he's he's looking into it's on his road map to make it a mobile application so that it'll work in iOS Safari awesome which would be brilliant and the cool thing about Zen cter is that it's it's very very good at what it does it has VoIP it allows you to invite people to a call that the host sets up you can have a chat you can have footnotes the chat doesn't persist after the call is over but the footnotes can a little bit so you can use those as references for your show notes and it saves the audio locally to HTML 5 cach and then uploads it after the show is done recording and then it will upload those files to Dropbox as well the cool thing about it is that it has a post-processing feature that uses aonic Al phonic is brilliant alanic is a website it's a IOS app it's a standalone desktop app it's a ton of things in in all of those cases it uses the same good post- production to make our levels the same if my levels are different than Neils and they're a little bit higher a little bit lower it adjusts them last week when we recorded Neil you told me after we were done that my were terrible right they were all wrong weren't they they were way too low yeah yeah you listened to the show did you yes how were they afterwards sounded fine aonic works it really does and I have a lot of respect for for for George who uh who writes it and the the the different applications are very different in terms of capability the web app has the most amount of features in it um it does things like taking text files that say where the chapters are and being able to put them into the the web and have it spit out a MP3 that has chapter markers and suitable for overcast it's it's a huge swis army knife tool for that stuff it does everything uh you can even use it to process the audio for movie files if you have an mp4 that you put into it you'll get back a movie with good audio it's it's incredible the desktop app is a lot more limited you feed it to multi-track files you get back one file and adjusts it it's it's very simple in that regard but it works the mobile app has a button on it that you can tap to to Mark where the chapter markers need to go so there are a number of different things going on there that make them all slightly different but they're all both they're all very capable they're wonderful now one of the things that one of our readers commented on our listeners commented on was that sometimes the amount of space between when I speak or Neil speaks is either too much or too little and there are a number of different timing issues going on here first of all there's latency over the internet right how fast is your internet connection Neil pretty fast actually I get about over 50 to 60 down and usually about 15 to 20 up okay I have 350 down and 25 to 30 up that's pretty good I do okay and you know someday I hope for that number to increase but but right now I 350 down so there's latency over the Internet even though we both have very good internet connection because even though our down is good our our up is a fraction of that so that's one part that plays into it uh another part that plays into it is the timing you know all of this is done by chips that have clocks in them and my MacBook proos clock is not exactly the same as the MacBook as the clock inside Neil's MacBook Pro and so those timings can get out of sync and another thing that that takes place is when I adjust you know it's also the viip connection because just the the nature the WIP connection is such that we could be overlapping by a little bit if we're not careful but knowing that we leave pauses between some of these things I go ahead and take it to an application called farite and farite is brilliant farite was written by a fellow in England and it's wonderful and one of the features that I I asked him about he was already working on and that is the ability to tighten one of the things that that he does is that he allows you to detect silence and then strip the silence out but when I did that using fite early on it left all these gaps where the silence had been and so I asked him how can I compact all of that and he said well there's a feature called Titan and Titan tightens up the audio file by by getting rid of those silences and it allows you to adjust how much or how little silence you leave in and uh and it works great except that sometimes I'm not as sensitive with those those adjustments as I should be either taking out too much and resp speaking one after the other stepping on each other sentences or by leaving too much gaps in so I I apologize to your listeners that's something I'm working on but that's where that comes from is my adjustment not the tools the tools are wondrous and after farite I take it to uh to SoundCloud and publish so I go through what four different applications Zen cter aonic farite oh and I left out the one sometimes we get requests for chapter markers overcast some of the other their podcast your apps that people listen through use chapter markers and so sometimes it's it's when it's easy for me to to figure out where the chapters should go I will open up an application by another fellow um I think his name is Thomas Pembrook or Thomas Pritchard Thomas Pritchard forgive me um wrote podcast chapters which is in the Mac App Store and is very well laid out and I I put the audio file in that I press command then each time there's a new chapter and you know the the this result is that I have to listen to the podcast again I end up listening to the podcast during the course of this uh generally two times maybe three I'm sorry for the whole production and um and and the the one of the nice things about podcast chapters is besides how what else it does as well it allows you to speed up the playback so I can listen it one and a half times or two times and be able to pick out where the chapters go just a little bit faster and then I take it to SoundCloud and publish and and we we've arrived at this because early on as you know the the quality wasn't what I really wanted it to be it wasn't representative of what you can do here and trying to just get the sound quality up goes a long way towards helping you hear the ideas we're talking about and that's how the sausage gets made thanks for indulging me speaking of sausage and and stuff like that and the nitty-gritty and getting stuff to work you were trying to work through a GitHub project recently so I wasted a few hours this week I have finally got to a point where smart home accessories are cheap enough and prevalent enough um and advanced enough that it seems like I can go beyond my Hue bulbs and maybe dig a Little Deeper um and get the smart home of my dreams I'm about to move to a new place and so I'm kind of planning out um what I want to do there and and how I want to uh Implement things and and and that sort of stuff um and homekit is growing and what it does uh is growing uh and the accessories that connect to it the number of those are growing but it's still not quite there yet so so so wait let me stop you right there what's your ideal smart home what is the Smart Home of your dreams well I want to be able to control the things that I have in my house that I would want to not only be able to control while uh in the house but also away from it so logical things air conditioning um controlling the television would be fantastic I don't know what channel anything is I got 800 freaking channels I don't know you know I don't know where CNBC is if I want to watch it and if I try to tell my Xbox to change it to CNBC it puts on CMT country music television so so that's a voice Reco problem well that's just an Xbox one problem because it's a piece of crap I want to be able to get to a point where I can have a scene like right now I have a scene there are two Hue bulbs I have a projector in my current apartment and I have two Hue bulbs that turn off with the the scene of watch TV and allows the projector to be seen adequately what I would like to have is say watch TV and have it turn on all the necessary devices the projector the Xbox the cable box Etc turn off the lights everything else and then I should be able to say watch this Channel and then some connected device would be able to automatically change the channel and everything would work with my voice and I wouldn't have to use a remote and flip through the guide cuz I'm not a channel flipper I just don't like doing that so I want to get to that point and there is a service uh it's a GitHub project uh called homebridge that allows you to take connected devices that are not necessarily homekit compliant and control them with Siri on your phone uh I wasted about 3 hours yesterday on it and I say wasted because it didn't get anything to work unfortunately but um I'm going to continue to dig at it if anybody who's listening has an experience with homebridge and might be able to help me out it would be much appreciated um but I wanted to just test it out you can run it in two ways you can run it in OS 10 on your Mac and have that act as a server for homebridge and your Mac needs to be on or what I would eventually like to do is you can do it on a Raspberry Pi and just have that sitting somewhere in your house and always connecting so to access a server for homebridge connects to your Wi-Fi network allows you to use your iPhone or whatever other device to use Siri to control things um the truth the truth is that this is really a node.js kind of software and it runs on a number of things it runs on a freas it runs on Windows it runs on OS 10 it runs on Raspberry Pi it runs on a bunch of things I'm thinking about running this on my router that would be cool you know if you have a signology router or a signology Nas for example clearly you're able to run things on those they have their own app store it's very hacked together and the more you try to do with it from what I've read the more likely it is to break with as it is with an aack project you install plugins for the devices that you want to control so the one that I was trying to test out um before I get a little more advanced this and I couldn't get it to work unfortunately was a uh Siri homekit plugin for iTunes on my Mac and so what it would allow me to do is to tell Siri to play an artist a playlist whatever but also to dictate which of my AirPlay speakers I want to play on I have a set of airpl play speakers at my desk I have uh set in the kitchen I have some in the bedroom and then I have a Don receiver uh that is Den I don't know how to pronounce it know a Denon receiver in my living area with the with a projector that also is an AirPlay compliant device now it would be really nice to be able to tell my phone to play an artist on a certain speaker but Siri and homekit don't have that level of control and that is where homebridge comes in so homebridge has plugins for things like iTunes it has a plugin for my denim receiver because it's a Wi-Fi connected receiver so it'll turn it on um it has a plugin to turn on an Xbox one uh over IP um it has plugins to control all kinds of devices and can also Bridge smart home platforms between each other so for example uh you could in theory use uh your iPhone and Siri to control a Logitech Harmony Hub which is an infrared blaster which then controls a number of devices like for example the things I was talking about controlling projector uh Xbox cable Box Etc um that is potentially Bridging the Gap and creating scenes and adding devices to homekit that normally would not operate with homekit because as it stands right now there is no homekit protocol for infrared blaster television that sort of stuff so that's the kind of smart home home controls that I really want because especially when you have a complex home theater setup right it's just a nightmare to get everything working to get it all turn to the right input and on and all that kind of stuff and there's bunch of remotes and you're just flipping that's right all the stuff that Harmony is known for that is the kind of of thing that I would really like to see simplified with voice where I can just tell my TV to turn into a certain Channel or whatever but then there's also you know like remote control of things like um uh your temperature uh that's another area where I have an issue because apparently nobody makes a window mounted homekit air conditioner so my options there are either to use a Smart plug which would turn the air conditioner on and off but that doesn't give me any ability to set the temperature or anything like that I could basically just tell it to turn the AC on or off when I leave my apartment or whatever um or you know I don't know what my other options would be to make it work maybe homebridge could find some sort of way if there's a Wi-Fi connected AC unit that it would work with maybe there's a plugin for it or something but that's the kind of stuff that I want to be able to do as I Envision my dream smartphone home yeah you won't like it but there are plugins for T see I couldn't get that to work properly especially with the AC unit I had at my old apartment where it would have to go through like 30° of temperature to get to the right one so it just go beep beep beep beep it was awful um so to does make a smart AC control infrared blast and they've said that they have homekit compatibility coming but a lot of products have advertised homekit compatibility and don't have it like the Chinese brand hire uh h a i e r am I pronouncing that one right you are uh they announced in September of 2015 a uh homekit connected window mounted AC unit and it has yet to ship from everything that I can find if you Google it the only thing you can really find is a press release about it so you know I don't know when these products are coming uh wwec a couple weeks ago Apple had a long list of companies that areed to be making homekit products and hire was among those up there so um I'm just looking at that that image again yeah they're on the right side T's on that image by the way yeah Tat's on there hire's on there these are companies that pledge support but have yet to ship anything so I know dlink is planning on uh set shipping out an updated version of their camera that will be homekit compatible um and who's the other camera company they have one coming as well well we know that first alerts camera will be on that list and we know that the August camera for their doorbell and I think the canary as well is uh Canary's on the list yes which is awesome yeah so you know it's coming but for example I'm going to be in the next couple months in the market to buy a window mounted AC unit for my new place and I really want to get something that I can control with homekit so I can have the temperature go up a little bit when I leave save some electricity uh be able to turn it down before I get home so when I get home it's nice nice and cool in my place uh you know that sort of stuff and we're not there yet there are some hacks you know I could use some smart plugs I could do some things here and there to kind of act as a as a interm for it but homebridge is one of those things that I'm really excited about and hoping to get working specifically for controlling my home theater well homebridge let's be clear is a patch for you until official support is provided right right and I don't know that Apple's in a rush to ever provide official support for uh home theater well no but if Logitech just for example wanted to but are there the proper uh calls within homekit that Apple allows cuz don't forget they had to expand the abilities of the API with iOS 10 to add things like doorbell cameras and uh cameras were not in the original plan uh so what so originally the original spec was that you had you had door locks fans garage door openers lights Outlets thermostats and and now cameras right uh and you get to define the Apple characteristic types are are brightness door State locked or unlocked temperature lock State you know locked or unlocked kind of thing uh or door state was open close power State onof rotation speed which speed direction of rotation uh the target door State the target state of these kinds of things and the target temperature right and and that's covers a decent amount of stuff but as You' say it doesn't cover home theater but what I forget is is those are the Apple defined service types ppes and states the the question is can you define your own in your own application to augment that well like for example uh the Elgato Eve room is a product that does things that homekit doesn't necessarily allow for like for example it can tell the quality of the air uh I'm opening my EV app right now right now there's a number of problems with that device uh number one it connects over Bluetooth to your phone so you have to kind of be within range of it stuff like that uh but number two it you can't do anything with the information from it homekit doesn't allow you to connect things so for example uh one potential solution if homekit were able to do it would be to have a smart plug on a window AC unit and then separately have a temperature sensor that is also home kit connected and I could say if the temperature goes below 74° turn on the smart plug and activate the air conditioner to cool it down to 72 or whatever right um so what Apple has are are they have action sets and they have time based triggers right that's that's how the rules are constructed for for trying to do device interaction stuff you you can have an action set where multiple things are going to happen at once based on a timer or you can have a timer trigger that specifies the time for event to happen and location based stuff as well if how optionally it recurs and things like that but they don't have uh device chaining kind of things the way if this then that does for example and there's a delay with if this then that of about 15 minutes so for things like if you want to keep your temperature regulated in your apartment and save energy and you don't necessarily have a smart device for it uh then homekit is not the solution for that and if this then that won't be as responsive as you want so there's room for improvement here but we haven't seen it all yet because the iOS 10 is still early days yeah there's a lot of room for improvement there need to be more accessories the fact that I can't find a window AC unit when you know a large portion of the population lives in cities and has window AC units without central air um you would think that uh that would be there would be a market for that uh so I'm hoping that something hits the market soon and and does what I'm looking for because I'm I'm in the market to buy one um and if anybody out there is listening and knows of one that I haven't been able to find it's it's kind of the Wild West right now with homekit a lot of companies announced support and then realized there was a hardware component of it that they couldn't meet and then so they never actually shipped um and that's kind of where you have that list from wwec with a bunch of Manufacturers on it that never shipped homekit products when are these things coming out what are they going to make we don't really know yet I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of those cameras that were announced at WWDC don't even ship this year just the way that homid launch has gone well but but all of the rough spots of needing the hardware and stuff like that were last year's problems so I I would expect these ones would go smoother maybe now I'm I'm just looking at so I've got the eve and I've got a with's home over there and I they both measure air quality in parts per millions and the eve says that my air quality is excellent at 514 parts per million and my home says that it's 450 and so I'm not sure what the discrepancy is there's the echo from the home speaker sorry about that it's got a microphone on it and so it's picking me up speaking and then playing it back through the iPhone I apologize but it's interesting to me that these things pick up different readings like that when they're in the same room um the with's home product is not homekit because of course homekit didn't have cameras until now but the the eve stuff is now Bluetooth like you said is is an interesting choice and I would venture to say this is my opinion that Apple's support of Bluetooth in homekit is not where their attention is their attention is on things that are WI or things that use a bridge to talk to ethernet um and that they have Bluetooth in the spec but that they really didn't didn't give it the love that we think of Apple giving things um all of elgato's products are Bluetooth homekit in this path uh some of the other people doing similar products not the same products but some of them similar are are using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi in the same product and that can make a difference just in in terms of connectivity between you know all of the devices right but the Bluetooth stuff does work and you know it does follow the spec I have the Apple TV 4 and am able to see what the Eve is reading when I'm outside the home by virtue of the Bluetooth in the eve talking to the Apple TV right yeah the groundwork is there for a lot of this stuff it's just not as I'm as I'm looking to invest in it more seriously beyond the light bulbs that I have um it's coming up short and you just want Logitech to get on the stick I'd like to be able to control my home theater but I want to be able to control my AC and and we're not there yet the products that I've tested just aren't really that good that reliable or they just aren't homekit compatible and I want to be able to especially with iOS 10 and the home app and integration into control center I mean I want to be able to just hit a button on there that says watch TV and you know if I have a screen for my projector that's on a motor it comes down the projector turns on the cable box turns on the lights go off the action set why not I mean that that's so many things to do at once but that's a task that you would do regularly that's really where smart home excels it's like it's like when voice dictation and Siri first came out Siri was great for complex tasks like saying you know create a reminder to tell me tomorrow at 10:00 to empty the dishwasher or something like that right I mean that's something that if you were to do that you would have to open your phone open the Reminders app create a new reminder put 10:00 type in empty the dishwasher save it I mean it's such a complex thing with so many steps that that voice command saves you so much time there are other examples where it doesn't necessarily save you time and voice commands don't really make a lot of sense but you know for stuff like Smart Homes where you have multiple actions at once for scenes where you can say good night and it turns off all your lights for example or you come home and things just automatically turn out without having to talk to it location based stuff that's where the future of smart home is and that's where it needs to be going it needs to greatly expand the number of connected devices Beyond light bulbs and shades and air quality measure things well and and the I I think back to when we talked with Karly noblock um of Home Garden television in her own blog uh kly K you know she she said that the future of this is all of these things making stuff more convenient for you right that's that's what it comes down to is is the shades matter if you're sitting at the kitchen table and blinded by the Sun at noon right but if you don't have that problem then it's not a solution you need so it's it's about having enough of the the equipment out there to make all of these things come together to make your life Neil Hughes more convenient one day I'm I'm holding out hope I'm hope I'm hoping soon because I'm gonna have to buy stuff soon for my new place I want to see pictures of the new place this has been the Diamond Jubilee episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor Neil where can people find you on the internet well if you want to read what I I have to write it's at Apple insider.com and you can find me on Twitter at thisis Neil NE L and if you have any homekit recommendations or advice on how to set up home bridge I am all ears I'm I'm Victor I'm at V marks on Twitter this has been another episode of the Apple Insider podcast and if Neil Cuts playing cards in half to figure out the size of the original iPhone battery we'll all hear about it next week on the Apple Insider podcast nyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this the 75th Diamond Jubilee episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor marks and joining me is Apple Insider's editor-in Chief Neil Hughes hey Victor how's it going it's fantastic how are you I'm all right that's kind of a let down you're brilliant always I know it so let's begin I wanted to begin by talking a little bit about gosh I think I wanted to talk about the rumors let's do rumors well we had a bunch of things right we had we had iPhone we had display stuff and things like that but but first of all you've been running the beta version of iOS 10 I have you're on beta 1 is that right yes unfortunately why is there no beta 2 that's a good question uh it's going to be coming up on three weeks next week since uh the launch of beta one typically Apple uh would do a two week Gap in between releases um and I think that was the expectation that we would see a new beta either on Monday or Tuesday of this week and so we do not have one and that pains me a very great deal because uh in order to do my day job I have to be running um iOS 10 and watch OS 3 on my devices and uh they are buggy and you should not be running them uh anyone who is not doing this for a living who writes about Apple should not be running the beta software on their main phone because this is meant for Developers for testing unfortunately I don't have a spare Apple watch and if I want to continue wearing my Apple watch um then I have to be connected to a phone running iOS 10 so I'm carrying both with me everywhere and dealing with a lot of crashes we do not yet have a beta 2 but hopefully next week well I know you're looking forward to it I wisely have chosen to not run the betas this time so that is a wise decision I I as much as I like the change in iOS 10 um and watchos 3 they're both fantastic um not for general public consumption well you remember that every time I've tried a new release right whether it was the iOS 8 betas or the iOS 9 betas I have encountered bizarre problems that no one can EXP La I know and I can say that I had a bizarre problem that has lasted since iOS 7 with copy and paste not working properly and I don't know what the heck happened but installing iOS 10 beta fixed copy and paste it actually works properly for me now so Hallelujah that alone is quite an accomplishment and almost makes almost makes the issues of the beta worth it for me I am glad to hear that your longtime suffering is at an end indeed um what I what I'm at a loss for is is how this issue persisted across so many different phones and releases for you it's probably something corrupt inside your your iCloud backup that's killing it yeah it must be I have no idea this phone was um uh it was not a fresh install it was a overthe a install of beta 10 and it fixed it and I have no idea why but again this persisted over phones and Os releases and everything and I continue to have an issue where I would copy something go to another app hit paste and it would paste something not that I had copied something from prior and then I would have to go back and hit copy again sometimes a third time so uh I am extremely thankful that it has apparently been fixed with iOS 10 and I've Googled it in many attempts to fix it and found that other people were having similar problems so uh hopefully this is something that Apple quietly fixed uh in the new release that will fix that issue for everybody else that was experiencing it cool now let me let me talk about this for a second because I I as you know am a fan of all things historical including technology history right right and if you've been watching my Twitter feed you've seen that I've been posting things under the the hashtag computer Museum lately M I have been digging through and I have been unearthing crazy crazy old stuff in terms of technology and we wrote an article about how the iPhone is turning nine this year MH right so F first of all did you write that article I did what was in it tell us for it because you wrote it you can tell us best well it was just kind of how the iPhone um is at a crossroads right now and it was a little bit of a history lesson as to what happened with the first generation iPhone and some of the mistakes that were made that Apple course corrected in in some cases like adjusting the pricing almost immediately um and some a little more over time such as um well the addition of copy and paste for example took a little while uh the the app store didn't launch for another year but um it was just kind of putting all that in perspective for where apple is now having just come off of their first ever quarter with year-over-year decline in iPhone sales where obviously the iPhone is an astronomical success and continues to be especially if you're not someone who's focused on growth and just looking at the dollars and cents of it the iPhone is is a cash printing machine for Apple um so you know it's interesting place where Apple's at right now where if the company wants to stimulate growth and return to growth uh what are they going to do to make that happen as we're kind of on the cusp of the launch of the I so-called iPhone 7 which is expected to look largely like the iPhone 6s um just kind of talking about um those those things that Apple did in the beginning like the $200 price cut two months after it launched to address some of the issues that they had right out of the gate you know it's easy for people to forget that the first iPhone which came out in 2007 um June of 2007 so we just celebrated the anniversary on 29th 2007 uh the first iPhone only sold like 6 million units in its entire lifetime that first generation model I mean 6 million units is nothing today like apple sells that many phones in a couple weeks consider that a failure these days yeah we're talking about a a years worth of sales after they finally replaced it with the iPhone 3G but that first generation iPhone let put some perspective on that right with the landscape at the time was that before the iPhone mobile phones were either uh dumb phones or feature phones as we call them today you know the hottest phone back then the the phone that everyone wanted to have back then was the Motorola Razor yes which was which was at the top of the Heap for years I mean it was not as quickly evolving of it IND back then is it is now certain it's not exactly I mean there were definitely Revolutions in terms of what you were able to do back then things like the uh the Nokia Symbian S60 Series where it was a a smartphone platform and you could totally run applications from the Nokia App Store on it or or the Sony versions that were uiq which was similar there there were definitely smartphones out there and I'm not even mentioning Blackberry or uh or Moto Q but I mean compare like think about uh Windows mobile 20 2002 2003 and then think about how little it had changed by 2007 when the iPhone came out I mean let's put it got color I had a Windows I had a I had a Windows mobile 2003 device that was color um it was a Dell axom PDA I remember I remember that and uh that platform really did not evolve in that span from 2003 when the OS shipped until like 2007 when the iPhone came out really was still looking the same was still a start button based interface stylus based interface I mean and to put that in perspective think about the iPhone here we are in 2016 think about four years ago what your iPhone was wait wait wait just because I I want to BR go back to Palm for a second because Palm was the originator of a lot of this right palm was the original pocket assistant Palm was the the first stylus base and the whole Palm interface was predicated on copying um Macintosh system six or Bas Windows mobile was the market leader at that time well so here's an interesting piece that I wanted to bring up is that if you remember in 2005 so Palm had this history and and our own Daniel Aon Diller wrote about this years ago it roughly drafted the um Palm had this history of being the hardware and software company and then selling off the software and being just the hardware right and Licensing the software back from the the other company and they did this off and on repeatedly and and the benefit of doing it like this was that the software company could license the Palm OS out to Sony Qualcomm Kera and others and and therefore there would be more palmos devices and the last time they did this exercise access bought the software bought the OS and was giving them a hard time about doing it because Palm had bought a Boos and was going to run BOS we were going to have our first true um multi-threaded multitasking smart phone via Palm running BOS that future never came to be because access said if you do that we will no longer license you to Palm OS and by the way we're going to Stop Licensing to Palm OS and you're going to have to pick up Linux from us and it's going to be access Linux on Palm MH and so their answer was a a screw me screw you move where they said we will license in Windows mobile and they sold half of the Palm trios with palm OS and the other half with Windows mobile mhm and all of this was happening in January of 2007 yeah I mean don't forget that the best uh phone OS you could get that time was HTC Sense was doing their own uh skin over Windows Diamond interface which was basically saying Windows mobile is terrible it's not finger friendly you need a stylus it uses a start button it's a nightmare let's well the problem with the H interface was that it was beautiful for about the first layer and a half and as soon as you tried to do anything you dumped right back into Windows mobile and that's one of the problems that uh you know still persists on many Android devices to this day I mean not every company has the uh resources of Samsung and even Samsung is not really a software company but you end up with these you know unique user interfaces on uh Android that lead to inconsistencies within the platform Google would rather that you didn't do that at all they would rather you just ship stock Android and deal with it right but you're not going to be able to Samsung from doing that because they have to differentiate their phones so what was once a problem continues to be a problem just different companies and the names have changed but um yeah you know if you look back on that and how stagnant the smartphone industry was before the iPhone came in it took a little while and certainly until the iPhone 3G hit for things to really start to accelerate the way that they did I don't think it was stagnant at all there were a lot of interesting attempts at doing things but they were all within a a well boundar sort of um space right you know there there were the Nokia S40 phones that were music players also there were the Sony wman phones that were music players like the wman 880 um there there were a number of attempts at doing things to differentiate from what phones had been I I mean clearly you're nostalgic for this era era but those phones were all garbage they some of them were actually quite good but not none of them were as interesting or good as the first iPhone right the iPhone was a paradigm changer without question and you got to remember too back then nobody owned a smartphone nobody had a data plan they were expensive I mean now you're looking at you know most I had GPRS data and I had a Nokia I had a couple of different you are not not most people Victor you are an early adopter Enthusiast your mom did not own a Windows phone smartphone or Palm or anything like that my dad had the Kera Palm phone and before that and after that he had the handspring Trio phone with the smartphone mod was his company paying for it or was he buying it himself um IBM paid for at least one of those yeah I mean people weren't buying smartphones the way they are now you know most phone sales now of all phones are smartphones remember back you know Nokio was the worldwide leader oh the communicator do you remember the communicator Nokia controlled 90% of the smartphone market up until like 201 when when things really started to shift globally but um for those first few years of the iPhone smartphones were still a very small share of the overall mobile phone business certainly in the years yeah certainly in the years since it's it's changed quite a bit but um really the the iPhone was the Tipping Point in so many ways in terms of accessibility in terms of demand in terms of um adoption uh without the iPhone the whole I mean the iPhone literally change the entire world of computing and Technology um you know the iPhone your first iPhone I bought my first iPhone in September of 2007 uh the day that Apple announced the price drop so you still have it I do I was a uh very poor newspaper reporter at the time um and repeat yourself I um they announced the price drop and I was a T-Mobile customer at the time so I might if uh if if T-Mobile you had jailbreak to be able to get it to work on I had to go to an AT&T store because technically it was a subsidized phone so there was a weird thing where AT&T wanted to set it up in the store because Apple wanted them to do it to make sure that everything was good but then they backed off of that because it was they because the activation servers were crashing so they just let people start taking their phones home so so here's what happened originally right I bought it on day one and the way that I bought it on day one was I I I just I couldn't handle waiting in line so I had a friend who lived in Oregon and waited in line in Oregon and then shipped it to me overnight after he waited in line and got it MH and so he he was in Portland I think and or somewhere outside Beaverton who knows and he shipped me the iPhone and I had it the next day basically and when the price drop hit which as you said was was September mhm I bought it in June price drop happened in September they gave out uh $100 gift cards card gift cards to everyone and those gift cards came in great useful for many many users because when it came time for the 3G people who had that gift card ready used it to go towards the purchas of 3G yeah except you paid $200 more than the phone was worth two months later so H but you had it you had so they when they launched the there was an 8 gig model that sold for $600 and there was a 4 gig model that sold for $500 uh both of them um launched on June 29th in September Apple cut the price by 200 bucks and basically discontinued the 4 Gig sold the remaining inventory that day that it was announced um was also about the same time that they had first jailbroken the iPhone so I knew that I could run it on T-Mobile I was not a AT&T customer and since it was a subsidized phone you technically had to be an AT&T customer to buy the well it was sim locked I went into a AT&T store they wanted to activate it I told them that I was buying it for a GI for somebody and that they would bring it back um so yes I lied to the AT&T store somebody come get me um and then uh because I couldn't afford a data plan on a on a uh on you know the prices they had at that time I had the at& data plan you were going to get was the the unlimited data plan at that time well it was expensive and I couldn't afford it so I Mike still has his unlimited data plan grandfathered from that time I was on T-Mobile and I hacked it to run and then I had um a T-Mobile WAP a WAP plan which basically allowed limited internet but there was a jailbreak install that you could do it wasn't uh what it later became with like their own app store and stuff like you had to do everything kind of coded by hand with the you know tutorials online but yeah C was not originally an app store it became one right so I had to hack it so that it would reroute all internet traffic through the single port that T-Mobile allowed cuz it turned out that T-Mobile at the time when they were selling these it was like I think it was $3 a month for data uh and it was slow as hell but um first of all all data at that time was right you were using GPRS right so they weren't checking the type of data that was going through so you you would forward all data through a specific port and then the phone worked you could browse the web on the go you could uh the only thing you couldn't get when I did that was visual voicemail but everything else uh T-Mobile didn't run Visual Voicemail servers at that time right it was an AT&T exclusive it required their servers and all that but other than that um the phone worked great and I kept it for until the iPhone 4 came out so I stuck around with the OG iPhone for a long time um and that was actually I got the iPhone 4 because I just started working at Apple Insider um and so that was the only reason that I had upgrade at that point was I kind of had to um but prior to that um you know just in terms of trying to save save money and being a poor reporter at a newspaper that was uh that was how I scratched by nice I had the the iPhone that I bought on day one and um I was at Ma when it was announced I was at Mack again the year later when iOS 2 was announced now early on there was no app store and Maps were not turn BYT with with the use of the GPS they were sort of assisted GPS and you you could step through the steps on the turns but it wouldn't recognize where you were and adjust the turns for you at that time right and there like I said there was no app store you had the apps that were there and you had the internet you had Safari yep and web apps web apps and they were surprisingly capable you could do a lot with them you know openg let you do cool transforms where you could do animations to to flip cards kind of thing and and really make the web app feel like a native app in a lot of ways right it was really cool and and the you know beauty of that is okay fine you're using the network resource to pull it down but it could store it in some cash on the phone and that you always had the app up to date you never had to worry about updates you always had you know it was it was either available or it wasn't and it was going to be great because there was no worry about viruses or other vulnerabilities it was it was just its own thing but we you know the the the outcry and and the hackers and uh people like Erica sedun who is a developer who used to work for uh tuaw The Unofficial Apple web blog when it was a thing um you know she wrote about along with people like Craig hackenberry behind icon Factory and Twitter Ric they they wrote about how to unofficially write applications for the iPhone at that time and people made really cool jailbroken applications before you could install um you know app before there was an app right using the work laid down by sedun and and hackenberry there was actually one app that was kind of mindblowing at the time it's funny to look back and be like you know who cares but um one of the early demos for the Microsoft Surface not the surface that we know now but no no the coffee table the coffee table which was announced before the iPhone or around the same time one of the demos they had was a series of photos laying on a table and they were like kind of stacking them and resizing them and moving them around and so someone made an app for the iPhone before there was an app store on Cydia that you could install that was you could take photos from your collection and move them around on the screen and resize them and put them in front of each other and stuff like that and I remember showing that to people and like it blew their mind because it was using multitouch and there were all these items on the screen at once and the screen was essentially just a blank canvas to do something with and it's funny to look back and and realize you know how how silly that was today that would be a technology demo not an app right but you know at the time that was like you know especially when you were thinking about Microsoft Surface and it was this giant table and all that stuff like this was something in your pocket that was doing that exact same capability it was it was really quite incredible well so the the original Blackberry quote was one of the founders of blackberry got an iPhone and took it apart and his response was my God they they they somehow shrunk down and shoved a Mac inside a phone and and that was literally what we'd arrived at yeah I still have my original iPhone I still have I still have I think I have two iPhone 3GS hanging around right now maybe three of them um I I think the the greatest Testament you could give to the original iPhone is how much how many of the design principles not only remain in the current iPhone in terms of where everything's located and how it works Etc but also in how Apple has Revisited them and come back to them over the years for example the iPhone 3G went with the plastic back the iPhone 4 switched to a glass back and uh they kept those uh uh sharp edges on the four and the five and the 5S but now you look at the iPhone wait look at your Apple watch in profile and look at your original iPhone right now look at your iPhone 5S or I'm sorry look at your iPhone 6s and your iPhone 6 metal back curved edges a very very very similar design to the first iPhone when you break it down in that way obviously not as thin and not as elegant no but your Apple watch is every bit as thick oh yeah it is so um yeah it's it's um it's it's interesting to look back and realize how much foresight Apple had in the design of the iPhone in something that was not only iconic but that could last and you could pick up an iPhone right now and and and I have my original classic iPhone and when I feel it in my hand it just feels right it's it's well construed Ed um yeah it's thick and uh but I mean honestly if they sold a phone like that right now that had like a great camera and a thick battery that would last a couple days I'd probably buy it they've come a long way maybe a 10th Generation iPhone next year right yeah you know I I I've been digging through and and posting things like I said on Twitter and I found the uh all of the Mac magazines from back then of the Mac world and some of the others Mac User from from the announcement of the original iPhone with the with the first one on the cover story yeah yeah it's um you know the first question is why on Earth did I save all that stuff but the second thing is is it's it's really like you say it's interesting to look back at what we what has been MH and where we've been and I still you know Mikey laughs at me for this but but a time to time I power on the uh the iPhone 3G and the original iPhone and some of the apps are still able to work you know the the servers that they talked to for things on the internet are still there and in some cases still alive and still talking the same language now a lot of that's going to change real soon because iOS 10 uh requires https for all connections so I I fully expect that many of the things that I was using on those old iPhones are are pretty much dead I think the last OS you can install is 3.1.2 on the first iPhone I think that's the most up-to-date it can be that's correct and 313 and four were allowed on the 3G I actually after I got my iPhone 4 and still my old iPhone hanging around because I like to do fun stuff with technology just for the heck of it I did a hack where I installed Android on my uh first gen iPhone uh and there was also a mod on Cydia that took iOS 4 features and ported them back to uh 3.1.2 yeah um so that was pretty cool yeah one of these days I'm going to try and roll back my original iPhone to to iOS 1.0 or rather iPhone OS 1.0 and I I have the you know I have the original Apple TV right MH and I've rolled that the hot plate and I've rolled that back to Apple TV os1 and I actually then had to use it I had I had a requirement where I actually had to use it so I had to go ahead and update it to Apple TV OS 2 to be able to use it again and um the nice thing about the current version of iTunes you know it's it's kind of incredible here we are in 2016 and iTunes 12 is able to talk to the original Apple TV who says Apple doesn't offer Legacy support they totally offer Legacy support and it it updated and it synchronized the movies that I had to have on it so here's what I was doing I I know all of our listeners think I'm nuts and wish I would move on to something interesting by promise I will but I I had a movie that had been edited in iMovie for an event and there were a series of projectors on a wall pointing at different screens that had come down motorized and I needed something that could run the movie reliably on demand and I didn't want to use a laptop M because laptops have a thousand things that can go wrong right and so I couldn't do it with the modern Apple TV because the modern Apple TV even though it has storage doesn't really have a way to save movies to it locally that I could think of mhm someone's going to tell me that I'm wrong that there's an app for that and everything and I I appreciate it if they do but at the time I couldn't think of how the answer was but the the original Apple TV was essentially an iPod with an HDMI port on it and and synced the same way and so I I loaded the current new 2016 movie onto the 2007 Apple TV connected it to the the port in the wall that ran the projectors in the ceiling and used the infrared remote to press play and it just worked which is just what it should do that's pretty cool it was excellent the event went off without a hitch that's awesome brilliant so we talked about that you know a couple weeks ago couple weeks ago we were talking before WWDC about how Apple was going to make a display and it was going to have Thunderbolt and it was going to have an external graphic unit in it and and we were totally wrong well I we I didn't think they were going to do that that was just a rumor that was out there um what happened was WWDC came and passed and not only did they not release one but uh they also the week after WWDC discontinued the uh Thunderbolt display it is no more um they are no longer they're selling their available inventory and then that's it now according to yet another rumor apple is still working on the supposed model with an integrated graphics card uh and as we've discussed before this makes sense uh for a variety of reasons but the biggest one is if you were to invest in a 12-in Macbook which is underpowered uh to allow for its thin design and battery life uh you couldn't drive all the pixels on a big monitor uh which is a problem uh that would limit Apple's ability to sell that especially as they're pushing for thinner and lighter devices so the expectation is that apple is going to release a new Thunderbolt display that is going to have an integrated graphics card in the display itself that will act as an external graphics card for a MacBook MacBook Pro whatever uh this is technically possible and has been done with mac and is currently being done commercially on Windows PCS because the speed of Thunderbolt is fast enough that it actually has the bandwidth to allow graphics card to work externally now I wouldn't um expect this external graphics card capability to be some sort of superpowered gaming rig uh I think this is more about just driving the pixels on a retina display uh for a 27in thunderbolt Retina Display I don't see this turning into you know some high-end GeForce GTX graphics card we're not playing crisis or Warcraft or whatever you're not going to be buying this machine for halflife 3 if it ever comes out so oh come on I wish um I I am uh a former PC Gamer I guess is the way I would put it I used to build recovering recovering if you will I just don't have the space and the time really building a Windows PC was a lot of fun for somebody like myself who's nerdy and likes working with gadgets and I liked upgrading the components and you know it was it was a lot of time and back then I had a lot of time in my hands you know and you're counting frame rates and uh and checking temperatures and doing all that kind of stuff and it was fun uh but nowadays if I want a game I'm mostly playing games on my TV just because it's easier because you just kind of plug it in and it works uh so wait why not steam box you know I thought about it I I I PC games with controllers are not something that you know uh valve has done a pretty good job with their Big Picture Mode to try to address that but there's still something about using a game console uh where it's just designed for that so-called Leanback experience with a controller um that does not work as well on PC games now having said that if I could get a high-end graphics card and plug it into my Mac over uh Thunderbolt or buy a monitor with an integrated graphics card that was you know or or have something that was swappable even potentially I would be all over that uh I would if I had to you know uh God forbid boot camp uh dual boot Windows on my Mac and be able to play PC games that I currently cannot play that I'm missing out on because of you know being only Mac but I just don't have the space to build a PC Tower and I don't really have the motivation to buy a um a a steam box uh you know maybe if halflife 3 ever launches or something I would do that but I what I am hoping is cu realistically let's be honest this Thunderbolt display with graphics card is not going to have a high-end graphics card it'll be enough to push the pixels which is fine that's what Apple wants it for what would be nice to see is if Apple uses its launch as an opportunity to allow thirdparty manufacturers to introduce their own Thunderbolt graphics cards to market for official support for OS 10 and not just some hack being put together as it is right now and so if I as somebody who maybe wants to push pixels get some more power not even for gaming like just running Final Cut Pro and stuff like that uh to be able to take a small 12-in MacBook and dock it and have it turn into a super powerful workstation at home and then be able to take it on the go and have nice portability and Battery let's temper that a little bit right super power for all in terms of the graphics card that would be attached to it the processor is going to the processor inside true that is that is true yes um it it doesn't magically become a core i7 no but it would greatly enhance the ability of it to do things like edit video um the exporting of the video is tends to be more more CPU intensive so that would probably still be pretty slow but uh in terms of uh you know um transferring the video files and that sort of thing and you could you could make that a much more efficient experience with Thunderbolt and docking it and turning it into something more powerful um and we've talked about this with the iPad to right this ability to turn your personal Computing device into the device that you need at that moment if you need an ultra portable laptop you got it if you need more of a workstation you can do it you love that SMART connector I I think that well it doesn't even have to be a SMART connector it could be lightning it could be USB C in the case of the 12-in MacBook um whatever it's done over uh we have the bandwidth in the technology now to get the best of both worlds with these devices you don't have to make those kinds of sacrifices you don't have to make those kinds of compromises and so it would be nice to see if os10 offers some sort of official support for that with third party manufacturers to allow me to maybe put a high-end GeForce graphics card connect to my Mac and have it work so so what do you think the likelihood is of this rumor coming true uh it came from John pitchkowski uh formally of all things D now known as recode he's a BuzzFeed of all places now um he has where you get hired man he he has a pretty good track record on this stuff so I went from not thinking it was going to happen to thinking it's probably going to happen and I'm excited um even if it is not a high-end gaming thing and it just pushes the pixels to have that option to be able to have a super portable laptop and then dock it with a gorgeous 27in Retina Display that's awesome you know I mean if you care at all about this kind of stuff if if technology excites you that's really really cool so in the meantime there is no Apple display they're selling out whatever stock they have on hand which knowing that they manage stock well is probably not much right can we talk about the best Alternatives so that our dear listeners who are actually going out and buying monitors know what to get yeah I mean um you have a lot of options out there there's a lot of um 4K 4K and 5K displays that you can get um and they're pretty reasonably price I mean if you think about Apple's Thunderbolt display was like 1,000 bucks right so so ad Dell ultr sharp 27 in the uh the u2717d infinity edge monitor is uh get that for 500 bucks yeah Amazon 510 yeah I mean that's half the price of a thunderbolt display and it's the same size at 27 in so uh and that's you know um that's not a 4K one though that's a a it's a what is it it's it's 2560 X 1440 yeah that's not 4K okay well let's keep going then yeah the the there's a 32 in I was going to go for the 43 in next yeah that's pretty big though we have a Roundup on Apple Insider for people that are curious there's an Asus 32 in okay it's 990 but it's 990 yeah still cheaper than a thunderbolt display was okay what about the LG the ultrawide I mean if you really want to screen that wide I I wouldn't really be interested in something like that but certainly that is an option well it's a 21 to9 ratio and the 21 to9 aspect ratio is a movie theater aspect ratio yeah and it has two Thunderbolt 2.0 ports on it which is pretty awesome and it has USB 3 for quick charging too so and it's it it's cheaper than the other I mean it's $787 yeah I mean you got to remember the the Thunderbolt display that Apple discontinued was not a retina display this was not the 5K iMac display that Apple's been using for the last year so right um you know the comparable uh standard resolution displays like that Dell 27in Ultra sharp for 500 bucks it's a pretty good deal it's comparable I mean it does not have the design of the Thunderbolt display which is admittedly gorgeous although thick by modern standards uh and heavy but a really nice uh nicely designed piece of equipment that apple had and hopefully you know when we get something later this year it's along those same lines uh you know thin and and really great panel I would imagine they'd use the same 5K panel that's in the 27in iMac let's we we we posted on our site a picture of a purported iPhone 7 enclosure mhm right the case back and the shot that we had that I saw showed the lightning port in the middle and speaker Grill holes on one side and speaker Grill holes on the other side of that lightning Port yeah what does it mean what does it all mean I mean my guess is either one of the speaker Grill holes on the left side serves as a m a mic or all of them serve as a mic and it's just an aesthetic change um I can't see a lot of benefit to uh stereo sound on an iPhone uh particularly on the bottom of is held in portrait mode dude I want I want speakers in four corners on the phone and I want it to be like the iPad Pro but mini I I mean I guess you could do that I don't really point but um yeah I I uh I I think that that's just an aesthetic change that they want to do uh getting rid of the headphone jack um it just looks cleaner to have the same holes on each side of the lightning Port uh but I wouldn't read too much into it you know I I had a friend asking me about it the other day and saying what are they going to do with the space now they got rid of the iPhone jacket I'm like I don't know put another speaker there and he's like what's the point like the people that are focusing on that are missing the point the the additional speakers are not why they're getting rid of the headphone jack they're getting rid of the headphone jack because because it's a legacy item that Apple wants to encourage the death of and it allows for thinner phones I was going to go with the latter half of that answer it chews up space that could other be used for more cool stuff right that's really that's really what it comes down to well so traditionally in iPhones the batteries have been rectangular in shape correct with squared off Corners basically and we know that for the MacBook they have been and and even for some of the MacBook Pros for a little while they've they've been making their own battery cells that are layered in such a way that they take advantage of even the curved space so that there's there's really no room left for air it's just battery right right so by getting rid of that Port they now have more space in theory battery potentially in theory in theory people don't realize yes the phones are Getting Thinner but the batteries in many cases on new phones are actually larger than they were before because the components inside the phone are so much smaller the things that used to take up a lot of space like the memory and the processor and all that stuff are now actually much smaller components they're they're built smaller they're more efficient they're cooler and so therefore there's more space in there to put in a battery well let's let's talk about this for a second so on the original iPhone I I have a bad habit of taking apart iPhones right the original iPhone I haven't done it in a little while but but the the original iPhone the battery was about a little larger than the size of a compact flash card or or another way of thinking of is if you took a deck of cards and you took out a a a playing card and cut it in half splitting it right down the center vertic you know so that it was it was you had two horizontal halves yeah right um it was about that size and the rest of it the top part was all phone motherboard a strip down the left was all phone motherboard and at the bottom was the antenna and the home button and speaker and mic package right right and that was pretty consistent with with some changes through the 3Gs the 3Gs was a little easier to disassemble the the 3Gs was um a more elongated battery and more of the and and sort of the progression of this over time was that the motherboard became a strip of printed circuit card that ran pretty much down the left side of things and the battery grew taller and the battery grew wider over time and now so we're left with the phone where you just have a very thin strip of a printed circuit card and a lot of battery and that's the same across Apple's product lines You Take A Part a 12-in Macbook You Take A Part A any iPad any iPhone and it's basically all battery in there um and that is a testament to how far the rest of our technology has come and how not far our battery technology has come well true and I'm I'm very hopeful that our Battery Technology keeps going somebody one day is going to come through with a major breakthrough in Battery Technology and they're going to be the richest person on Earth it'll happen hopefully pray it'll happen so there are a number of vendors out there that are suppliers for parts for the iPhone and I'm thinking of tsmc who we know make the processor chips for the iPhone Samsung who've made processor chips have made memory have supplied the displays and and in this case I think the rumor is that they're supplying the OLED display yeah uh everybody's gearing up for an OLED display for next year's iPhone not this year it sounds to me all these suppliers are banking on their their revenue from the iPhone 7 they're they're basically counting on the iPhone 7 to keep them in the black is that right well you're conflating two different things I'm I've got a couple of different stories going on there but I was thinking about the tsmc story yeah so I mean everybody's ramping up for the iPhone 7 uh as it's known colloquially at least um that is supposed to launch in September um and you know there's a hope that uh you'll definitely get the seasonal spike in sales with a product launch but um there's hope that it will be able to return to growth uh as we kind of talked about earlier uh and outperform the iPhone 6s um but separately uh sharp which is now owned by foxcon and Samsung which are both key display suppliers for apple have been ramping up OLED production and anticipation of a new design for the iPhone in 2017 which is expected to have an all glass chassis and an LED display among many other changes I mean I have a report here saying that tsmc is forecasting to grow revenues by 20% in third quarter yeah they're gearing up doing chip production because they think an A10 is coming yeah they're gearing up chip production and they're getting back in the game uh tsmc was an exclusive chip Builder um a few years ago for Apple that changed as they couldn't necessarily meet the demands that apple had with uh growing products so Samsung kind of edged their way back into the chip production business and so uh the rumor here is is that tsmc is going to be the exclusive for for most or all of the A10 orders that's the rumor we'll see how it plays out you never really know um and it's certainly possible that Samsung stays in there I mean let's not you know for as much as uh our listeners and readers of Apple andc don't like Samsung for being a competitor to Apple they're also uh one of the largest chipm companies on the planet uh able capable of producing the capacity of arm-based processors for apple is there any practical reason not not just uh emotional or or otherwise but is there a practical reason for preferring a phone with one chip in it versus the other from the supplier from Apple's perspective from from a user's perspective the A10 from tsmc or the A9 or whatever it is oh don't go down this road don't go down this road uh there was a thing last year with the A9 processor where people found that if it was built by tsmc or Samsung there was a different um uh level of cap different power level for each one while one was more powerful than the other but that was with a benchmark test it wasn't with real world performance there are going to be slight variances in parts coming from different suppliers in every facet of the iPhone camera screen processor the overall experience is supposed to be nearly identical and seamless from phone to phone depending on the user some people got really worked up over where they had the tsmc chip or the Sam the Samsung chip last year because of Benchmark reports but that was nonsense in terms of actual real world performance is exactly the same thank you thank you so we talked about Samsung gearing up OLED production is there anything we forgot to say about that no Samsung and sharp are the ones gearing up okay and uh and flexium yeah I mean suppliers are gearing up for the next iPhone that's seasonal suppliers going to supply mhm um what what's what's what's going on with Spotify I mean do do you use Spotify first of all I use spotify's free uh account cuz I prefer to buy my music I don't rent it so I'll sample something on Spotify and then if I like the album I'll either buy it on iTunes or if I really like it I'll I'll buy it on vinyl and get a digital download code with it okay um so we we ran a story that says that Spotify is bumping up against the App Store that that they want to issue an update and that they're being told that they cannot update the app because it would compete with apple music they want or at least that's what they said go go into this unpack this for me a little bit nobody really knows what the app update has but the presumption is that they're giving people a link to go to their website to to sign up for Spotify so that they save $3 Apple takes a 30% cut of all sales on the App Store including inapp purchases and subscriptions that will soon change slightly where if you have a subscription over a year long then the Apple's cut will drop to 15% however um Spotify charges $13 uh per month for new users who sign up through their app on the iPhone and the reason for the higher price is solely because Apple's 30% cut if you were to go to spotify's website or sign up through their app on the Mac or something like that you would pay $10 a month instead of 13 so they're raising a stink saying it's unfair that Apple takes a 30% cut of all subscriptions uh through their app on the iPhone uh they don't think Apple's policy is fair so they claim that they tried to push through an update to their app the other day and it was rejected by Apple because of their uh rules for inapp purchases so the only thing I can guess is they probably included a link to leave the app go to the website and save three bucks which apple does not allow um they sent a letter to Apple they leaked it to the Press they gave it to members of Congress um they're raising a stink saying that apple is engaged in anti-competitive practices uh to keep apple music cheaper to sign up for than Spotify right now this is not the first time that the app store has has used this uh reasoning that you cannot compete against an built-in app it used to be that Apple did not allow you to charged less outside of the App Store you had to have pricing parody so that you know you wouldn't be able to for example um go through uh the website and you know save money that way or they they wanted to make sure that everything was priced the same and then they would still get their 30% cut they eventually backed off of that and so now that's why you can see Spotify charging $3 more on iPhone uh than they do elsewhere right I'm I'm thinking back to the days where some of Google's apps were not updated for a long period of time because Apple was rejecting the the updates I'm thinking of that I'm thinking of the VoIP apps things like that there was there were some yeah some issues with apple had policies about replicating the core functions of the phone so they didn't like apps that made allowed you to make calls for softened on softened on pretty much all that stuff the policies are not as Arcane as they once were um but I mean there are still some issues and you know there's there's different things like for example you can download the eBay app or the Amazon app and buy goods and services through those apps and uh not and apple doesn't take a 30% cut um it's it's but if it's content being sold then Apple takes 30% cut and 30% cut of ongoing subscriptions is a little high we've talked about that before it's a little too much and uh certainly would think that uh uh Apple will hopefully revisit that again cuz I think even 15% is too much what do you think the right number is I don't think that they should have uh a cut of sales in perpetuity especially if uh the service being provided is all hosted by you know Spotify or whoever I mean if you're paying for a Microsoft Office subscription for example and you buy it through iTunes does Apple deserve to get a 30% cut of that uh forever it's it's a valid question what do you think the counterargument is the counter argument is Apple has to maintain the servers and they serve up a lot of apps that are free or freemium and for them to maintain the quality of the App Store and the review process and all that costs money there's upkeep and they have to make money so that's where where they're going to take their pound of Flesh so to speak I understand where Apple's coming from I just don't think ongoing 30% cut or even a 15% cut is fair when Apple at that point is not really involved in it at all I wonder of Wonders actually had a story this week that we published do you remember what it was you talked about how we do this podcast I talked about how we do this podcast so this is this is the ultimate in in Naval gazing I suppose but um the as our listeners know and are are welcome to remind me we have had some hiccups in our quality over the year and we've made a lot of progress towards getting better about that and we the prog process that we use right now is sort of multi-layered right it's multifaceted with a lot of different apps we have we start by using zenc Caster or sometimes Skype but today we we open up zenc caster and started zenc caster and we've been using Zen Caster's Voiceover IP to hold this call well I should back up a step what microphone are you using I am using the iRig studio right and that's a mic that has a number of different connections you can use it with lightning you can use it with uh USB you're using it with USB because lightning audio isn't quite perfect for this kind of calls lightning audio does not work with VoIP or anything like that it only works with recording apps but not personto person calls because of iOS coding weirdness it's annoying because I would love to do this podcast on my iPad Pro um because this is exactly the type of task that an iPad I think is great for where I don't want a million things in my face I want to be able to focus on what we're talking about I want to be able to focus on the podcast and have all my attention on it and I think that's a great use for an iPad can't do it and it's what's even stranger is that it used to function like this it used to be possible to do lightning audio Skype used to work with lightning audio and then they released an update at some point last year where they switched to the iOS Core Audio recommendations that Apple has uh which defaults to um either the built-in microphone or if you plug in headphones to the headphone jack it'll default to the microphone on the headphones that you plug in but there and it will also use a Bluetooth Source yeah but there is no way to do a uh FaceTime audio call for example or a Skype call over lightning although I have not tested with iOS 10 yet maybe Apple fixed that but I think that's more of a developer thing than an apple thing at that point but Apple's recommended course of action for uh audio calls uh person to person is to not use lighting audio so the reason I mentioned that is that the the sound all begins with the microphone and you know you're using a nice microphone I'm using a microphone and and it turns out my microphone is very affordable my microphone cost $50 on Amazon and my travel mic that I take with me was $12 and then I get it into the computer using a mic interface from uh centrance which is a really nice mic interface uh I'm very pleased with it sound and and one of the things that I do to compare mic interfaces is that I'll use the same microphone and make that I set my levels the same using audacity to monitor my levels and just switching out the mic interfaces I can tell which ones have different sounds to them and whether or not they introduced more noise into the signal so from there we go into zenc Caster now zenc Caster is currently a web application that runs in Firefox and chrome and I've I've asked and inquired and I'm going to say it without having asked permission to say it but he's he's looking into it's on his road map to make it a mobile application so that it'll work in iOS Safari awesome which would be brilliant and the cool thing about Zen cter is that it's it's very very good at what it does it has VoIP it allows you to invite people to a call that the host sets up you can have a chat you can have footnotes the chat doesn't persist after the call is over but the footnotes can a little bit so you can use those as references for your show notes and it saves the audio locally to HTML 5 cach and then uploads it after the show is done recording and then it will upload those files to Dropbox as well the cool thing about it is that it has a post-processing feature that uses aonic Al phonic is brilliant alanic is a website it's a IOS app it's a standalone desktop app it's a ton of things in in all of those cases it uses the same good post- production to make our levels the same if my levels are different than Neils and they're a little bit higher a little bit lower it adjusts them last week when we recorded Neil you told me after we were done that my were terrible right they were all wrong weren't they they were way too low yeah yeah you listened to the show did you yes how were they afterwards sounded fine aonic works it really does and I have a lot of respect for for for George who uh who writes it and the the the different applications are very different in terms of capability the web app has the most amount of features in it um it does things like taking text files that say where the chapters are and being able to put them into the the web and have it spit out a MP3 that has chapter markers and suitable for overcast it's it's a huge swis army knife tool for that stuff it does everything uh you can even use it to process the audio for movie files if you have an mp4 that you put into it you'll get back a movie with good audio it's it's incredible the desktop app is a lot more limited you feed it to multi-track files you get back one file and adjusts it it's it's very simple in that regard but it works the mobile app has a button on it that you can tap to to Mark where the chapter markers need to go so there are a number of different things going on there that make them all slightly different but they're all both they're all very capable they're wonderful now one of the things that one of our readers commented on our listeners commented on was that sometimes the amount of space between when I speak or Neil speaks is either too much or too little and there are a number of different timing issues going on here first of all there's latency over the internet right how fast is your internet connection Neil pretty fast actually I get about over 50 to 60 down and usually about 15 to 20 up okay I have 350 down and 25 to 30 up that's pretty good I do okay and you know someday I hope for that number to increase but but right now I 350 down so there's latency over the Internet even though we both have very good internet connection because even though our down is good our our up is a fraction of that so that's one part that plays into it uh another part that plays into it is the timing you know all of this is done by chips that have clocks in them and my MacBook proos clock is not exactly the same as the MacBook as the clock inside Neil's MacBook Pro and so those timings can get out of sync and another thing that that takes place is when I adjust you know it's also the viip connection because just the the nature the WIP connection is such that we could be overlapping by a little bit if we're not careful but knowing that we leave pauses between some of these things I go ahead and take it to an application called farite and farite is brilliant farite was written by a fellow in England and it's wonderful and one of the features that I I asked him about he was already working on and that is the ability to tighten one of the things that that he does is that he allows you to detect silence and then strip the silence out but when I did that using fite early on it left all these gaps where the silence had been and so I asked him how can I compact all of that and he said well there's a feature called Titan and Titan tightens up the audio file by by getting rid of those silences and it allows you to adjust how much or how little silence you leave in and uh and it works great except that sometimes I'm not as sensitive with those those adjustments as I should be either taking out too much and resp speaking one after the other stepping on each other sentences or by leaving too much gaps in so I I apologize to your listeners that's something I'm working on but that's where that comes from is my adjustment not the tools the tools are wondrous and after farite I take it to uh to SoundCloud and publish so I go through what four different applications Zen cter aonic farite oh and I left out the one sometimes we get requests for chapter markers overcast some of the other their podcast your apps that people listen through use chapter markers and so sometimes it's it's when it's easy for me to to figure out where the chapters should go I will open up an application by another fellow um I think his name is Thomas Pembrook or Thomas Pritchard Thomas Pritchard forgive me um wrote podcast chapters which is in the Mac App Store and is very well laid out and I I put the audio file in that I press command then each time there's a new chapter and you know the the this result is that I have to listen to the podcast again I end up listening to the podcast during the course of this uh generally two times maybe three I'm sorry for the whole production and um and and the the one of the nice things about podcast chapters is besides how what else it does as well it allows you to speed up the playback so I can listen it one and a half times or two times and be able to pick out where the chapters go just a little bit faster and then I take it to SoundCloud and publish and and we we've arrived at this because early on as you know the the quality wasn't what I really wanted it to be it wasn't representative of what you can do here and trying to just get the sound quality up goes a long way towards helping you hear the ideas we're talking about and that's how the sausage gets made thanks for indulging me speaking of sausage and and stuff like that and the nitty-gritty and getting stuff to work you were trying to work through a GitHub project recently so I wasted a few hours this week I have finally got to a point where smart home accessories are cheap enough and prevalent enough um and advanced enough that it seems like I can go beyond my Hue bulbs and maybe dig a Little Deeper um and get the smart home of my dreams I'm about to move to a new place and so I'm kind of planning out um what I want to do there and and how I want to uh Implement things and and and that sort of stuff um and homekit is growing and what it does uh is growing uh and the accessories that connect to it the number of those are growing but it's still not quite there yet so so so wait let me stop you right there what's your ideal smart home what is the Smart Home of your dreams well I want to be able to control the things that I have in my house that I would want to not only be able to control while uh in the house but also away from it so logical things air conditioning um controlling the television would be fantastic I don't know what channel anything is I got 800 freaking channels I don't know you know I don't know where CNBC is if I want to watch it and if I try to tell my Xbox to change it to CNBC it puts on CMT country music television so so that's a voice Reco problem well that's just an Xbox one problem because it's a piece of crap I want to be able to get to a point where I can have a scene like right now I have a scene there are two Hue bulbs I have a projector in my current apartment and I have two Hue bulbs that turn off with the the scene of watch TV and allows the projector to be seen adequately what I would like to have is say watch TV and have it turn on all the necessary devices the projector the Xbox the cable box Etc turn off the lights everything else and then I should be able to say watch this Channel and then some connected device would be able to automatically change the channel and everything would work with my voice and I wouldn't have to use a remote and flip through the guide cuz I'm not a channel flipper I just don't like doing that so I want to get to that point and there is a service uh it's a GitHub project uh called homebridge that allows you to take connected devices that are not necessarily homekit compliant and control them with Siri on your phone uh I wasted about 3 hours yesterday on it and I say wasted because it didn't get anything to work unfortunately but um I'm going to continue to dig at it if anybody who's listening has an experience with homebridge and might be able to help me out it would be much appreciated um but I wanted to just test it out you can run it in two ways you can run it in OS 10 on your Mac and have that act as a server for homebridge and your Mac needs to be on or what I would eventually like to do is you can do it on a Raspberry Pi and just have that sitting somewhere in your house and always connecting so to access a server for homebridge connects to your Wi-Fi network allows you to use your iPhone or whatever other device to use Siri to control things um the truth the truth is that this is really a node.js kind of software and it runs on a number of things it runs on a freas it runs on Windows it runs on OS 10 it runs on Raspberry Pi it runs on a bunch of things I'm thinking about running this on my router that would be cool you know if you have a signology router or a signology Nas for example clearly you're able to run things on those they have their own app store it's very hacked together and the more you try to do with it from what I've read the more likely it is to break with as it is with an aack project you install plugins for the devices that you want to control so the one that I was trying to test out um before I get a little more advanced this and I couldn't get it to work unfortunately was a uh Siri homekit plugin for iTunes on my Mac and so what it would allow me to do is to tell Siri to play an artist a playlist whatever but also to dictate which of my AirPlay speakers I want to play on I have a set of airpl play speakers at my desk I have uh set in the kitchen I have some in the bedroom and then I have a Don receiver uh that is Den I don't know how to pronounce it know a Denon receiver in my living area with the with a projector that also is an AirPlay compliant device now it would be really nice to be able to tell my phone to play an artist on a certain speaker but Siri and homekit don't have that level of control and that is where homebridge comes in so homebridge has plugins for things like iTunes it has a plugin for my denim receiver because it's a Wi-Fi connected receiver so it'll turn it on um it has a plugin to turn on an Xbox one uh over IP um it has plugins to control all kinds of devices and can also Bridge smart home platforms between each other so for example uh you could in theory use uh your iPhone and Siri to control a Logitech Harmony Hub which is an infrared blaster which then controls a number of devices like for example the things I was talking about controlling projector uh Xbox cable Box Etc um that is potentially Bridging the Gap and creating scenes and adding devices to homekit that normally would not operate with homekit because as it stands right now there is no homekit protocol for infrared blaster television that sort of stuff so that's the kind of smart home home controls that I really want because especially when you have a complex home theater setup right it's just a nightmare to get everything working to get it all turn to the right input and on and all that kind of stuff and there's bunch of remotes and you're just flipping that's right all the stuff that Harmony is known for that is the kind of of thing that I would really like to see simplified with voice where I can just tell my TV to turn into a certain Channel or whatever but then there's also you know like remote control of things like um uh your temperature uh that's another area where I have an issue because apparently nobody makes a window mounted homekit air conditioner so my options there are either to use a Smart plug which would turn the air conditioner on and off but that doesn't give me any ability to set the temperature or anything like that I could basically just tell it to turn the AC on or off when I leave my apartment or whatever um or you know I don't know what my other options would be to make it work maybe homebridge could find some sort of way if there's a Wi-Fi connected AC unit that it would work with maybe there's a plugin for it or something but that's the kind of stuff that I want to be able to do as I Envision my dream smartphone home yeah you won't like it but there are plugins for T see I couldn't get that to work properly especially with the AC unit I had at my old apartment where it would have to go through like 30° of temperature to get to the right one so it just go beep beep beep beep it was awful um so to does make a smart AC control infrared blast and they've said that they have homekit compatibility coming but a lot of products have advertised homekit compatibility and don't have it like the Chinese brand hire uh h a i e r am I pronouncing that one right you are uh they announced in September of 2015 a uh homekit connected window mounted AC unit and it has yet to ship from everything that I can find if you Google it the only thing you can really find is a press release about it so you know I don't know when these products are coming uh wwec a couple weeks ago Apple had a long list of companies that areed to be making homekit products and hire was among those up there so um I'm just looking at that that image again yeah they're on the right side T's on that image by the way yeah Tat's on there hire's on there these are companies that pledge support but have yet to ship anything so I know dlink is planning on uh set shipping out an updated version of their camera that will be homekit compatible um and who's the other camera company they have one coming as well well we know that first alerts camera will be on that list and we know that the August camera for their doorbell and I think the canary as well is uh Canary's on the list yes which is awesome yeah so you know it's coming but for example I'm going to be in the next couple months in the market to buy a window mounted AC unit for my new place and I really want to get something that I can control with homekit so I can have the temperature go up a little bit when I leave save some electricity uh be able to turn it down before I get home so when I get home it's nice nice and cool in my place uh you know that sort of stuff and we're not there yet there are some hacks you know I could use some smart plugs I could do some things here and there to kind of act as a as a interm for it but homebridge is one of those things that I'm really excited about and hoping to get working specifically for controlling my home theater well homebridge let's be clear is a patch for you until official support is provided right right and I don't know that Apple's in a rush to ever provide official support for uh home theater well no but if Logitech just for example wanted to but are there the proper uh calls within homekit that Apple allows cuz don't forget they had to expand the abilities of the API with iOS 10 to add things like doorbell cameras and uh cameras were not in the original plan uh so what so originally the original spec was that you had you had door locks fans garage door openers lights Outlets thermostats and and now cameras right uh and you get to define the Apple characteristic types are are brightness door State locked or unlocked temperature lock State you know locked or unlocked kind of thing uh or door state was open close power State onof rotation speed which speed direction of rotation uh the target door State the target state of these kinds of things and the target temperature right and and that's covers a decent amount of stuff but as You' say it doesn't cover home theater but what I forget is is those are the Apple defined service types ppes and states the the question is can you define your own in your own application to augment that well like for example uh the Elgato Eve room is a product that does things that homekit doesn't necessarily allow for like for example it can tell the quality of the air uh I'm opening my EV app right now right now there's a number of problems with that device uh number one it connects over Bluetooth to your phone so you have to kind of be within range of it stuff like that uh but number two it you can't do anything with the information from it homekit doesn't allow you to connect things so for example uh one potential solution if homekit were able to do it would be to have a smart plug on a window AC unit and then separately have a temperature sensor that is also home kit connected and I could say if the temperature goes below 74° turn on the smart plug and activate the air conditioner to cool it down to 72 or whatever right um so what Apple has are are they have action sets and they have time based triggers right that's that's how the rules are constructed for for trying to do device interaction stuff you you can have an action set where multiple things are going to happen at once based on a timer or you can have a timer trigger that specifies the time for event to happen and location based stuff as well if how optionally it recurs and things like that but they don't have uh device chaining kind of things the way if this then that does for example and there's a delay with if this then that of about 15 minutes so for things like if you want to keep your temperature regulated in your apartment and save energy and you don't necessarily have a smart device for it uh then homekit is not the solution for that and if this then that won't be as responsive as you want so there's room for improvement here but we haven't seen it all yet because the iOS 10 is still early days yeah there's a lot of room for improvement there need to be more accessories the fact that I can't find a window AC unit when you know a large portion of the population lives in cities and has window AC units without central air um you would think that uh that would be there would be a market for that uh so I'm hoping that something hits the market soon and and does what I'm looking for because I'm I'm in the market to buy one um and if anybody out there is listening and knows of one that I haven't been able to find it's it's kind of the Wild West right now with homekit a lot of companies announced support and then realized there was a hardware component of it that they couldn't meet and then so they never actually shipped um and that's kind of where you have that list from wwec with a bunch of Manufacturers on it that never shipped homekit products when are these things coming out what are they going to make we don't really know yet I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of those cameras that were announced at WWDC don't even ship this year just the way that homid launch has gone well but but all of the rough spots of needing the hardware and stuff like that were last year's problems so I I would expect these ones would go smoother maybe now I'm I'm just looking at so I've got the eve and I've got a with's home over there and I they both measure air quality in parts per millions and the eve says that my air quality is excellent at 514 parts per million and my home says that it's 450 and so I'm not sure what the discrepancy is there's the echo from the home speaker sorry about that it's got a microphone on it and so it's picking me up speaking and then playing it back through the iPhone I apologize but it's interesting to me that these things pick up different readings like that when they're in the same room um the with's home product is not homekit because of course homekit didn't have cameras until now but the the eve stuff is now Bluetooth like you said is is an interesting choice and I would venture to say this is my opinion that Apple's support of Bluetooth in homekit is not where their attention is their attention is on things that are WI or things that use a bridge to talk to ethernet um and that they have Bluetooth in the spec but that they really didn't didn't give it the love that we think of Apple giving things um all of elgato's products are Bluetooth homekit in this path uh some of the other people doing similar products not the same products but some of them similar are are using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi in the same product and that can make a difference just in in terms of connectivity between you know all of the devices right but the Bluetooth stuff does work and you know it does follow the spec I have the Apple TV 4 and am able to see what the Eve is reading when I'm outside the home by virtue of the Bluetooth in the eve talking to the Apple TV right yeah the groundwork is there for a lot of this stuff it's just not as I'm as I'm looking to invest in it more seriously beyond the light bulbs that I have um it's coming up short and you just want Logitech to get on the stick I'd like to be able to control my home theater but I want to be able to control my AC and and we're not there yet the products that I've tested just aren't really that good that reliable or they just aren't homekit compatible and I want to be able to especially with iOS 10 and the home app and integration into control center I mean I want to be able to just hit a button on there that says watch TV and you know if I have a screen for my projector that's on a motor it comes down the projector turns on the cable box turns on the lights go off the action set why not I mean that that's so many things to do at once but that's a task that you would do regularly that's really where smart home excels it's like it's like when voice dictation and Siri first came out Siri was great for complex tasks like saying you know create a reminder to tell me tomorrow at 10:00 to empty the dishwasher or something like that right I mean that's something that if you were to do that you would have to open your phone open the Reminders app create a new reminder put 10:00 type in empty the dishwasher save it I mean it's such a complex thing with so many steps that that voice command saves you so much time there are other examples where it doesn't necessarily save you time and voice commands don't really make a lot of sense but you know for stuff like Smart Homes where you have multiple actions at once for scenes where you can say good night and it turns off all your lights for example or you come home and things just automatically turn out without having to talk to it location based stuff that's where the future of smart home is and that's where it needs to be going it needs to greatly expand the number of connected devices Beyond light bulbs and shades and air quality measure things well and and the I I think back to when we talked with Karly noblock um of Home Garden television in her own blog uh kly K you know she she said that the future of this is all of these things making stuff more convenient for you right that's that's what it comes down to is is the shades matter if you're sitting at the kitchen table and blinded by the Sun at noon right but if you don't have that problem then it's not a solution you need so it's it's about having enough of the the equipment out there to make all of these things come together to make your life Neil Hughes more convenient one day I'm I'm holding out hope I'm hope I'm hoping soon because I'm gonna have to buy stuff soon for my new place I want to see pictures of the new place this has been the Diamond Jubilee episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor Neil where can people find you on the internet well if you want to read what I I have to write it's at Apple insider.com and you can find me on Twitter at thisis Neil NE L and if you have any homekit recommendations or advice on how to set up home bridge I am all ears I'm I'm Victor I'm at V marks on Twitter this has been another episode of the Apple Insider podcast and if Neil Cuts playing cards in half to figure out the size of the original iPhone battery we'll all hear about it next week on the Apple Insider podcast nyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this the 75th Diamond Jubilee episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor marks and joining me is Apple Insider's editor-in Chief Neil Hughes hey Victor how's it going it's fantastic how are you I'm all right that's kind of a let down you're brilliant always I know it so let's begin I wanted to begin by talking a little bit about gosh I think I wanted to talk about the rumors let's do rumors well we had a bunch of things right we had we had iPhone we had display stuff and things like that but but first of all you've been running the beta version of iOS 10 I have you're on beta 1 is that right yes unfortunately why is there no beta 2 that's a good question uh it's going to be coming up on three weeks next week since uh the launch of beta one typically Apple uh would do a two week Gap in between releases um and I think that was the expectation that we would see a new beta either on Monday or Tuesday of this week and so we do not have one and that pains me a very great deal because uh in order to do my day job I have to be running um iOS 10 and watch OS 3 on my devices and uh they are buggy and you should not be running them uh anyone who is not doing this for a living who writes about Apple should not be running the beta software on their main phone because this is meant for Developers for testing unfortunately I don't have a spare Apple watch and if I want to continue wearing my Apple watch um then I have to be connected to a phone running iOS 10 so I'm carrying both with me everywhere and dealing with a lot of crashes we do not yet have a beta 2 but hopefully next week well I know you're looking forward to it I wisely have chosen to not run the betas this time so that is a wise decision I I as much as I like the change in iOS 10 um and watchos 3 they're both fantastic um not for general public consumption well you remember that every time I've tried a new release right whether it was the iOS 8 betas or the iOS 9 betas I have encountered bizarre problems that no one can EXP La I know and I can say that I had a bizarre problem that has lasted since iOS 7 with copy and paste not working properly and I don't know what the heck happened but installing iOS 10 beta fixed copy and paste it actually works properly for me now so Hallelujah that alone is quite an accomplishment and almost makes almost makes the issues of the beta worth it for me I am glad to hear that your longtime suffering is at an end indeed um what I what I'm at a loss for is is how this issue persisted across so many different phones and releases for you it's probably something corrupt inside your your iCloud backup that's killing it yeah it must be I have no idea this phone was um uh it was not a fresh install it was a overthe a install of beta 10 and it fixed it and I have no idea why but again this persisted over phones and Os releases and everything and I continue to have an issue where I would copy something go to another app hit paste and it would paste something not that I had copied something from prior and then I would have to go back and hit copy again sometimes a third time so uh I am extremely thankful that it has apparently been fixed with iOS 10 and I've Googled it in many attempts to fix it and found that other people were having similar problems so uh hopefully this is something that Apple quietly fixed uh in the new release that will fix that issue for everybody else that was experiencing it cool now let me let me talk about this for a second because I I as you know am a fan of all things historical including technology history right right and if you've been watching my Twitter feed you've seen that I've been posting things under the the hashtag computer Museum lately M I have been digging through and I have been unearthing crazy crazy old stuff in terms of technology and we wrote an article about how the iPhone is turning nine this year MH right so F first of all did you write that article I did what was in it tell us for it because you wrote it you can tell us best well it was just kind of how the iPhone um is at a crossroads right now and it was a little bit of a history lesson as to what happened with the first generation iPhone and some of the mistakes that were made that Apple course corrected in in some cases like adjusting the pricing almost immediately um and some a little more over time such as um well the addition of copy and paste for example took a little while uh the the app store didn't launch for another year but um it was just kind of putting all that in perspective for where apple is now having just come off of their first ever quarter with year-over-year decline in iPhone sales where obviously the iPhone is an astronomical success and continues to be especially if you're not someone who's focused on growth and just looking at the dollars and cents of it the iPhone is is a cash printing machine for Apple um so you know it's interesting place where Apple's at right now where if the company wants to stimulate growth and return to growth uh what are they going to do to make that happen as we're kind of on the cusp of the launch of the I so-called iPhone 7 which is expected to look largely like the iPhone 6s um just kind of talking about um those those things that Apple did in the beginning like the $200 price cut two months after it launched to address some of the issues that they had right out of the gate you know it's easy for people to forget that the first iPhone which came out in 2007 um June of 2007 so we just celebrated the anniversary on 29th 2007 uh the first iPhone only sold like 6 million units in its entire lifetime that first generation model I mean 6 million units is nothing today like apple sells that many phones in a couple weeks consider that a failure these days yeah we're talking about a a years worth of sales after they finally replaced it with the iPhone 3G but that first generation iPhone let put some perspective on that right with the landscape at the time was that before the iPhone mobile phones were either uh dumb phones or feature phones as we call them today you know the hottest phone back then the the phone that everyone wanted to have back then was the Motorola Razor yes which was which was at the top of the Heap for years I mean it was not as quickly evolving of it IND back then is it is now certain it's not exactly I mean there were definitely Revolutions in terms of what you were able to do back then things like the uh the Nokia Symbian S60 Series where it was a a smartphone platform and you could totally run applications from the Nokia App Store on it or or the Sony versions that were uiq which was similar there there were definitely smartphones out there and I'm not even mentioning Blackberry or uh or Moto Q but I mean compare like think about uh Windows mobile 20 2002 2003 and then think about how little it had changed by 2007 when the iPhone came out I mean let's put it got color I had a Windows I had a I had a Windows mobile 2003 device that was color um it was a Dell axom PDA I remember I remember that and uh that platform really did not evolve in that span from 2003 when the OS shipped until like 2007 when the iPhone came out really was still looking the same was still a start button based interface stylus based interface I mean and to put that in perspective think about the iPhone here we are in 2016 think about four years ago what your iPhone was wait wait wait just because I I want to BR go back to Palm for a second because Palm was the originator of a lot of this right palm was the original pocket assistant Palm was the the first stylus base and the whole Palm interface was predicated on copying um Macintosh system six or Bas Windows mobile was the market leader at that time well so here's an interesting piece that I wanted to bring up is that if you remember in 2005 so Palm had this history and and our own Daniel Aon Diller wrote about this years ago it roughly drafted the um Palm had this history of being the hardware and software company and then selling off the software and being just the hardware right and Licensing the software back from the the other company and they did this off and on repeatedly and and the benefit of doing it like this was that the software company could license the Palm OS out to Sony Qualcomm Kera and others and and therefore there would be more palmos devices and the last time they did this exercise access bought the software bought the OS and was giving them a hard time about doing it because Palm had bought a Boos and was going to run BOS we were going to have our first true um multi-threaded multitasking smart phone via Palm running BOS that future never came to be because access said if you do that we will no longer license you to Palm OS and by the way we're going to Stop Licensing to Palm OS and you're going to have to pick up Linux from us and it's going to be access Linux on Palm MH and so their answer was a a screw me screw you move where they said we will license in Windows mobile and they sold half of the Palm trios with palm OS and the other half with Windows mobile mhm and all of this was happening in January of 2007 yeah I mean don't forget that the best uh phone OS you could get that time was HTC Sense was doing their own uh skin over Windows Diamond interface which was basically saying Windows mobile is terrible it's not finger friendly you need a stylus it uses a start button it's a nightmare let's well the problem with the H interface was that it was beautiful for about the first layer and a half and as soon as you tried to do anything you dumped right back into Windows mobile and that's one of the problems that uh you know still persists on many Android devices to this day I mean not every company has the uh resources of Samsung and even Samsung is not really a software company but you end up with these you know unique user interfaces on uh Android that lead to inconsistencies within the platform Google would rather that you didn't do that at all they would rather you just ship stock Android and deal with it right but you're not going to be able to Samsung from doing that because they have to differentiate their phones so what was once a problem continues to be a problem just different companies and the names have changed but um yeah you know if you look back on that and how stagnant the smartphone industry was before the iPhone came in it took a little while and certainly until the iPhone 3G hit for things to really start to accelerate the way that they did I don't think it was stagnant at all there were a lot of interesting attempts at doing things but they were all within a a well boundar sort of um space right you know there there were the Nokia S40 phones that were music players also there were the Sony wman phones that were music players like the wman 880 um there there were a number of attempts at doing things to differentiate from what phones had been I I mean clearly you're nostalgic for this era era but those phones were all garbage they some of them were actually quite good but not none of them were as interesting or good as the first iPhone right the iPhone was a paradigm changer without question and you got to remember too back then nobody owned a smartphone nobody had a data plan they were expensive I mean now you're looking at you know most I had GPRS data and I had a Nokia I had a couple of different you are not not most people Victor you are an early adopter Enthusiast your mom did not own a Windows phone smartphone or Palm or anything like that my dad had the Kera Palm phone and before that and after that he had the handspring Trio phone with the smartphone mod was his company paying for it or was he buying it himself um IBM paid for at least one of those yeah I mean people weren't buying smartphones the way they are now you know most phone sales now of all phones are smartphones remember back you know Nokio was the worldwide leader oh the communicator do you remember the communicator Nokia controlled 90% of the smartphone market up until like 201 when when things really started to shift globally but um for those first few years of the iPhone smartphones were still a very small share of the overall mobile phone business certainly in the years yeah certainly in the years since it's it's changed quite a bit but um really the the iPhone was the Tipping Point in so many ways in terms of accessibility in terms of demand in terms of um adoption uh without the iPhone the whole I mean the iPhone literally change the entire world of computing and Technology um you know the iPhone your first iPhone I bought my first iPhone in September of 2007 uh the day that Apple announced the price drop so you still have it I do I was a uh very poor newspaper reporter at the time um and repeat yourself I um they announced the price drop and I was a T-Mobile customer at the time so I might if uh if if T-Mobile you had jailbreak to be able to get it to work on I had to go to an AT&T store because technically it was a subsidized phone so there was a weird thing where AT&T wanted to set it up in the store because Apple wanted them to do it to make sure that everything was good but then they backed off of that because it was they because the activation servers were crashing so they just let people start taking their phones home so so here's what happened originally right I bought it on day one and the way that I bought it on day one was I I I just I couldn't handle waiting in line so I had a friend who lived in Oregon and waited in line in Oregon and then shipped it to me overnight after he waited in line and got it MH and so he he was in Portland I think and or somewhere outside Beaverton who knows and he shipped me the iPhone and I had it the next day basically and when the price drop hit which as you said was was September mhm I bought it in June price drop happened in September they gave out uh $100 gift cards card gift cards to everyone and those gift cards came in great useful for many many users because when it came time for the 3G people who had that gift card ready used it to go towards the purchas of 3G yeah except you paid $200 more than the phone was worth two months later so H but you had it you had so they when they launched the there was an 8 gig model that sold for $600 and there was a 4 gig model that sold for $500 uh both of them um launched on June 29th in September Apple cut the price by 200 bucks and basically discontinued the 4 Gig sold the remaining inventory that day that it was announced um was also about the same time that they had first jailbroken the iPhone so I knew that I could run it on T-Mobile I was not a AT&T customer and since it was a subsidized phone you technically had to be an AT&T customer to buy the well it was sim locked I went into a AT&T store they wanted to activate it I told them that I was buying it for a GI for somebody and that they would bring it back um so yes I lied to the AT&T store somebody come get me um and then uh because I couldn't afford a data plan on a on a uh on you know the prices they had at that time I had the at& data plan you were going to get was the the unlimited data plan at that time well it was expensive and I couldn't afford it so I Mike still has his unlimited data plan grandfathered from that time I was on T-Mobile and I hacked it to run and then I had um a T-Mobile WAP a WAP plan which basically allowed limited internet but there was a jailbreak install that you could do it wasn't uh what it later became with like their own app store and stuff like you had to do everything kind of coded by hand with the you know tutorials online but yeah C was not originally an app store it became one right so I had to hack it so that it would reroute all internet traffic through the single port that T-Mobile allowed cuz it turned out that T-Mobile at the time when they were selling these it was like I think it was $3 a month for data uh and it was slow as hell but um first of all all data at that time was right you were using GPRS right so they weren't checking the type of data that was going through so you you would forward all data through a specific port and then the phone worked you could browse the web on the go you could uh the only thing you couldn't get when I did that was visual voicemail but everything else uh T-Mobile didn't run Visual Voicemail servers at that time right it was an AT&T exclusive it required their servers and all that but other than that um the phone worked great and I kept it for until the iPhone 4 came out so I stuck around with the OG iPhone for a long time um and that was actually I got the iPhone 4 because I just started working at Apple Insider um and so that was the only reason that I had upgrade at that point was I kind of had to um but prior to that um you know just in terms of trying to save save money and being a poor reporter at a newspaper that was uh that was how I scratched by nice I had the the iPhone that I bought on day one and um I was at Ma when it was announced I was at Mack again the year later when iOS 2 was announced now early on there was no app store and Maps were not turn BYT with with the use of the GPS they were sort of assisted GPS and you you could step through the steps on the turns but it wouldn't recognize where you were and adjust the turns for you at that time right and there like I said there was no app store you had the apps that were there and you had the internet you had Safari yep and web apps web apps and they were surprisingly capable you could do a lot with them you know openg let you do cool transforms where you could do animations to to flip cards kind of thing and and really make the web app feel like a native app in a lot of ways right it was really cool and and the you know beauty of that is okay fine you're using the network resource to pull it down but it could store it in some cash on the phone and that you always had the app up to date you never had to worry about updates you always had you know it was it was either available or it wasn't and it was going to be great because there was no worry about viruses or other vulnerabilities it was it was just its own thing but we you know the the the outcry and and the hackers and uh people like Erica sedun who is a developer who used to work for uh tuaw The Unofficial Apple web blog when it was a thing um you know she wrote about along with people like Craig hackenberry behind icon Factory and Twitter Ric they they wrote about how to unofficially write applications for the iPhone at that time and people made really cool jailbroken applications before you could install um you know app before there was an app right using the work laid down by sedun and and hackenberry there was actually one app that was kind of mindblowing at the time it's funny to look back and be like you know who cares but um one of the early demos for the Microsoft Surface not the surface that we know now but no no the coffee table the coffee table which was announced before the iPhone or around the same time one of the demos they had was a series of photos laying on a table and they were like kind of stacking them and resizing them and moving them around and so someone made an app for the iPhone before there was an app store on Cydia that you could install that was you could take photos from your collection and move them around on the screen and resize them and put them in front of each other and stuff like that and I remember showing that to people and like it blew their mind because it was using multitouch and there were all these items on the screen at once and the screen was essentially just a blank canvas to do something with and it's funny to look back and and realize you know how how silly that was today that would be a technology demo not an app right but you know at the time that was like you know especially when you were thinking about Microsoft Surface and it was this giant table and all that stuff like this was something in your pocket that was doing that exact same capability it was it was really quite incredible well so the the original Blackberry quote was one of the founders of blackberry got an iPhone and took it apart and his response was my God they they they somehow shrunk down and shoved a Mac inside a phone and and that was literally what we'd arrived at yeah I still have my original iPhone I still have I still have I think I have two iPhone 3GS hanging around right now maybe three of them um I I think the the greatest Testament you could give to the original iPhone is how much how many of the design principles not only remain in the current iPhone in terms of where everything's located and how it works Etc but also in how Apple has Revisited them and come back to them over the years for example the iPhone 3G went with the plastic back the iPhone 4 switched to a glass back and uh they kept those uh uh sharp edges on the four and the five and the 5S but now you look at the iPhone wait look at your Apple watch in profile and look at your original iPhone right now look at your iPhone 5S or I'm sorry look at your iPhone 6s and your iPhone 6 metal back curved edges a very very very similar design to the first iPhone when you break it down in that way obviously not as thin and not as elegant no but your Apple watch is every bit as thick oh yeah it is so um yeah it's it's um it's it's interesting to look back and realize how much foresight Apple had in the design of the iPhone in something that was not only iconic but that could last and you could pick up an iPhone right now and and and I have my original classic iPhone and when I feel it in my hand it just feels right it's it's well construed Ed um yeah it's thick and uh but I mean honestly if they sold a phone like that right now that had like a great camera and a thick battery that would last a couple days I'd probably buy it they've come a long way maybe a 10th Generation iPhone next year right yeah you know I I I've been digging through and and posting things like I said on Twitter and I found the uh all of the Mac magazines from back then of the Mac world and some of the others Mac User from from the announcement of the original iPhone with the with the first one on the cover story yeah yeah it's um you know the first question is why on Earth did I save all that stuff but the second thing is is it's it's really like you say it's interesting to look back at what we what has been MH and where we've been and I still you know Mikey laughs at me for this but but a time to time I power on the uh the iPhone 3G and the original iPhone and some of the apps are still able to work you know the the servers that they talked to for things on the internet are still there and in some cases still alive and still talking the same language now a lot of that's going to change real soon because iOS 10 uh requires https for all connections so I I fully expect that many of the things that I was using on those old iPhones are are pretty much dead I think the last OS you can install is 3.1.2 on the first iPhone I think that's the most up-to-date it can be that's correct and 313 and four were allowed on the 3G I actually after I got my iPhone 4 and still my old iPhone hanging around because I like to do fun stuff with technology just for the heck of it I did a hack where I installed Android on my uh first gen iPhone uh and there was also a mod on Cydia that took iOS 4 features and ported them back to uh 3.1.2 yeah um so that was pretty cool yeah one of these days I'm going to try and roll back my original iPhone to to iOS 1.0 or rather iPhone OS 1.0 and I I have the you know I have the original Apple TV right MH and I've rolled that the hot plate and I've rolled that back to Apple TV os1 and I actually then had to use it I had I had a requirement where I actually had to use it so I had to go ahead and update it to Apple TV OS 2 to be able to use it again and um the nice thing about the current version of iTunes you know it's it's kind of incredible here we are in 2016 and iTunes 12 is able to talk to the original Apple TV who says Apple doesn't offer Legacy support they totally offer Legacy support and it it updated and it synchronized the movies that I had to have on it so here's what I was doing I I know all of our listeners think I'm nuts and wish I would move on to something interesting by promise I will but I I had a movie that had been edited in iMovie for an event and there were a series of projectors on a wall pointing at different screens that had come down motorized and I needed something that could run the movie reliably on demand and I didn't want to use a laptop M because laptops have a thousand things that can go wrong right and so I couldn't do it with the modern Apple TV because the modern Apple TV even though it has storage doesn't really have a way to save movies to it locally that I could think of mhm someone's going to tell me that I'm wrong that there's an app for that and everything and I I appreciate it if they do but at the time I couldn't think of how the answer was but the the original Apple TV was essentially an iPod with an HDMI port on it and and synced the same way and so I I loaded the current new 2016 movie onto the 2007 Apple TV connected it to the the port in the wall that ran the projectors in the ceiling and used the infrared remote to press play and it just worked which is just what it should do that's pretty cool it was excellent the event went off without a hitch that's awesome brilliant so we talked about that you know a couple weeks ago couple weeks ago we were talking before WWDC about how Apple was going to make a display and it was going to have Thunderbolt and it was going to have an external graphic unit in it and and we were totally wrong well I we I didn't think they were going to do that that was just a rumor that was out there um what happened was WWDC came and passed and not only did they not release one but uh they also the week after WWDC discontinued the uh Thunderbolt display it is no more um they are no longer they're selling their available inventory and then that's it now according to yet another rumor apple is still working on the supposed model with an integrated graphics card uh and as we've discussed before this makes sense uh for a variety of reasons but the biggest one is if you were to invest in a 12-in Macbook which is underpowered uh to allow for its thin design and battery life uh you couldn't drive all the pixels on a big monitor uh which is a problem uh that would limit Apple's ability to sell that especially as they're pushing for thinner and lighter devices so the expectation is that apple is going to release a new Thunderbolt display that is going to have an integrated graphics card in the display itself that will act as an external graphics card for a MacBook MacBook Pro whatever uh this is technically possible and has been done with mac and is currently being done commercially on Windows PCS because the speed of Thunderbolt is fast enough that it actually has the bandwidth to allow graphics card to work externally now I wouldn't um expect this external graphics card capability to be some sort of superpowered gaming rig uh I think this is more about just driving the pixels on a retina display uh for a 27in thunderbolt Retina Display I don't see this turning into you know some high-end GeForce GTX graphics card we're not playing crisis or Warcraft or whatever you're not going to be buying this machine for halflife 3 if it ever comes out so oh come on I wish um I I am uh a former PC Gamer I guess is the way I would put it I used to build recovering recovering if you will I just don't have the space and the time really building a Windows PC was a lot of fun for somebody like myself who's nerdy and likes working with gadgets and I liked upgrading the components and you know it was it was a lot of time and back then I had a lot of time in my hands you know and you're counting frame rates and uh and checking temperatures and doing all that kind of stuff and it was fun uh but nowadays if I want a game I'm mostly playing games on my TV just because it's easier because you just kind of plug it in and it works uh so wait why not steam box you know I thought about it I I I PC games with controllers are not something that you know uh valve has done a pretty good job with their Big Picture Mode to try to address that but there's still something about using a game console uh where it's just designed for that so-called Leanback experience with a controller um that does not work as well on PC games now having said that if I could get a high-end graphics card and plug it into my Mac over uh Thunderbolt or buy a monitor with an integrated graphics card that was you know or or have something that was swappable even potentially I would be all over that uh I would if I had to you know uh God forbid boot camp uh dual boot Windows on my Mac and be able to play PC games that I currently cannot play that I'm missing out on because of you know being only Mac but I just don't have the space to build a PC Tower and I don't really have the motivation to buy a um a a steam box uh you know maybe if halflife 3 ever launches or something I would do that but I what I am hoping is cu realistically let's be honest this Thunderbolt display with graphics card is not going to have a high-end graphics card it'll be enough to push the pixels which is fine that's what Apple wants it for what would be nice to see is if Apple uses its launch as an opportunity to allow thirdparty manufacturers to introduce their own Thunderbolt graphics cards to market for official support for OS 10 and not just some hack being put together as it is right now and so if I as somebody who maybe wants to push pixels get some more power not even for gaming like just running Final Cut Pro and stuff like that uh to be able to take a small 12-in MacBook and dock it and have it turn into a super powerful workstation at home and then be able to take it on the go and have nice portability and Battery let's temper that a little bit right super power for all in terms of the graphics card that would be attached to it the processor is going to the processor inside true that is that is true yes um it it doesn't magically become a core i7 no but it would greatly enhance the ability of it to do things like edit video um the exporting of the video is tends to be more more CPU intensive so that would probably still be pretty slow but uh in terms of uh you know um transferring the video files and that sort of thing and you could you could make that a much more efficient experience with Thunderbolt and docking it and turning it into something more powerful um and we've talked about this with the iPad to right this ability to turn your personal Computing device into the device that you need at that moment if you need an ultra portable laptop you got it if you need more of a workstation you can do it you love that SMART connector I I think that well it doesn't even have to be a SMART connector it could be lightning it could be USB C in the case of the 12-in MacBook um whatever it's done over uh we have the bandwidth in the technology now to get the best of both worlds with these devices you don't have to make those kinds of sacrifices you don't have to make those kinds of compromises and so it would be nice to see if os10 offers some sort of official support for that with third party manufacturers to allow me to maybe put a high-end GeForce graphics card connect to my Mac and have it work so so what do you think the likelihood is of this rumor coming true uh it came from John pitchkowski uh formally of all things D now known as recode he's a BuzzFeed of all places now um he has where you get hired man he he has a pretty good track record on this stuff so I went from not thinking it was going to happen to thinking it's probably going to happen and I'm excited um even if it is not a high-end gaming thing and it just pushes the pixels to have that option to be able to have a super portable laptop and then dock it with a gorgeous 27in Retina Display that's awesome you know I mean if you care at all about this kind of stuff if if technology excites you that's really really cool so in the meantime there is no Apple display they're selling out whatever stock they have on hand which knowing that they manage stock well is probably not much right can we talk about the best Alternatives so that our dear listeners who are actually going out and buying monitors know what to get yeah I mean um you have a lot of options out there there's a lot of um 4K 4K and 5K displays that you can get um and they're pretty reasonably price I mean if you think about Apple's Thunderbolt display was like 1,000 bucks right so so ad Dell ultr sharp 27 in the uh the u2717d infinity edge monitor is uh get that for 500 bucks yeah Amazon 510 yeah I mean that's half the price of a thunderbolt display and it's the same size at 27 in so uh and that's you know um that's not a 4K one though that's a a it's a what is it it's it's 2560 X 1440 yeah that's not 4K okay well let's keep going then yeah the the there's a 32 in I was going to go for the 43 in next yeah that's pretty big though we have a Roundup on Apple Insider for people that are curious there's an Asus 32 in okay it's 990 but it's 990 yeah still cheaper than a thunderbolt display was okay what about the LG the ultrawide I mean if you really want to screen that wide I I wouldn't really be interested in something like that but certainly that is an option well it's a 21 to9 ratio and the 21 to9 aspect ratio is a movie theater aspect ratio yeah and it has two Thunderbolt 2.0 ports on it which is pretty awesome and it has USB 3 for quick charging too so and it's it it's cheaper than the other I mean it's $787 yeah I mean you got to remember the the Thunderbolt display that Apple discontinued was not a retina display this was not the 5K iMac display that Apple's been using for the last year so right um you know the comparable uh standard resolution displays like that Dell 27in Ultra sharp for 500 bucks it's a pretty good deal it's comparable I mean it does not have the design of the Thunderbolt display which is admittedly gorgeous although thick by modern standards uh and heavy but a really nice uh nicely designed piece of equipment that apple had and hopefully you know when we get something later this year it's along those same lines uh you know thin and and really great panel I would imagine they'd use the same 5K panel that's in the 27in iMac let's we we we posted on our site a picture of a purported iPhone 7 enclosure mhm right the case back and the shot that we had that I saw showed the lightning port in the middle and speaker Grill holes on one side and speaker Grill holes on the other side of that lightning Port yeah what does it mean what does it all mean I mean my guess is either one of the speaker Grill holes on the left side serves as a m a mic or all of them serve as a mic and it's just an aesthetic change um I can't see a lot of benefit to uh stereo sound on an iPhone uh particularly on the bottom of is held in portrait mode dude I want I want speakers in four corners on the phone and I want it to be like the iPad Pro but mini I I mean I guess you could do that I don't really point but um yeah I I uh I I think that that's just an aesthetic change that they want to do uh getting rid of the headphone jack um it just looks cleaner to have the same holes on each side of the lightning Port uh but I wouldn't read too much into it you know I I had a friend asking me about it the other day and saying what are they going to do with the space now they got rid of the iPhone jacket I'm like I don't know put another speaker there and he's like what's the point like the people that are focusing on that are missing the point the the additional speakers are not why they're getting rid of the headphone jack they're getting rid of the headphone jack because because it's a legacy item that Apple wants to encourage the death of and it allows for thinner phones I was going to go with the latter half of that answer it chews up space that could other be used for more cool stuff right that's really that's really what it comes down to well so traditionally in iPhones the batteries have been rectangular in shape correct with squared off Corners basically and we know that for the MacBook they have been and and even for some of the MacBook Pros for a little while they've they've been making their own battery cells that are layered in such a way that they take advantage of even the curved space so that there's there's really no room left for air it's just battery right right so by getting rid of that Port they now have more space in theory battery potentially in theory in theory people don't realize yes the phones are Getting Thinner but the batteries in many cases on new phones are actually larger than they were before because the components inside the phone are so much smaller the things that used to take up a lot of space like the memory and the processor and all that stuff are now actually much smaller components they're they're built smaller they're more efficient they're cooler and so therefore there's more space in there to put in a battery well let's let's talk about this for a second so on the original iPhone I I have a bad habit of taking apart iPhones right the original iPhone I haven't done it in a little while but but the the original iPhone the battery was about a little larger than the size of a compact flash card or or another way of thinking of is if you took a deck of cards and you took out a a a playing card and cut it in half splitting it right down the center vertic you know so that it was it was you had two horizontal halves yeah right um it was about that size and the rest of it the top part was all phone motherboard a strip down the left was all phone motherboard and at the bottom was the antenna and the home button and speaker and mic package right right and that was pretty consistent with with some changes through the 3Gs the 3Gs was a little easier to disassemble the the 3Gs was um a more elongated battery and more of the and and sort of the progression of this over time was that the motherboard became a strip of printed circuit card that ran pretty much down the left side of things and the battery grew taller and the battery grew wider over time and now so we're left with the phone where you just have a very thin strip of a printed circuit card and a lot of battery and that's the same across Apple's product lines You Take A Part a 12-in Macbook You Take A Part A any iPad any iPhone and it's basically all battery in there um and that is a testament to how far the rest of our technology has come and how not far our battery technology has come well true and I'm I'm very hopeful that our Battery Technology keeps going somebody one day is going to come through with a major breakthrough in Battery Technology and they're going to be the richest person on Earth it'll happen hopefully pray it'll happen so there are a number of vendors out there that are suppliers for parts for the iPhone and I'm thinking of tsmc who we know make the processor chips for the iPhone Samsung who've made processor chips have made memory have supplied the displays and and in this case I think the rumor is that they're supplying the OLED display yeah uh everybody's gearing up for an OLED display for next year's iPhone not this year it sounds to me all these suppliers are banking on their their revenue from the iPhone 7 they're they're basically counting on the iPhone 7 to keep them in the black is that right well you're conflating two different things I'm I've got a couple of different stories going on there but I was thinking about the tsmc story yeah so I mean everybody's ramping up for the iPhone 7 uh as it's known colloquially at least um that is supposed to launch in September um and you know there's a hope that uh you'll definitely get the seasonal spike in sales with a product launch but um there's hope that it will be able to return to growth uh as we kind of talked about earlier uh and outperform the iPhone 6s um but separately uh sharp which is now owned by foxcon and Samsung which are both key display suppliers for apple have been ramping up OLED production and anticipation of a new design for the iPhone in 2017 which is expected to have an all glass chassis and an LED display among many other changes I mean I have a report here saying that tsmc is forecasting to grow revenues by 20% in third quarter yeah they're gearing up doing chip production because they think an A10 is coming yeah they're gearing up chip production and they're getting back in the game uh tsmc was an exclusive chip Builder um a few years ago for Apple that changed as they couldn't necessarily meet the demands that apple had with uh growing products so Samsung kind of edged their way back into the chip production business and so uh the rumor here is is that tsmc is going to be the exclusive for for most or all of the A10 orders that's the rumor we'll see how it plays out you never really know um and it's certainly possible that Samsung stays in there I mean let's not you know for as much as uh our listeners and readers of Apple andc don't like Samsung for being a competitor to Apple they're also uh one of the largest chipm companies on the planet uh able capable of producing the capacity of arm-based processors for apple is there any practical reason not not just uh emotional or or otherwise but is there a practical reason for preferring a phone with one chip in it versus the other from the supplier from Apple's perspective from from a user's perspective the A10 from tsmc or the A9 or whatever it is oh don't go down this road don't go down this road uh there was a thing last year with the A9 processor where people found that if it was built by tsmc or Samsung there was a different um uh level of cap different power level for each one while one was more powerful than the other but that was with a benchmark test it wasn't with real world performance there are going to be slight variances in parts coming from different suppliers in every facet of the iPhone camera screen processor the overall experience is supposed to be nearly identical and seamless from phone to phone depending on the user some people got really worked up over where they had the tsmc chip or the Sam the Samsung chip last year because of Benchmark reports but that was nonsense in terms of actual real world performance is exactly the same thank you thank you so we talked about Samsung gearing up OLED production is there anything we forgot to say about that no Samsung and sharp are the ones gearing up okay and uh and flexium yeah I mean suppliers are gearing up for the next iPhone that's seasonal suppliers going to supply mhm um what what's what's what's going on with Spotify I mean do do you use Spotify first of all I use spotify's free uh account cuz I prefer to buy my music I don't rent it so I'll sample something on Spotify and then if I like the album I'll either buy it on iTunes or if I really like it I'll I'll buy it on vinyl and get a digital download code with it okay um so we we ran a story that says that Spotify is bumping up against the App Store that that they want to issue an update and that they're being told that they cannot update the app because it would compete with apple music they want or at least that's what they said go go into this unpack this for me a little bit nobody really knows what the app update has but the presumption is that they're giving people a link to go to their website to to sign up for Spotify so that they save $3 Apple takes a 30% cut of all sales on the App Store including inapp purchases and subscriptions that will soon change slightly where if you have a subscription over a year long then the Apple's cut will drop to 15% however um Spotify charges $13 uh per month for new users who sign up through their app on the iPhone and the reason for the higher price is solely because Apple's 30% cut if you were to go to spotify's website or sign up through their app on the Mac or something like that you would pay $10 a month instead of 13 so they're raising a stink saying it's unfair that Apple takes a 30% cut of all subscriptions uh through their app on the iPhone uh they don't think Apple's policy is fair so they claim that they tried to push through an update to their app the other day and it was rejected by Apple because of their uh rules for inapp purchases so the only thing I can guess is they probably included a link to leave the app go to the website and save three bucks which apple does not allow um they sent a letter to Apple they leaked it to the Press they gave it to members of Congress um they're raising a stink saying that apple is engaged in anti-competitive practices uh to keep apple music cheaper to sign up for than Spotify right now this is not the first time that the app store has has used this uh reasoning that you cannot compete against an built-in app it used to be that Apple did not allow you to charged less outside of the App Store you had to have pricing parody so that you know you wouldn't be able to for example um go through uh the website and you know save money that way or they they wanted to make sure that everything was priced the same and then they would still get their 30% cut they eventually backed off of that and so now that's why you can see Spotify charging $3 more on iPhone uh than they do elsewhere right I'm I'm thinking back to the days where some of Google's apps were not updated for a long period of time because Apple was rejecting the the updates I'm thinking of that I'm thinking of the VoIP apps things like that there was there were some yeah some issues with apple had policies about replicating the core functions of the phone so they didn't like apps that made allowed you to make calls for softened on softened on pretty much all that stuff the policies are not as Arcane as they once were um but I mean there are still some issues and you know there's there's different things like for example you can download the eBay app or the Amazon app and buy goods and services through those apps and uh not and apple doesn't take a 30% cut um it's it's but if it's content being sold then Apple takes 30% cut and 30% cut of ongoing subscriptions is a little high we've talked about that before it's a little too much and uh certainly would think that uh uh Apple will hopefully revisit that again cuz I think even 15% is too much what do you think the right number is I don't think that they should have uh a cut of sales in perpetuity especially if uh the service being provided is all hosted by you know Spotify or whoever I mean if you're paying for a Microsoft Office subscription for example and you buy it through iTunes does Apple deserve to get a 30% cut of that uh forever it's it's a valid question what do you think the counterargument is the counter argument is Apple has to maintain the servers and they serve up a lot of apps that are free or freemium and for them to maintain the quality of the App Store and the review process and all that costs money there's upkeep and they have to make money so that's where where they're going to take their pound of Flesh so to speak I understand where Apple's coming from I just don't think ongoing 30% cut or even a 15% cut is fair when Apple at that point is not really involved in it at all I wonder of Wonders actually had a story this week that we published do you remember what it was you talked about how we do this podcast I talked about how we do this podcast so this is this is the ultimate in in Naval gazing I suppose but um the as our listeners know and are are welcome to remind me we have had some hiccups in our quality over the year and we've made a lot of progress towards getting better about that and we the prog process that we use right now is sort of multi-layered right it's multifaceted with a lot of different apps we have we start by using zenc Caster or sometimes Skype but today we we open up zenc caster and started zenc caster and we've been using Zen Caster's Voiceover IP to hold this call well I should back up a step what microphone are you using I am using the iRig studio right and that's a mic that has a number of different connections you can use it with lightning you can use it with uh USB you're using it with USB because lightning audio isn't quite perfect for this kind of calls lightning audio does not work with VoIP or anything like that it only works with recording apps but not personto person calls because of iOS coding weirdness it's annoying because I would love to do this podcast on my iPad Pro um because this is exactly the type of task that an iPad I think is great for where I don't want a million things in my face I want to be able to focus on what we're talking about I want to be able to focus on the podcast and have all my attention on it and I think that's a great use for an iPad can't do it and it's what's even stranger is that it used to function like this it used to be possible to do lightning audio Skype used to work with lightning audio and then they released an update at some point last year where they switched to the iOS Core Audio recommendations that Apple has uh which defaults to um either the built-in microphone or if you plug in headphones to the headphone jack it'll default to the microphone on the headphones that you plug in but there and it will also use a Bluetooth Source yeah but there is no way to do a uh FaceTime audio call for example or a Skype call over lightning although I have not tested with iOS 10 yet maybe Apple fixed that but I think that's more of a developer thing than an apple thing at that point but Apple's recommended course of action for uh audio calls uh person to person is to not use lighting audio so the reason I mentioned that is that the the sound all begins with the microphone and you know you're using a nice microphone I'm using a microphone and and it turns out my microphone is very affordable my microphone cost $50 on Amazon and my travel mic that I take with me was $12 and then I get it into the computer using a mic interface from uh centrance which is a really nice mic interface uh I'm very pleased with it sound and and one of the things that I do to compare mic interfaces is that I'll use the same microphone and make that I set my levels the same using audacity to monitor my levels and just switching out the mic interfaces I can tell which ones have different sounds to them and whether or not they introduced more noise into the signal so from there we go into zenc Caster now zenc Caster is currently a web application that runs in Firefox and chrome and I've I've asked and inquired and I'm going to say it without having asked permission to say it but he's he's looking into it's on his road map to make it a mobile application so that it'll work in iOS Safari awesome which would be brilliant and the cool thing about Zen cter is that it's it's very very good at what it does it has VoIP it allows you to invite people to a call that the host sets up you can have a chat you can have footnotes the chat doesn't persist after the call is over but the footnotes can a little bit so you can use those as references for your show notes and it saves the audio locally to HTML 5 cach and then uploads it after the show is done recording and then it will upload those files to Dropbox as well the cool thing about it is that it has a post-processing feature that uses aonic Al phonic is brilliant alanic is a website it's a IOS app it's a standalone desktop app it's a ton of things in in all of those cases it uses the same good post- production to make our levels the same if my levels are different than Neils and they're a little bit higher a little bit lower it adjusts them last week when we recorded Neil you told me after we were done that my were terrible right they were all wrong weren't they they were way too low yeah yeah you listened to the show did you yes how were they afterwards sounded fine aonic works it really does and I have a lot of respect for for for George who uh who writes it and the the the different applications are very different in terms of capability the web app has the most amount of features in it um it does things like taking text files that say where the chapters are and being able to put them into the the web and have it spit out a MP3 that has chapter markers and suitable for overcast it's it's a huge swis army knife tool for that stuff it does everything uh you can even use it to process the audio for movie files if you have an mp4 that you put into it you'll get back a movie with good audio it's it's incredible the desktop app is a lot more limited you feed it to multi-track files you get back one file and adjusts it it's it's very simple in that regard but it works the mobile app has a button on it that you can tap to to Mark where the chapter markers need to go so there are a number of different things going on there that make them all slightly different but they're all both they're all very capable they're wonderful now one of the things that one of our readers commented on our listeners commented on was that sometimes the amount of space between when I speak or Neil speaks is either too much or too little and there are a number of different timing issues going on here first of all there's latency over the internet right how fast is your internet connection Neil pretty fast actually I get about over 50 to 60 down and usually about 15 to 20 up okay I have 350 down and 25 to 30 up that's pretty good I do okay and you know someday I hope for that number to increase but but right now I 350 down so there's latency over the Internet even though we both have very good internet connection because even though our down is good our our up is a fraction of that so that's one part that plays into it uh another part that plays into it is the timing you know all of this is done by chips that have clocks in them and my MacBook proos clock is not exactly the same as the MacBook as the clock inside Neil's MacBook Pro and so those timings can get out of sync and another thing that that takes place is when I adjust you know it's also the viip connection because just the the nature the WIP connection is such that we could be overlapping by a little bit if we're not careful but knowing that we leave pauses between some of these things I go ahead and take it to an application called farite and farite is brilliant farite was written by a fellow in England and it's wonderful and one of the features that I I asked him about he was already working on and that is the ability to tighten one of the things that that he does is that he allows you to detect silence and then strip the silence out but when I did that using fite early on it left all these gaps where the silence had been and so I asked him how can I compact all of that and he said well there's a feature called Titan and Titan tightens up the audio file by by getting rid of those silences and it allows you to adjust how much or how little silence you leave in and uh and it works great except that sometimes I'm not as sensitive with those those adjustments as I should be either taking out too much and resp speaking one after the other stepping on each other sentences or by leaving too much gaps in so I I apologize to your listeners that's something I'm working on but that's where that comes from is my adjustment not the tools the tools are wondrous and after farite I take it to uh to SoundCloud and publish so I go through what four different applications Zen cter aonic farite oh and I left out the one sometimes we get requests for chapter markers overcast some of the other their podcast your apps that people listen through use chapter markers and so sometimes it's it's when it's easy for me to to figure out where the chapters should go I will open up an application by another fellow um I think his name is Thomas Pembrook or Thomas Pritchard Thomas Pritchard forgive me um wrote podcast chapters which is in the Mac App Store and is very well laid out and I I put the audio file in that I press command then each time there's a new chapter and you know the the this result is that I have to listen to the podcast again I end up listening to the podcast during the course of this uh generally two times maybe three I'm sorry for the whole production and um and and the the one of the nice things about podcast chapters is besides how what else it does as well it allows you to speed up the playback so I can listen it one and a half times or two times and be able to pick out where the chapters go just a little bit faster and then I take it to SoundCloud and publish and and we we've arrived at this because early on as you know the the quality wasn't what I really wanted it to be it wasn't representative of what you can do here and trying to just get the sound quality up goes a long way towards helping you hear the ideas we're talking about and that's how the sausage gets made thanks for indulging me speaking of sausage and and stuff like that and the nitty-gritty and getting stuff to work you were trying to work through a GitHub project recently so I wasted a few hours this week I have finally got to a point where smart home accessories are cheap enough and prevalent enough um and advanced enough that it seems like I can go beyond my Hue bulbs and maybe dig a Little Deeper um and get the smart home of my dreams I'm about to move to a new place and so I'm kind of planning out um what I want to do there and and how I want to uh Implement things and and and that sort of stuff um and homekit is growing and what it does uh is growing uh and the accessories that connect to it the number of those are growing but it's still not quite there yet so so so wait let me stop you right there what's your ideal smart home what is the Smart Home of your dreams well I want to be able to control the things that I have in my house that I would want to not only be able to control while uh in the house but also away from it so logical things air conditioning um controlling the television would be fantastic I don't know what channel anything is I got 800 freaking channels I don't know you know I don't know where CNBC is if I want to watch it and if I try to tell my Xbox to change it to CNBC it puts on CMT country music television so so that's a voice Reco problem well that's just an Xbox one problem because it's a piece of crap I want to be able to get to a point where I can have a scene like right now I have a scene there are two Hue bulbs I have a projector in my current apartment and I have two Hue bulbs that turn off with the the scene of watch TV and allows the projector to be seen adequately what I would like to have is say watch TV and have it turn on all the necessary devices the projector the Xbox the cable box Etc turn off the lights everything else and then I should be able to say watch this Channel and then some connected device would be able to automatically change the channel and everything would work with my voice and I wouldn't have to use a remote and flip through the guide cuz I'm not a channel flipper I just don't like doing that so I want to get to that point and there is a service uh it's a GitHub project uh called homebridge that allows you to take connected devices that are not necessarily homekit compliant and control them with Siri on your phone uh I wasted about 3 hours yesterday on it and I say wasted because it didn't get anything to work unfortunately but um I'm going to continue to dig at it if anybody who's listening has an experience with homebridge and might be able to help me out it would be much appreciated um but I wanted to just test it out you can run it in two ways you can run it in OS 10 on your Mac and have that act as a server for homebridge and your Mac needs to be on or what I would eventually like to do is you can do it on a Raspberry Pi and just have that sitting somewhere in your house and always connecting so to access a server for homebridge connects to your Wi-Fi network allows you to use your iPhone or whatever other device to use Siri to control things um the truth the truth is that this is really a node.js kind of software and it runs on a number of things it runs on a freas it runs on Windows it runs on OS 10 it runs on Raspberry Pi it runs on a bunch of things I'm thinking about running this on my router that would be cool you know if you have a signology router or a signology Nas for example clearly you're able to run things on those they have their own app store it's very hacked together and the more you try to do with it from what I've read the more likely it is to break with as it is with an aack project you install plugins for the devices that you want to control so the one that I was trying to test out um before I get a little more advanced this and I couldn't get it to work unfortunately was a uh Siri homekit plugin for iTunes on my Mac and so what it would allow me to do is to tell Siri to play an artist a playlist whatever but also to dictate which of my AirPlay speakers I want to play on I have a set of airpl play speakers at my desk I have uh set in the kitchen I have some in the bedroom and then I have a Don receiver uh that is Den I don't know how to pronounce it know a Denon receiver in my living area with the with a projector that also is an AirPlay compliant device now it would be really nice to be able to tell my phone to play an artist on a certain speaker but Siri and homekit don't have that level of control and that is where homebridge comes in so homebridge has plugins for things like iTunes it has a plugin for my denim receiver because it's a Wi-Fi connected receiver so it'll turn it on um it has a plugin to turn on an Xbox one uh over IP um it has plugins to control all kinds of devices and can also Bridge smart home platforms between each other so for example uh you could in theory use uh your iPhone and Siri to control a Logitech Harmony Hub which is an infrared blaster which then controls a number of devices like for example the things I was talking about controlling projector uh Xbox cable Box Etc um that is potentially Bridging the Gap and creating scenes and adding devices to homekit that normally would not operate with homekit because as it stands right now there is no homekit protocol for infrared blaster television that sort of stuff so that's the kind of smart home home controls that I really want because especially when you have a complex home theater setup right it's just a nightmare to get everything working to get it all turn to the right input and on and all that kind of stuff and there's bunch of remotes and you're just flipping that's right all the stuff that Harmony is known for that is the kind of of thing that I would really like to see simplified with voice where I can just tell my TV to turn into a certain Channel or whatever but then there's also you know like remote control of things like um uh your temperature uh that's another area where I have an issue because apparently nobody makes a window mounted homekit air conditioner so my options there are either to use a Smart plug which would turn the air conditioner on and off but that doesn't give me any ability to set the temperature or anything like that I could basically just tell it to turn the AC on or off when I leave my apartment or whatever um or you know I don't know what my other options would be to make it work maybe homebridge could find some sort of way if there's a Wi-Fi connected AC unit that it would work with maybe there's a plugin for it or something but that's the kind of stuff that I want to be able to do as I Envision my dream smartphone home yeah you won't like it but there are plugins for T see I couldn't get that to work properly especially with the AC unit I had at my old apartment where it would have to go through like 30° of temperature to get to the right one so it just go beep beep beep beep it was awful um so to does make a smart AC control infrared blast and they've said that they have homekit compatibility coming but a lot of products have advertised homekit compatibility and don't have it like the Chinese brand hire uh h a i e r am I pronouncing that one right you are uh they announced in September of 2015 a uh homekit connected window mounted AC unit and it has yet to ship from everything that I can find if you Google it the only thing you can really find is a press release about it so you know I don't know when these products are coming uh wwec a couple weeks ago Apple had a long list of companies that areed to be making homekit products and hire was among those up there so um I'm just looking at that that image again yeah they're on the right side T's on that image by the way yeah Tat's on there hire's on there these are companies that pledge support but have yet to ship anything so I know dlink is planning on uh set shipping out an updated version of their camera that will be homekit compatible um and who's the other camera company they have one coming as well well we know that first alerts camera will be on that list and we know that the August camera for their doorbell and I think the canary as well is uh Canary's on the list yes which is awesome yeah so you know it's coming but for example I'm going to be in the next couple months in the market to buy a window mounted AC unit for my new place and I really want to get something that I can control with homekit so I can have the temperature go up a little bit when I leave save some electricity uh be able to turn it down before I get home so when I get home it's nice nice and cool in my place uh you know that sort of stuff and we're not there yet there are some hacks you know I could use some smart plugs I could do some things here and there to kind of act as a as a interm for it but homebridge is one of those things that I'm really excited about and hoping to get working specifically for controlling my home theater well homebridge let's be clear is a patch for you until official support is provided right right and I don't know that Apple's in a rush to ever provide official support for uh home theater well no but if Logitech just for example wanted to but are there the proper uh calls within homekit that Apple allows cuz don't forget they had to expand the abilities of the API with iOS 10 to add things like doorbell cameras and uh cameras were not in the original plan uh so what so originally the original spec was that you had you had door locks fans garage door openers lights Outlets thermostats and and now cameras right uh and you get to define the Apple characteristic types are are brightness door State locked or unlocked temperature lock State you know locked or unlocked kind of thing uh or door state was open close power State onof rotation speed which speed direction of rotation uh the target door State the target state of these kinds of things and the target temperature right and and that's covers a decent amount of stuff but as You' say it doesn't cover home theater but what I forget is is those are the Apple defined service types ppes and states the the question is can you define your own in your own application to augment that well like for example uh the Elgato Eve room is a product that does things that homekit doesn't necessarily allow for like for example it can tell the quality of the air uh I'm opening my EV app right now right now there's a number of problems with that device uh number one it connects over Bluetooth to your phone so you have to kind of be within range of it stuff like that uh but number two it you can't do anything with the information from it homekit doesn't allow you to connect things so for example uh one potential solution if homekit were able to do it would be to have a smart plug on a window AC unit and then separately have a temperature sensor that is also home kit connected and I could say if the temperature goes below 74° turn on the smart plug and activate the air conditioner to cool it down to 72 or whatever right um so what Apple has are are they have action sets and they have time based triggers right that's that's how the rules are constructed for for trying to do device interaction stuff you you can have an action set where multiple things are going to happen at once based on a timer or you can have a timer trigger that specifies the time for event to happen and location based stuff as well if how optionally it recurs and things like that but they don't have uh device chaining kind of things the way if this then that does for example and there's a delay with if this then that of about 15 minutes so for things like if you want to keep your temperature regulated in your apartment and save energy and you don't necessarily have a smart device for it uh then homekit is not the solution for that and if this then that won't be as responsive as you want so there's room for improvement here but we haven't seen it all yet because the iOS 10 is still early days yeah there's a lot of room for improvement there need to be more accessories the fact that I can't find a window AC unit when you know a large portion of the population lives in cities and has window AC units without central air um you would think that uh that would be there would be a market for that uh so I'm hoping that something hits the market soon and and does what I'm looking for because I'm I'm in the market to buy one um and if anybody out there is listening and knows of one that I haven't been able to find it's it's kind of the Wild West right now with homekit a lot of companies announced support and then realized there was a hardware component of it that they couldn't meet and then so they never actually shipped um and that's kind of where you have that list from wwec with a bunch of Manufacturers on it that never shipped homekit products when are these things coming out what are they going to make we don't really know yet I wouldn't be surprised if a lot of those cameras that were announced at WWDC don't even ship this year just the way that homid launch has gone well but but all of the rough spots of needing the hardware and stuff like that were last year's problems so I I would expect these ones would go smoother maybe now I'm I'm just looking at so I've got the eve and I've got a with's home over there and I they both measure air quality in parts per millions and the eve says that my air quality is excellent at 514 parts per million and my home says that it's 450 and so I'm not sure what the discrepancy is there's the echo from the home speaker sorry about that it's got a microphone on it and so it's picking me up speaking and then playing it back through the iPhone I apologize but it's interesting to me that these things pick up different readings like that when they're in the same room um the with's home product is not homekit because of course homekit didn't have cameras until now but the the eve stuff is now Bluetooth like you said is is an interesting choice and I would venture to say this is my opinion that Apple's support of Bluetooth in homekit is not where their attention is their attention is on things that are WI or things that use a bridge to talk to ethernet um and that they have Bluetooth in the spec but that they really didn't didn't give it the love that we think of Apple giving things um all of elgato's products are Bluetooth homekit in this path uh some of the other people doing similar products not the same products but some of them similar are are using Bluetooth and Wi-Fi in the same product and that can make a difference just in in terms of connectivity between you know all of the devices right but the Bluetooth stuff does work and you know it does follow the spec I have the Apple TV 4 and am able to see what the Eve is reading when I'm outside the home by virtue of the Bluetooth in the eve talking to the Apple TV right yeah the groundwork is there for a lot of this stuff it's just not as I'm as I'm looking to invest in it more seriously beyond the light bulbs that I have um it's coming up short and you just want Logitech to get on the stick I'd like to be able to control my home theater but I want to be able to control my AC and and we're not there yet the products that I've tested just aren't really that good that reliable or they just aren't homekit compatible and I want to be able to especially with iOS 10 and the home app and integration into control center I mean I want to be able to just hit a button on there that says watch TV and you know if I have a screen for my projector that's on a motor it comes down the projector turns on the cable box turns on the lights go off the action set why not I mean that that's so many things to do at once but that's a task that you would do regularly that's really where smart home excels it's like it's like when voice dictation and Siri first came out Siri was great for complex tasks like saying you know create a reminder to tell me tomorrow at 10:00 to empty the dishwasher or something like that right I mean that's something that if you were to do that you would have to open your phone open the Reminders app create a new reminder put 10:00 type in empty the dishwasher save it I mean it's such a complex thing with so many steps that that voice command saves you so much time there are other examples where it doesn't necessarily save you time and voice commands don't really make a lot of sense but you know for stuff like Smart Homes where you have multiple actions at once for scenes where you can say good night and it turns off all your lights for example or you come home and things just automatically turn out without having to talk to it location based stuff that's where the future of smart home is and that's where it needs to be going it needs to greatly expand the number of connected devices Beyond light bulbs and shades and air quality measure things well and and the I I think back to when we talked with Karly noblock um of Home Garden television in her own blog uh kly K you know she she said that the future of this is all of these things making stuff more convenient for you right that's that's what it comes down to is is the shades matter if you're sitting at the kitchen table and blinded by the Sun at noon right but if you don't have that problem then it's not a solution you need so it's it's about having enough of the the equipment out there to make all of these things come together to make your life Neil Hughes more convenient one day I'm I'm holding out hope I'm hope I'm hoping soon because I'm gonna have to buy stuff soon for my new place I want to see pictures of the new place this has been the Diamond Jubilee episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm your host Victor Neil where can people find you on the internet well if you want to read what I I have to write it's at Apple insider.com and you can find me on Twitter at thisis Neil NE L and if you have any homekit recommendations or advice on how to set up home bridge I am all ears I'm I'm Victor I'm at V marks on Twitter this has been another episode of the Apple Insider podcast and if Neil Cuts playing cards in half to figure out the size of the original iPhone battery we'll all hear about it next week on the Apple Insider podcast n\n"