"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to the Apple Insider podcast coming to you live recorded from CES 2018 I'm your host Victor I'm back and joining me is Mike worthley hello again everybody I am not at CES I'm at my desk but you should probably expect that by now and I know you're grateful that you're not here yeah the the CES environment is just not for me it's the the crowds i' I've done my bit in overcrowded environments and I'm done with that so it's it's an astoundingly well attended show there are a huge number of people here the show sprawls across three convention floor Halls uh at least two Hotel convention centers and a third one for press events not to mention that there are tons of companies that have a smattering of suets all up and down the Las Vegas Strip and so if you're trying to cover this event it's very difficult to see everything it's very difficult to see the things you want to see just because you lose two hours trying to get anywhere other than the hall that you're actually in and and a non-sarcastic shout out to Nevada Power for getting the power back on yesterday after about an hour and a half outage on the main floor yeah North and Central Halls lost power yesterday for for a good bit and I have already begun to receive PR pitches telling me that uh we need to switch to their power Banks well and and amusingly amusingly one of the power Banks product name is coal so we need to switch to coal in order to get the power back oh boy yeah there was a social media a bunch of Brands took to social media to take advantage of the blackout yesterday like uh dell with the XPS 13 saying it's lit after many hours of darkness and and other assorted little tidbits like that it was uh interesting to watch it develop on social media as it happened and every smart light bulb company gets a tag in there and it's it's fun yeah but I this has been a weird year right I've been coming to this show for 7 years there are a lot of people who are veterans who've been coming for much longer than I have as much as 22 years even one guy I know and they've never seen flooding in the streets of Las Vegas from the rains MH they've never seen rains one guy who's an Oldtimer recalled a snowfall one year but most of the people that I run into can't even recall that I think that was 2004 that they had the snow during the CES that year it was 2004 or 2005 really and the rain actually shut down Google's booth for the better part of the day because their their trailer wasn't sufficiently weatherproofed yeah well nothing here is you know because they never experienced rain they don't know that the roof has a leak well that makes sense in a strange kind of desert way I suppose yeah you you find out when you have buckets all over the Casino floors it's really something uh but that's not the important thing I don't want to bring you the news about the weather I want to bring you the news about some of the bizarre and wonderful things that we've been seeing and as an Apple user before you flip out about this there's a couple Market factors at work this year the first one being Apple shift in homekit from a hardware solution to being able to be done in software so that means we're seeing more homekit this year than we've seen before and also Intel is loosening up Thunderbolt 3 license ing requirements of 2018 so USBC and Thunderbolt peripherals were actually seeing a lot of this year as well well I want to temper that a little bit by saying a lot because there are still many people on the show floor exhibiting products that are suitable for Amazon Alexa and Google home assistant or Google Assistant that have no idea that Apple has loosened the restrictions around homekit authentication yeah I think this is going to be a multi-year process I I Apple kind of slipped that in during the during the WWDC they didn't it was huge if you knew to watch for it but if you didn't know to watch for it you missed it right and the and the Intel thing was kind of a kind of a subdued press release and I want to say November as well so I think that both are going to be a multi-year Evolution I I think that this year there is more homekit than we've seen I think next year will be ridiculous yes no but I've been going around the show floor and and actually educating people to look into homekit and to find out about what's required now because the requirements are so much easier easier to deal with and and this is interesting but there are products out here like there are X Jimmy projectors which we've got a review unit of and we're going to get more eventually that are android-based but have AirPlay compatibility so you can AirPlay video to them which is pretty cool um there are devices that have Amazon Alexa built in and are going to have Google Assistant built in but also accept AirPlay audio AirPlay video which are interesting and I I say that because traditionally when you have an Android product and you're shipping it with with the Android OS you you wouldn't necessarily concern yourself with AirPlay but they have which I like to bring to light you know what I'm actually finding a little disturbing is we're not seeing anything with AirPlay 2 this is on Apple is what I'm thinking I think you're right and and there are companies that I've talked to that have said AirPlay 2 is absolutely a yes but you can't speak anything about it with our company name it's under embargo because we will be there when Apple is ready to be there we actually don't have much more from vendors other than yes we will support AirPlay 2 when it is available we don't have any kind of product lists as far as say what dayon receivers are going to have it we don't have any kind of guidance as to future products you be careful you should be careful to not call out one manufacturer with that because I'm I'm hearing this from every audience AIO manufacturer that you can think of I I'm going around and I'm asking and I'm not just asking you know the one that you mentioned I'm asking all of their competitors and and that's why I want to avoid naming names because they're all giving the same answer which is we intend to do it as soon as we are able as soon as apple is ready yeah the only reason why I picked Anon is well number one because I have one and number two they're on that slide when they were talking about AirPlay 2 at the WWDC back in the summer so this that's that's a good reason yeah this isn't inside knowledge or anything like that I haven't we we have had some email exchanges with just about every Audio company asking about AirPlay 2 and we we keep getting the same canned response so yeah but I you know I want to mention we're going to have an interview later in the show with uh with the the head of marketing for Pioneer rays which is a a very interesting audio product and uh they they've provided to us the currently released version of raay the earphones and raise rally which are lightning audio products that have female lightning ports on them so that you can do the pass through charging and uh that's that's pretty cool but the charge it's not just a charge port it's also a data compatible Port so you could hook up your headphones and be listening and also sync to a computer or the rally product is a speaker phone and the thing beauty of it there is that it's a conference calling kind of phone which works way better than when you just put your iPhone on speaker on a table and everyone tries to crowd around it and it has a female lightning port on it so that you can charge your phone while you're doing it or if you want to use your computer and not have four people crowding over your shoulders while you're on Skype or something or FaceTime for that matter you can just use your regular USB or USBC to lightning cable and connect it to that and use it as a speaker phone for your computer the Rays with the Z that is RA YZ they were it was one of the first products actually embrac the lightning plug for an audio peripheral as opposed to just say a docking station for a stereo or something like that right it's a solid product I I had a chance to mess around with the headset I I haven't really examined it in any kind of depth I'm very pleased with the build quality I saw with what I what with what I had used God I want to say this is eight months ago at this point yeah so but you had mentioned that we we have these on hand now we I have them in my hot little hands oh that's fantastic and they have the headphones the earbuds are smart active noise cancelling earbuds that do not have a giant battery wart on them do not have a giant remote control wart in the middle they have a remote control lump but it's a very small spelt one you if you looked at them you would not notice there's anything out of the ordinary for these things that's how good they've done that's how accomplished they are at making this stuff shrink down and what I have to really say is is that they've got six microphones on these and so they use microphones to calibrate the audio for your ears for the noise cancellation they use it to set the noise floor for the noise cancellation they use to do cool tricks like you can take the earphones out of your ear and the music will pause because they can tell that they're no longer in ears you put them back it starts playing again if you're on a conference call they can do super cool things like they smart mute so when you're speaking you come off mute and when you stop speaking it automatically mutes you so you don't end up being the guy in the conference call where everyone says can the guy in the airport please put himself on mute it's really really pretty awesome and the the thing that I think they have a hard time communicating sometimes is that because these are lightning products they can update them via the app so they can update the firmware via the app and not just bug fix but add functionality yeah I was going to bring that up Victor and I have been on this beat for a long time and that we have part of the initial hazing ritual I think for lack of a better term and in when you first get on this beat is you get batter hey hey there there were no paddles involved no there weren't but there were but there were an assortment of various audio accessories starting with very early very bad Bluetooth ones and just an array of earbuds and things like that and they have come even in the last 5 years they have come so far and I was originally skeptical with the lightning only thing versus I mean I want to be careful and say that that the bad products were not from Pioneer in this case they were you know yeah I'm not I'm not speaking a wide variety of Manufacturers Bluetooth stuff years ago yeah I'm not speaking of pioneers specifically here this is just General we'd get a wide array of stuff and what lightning has done is now we have a a digital all the way through to your ear hole kind of connection where you can do things like adding adding features and software and previously you'd get the you know the TRS Jack and you'd plug it in and what you got is what you got and if something didn't work something didn't work and that's the way it goes and and so I think the thing to point out here is that historically people had a lot of love for the the TRS or trrs Jack but the the thing to do is to not look at at the removal of that that Jack removal of the headphone jack as a negative thing look it as an opportunity for all the cool things that are now possible when you go all digital like that yeah now it's important to point out that many of the audio people here at the show are focused on Bluetooth that lightning audio is not necessarily setting the world on fire here in terms of what's being exhibited um and that's why I'm highlighting Pioneer because they're really showing off what can be done there are a lot of our our friends from other shows and other booths um exhibiting that are doing Bluetooth and doing Bluetooth well and I want to point out libratone for example who are launching a a Bluetooth earbud set that are pretty awesome lione we've been reviewing them for years and they just keep updating their products using firmware updates available over the air to fix things and make them better you know they integrated Amazon Alexa's voice into the libratone zip speaker product just by a software update they're they're doing interesting things I want to mention uh another one called aftershocks which we're going to review and aftershocks is a bone conduction Bluetooth headphone set so you don't actually have anything in your ear it conducts the noise through the bones on the side of your skull and they're so light and I think they're the only approved earphone or headset that you can use while running a marathon because they don't actually block your ears so you're you're not in danger of you know outside noises kind of thing yeah Bluetooth for sure has come a long way just the same as as lightning audio has versus the TRS stuff it's um yeah a lot has happened in the way of Bluetooth the first stuff that like I said that Victor and I have seen and reviewed with Bluetooth 2 and so not so good but the Bluetooth four and five stuff is solid the auto quality is nice it it's it's well for lack of better term it's very pleasant to see how how this is improved over time right now Bluetooth is a little bit dependent on audio codecs and the way that works is that the the audio has to be encoded over the a to get to the other side and you know the old stuff we were using was using SBC or the the typical subband communication for doing the audio Yeah it's the lowest common denominator everything defaults to it when nothing else Works uh apt X is something that CSR is giving away basically and everyone can have make makes a product can use appex to go ahead and have that be their codec for good audio but the downside here is that from Apple Macintosh supports Apex audio so you can pair a Bluetooth headset that uses it to your uh to your Mac and get great sound but iOS does not yeah and the reason there is that Apple has always preferred and was trying to make stick the idea of using AAC as the audio codec and so the iPhone favors that and the products that are equipped with the W1 chipset are using AAC as the audio codec there over Bluetooth which is something that was always possible with CSR as the Bluetooth chip provider but you had to pay the license fee to do it which is why Apex was successful on Android and other places so you know you'll still you'll get good sound out of modern Bluetooth air sets but with an iPhone you really need to be using the W1 of the Power Beats or a wired lightning solution like the Pioneer Rays or in years past Philips Fidelio now Phillips here at the show is not showing any lightning products this time they're they're going all in on Bluetooth this year well I mean that makes sense from a business perspective I would think it it really is about making one skew that can be used across as many products as possible you want to hear what I'm excited about at CES you sound very excited already I actually am there are a ton of new external GPU enclosures that are at CES and you haven't done a lot of work on those uh primarily because frankly the press releases are just as good as looking them at an empty enclosure at the show but this year we're seeing a whole bunch of different form factors we're seeing a bunch of different sizes if you're not planning on using a full width card or a 10inch long card they're now smaller enclosures so you don't have to have this Behemoth on your desk anymore there are all-in ones like Lenovo we're not certain about Mac compatibility with this one yet but it's got a it's got an Nvidia 1050 card integrated into it and it's about the size of a of a paperback book so the nice thing about a solution like that is that instead of having to assemble one yourself you're you're using one that's already been together with heat management and all the thermal considerations in mind which is a big problem when you have a very hot GPU right now to be perfectly clear on this a high Seer support doesn't fully launch until the spring and right now you're limited to a small handful of AMD cards including the Vega 56 and 64 mind you I'm hoping that there isn't going to be a blessed configuration like Apple only allow these six cards or something like that we'll see what happens when it when it fully evolves you can do Nvidia cards right now with with some hacks but I having a hard time recommending those I'm just happy that the ecosystem is growing well the thing to remember is that Apple likes having multiple suppliers of different things and that Apple has a history of having used Nvidia in the MacBook Pros mhm so it's entirely reasonable to to have hopes that Nvidia will have full support at some point at present Nvidia external GPU support is better in Sierra than it is in High Sierra but the solution in Sierra is a hack and not Apple supported in any way High Sierra at least is Apple blessed at least in part right I'm just saying that that full support and and blessed support as you say right right is I have not out of the realm of possibility yeah I have full hope that full Nvidia support will arrive in the spring when when the full support for the for the technology arrives we'll see but like I said the the the availability of the enclosures not for $500 is huge yeah that's for sure other things we've seen you know we were talking about home kit and there are a decent number of homekit accessories here that are some some that are updates and some that are totally new products that we haven't seen before for example the Netgear Arlo camera uh that's focused on children is said to be homekit compatible uh First Alert who formerly had made a homekit compatible smoke alarm and carbon monoxide detector are now making one where they're trying to reach a sort of broader Market than just homekit provides so they they've integrated in the Amazon Alexa Voice Assistant into the smoke detector they're using really good audio I think it's from JBL but don't hold me to it and it will also be one of those kinds of products that I expect will be AirPlay to down the road when Apple goes ahead and releases it so you could instead of trying to figure out how you're going to do whole home audio the the truth is you ought to have a smoke detector in every bedroom in the central space between bedrooms and in your main living areas for your your kitchen and living room well if you do that you've now got whole house audio curtisy fair play 2o so that's an interesting kind of thing Philips hu of course updated their their app and as doing continuing to do homekit with their Bridge um let's see there are a couple of security systems we covered Abode and I'm talking to Honeywell later today to to hear about what they're going to do and how they're exploring the possibilities of homekit um simply sa the weo bridge the weimo bridge is a big one from belcon yeah but hold up I talked I talked with the founder of Simply Safe and simply safe is a DIY home security system and they're going all in on homekit good and I just it's really cool because you know we we talk about doing this kind of thing in in homekit on your own where you have the door lock and you have camera and you have these these uh Door and Window sensor kind of things and you you sort of rig it together using automation scripts in home to to pull it all together but the idea of having a provider back it and create the scenes for you that say you know here's my away scene here's my armed scene and all these things and be able to control them by a voice command from hiri and things like this is huge I just triggered a Hy Siri somewhere yeah I heard that it's a big deal I think it's important so now talk to me about weimo Bridge cuz I had a party with those guys and and that's one of the other things that happens here at CS you want to repeat yourself there that's one of the other I may I may leave it in to be honest but that's one of the things that happens here at CES is that you go to the exhibits during the day and at night you may or may not get invited into receptions or parties or or cocktail hours to really meet with the people behind the products and talk with them and it's a good opportunity to ask questions about why the decisions were made that were made and one of the things that I I did was I went to a balcon reception that was all about their wireless charging and how great it was that that they could do CH charging for everything and I said that's pretty nice but but where is homekit and weimo and they said I'm glad you asked let me introduce you to the product manager for linkis and weimo and here you go and he goes yeah we launched this $39 bridge and it makes all of our existing weimo stuff home kit compatible to which I said that's awesome but what about the future our future products going to be Wi-Fi already and they're going to have homekit built into them and he said we have a huge number of people who have existing weimo stuff that needs to be made homid and we're doing that now later on you know maybe and we all took another drink it was really now to to give you some perspective let me set the scene this reception took place in a bar called minus5 and minus5 is a a thing where they have lockers at the entrance you you put your stuff in a locker so you're carrying around a bag full of business cards and and samples of product and stuff like that you put that in a a locker you lock it they hand you a fake fur parka and a a fake fur hat to wear and gloves and you go into the minus5 bar it's all ice everything is ice sculpture and the furniture is ice sculpture and the glasses from which you drink are carved out of ice and you you have to hold the glass with your gloves to prevent your hands from sticking to the glass as they pour your drink it's really quite cold after a while you can't feel your feet so we're all in here in these these fur jackets with hats that have belcon and lynx's branding on them having drinks talking about weimo and that's what it's like at nerdfest 2018 um Victor marks apple and cider uh Apple insiders um your loyal cores name our loyal our loyal our loyal correspondent and our Hunter S Thompson in the flesh there we go I got the name out anyway so that's that's that's when the lizards and the bats started flying through and uh you have to be careful cuz this is Bat Country out here oh boy the uh you said it now the the cool thing is I I was never interested in using wio before this because I've I've done some exercise with homebridge on Raspberry Pi as as Neil but having weimo have full support means now I can look at using wio in my house and being very happy with it knowing that it's a a well sused Out product simply more options are better and the the weimo stuff has been around a very long time relatively 2011 2012 so this is this is a big addition with support to for people looking at homekit build outs and I cannot stress enough that homekit is homekit is hard to get into peace meal you really have to consider the other people in your house that are not you like for instance I'm fine with a powerocket adapter that's that's makes perfect sense for me I know what it is I know to control it but I know that if it's attached to a power switch I maybe I shouldn't touch that power switch but my children for instance or my senior citizens in the house don't m the so in that case a switch is appropriate so I it's just something you've got to look at the you've got to look at the available pieces to homekit and figure out what's going to work the best there's no Universal solution well but yeah given the weimo given the weimo infrastructure given what they've built out this gives people many more options to choose from the best Solutions are the ones that when installed don't act any different than what you would expect them to do if they weren't smart yeah I think I'm out of if you have if you have a hue bulb screwed into a light socket when you flip the switch on the wall just as you have done for the past 100 years the light has to come on you you need to have user expectations and with a hue product it does the issue is that if you want the Hue to be a smart product you have to leave the light switch on on the wall and then control the rest of it from right you know the the assistant or the home app or this kind of thing and that breaks the expectation and that's why I like replacing the inwall switch or doing something to convert the in-wall switch rather than the light bulb approach yeah I'm with you on that that that's uh I think we've spoken about this about six months ago on this very podcast but this is I'm very much with you on that and I think that like I said I think my word quotient for the week is is full and I think that's why I'm having trouble extracting my thoughts this morning well we we've put you know I I should explain when I'm here at CES I am doing a lot to go between the booths and between the convention halls and try and capture the stories Mike is on the back end sitting at home and well no sitting in his his Apple Insider cabal office in my bunker right yes and is grinding out the stories based on the information and pictures and things that I'm relating to him so he work as a tight team and I have been overworking him and I I owe everyone apologies for this but it's it's really that's how we function effectively as a team and so Mike when you're out of your word quotient we understand why well plus to say nothing the fact that connectivity in Las Vegas with everybody doing the same thing that you and I are that that sometimes leads to some interesting gaps in conversations where I'll send you a question and I'll get a response an hour later because you just got the message yeah so yeah it's it's difficult you know and there are tons of vendors that have products that could be converted to homekit that could be adapted to homekit but they just don't know that it's possible yet and so I was actually at a booth and was showing someone how I've converted using homebridge their product to work with homekit when they didn't want to support it because they thought they had to spend the money on the secure authentication chip there's a huge education thing at work there but being able to demonstrate that that they need to get on board with it is a fun thing to do so so yeah it's kind of a mixed role being an advocate for Apple stuff as well as trying to find it here but uh so we said Netgear we said Philips Hugh we said weimo we said uh we didn't mention Nano Leaf Nano Leaf's is a good one so oh yeah Nano Leaf's got an interesting Dungeons and Dragons style controller now it's a a 12-sided rotational homekit compatible controller decahedron yep do decahedron and you put the side for the for the action you want up and then your leaf or your other homekit gear that you've got set up in conjunction with the leaf lighting will respond accordingly right so firstly firstly the controller controls the lighting and what Nano Leaf does is they make uh both triangular and soon Square panels that attach to each other and can display beautiful colored lights all over your wall in a pattern and the doc aedin controls those and controls colors and brightness and things like that but because it's a homekit device it can also act as the trigger for scenes and other devices which makes it kind of fun yeah it's kind of wacky it's like something that a Logan's Run well I mean the idea is is they they originally started by making light bulbs and their light bulbs were DOTA katron shaped LED bulbs where the DOTA krin part was black and you saw the LEDs actually mounted on the outside of the black bit very unique look and that was they launched through a crowdfunding effort I have some of those bulbs they're kind of cool but they're not nearly as cool as doing this whole wall art kind of lighting which is is no one else is doing that you can buy a bunch of different kind of homekit light bulbs if you want but doing it their way means they're doing something that only they can do hang on one second okay I'm back sorry about that so let's let's do this in Reverse normally at this point in the show Neil asks me so what's the most interesting thing you've seen at CES which is a hard question to answer anyway so I'm going to go ahead and flip it Mike what's the most interesting thing you've seen come out of our reporting and and coverage well I briefly talked about the external gpus but I understand that's kind of a niche thing the CES is kind of I'm actually going to flip the switch on you a little bit here the yeah the the interesting thing about CEs is it actually looks like this year that most of the stuff we're talking about is actually going to ship when when you deal with CES coverage you get a lot of press releases across your desk and you over time you get a feel for what's going to ship and what you don't think is going to ship and what's going to make their first quarter and what's you know you're going to see again at next year C yes hold your fork tongue but there's nothing there's nothing that I've seen this year that we've talked about throughout all the hit peripherals and everything else that we've talked about that suggests to me that the ship dates are not going to get met yeah and and to be fair we're not talking about the weird and wonderful CES that has like the robot assistant for elderly living kind of thing um where the idea is is take people who've never seen a robot before and then put it in their house as the caretaker yeah we're not yeah I'm not talking about that stuff that stuff we put that right right over there on this pile I'm looking at right over here for the crazy side of CES and we'll talk about some of that Apple Insider in fact by the time you listen this you may already see an article or two about it but I'm just I'm talking about the regular stuff I'm I'm talking about announcements like the new Thunderbolt 3 controller that now has a failback where if you have a thunderbolt enclosure you can plug it into a USB 3.1 type-c device like a Macbook and it will still work we're going to see that and I know we're going to see that right and I've been asking all of these vendors and exhibitors when are these things going to ship and the answer is generally q1 or Q2 which means this thing's real and it's in production now and we actually have them occasionally it's Q3 is which means there's a chance that it may ship this year or a chance it may die it may not go at all but but for the most part we're hearing things that are real yeah and and that's different that is totally different than even last year's CES and and that to that to me is the best thing out of CES this year is it's not it's not a vaporware Fest now you know it I want to talk some of the automotive accessory kind of products for a second because there's one I want to call out you know in years past we talked about Pearl and pearl had the rearview camera that cost $500 it was a license plate frame setup and there was another one that I was sent to review that we actually didn't review because it was simply not functioning and and you know I I sometimes get accusations from readers and listeners that say that I must be Shilling for products because I'm only saying good things but the truth is I only want to talk about products that are good enough I only really want to talk about products that are interesting if something's not good enough and it's going to disappoint you I don't even want to bother mentioning it and and I hope I'm not doing you disservice in this way but I just feel like wasting your time on something that's terrible isn't beneficial to anyone so we we sometimes turn those away we actually use the products we're reviewing we don't we don't sit down with a product and roll it over in our hands for two hours and take some pictures and talk about it like for instance I did a uh a landing Zone I I wouldn't even talk about it until I had sat it on my desk and actually used it for two weeks and I didn't do the full review for a few months afterwards that's a pretty long timeline so in in a lot of cases we'll get we'll get hey I want you to review this kickstarted product on day one and we're not really that interested in that because it doesn't look solid it doesn't look that interesting and frankly the software probably does work want one exception to that we will review products that are going on Kickstarter if they have shipped something previously right and or we can hold it in our hands and use it we have to be able to see I won't take a Skype briefing that shows me video of someone using it I have to hold it in my hands and if you're launching on Kickstarter but you've got one you can send me and I can write about and then post on day one we can do that but the rule is yeah but have the danger of that is yeah if if you send us your Kickstarter this is an exception to the not writing about garbage if you send us a Kickstarter and it's garbage we're going to say so yes there's that's the you take the risk but you know if if you insist that you're doing Kickstarter and you're going to go ahead and and get it out there that and fine but we have to have physical we have to have something we can hold and use yeah I yeah like I said and I've had the same accusations well you give everything like two and a half to five stars I'm like well the the stuff that's one star I know it's one star within the first week and I I have limited amount of hours in the day and I'm I'm not going to spend I send it back to the vendor and say thanks but no thanks and carry on move on that's just how it's got to go in that vein we've seen people try and do the license plate camera frame that's connected to an IOS app so you have a backup camera on a car that doesn't ship with a backup camera and the first one was 500 bucks and went out of business started by Apple Engineers great the second one was was done and done badly and I just ended up talking about it because it just didn't work right nand is a company that we saw last year making essentially a a tile or track R integrated into a cigar lighter adapter charger so that when you parked your car you could find your car on the map using their app and it would also be your car charger this year they have tire pressure sensors and that work with the app and a rear viiew license plate frame and they're doing that at a retail price of $119 and will be selling it in Walmart and so they have mastered the the backup camera license plate frame which I think is worth noting you know here's a company that's taking a weird kind of segment of of Auto space which is the aftermarket and upgrading cars that are a little bit older to have capabilities that are shipping in in new vehicles and tire pressure error is is a reasonable thing to do so you know TR there was also let's see Alpine had that uh one unit car carplay enclosure it's wired but it's a much larger screen than you'd normally be able to get in a in a stereo system that you've only got one unit to put in to put in something so you're talking about the Halo um F39 no that just rolls off the tongue doesn't well now to be fair the original Alpine carplay unit was the ILX 007 well okay that that does roll off the second unit the second unit that we reviewed which you can see on our site here is the Alpine ILX 107 which is the wireless carplay unit now they made a 207 that is carplay and Android auto and stuff like this and we didn't really you know we didn't even talk to them about it because well I like Alpine very much when they do their carplay only only units the radio interface when you're outside of carplay mimics Apple's interface for what iOS should look like almost precisely when they do it with the Android auto compatible units also they end up making What I Call Radio OS where where they've decided to make their own interface language that's neither Android auto or carplay and I I really let them have it because I already have two different visual interfaces in the radio I really don't want to have to learn a third that's branded as Alpine because they feel they have to be different and there's a little bit of ego attached to that for them but what they ought to do is try and find a design language that doesn't feel entirely out of place with either Android auto or carplay so that when you you switch between your FM tuner or your radio settings or any of these other things that you aren't sub thrown out of one world into another the f309 is an interesting product it's an Android auto carplay product so it's got that radio OS feel to it when you're outside of either of those worlds but it is a single D unit instead of a double D unit and so it will work with radios that are with cars that are much older and have only a single hole space the screen on a double D unit has traditionally been limited to six 6.9 almost 7even inches basically this is nine is it not the f309 unit is a 9in display and what they're doing here is they're attaching this giant display to the single D unit and having it have a tilt control on it you can you can rock it back and forth and adjust it so you get less glare and it looks a lot like for all the world the kinds of displays that are shipped by oems in cars like BMW and Mercedes where the display floats in front of the dashboard and so it's a huge upgrade for a car that has a single de unit yeah I'm not going to lie I think this is a great thing but I use my car trips just I put my phone down and I just drive you know so this isn't particularly for me but man it it looks like a solid product we we know that people using their phones while driving is a very real problem and we know that that people texting while driving is a very real problem and carplay does a lot to address that it does I yeah I Ely agree with you but this is just a a psychology thing I I spend all day at Apple Insider staring at the screen you are unique you alone in this one um I might and having that nav screen with Apple Maps is really gorgeous too having that full screen and you don't necessarily have to look over at it but having the uh the turn by turn showing there so you know that your left turn coming up in 500 MERS is is there that's huge I I really do like the idea of the F3 9 and um you know Pioneer released some single D units early in the year Pioneer's got some some updated units coming but Alpine continues to to do good things now we're going to end up trying to review that Alpine unit we're also going to review the cool things that Pioneer is showing and we we do this because first of all I like carplay second of all I do these radio installs in a snap but I I really like bringing them to you because CU I think having carplay in the car is something everyone should have if you have an iOS device if you use an iOS device I have a hard time saying anything other than yes you should have carplay okay I I'll go with that you know I have no arguments there what else should we talk about here what else is good well shifting over to Apple news we've got shareholders are asking Apple to study the impact of iPhone Addiction on young users and want Apple to take steps in the form of more restrictive parental controls on the iPhone and the iPad so this is interesting because this goes back for me to something Johnny I said in the interview that he gave to the New Yorker which Neil covered and uh we used to have that on our site until the New Yorker asked us to take it down I think but one of the quotes from that was Johnny I talking about how important it is to not be glued to the screen and he I think he alluded to using the Apple watch as a way of not doing that that he said we we were using our phones too much and by using the Apple watch it cuts down on that screen time because what happens is that you use the Apple watch more during the day but you use it for smaller amounts of time and smaller amounts of interactions when you use a phone you're using it for longer sessions yeah what in terms of restrictions the shareholder letter proposes modifying initial setup on iPhone for age gating and what they want is more control over over usable hours of the day what social media Services a child can access and more monitoring information on how a device is used and where the kids go on the internet now here's the interesting thing Victor and I are both parents yes I admit that um while I am okay with hours of the day you can only use it between X and Y hour I I I think that the vast majority of this goes to the parent I I think that shunting a restriction to a device so the parent can point well no your iPhone says you're done I I think that's cheating the issue I I would I would be happy with better controls for the parental restrictions and and being able to do things a little more finely grained than I can currently but I don't need someone else to decide by ageg gating for me because it's it's my job to determine what's acceptable and what isn't and I I locked out YouTube on the girls iPads and they don't get YouTube and their social media accounts are private accounts and they have accounts on Instagram and musically and they're not allowed to post to musically they're allowed to use it to create local videos saved to the photos folder they use Instagram to post on their private they're only allowed to follow people they actually know in real life or celebrities and if people they don't know try and follow them they block them so that their experience is one where they get to see a little bit about what public figures post and what people they actually know Post Yeah we haven't quite gotten to that level in this house yet the kids are a little bit too young to start dealing with social media and that kind of thing but I I agree with your approach on that I'm I have 12y olds and I'm trying to create a an environment that's safe for them that I can monitor without being um too much of a nanny about it and and yet ease them into understanding that when they post something it's out there forever and they lose control of it you know one of the things that that I did when they were a little younger was we'd look at the back of other people's cars and what bumper stickers were there and what were the stick figure families that they posted on them and I said you know what do you know about that person well their kid goes to this school they like going to this beach for vacation and they have a family with a mother a father a boy and a girl and a cat and I'm like how much information did they give away just by the back of their car and you know their eyes opened and said a lot you know we actually know quite a a bit of stuff about that person now and I said when you post something on social media it's like doing this on the back of the car but for the whole world and you can't take it back and so yeah I agree I I think that I have no problem with additional optional settings I'd rather Apple not be the curator of what my children get to see and watch based on an age that they have you know that they have established I I think that too much of this takes too much responsibility out of the hands of parents and they can just say oh no hey Apple put this restriction on and I'm just going by that and I have a problem with that I also think that the American educational system needs to do a slightly better job about discussing social media I don't think they very much about it at all so I'm while this is I I don't think this is a bad move I think that poorly executed this is going to be a problem and I so in Ence I'm of a mixed mind about it it's when my son was young he and I would have battles about the volume switch on his on his iPod where I would turn it down this is in the early days of iOS where there weren't that many controls on what kids could do as far as maximum volume and being that he was monkeying with an education appp he wanted at the maximum volume possible so to curtail that I ultimately just snipped off the end of a headphone jack and and put that in his it put that in his iPod at the time and his iPod Touch so he could get the reading lessons but I didn't have to hear whatever the song the app was playing 10,000 times in an hour so with one of my daughters uh we we initially had to years ago teach her about volume levels of of the iPad and the easiest way to tell her what to adjust the volume to was by naming the number of squares in yeah we call them dots we yeah and we did and so you know I I had to make and and and with her I make social stories so I made a keynote deck on my iPhone and then sent it to her and the keynote deck showed her all the squares and then showed her setting the volume at three squares and by doing that that that taught her to turn the volume down and you know she was one day run through the house shouting something and and I told her Maya you have to go to three squares and she turned to me and said I am not an iPad the old indoor Voice doesn't work anymore it does not but even now now with music she listens to musically over and over musically uses short segments of songs they don't license a full song and so you hear the same chorus over and over and over again and so we tell her you know bring it down three squares bring it down four squares we have to be able to hear why are you doing this to me because we're trying to have a conversation on the phone honey yeah because I think that's the best example I think that's parental involvement and that's how they should be taken care of rather than leaving it to Silicon Valley yeah that that's that's my stance on this and uh it's maybe it's not a popular stance you know people are going to criticize me saying well you can't pay attention your children all the time to which I say I work at home I most certainly can no I I understand the difficulty that parenting presents especially when both parents are working but I I really think the ultimate Authority has to lie with you as parents and and apple can provide tools to assist but they have to be an assist once once you start delegating everything to to Apple then you end up with the same kind of problems with with um with while you end up in regulatory problems you end up in legal problems with with expectations that Apple will look after you it it's it gets weird and it gets weird pretty fast yeah I agree I mean there have been lawsuits Apple has actually had to suffer from some lawsuits regarding this not necessarily with children but with adults saying well you you led me astray Apple you let me view this content which ruined my marriage we're not going to delve into it that far but you already know what I'm talking about and that that's not Apple's responsibility that it's not even Apple's responsibility to provide parental control R really it's it is 100% so there are some very real problems that that Apple can limit and there are the things like the old stories about inapp purchases um and you know Apple should totally be able to prevent $3,000 in an app purchases by a child I agree yep yep I'm with you on that you know Apple had initially created the App Store in such a way that there was no objectionable content ever and had to end up allowing content that said this content is advisable for children for people over the age of 17 right mhm and so they they have to walk these very fine lines and these very difficult propositions and there there has to be a way where they don't end up being responsible for everyone yeah keep in mind I said that apple is not responsible for this I'm not saying that Apple shouldn't give you the tools to do it I I think think that the tools they have are okay they they work for what I need them to work with if they Implement more that's fine but as long as it's not ham-handed as long as they're implemented well and with sanity and with granularity so parents can pick what they want to implement what they don't I'm finally now I want to talk for a second about another thing that I saw at CES and then we're going to post the interview and I want to wrap it up so sounds good the cool thing that I saw last night is a skateboard now you ask why is that cool it's a skateboard and and Neil has covered some of the motorized skateboards in the past we had onboard we've talked about boosted things like that what makes this one different is that all of those other ones had a controller in your hand to control the motorized part of the skateboard or had a iPhone app that you could use to control the skateboard this one this one is special this one you don't ride like a normal skateboard you ride it more like a snowboard or a surfboard and so you shift your weight in order for it to move forward or you shift weight back to cause it to reverse orak break and I can't ride a skateboard to save my life I'm pretty hopeless but I was able to stand on this and within 10 seconds I was navigating just fine around the show floor a muds people which is Testament to how good a job they've done and the IOS app exists to do things like speed limiting so you don't run away at 20 M an hour uh to talk about your battery life and your range and things like that and the batteries on this one pop off very easily so that you can take them inside and charge them and uh you know if you wanted to extend your range you could just buy some more batteries and pop them on when you need to it is a really impressive thing and the cost for it is significantly less than other boards that we've seen you know usually a board an electric skateboard is like 1,000 bucks and here we're talking on the order of around 500 and so that yeah that's app enabled electric skateboard that an idiot like me can ride without killing himself around a Convention Show floor amongst other people and it's 500 bucks I what could possibly go wrong ask please I don't want to know at this point I like it too much now so what I'm hoping for and what I was talking to them for and this is kind of a long shot was asking them to supply us with two boards one for Neil the experienced rider to take around Brooklyn and one for me the the uh hapless uh you know the person who needs a helmet and elbow pads and everything wondering where and and to have us both ride them and trade experiences yeah that work so we're going to try and do that and I gave you pictures and information about it last night hopefully we can post a story we'll see how that goes and now I want to to go ahead and introduce dearra from Pioneer welcome to this portion of the Apple Insider podcast from CES 2018 and it's kind of Staggering to say that cuz I'm still not ready to say 2018 yeah I I'm here with deerra from Pioneer and first of all introduce yourself tell me a little bit about what your role is okay I'm U part of the pioneer raise product team and I'm primarily responsible for uh marketing and um in addition to doing some user insights and consumer product testing and things like that fantastic so I'm I'm looking at the Pioneer Rays smart noise cancelling lightning powered headphones they're there're some in your earbuds mhm with noise cancellation yes and what what makes them smart noise cancelling number of things that make them smart I would say fundamentally it's the ability of the headphones to connect to your phone and TR and get information um via our app so what that means is our headphones know what mode the phone is in um our app can deliver um feature up updates over time and so this now becomes a product that is longer lasting and more valuable over time and can accept uh new features much like your iPhone would with traditional updates cool and and they have a number of features to them that also make them smart yes couple of great features let me just jump in on those um my my favorite feature is smart mute and um what smart mute really allows me to do is um Carry On A conversation um in a way that when I stop talking the microphone will know the microphones in the headset will know I'm not talking and automatically mute the phone mic so now people on the other end of the line aren't hearing all of my background noise and it's smart enough to know that as soon as I start talking to unmute the microphone so now I can have a very natural conversation and the entire conversation is not bothered by that background noise um that's one of the smart features that I love um another one that I love is uh one we call Smart noise cancelling and what this allows us to do is actually fine-tune the performance of the noise cancelling uniquely to each person so as you know um my ears are different from your ears um my ears are different left to right and so um the fit of the headphones can often impact the quality of the noise cancelling performance that you get so we're able to now um through a very short sequence of calibration um update the algorithm for noise cancelling real time so that it's optimized based on the fit to your ears leading to better performance very cool I I'm still excited about smart mute I can't tell you how many times I've been on a conference call and you know there's always someone on the conference call who's calling from the airport or calling from from the zoo or the swimming pool and the noise is going can can that guy please mute his phone can everyone mute their phones yeah and then the other one is when they call on you to speak Victor what do you think about this and my touchcreen is frozen and I can't take it off mute and they Victor Victor did we lose you and they think you've gone they they're sure I've gone yes and it takes too long sometimes to get that back and smart those are a couple of very real problems that we see um our Target customer um dealing with and we think we've got a very um simple yet Innovative way of addressing that amazing how many microphones are on this thing because my understanding is that the way that noise cancellation works is that you have microphones specifically to hear the outside noise to know how to filter it out yes uh we actually have six microphones and we use a combination of a feed forward feed back noise cancelling design so we're listening not only to the outside noise but we're also um listening to the the noise cancelling that's happening in your ear and we do that with the two microphones in each earpiece and we use the two microphones in the remote um in combination to enable these other smart features like smart mute um like smart noise cancelling and we've also introduced um the capability to uh use voice activated Hy Siri and so as a result of having these microphones specifically placed and specifically tuned we can do some very uh novel things with the headset okay I need to go into airplane mode for a second and I'm going to have to ask you to repeat that because when it gets notifications it will put a beep through the middle of the sound oh so tell tell me again about hyeri functionality yes so I love hay Siri that's another um it's another handsfree um experience that uh that I think our customer um will really benefit from so we're uniquely positioned to be able to allow you to activate hey Siri with only your voice and what does that mean it means that I can now leave the phone in my pocket I can say Hey Siri you know text Victor or hey Siri call Victor and as I'm walking down the street so it's all handsfree and being very present and can see my surroundings and yet I can have all of these um these benefits um enabled by my voice and then as we move into the phone call we just talked about the benefit of smart mute and so this is how these smart features all work together to really give you a um a seamless experience one of the coolest things that I know uh one of our other editors Neil Hughes is going to love Yeah is the fact that you've got the female lightning port on the headphones yeah yes so you can go ahead and charge your device mhm while you're you're listening right right we saw um you know there's there's so many advantages um to new uh new iPhones when they come out right there's always um you know improvements in screen and processing and with the removal of the 3 and a half millimeter Jack um when they moved to the iPhone 7 we saw a lot of people were were upset but we saw it really as a great a great moment where now we were really going to start to be able to offer these new features and benefits we've been talking about but what that left consumers with is the frustration of not being able to charge while they had the headphone plugged in and so that was really the idea behind this port so now you can be talking on the phone if you're like me on the phone all day long um I can plug my lightning cable in I can charge my phone um and still continue to use the headset you know one thing it also um often leads to is uh a question well am I charging the headset or am I charging the phone and the beauty of lightning power is that the headphones have no battery so you never need to charge them you plug them in and they're ready to go they power the noise cancelling and and all of these things work well together so um we're pretty excited about um being the first to be able to give you you the benefit of charging and talking at the same time let me ask is there a significant power drain because it's doing all this active noise cancellation with the six microphones and everything that's going on with the app that's a great question that is an it's a great question because we know you and I know and we believe our consumers all have this um angst about what's the battery life of my phone is it going to make it through the day am I going be charet yes charge anxiety you know we're carrying these power bricks around and I think one of the the the important pieces to talk about here is that within the headphone is um a new package of electronics um that we were the first to to Launch and it's it's essentially the apple lightning audio module too and that's a mouthful but what that really means is we've been able to design this product um with efficiency in mind and through the testing that we've done on the product we found that consumers should expect no more of a battery drain using our product with all of its smart features um as they would if they were using a standard pair of um apple lightning Earp pods wow yeah you know it's it's really kind of incredible because I'm looking at these and there're you classically you'd look at at earbuds that had noise cancellation and there was a giant lump that carried a AAA battery and a giant lump that carried the microphone and the noise cancelling technology and here if we didn't know that these were were smart noise cancelling lightning powered headphones they would look just like any other pair of headphones you've really concealed all of the technology and that you know you um you and I were talking earlier about sort of the vision behind the product and um in the very early days the team took a challenge to make sure that we designed a product that fit the physical expectations of the consumer right and so today you look at some of the passive products that are out there and they are very small they're very portable and the benefit of earbuds and earphones is that they they can go anywhere so for us to introduce new technology that caused a compromise in terms of size or excess battery drain or all of these other new behaviors we felt it didn't really add value and so um our team really took that as a personal Challenge and I was really excited to see what they were able to do in terms of packing in all of these features benefits keeping it efficient and yet making it small so you can just roll it up put it in your pocket and it's ready to go whenever you are so one of the things that I struggle with a lot when I I look at products is you know who is this for and what what problem do they have that's the most important for them to solve because you know as well as I do that when people say they've made a product for everybody it it means that they've made it for nobody because they haven't thought it through G live right so so who what what is the biggest problem that they solve for people this is um this is great you know we we look at the world that we live in today and how we work how we communicate with people uh whether it's through work or our friends through our social media channel the phone is really the center of of everything and to some extent um tablets and and laptops but if you think about it um we're not using landline conference systems anymore we're not using these these big old phones it's all on our phone we have the benefit of FaceTime Skype um all these unified communication systems and so when we when we see what that enables that now enables us to work anywhere we want Wherever Whenever and we see that the current Workforce is um is evolving to um offer that benefit of working in a collaborative workspace or work from home or we travel we live in a 24/7 World some of us and so you need to be able to be um able to talk to your team or your family from wherever you are so we look at the problems that that opens up for people that now means um you know being able to connect to my phone very quickly and simply I don't have to go through a a pairing process which can take time it means that um I want to be able to have a conversation in the airport or I want to catch up with my friends as I'm walking from the commuter train to my office in a noisy environment or I want to be able to have um my headset be smart enough to know when I need to stop listening to music or when I want to restart listening to music so I can have a conversation so we've really looked at this holistically kind of a day in the life of and some of the problems we've identified specifically are how do you have have a better conversation in noise and features like smart mute have addressed that um how do you have a conversation with a co-worker who wants to come up and talk to you and features like um either hearr which allows you to have a conversation uh without taking the earphones out or autop pause if you want to take them out and have a longer conversation we'll pause your music so you don't lose your place um so it's really designed for um today's upand cominging mobile worker right somebody we call them the remote workers or the hash work from anywhere generation because you really want to be able to do it and you want to be good at it um and you don't want the drawbacks that come along with making the phone call from the airport or someplace else yes cool now there's a second product called the raise rally yes and this is a portable conference speaker phone kind of thing yes I love it it's one of my favorite products I'm biased but I do love it um okay so this was the one that was made for you you well this was made for us really for our team when when you guys were sitting around and talking about the product spec this was this was your product they made it for me pretty much yeah well you know um it's funny that you say that but our team that created this we're all remote um so we have a virtual office we use a lot of these tools that I just talked about so we're on Skype calls with the team in Europe or the team in Japan um we're calling from airports or we're calling from hotel rooms or we want to have a quick team call Two of Us in the San Francisco office office two of us in Boston so how do you do that and a lot of um a lot of what we found people doing was using their iPhone and putting it in speaker phone mode MH it works you mostly mostly you can hear people mostly what we found is that people would be hunched over the table they'd be trying to huddle around it to hear or they feel like they had to shout in order to communicate to the person on the other line and we just said what if there was a way to just simply plug a speaker in and all of a sudden you get a virtual conference call experience almost like you're talking on a polycom plugged into your iPhone so so I don't need to have three people leaning over my shoulders crowding around my laptop no no because we designed it to be flexible enough to either plug directly into the lightning port on your phone or you can use that lightning to USB cable and plug it into the USB port on your laptop and have a Skype call um put the phone in the middle of the table and it is the microphone is ruay tune to pick up everybody's voice so if you have four or five people around a table they can have a conversation just like you and I are having right now and the microphone will pick that up so to describe this to the people listening okay there's a a lightning Port light lightning plug at one end the lightning plug carries the microphone it does and then uh a short you know 2 or 3 inch length of cable to the main unit which has the speaker and the mute button correct and then at the very end of all that is a female lightning Port correct and I can use a regular us usba to lightning connector for any laptop made since whenever yes absolutely or I could use the USBC to lightning cable that's the fancy one and use that with a modern MacBook Pro yes and you will get the benefit of this conference called quality sound um when you have it plugged into your um iPhone it is um smart enough to know if you're in phone mode or say music mode and that smart button will serve as uh mute unmute and we've got a little ring around the button that flashes either green when the microphone is active or it goes to red when you have it on mute so you have a visual indication just like the old phones um of when you're in mute and when you're not does it also do smart mute the way that uh it does not do smart mute yeah I know I know people um get so excited about that but it's really um smart mute we're able to do that because of the six microphones that we have and the proximity to your mouth and your ears um that um speaker is designed to be sort of in the middle of the table so you have to manually mute it but again we think one button turns red when you're on mute green when you're off should be um a great addition and make it simple for you to yeah um point of feedback that I have to give you about that color in a moment okay after after we finish talking I'll tell you about colors but um but the beauty of this is that when it's plugged into a lightning device like an iPad or an iPhone and you're using it for a conference call you can also charge using that that pass through female boort absolutely you don't have to about your battery right running down while you're on the call true that's a great Point um and it does it does not have a battery in it itself and so it draws power from uh from your iPhone um directly or from your laptop and fun fact um we've done some tests that have shown that it actually the raise rally consumes less of your battery than using your phone in speaker mode the amplifier for running this louder speaker is more efficient than trying to run the the speaker phone mode on the phone it is wow yeah isn't that amazing that is so you get better sound better speech and you don't consume as much of your battery very cool yeah I'm excited about it now you know why I love it I know so what what else am I missing what else should I know you know this product is um is super simple right it's um it connects to our Pioneer raise app just like the headphones do when you connect to the app the app is smart enough to recog I whether it's rally speaker phone or the raise earphone and it'll serve you up the menu options that you need um it like the um earphones C is updatable over time so we may be able to do some interesting things in the future in terms of speaker microphone tuning and our customers who buy the product today will get full advantage of any of those improvements that happen over time just by updating the software through the app so cool thank you so much dear thank you Victor this has been a lot of fun H have a fantastic CES you too and have a fantastic recovery from CES yes I will thank you this has been the Apple Insider podcast fantastic episode 155 live from CS C 2018 and I want to thank you for joining us and thank Mike for all his support during this event and we will be back next week mostly recovered well I wouldn't count on that you can catch my podcast on Monday at space javelin and and thank you so much and please feel free to leave us positive reviews on iTunes and and catch us on Twitter and email and let us know your feedback we'd love to be able to answer questions from you guys we'd love it thank you so much have a good day everybodyyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to the Apple Insider podcast coming to you live recorded from CES 2018 I'm your host Victor I'm back and joining me is Mike worthley hello again everybody I am not at CES I'm at my desk but you should probably expect that by now and I know you're grateful that you're not here yeah the the CES environment is just not for me it's the the crowds i' I've done my bit in overcrowded environments and I'm done with that so it's it's an astoundingly well attended show there are a huge number of people here the show sprawls across three convention floor Halls uh at least two Hotel convention centers and a third one for press events not to mention that there are tons of companies that have a smattering of suets all up and down the Las Vegas Strip and so if you're trying to cover this event it's very difficult to see everything it's very difficult to see the things you want to see just because you lose two hours trying to get anywhere other than the hall that you're actually in and and a non-sarcastic shout out to Nevada Power for getting the power back on yesterday after about an hour and a half outage on the main floor yeah North and Central Halls lost power yesterday for for a good bit and I have already begun to receive PR pitches telling me that uh we need to switch to their power Banks well and and amusingly amusingly one of the power Banks product name is coal so we need to switch to coal in order to get the power back oh boy yeah there was a social media a bunch of Brands took to social media to take advantage of the blackout yesterday like uh dell with the XPS 13 saying it's lit after many hours of darkness and and other assorted little tidbits like that it was uh interesting to watch it develop on social media as it happened and every smart light bulb company gets a tag in there and it's it's fun yeah but I this has been a weird year right I've been coming to this show for 7 years there are a lot of people who are veterans who've been coming for much longer than I have as much as 22 years even one guy I know and they've never seen flooding in the streets of Las Vegas from the rains MH they've never seen rains one guy who's an Oldtimer recalled a snowfall one year but most of the people that I run into can't even recall that I think that was 2004 that they had the snow during the CES that year it was 2004 or 2005 really and the rain actually shut down Google's booth for the better part of the day because their their trailer wasn't sufficiently weatherproofed yeah well nothing here is you know because they never experienced rain they don't know that the roof has a leak well that makes sense in a strange kind of desert way I suppose yeah you you find out when you have buckets all over the Casino floors it's really something uh but that's not the important thing I don't want to bring you the news about the weather I want to bring you the news about some of the bizarre and wonderful things that we've been seeing and as an Apple user before you flip out about this there's a couple Market factors at work this year the first one being Apple shift in homekit from a hardware solution to being able to be done in software so that means we're seeing more homekit this year than we've seen before and also Intel is loosening up Thunderbolt 3 license ing requirements of 2018 so USBC and Thunderbolt peripherals were actually seeing a lot of this year as well well I want to temper that a little bit by saying a lot because there are still many people on the show floor exhibiting products that are suitable for Amazon Alexa and Google home assistant or Google Assistant that have no idea that Apple has loosened the restrictions around homekit authentication yeah I think this is going to be a multi-year process I I Apple kind of slipped that in during the during the WWDC they didn't it was huge if you knew to watch for it but if you didn't know to watch for it you missed it right and the and the Intel thing was kind of a kind of a subdued press release and I want to say November as well so I think that both are going to be a multi-year Evolution I I think that this year there is more homekit than we've seen I think next year will be ridiculous yes no but I've been going around the show floor and and actually educating people to look into homekit and to find out about what's required now because the requirements are so much easier easier to deal with and and this is interesting but there are products out here like there are X Jimmy projectors which we've got a review unit of and we're going to get more eventually that are android-based but have AirPlay compatibility so you can AirPlay video to them which is pretty cool um there are devices that have Amazon Alexa built in and are going to have Google Assistant built in but also accept AirPlay audio AirPlay video which are interesting and I I say that because traditionally when you have an Android product and you're shipping it with with the Android OS you you wouldn't necessarily concern yourself with AirPlay but they have which I like to bring to light you know what I'm actually finding a little disturbing is we're not seeing anything with AirPlay 2 this is on Apple is what I'm thinking I think you're right and and there are companies that I've talked to that have said AirPlay 2 is absolutely a yes but you can't speak anything about it with our company name it's under embargo because we will be there when Apple is ready to be there we actually don't have much more from vendors other than yes we will support AirPlay 2 when it is available we don't have any kind of product lists as far as say what dayon receivers are going to have it we don't have any kind of guidance as to future products you be careful you should be careful to not call out one manufacturer with that because I'm I'm hearing this from every audience AIO manufacturer that you can think of I I'm going around and I'm asking and I'm not just asking you know the one that you mentioned I'm asking all of their competitors and and that's why I want to avoid naming names because they're all giving the same answer which is we intend to do it as soon as we are able as soon as apple is ready yeah the only reason why I picked Anon is well number one because I have one and number two they're on that slide when they were talking about AirPlay 2 at the WWDC back in the summer so this that's that's a good reason yeah this isn't inside knowledge or anything like that I haven't we we have had some email exchanges with just about every Audio company asking about AirPlay 2 and we we keep getting the same canned response so yeah but I you know I want to mention we're going to have an interview later in the show with uh with the the head of marketing for Pioneer rays which is a a very interesting audio product and uh they they've provided to us the currently released version of raay the earphones and raise rally which are lightning audio products that have female lightning ports on them so that you can do the pass through charging and uh that's that's pretty cool but the charge it's not just a charge port it's also a data compatible Port so you could hook up your headphones and be listening and also sync to a computer or the rally product is a speaker phone and the thing beauty of it there is that it's a conference calling kind of phone which works way better than when you just put your iPhone on speaker on a table and everyone tries to crowd around it and it has a female lightning port on it so that you can charge your phone while you're doing it or if you want to use your computer and not have four people crowding over your shoulders while you're on Skype or something or FaceTime for that matter you can just use your regular USB or USBC to lightning cable and connect it to that and use it as a speaker phone for your computer the Rays with the Z that is RA YZ they were it was one of the first products actually embrac the lightning plug for an audio peripheral as opposed to just say a docking station for a stereo or something like that right it's a solid product I I had a chance to mess around with the headset I I haven't really examined it in any kind of depth I'm very pleased with the build quality I saw with what I what with what I had used God I want to say this is eight months ago at this point yeah so but you had mentioned that we we have these on hand now we I have them in my hot little hands oh that's fantastic and they have the headphones the earbuds are smart active noise cancelling earbuds that do not have a giant battery wart on them do not have a giant remote control wart in the middle they have a remote control lump but it's a very small spelt one you if you looked at them you would not notice there's anything out of the ordinary for these things that's how good they've done that's how accomplished they are at making this stuff shrink down and what I have to really say is is that they've got six microphones on these and so they use microphones to calibrate the audio for your ears for the noise cancellation they use it to set the noise floor for the noise cancellation they use to do cool tricks like you can take the earphones out of your ear and the music will pause because they can tell that they're no longer in ears you put them back it starts playing again if you're on a conference call they can do super cool things like they smart mute so when you're speaking you come off mute and when you stop speaking it automatically mutes you so you don't end up being the guy in the conference call where everyone says can the guy in the airport please put himself on mute it's really really pretty awesome and the the thing that I think they have a hard time communicating sometimes is that because these are lightning products they can update them via the app so they can update the firmware via the app and not just bug fix but add functionality yeah I was going to bring that up Victor and I have been on this beat for a long time and that we have part of the initial hazing ritual I think for lack of a better term and in when you first get on this beat is you get batter hey hey there there were no paddles involved no there weren't but there were but there were an assortment of various audio accessories starting with very early very bad Bluetooth ones and just an array of earbuds and things like that and they have come even in the last 5 years they have come so far and I was originally skeptical with the lightning only thing versus I mean I want to be careful and say that that the bad products were not from Pioneer in this case they were you know yeah I'm not I'm not speaking a wide variety of Manufacturers Bluetooth stuff years ago yeah I'm not speaking of pioneers specifically here this is just General we'd get a wide array of stuff and what lightning has done is now we have a a digital all the way through to your ear hole kind of connection where you can do things like adding adding features and software and previously you'd get the you know the TRS Jack and you'd plug it in and what you got is what you got and if something didn't work something didn't work and that's the way it goes and and so I think the thing to point out here is that historically people had a lot of love for the the TRS or trrs Jack but the the thing to do is to not look at at the removal of that that Jack removal of the headphone jack as a negative thing look it as an opportunity for all the cool things that are now possible when you go all digital like that yeah now it's important to point out that many of the audio people here at the show are focused on Bluetooth that lightning audio is not necessarily setting the world on fire here in terms of what's being exhibited um and that's why I'm highlighting Pioneer because they're really showing off what can be done there are a lot of our our friends from other shows and other booths um exhibiting that are doing Bluetooth and doing Bluetooth well and I want to point out libratone for example who are launching a a Bluetooth earbud set that are pretty awesome lione we've been reviewing them for years and they just keep updating their products using firmware updates available over the air to fix things and make them better you know they integrated Amazon Alexa's voice into the libratone zip speaker product just by a software update they're they're doing interesting things I want to mention uh another one called aftershocks which we're going to review and aftershocks is a bone conduction Bluetooth headphone set so you don't actually have anything in your ear it conducts the noise through the bones on the side of your skull and they're so light and I think they're the only approved earphone or headset that you can use while running a marathon because they don't actually block your ears so you're you're not in danger of you know outside noises kind of thing yeah Bluetooth for sure has come a long way just the same as as lightning audio has versus the TRS stuff it's um yeah a lot has happened in the way of Bluetooth the first stuff that like I said that Victor and I have seen and reviewed with Bluetooth 2 and so not so good but the Bluetooth four and five stuff is solid the auto quality is nice it it's it's well for lack of better term it's very pleasant to see how how this is improved over time right now Bluetooth is a little bit dependent on audio codecs and the way that works is that the the audio has to be encoded over the a to get to the other side and you know the old stuff we were using was using SBC or the the typical subband communication for doing the audio Yeah it's the lowest common denominator everything defaults to it when nothing else Works uh apt X is something that CSR is giving away basically and everyone can have make makes a product can use appex to go ahead and have that be their codec for good audio but the downside here is that from Apple Macintosh supports Apex audio so you can pair a Bluetooth headset that uses it to your uh to your Mac and get great sound but iOS does not yeah and the reason there is that Apple has always preferred and was trying to make stick the idea of using AAC as the audio codec and so the iPhone favors that and the products that are equipped with the W1 chipset are using AAC as the audio codec there over Bluetooth which is something that was always possible with CSR as the Bluetooth chip provider but you had to pay the license fee to do it which is why Apex was successful on Android and other places so you know you'll still you'll get good sound out of modern Bluetooth air sets but with an iPhone you really need to be using the W1 of the Power Beats or a wired lightning solution like the Pioneer Rays or in years past Philips Fidelio now Phillips here at the show is not showing any lightning products this time they're they're going all in on Bluetooth this year well I mean that makes sense from a business perspective I would think it it really is about making one skew that can be used across as many products as possible you want to hear what I'm excited about at CES you sound very excited already I actually am there are a ton of new external GPU enclosures that are at CES and you haven't done a lot of work on those uh primarily because frankly the press releases are just as good as looking them at an empty enclosure at the show but this year we're seeing a whole bunch of different form factors we're seeing a bunch of different sizes if you're not planning on using a full width card or a 10inch long card they're now smaller enclosures so you don't have to have this Behemoth on your desk anymore there are all-in ones like Lenovo we're not certain about Mac compatibility with this one yet but it's got a it's got an Nvidia 1050 card integrated into it and it's about the size of a of a paperback book so the nice thing about a solution like that is that instead of having to assemble one yourself you're you're using one that's already been together with heat management and all the thermal considerations in mind which is a big problem when you have a very hot GPU right now to be perfectly clear on this a high Seer support doesn't fully launch until the spring and right now you're limited to a small handful of AMD cards including the Vega 56 and 64 mind you I'm hoping that there isn't going to be a blessed configuration like Apple only allow these six cards or something like that we'll see what happens when it when it fully evolves you can do Nvidia cards right now with with some hacks but I having a hard time recommending those I'm just happy that the ecosystem is growing well the thing to remember is that Apple likes having multiple suppliers of different things and that Apple has a history of having used Nvidia in the MacBook Pros mhm so it's entirely reasonable to to have hopes that Nvidia will have full support at some point at present Nvidia external GPU support is better in Sierra than it is in High Sierra but the solution in Sierra is a hack and not Apple supported in any way High Sierra at least is Apple blessed at least in part right I'm just saying that that full support and and blessed support as you say right right is I have not out of the realm of possibility yeah I have full hope that full Nvidia support will arrive in the spring when when the full support for the for the technology arrives we'll see but like I said the the the availability of the enclosures not for $500 is huge yeah that's for sure other things we've seen you know we were talking about home kit and there are a decent number of homekit accessories here that are some some that are updates and some that are totally new products that we haven't seen before for example the Netgear Arlo camera uh that's focused on children is said to be homekit compatible uh First Alert who formerly had made a homekit compatible smoke alarm and carbon monoxide detector are now making one where they're trying to reach a sort of broader Market than just homekit provides so they they've integrated in the Amazon Alexa Voice Assistant into the smoke detector they're using really good audio I think it's from JBL but don't hold me to it and it will also be one of those kinds of products that I expect will be AirPlay to down the road when Apple goes ahead and releases it so you could instead of trying to figure out how you're going to do whole home audio the the truth is you ought to have a smoke detector in every bedroom in the central space between bedrooms and in your main living areas for your your kitchen and living room well if you do that you've now got whole house audio curtisy fair play 2o so that's an interesting kind of thing Philips hu of course updated their their app and as doing continuing to do homekit with their Bridge um let's see there are a couple of security systems we covered Abode and I'm talking to Honeywell later today to to hear about what they're going to do and how they're exploring the possibilities of homekit um simply sa the weo bridge the weimo bridge is a big one from belcon yeah but hold up I talked I talked with the founder of Simply Safe and simply safe is a DIY home security system and they're going all in on homekit good and I just it's really cool because you know we we talk about doing this kind of thing in in homekit on your own where you have the door lock and you have camera and you have these these uh Door and Window sensor kind of things and you you sort of rig it together using automation scripts in home to to pull it all together but the idea of having a provider back it and create the scenes for you that say you know here's my away scene here's my armed scene and all these things and be able to control them by a voice command from hiri and things like this is huge I just triggered a Hy Siri somewhere yeah I heard that it's a big deal I think it's important so now talk to me about weimo Bridge cuz I had a party with those guys and and that's one of the other things that happens here at CS you want to repeat yourself there that's one of the other I may I may leave it in to be honest but that's one of the things that happens here at CES is that you go to the exhibits during the day and at night you may or may not get invited into receptions or parties or or cocktail hours to really meet with the people behind the products and talk with them and it's a good opportunity to ask questions about why the decisions were made that were made and one of the things that I I did was I went to a balcon reception that was all about their wireless charging and how great it was that that they could do CH charging for everything and I said that's pretty nice but but where is homekit and weimo and they said I'm glad you asked let me introduce you to the product manager for linkis and weimo and here you go and he goes yeah we launched this $39 bridge and it makes all of our existing weimo stuff home kit compatible to which I said that's awesome but what about the future our future products going to be Wi-Fi already and they're going to have homekit built into them and he said we have a huge number of people who have existing weimo stuff that needs to be made homid and we're doing that now later on you know maybe and we all took another drink it was really now to to give you some perspective let me set the scene this reception took place in a bar called minus5 and minus5 is a a thing where they have lockers at the entrance you you put your stuff in a locker so you're carrying around a bag full of business cards and and samples of product and stuff like that you put that in a a locker you lock it they hand you a fake fur parka and a a fake fur hat to wear and gloves and you go into the minus5 bar it's all ice everything is ice sculpture and the furniture is ice sculpture and the glasses from which you drink are carved out of ice and you you have to hold the glass with your gloves to prevent your hands from sticking to the glass as they pour your drink it's really quite cold after a while you can't feel your feet so we're all in here in these these fur jackets with hats that have belcon and lynx's branding on them having drinks talking about weimo and that's what it's like at nerdfest 2018 um Victor marks apple and cider uh Apple insiders um your loyal cores name our loyal our loyal our loyal correspondent and our Hunter S Thompson in the flesh there we go I got the name out anyway so that's that's that's when the lizards and the bats started flying through and uh you have to be careful cuz this is Bat Country out here oh boy the uh you said it now the the cool thing is I I was never interested in using wio before this because I've I've done some exercise with homebridge on Raspberry Pi as as Neil but having weimo have full support means now I can look at using wio in my house and being very happy with it knowing that it's a a well sused Out product simply more options are better and the the weimo stuff has been around a very long time relatively 2011 2012 so this is this is a big addition with support to for people looking at homekit build outs and I cannot stress enough that homekit is homekit is hard to get into peace meal you really have to consider the other people in your house that are not you like for instance I'm fine with a powerocket adapter that's that's makes perfect sense for me I know what it is I know to control it but I know that if it's attached to a power switch I maybe I shouldn't touch that power switch but my children for instance or my senior citizens in the house don't m the so in that case a switch is appropriate so I it's just something you've got to look at the you've got to look at the available pieces to homekit and figure out what's going to work the best there's no Universal solution well but yeah given the weimo given the weimo infrastructure given what they've built out this gives people many more options to choose from the best Solutions are the ones that when installed don't act any different than what you would expect them to do if they weren't smart yeah I think I'm out of if you have if you have a hue bulb screwed into a light socket when you flip the switch on the wall just as you have done for the past 100 years the light has to come on you you need to have user expectations and with a hue product it does the issue is that if you want the Hue to be a smart product you have to leave the light switch on on the wall and then control the rest of it from right you know the the assistant or the home app or this kind of thing and that breaks the expectation and that's why I like replacing the inwall switch or doing something to convert the in-wall switch rather than the light bulb approach yeah I'm with you on that that that's uh I think we've spoken about this about six months ago on this very podcast but this is I'm very much with you on that and I think that like I said I think my word quotient for the week is is full and I think that's why I'm having trouble extracting my thoughts this morning well we we've put you know I I should explain when I'm here at CES I am doing a lot to go between the booths and between the convention halls and try and capture the stories Mike is on the back end sitting at home and well no sitting in his his Apple Insider cabal office in my bunker right yes and is grinding out the stories based on the information and pictures and things that I'm relating to him so he work as a tight team and I have been overworking him and I I owe everyone apologies for this but it's it's really that's how we function effectively as a team and so Mike when you're out of your word quotient we understand why well plus to say nothing the fact that connectivity in Las Vegas with everybody doing the same thing that you and I are that that sometimes leads to some interesting gaps in conversations where I'll send you a question and I'll get a response an hour later because you just got the message yeah so yeah it's it's difficult you know and there are tons of vendors that have products that could be converted to homekit that could be adapted to homekit but they just don't know that it's possible yet and so I was actually at a booth and was showing someone how I've converted using homebridge their product to work with homekit when they didn't want to support it because they thought they had to spend the money on the secure authentication chip there's a huge education thing at work there but being able to demonstrate that that they need to get on board with it is a fun thing to do so so yeah it's kind of a mixed role being an advocate for Apple stuff as well as trying to find it here but uh so we said Netgear we said Philips Hugh we said weimo we said uh we didn't mention Nano Leaf Nano Leaf's is a good one so oh yeah Nano Leaf's got an interesting Dungeons and Dragons style controller now it's a a 12-sided rotational homekit compatible controller decahedron yep do decahedron and you put the side for the for the action you want up and then your leaf or your other homekit gear that you've got set up in conjunction with the leaf lighting will respond accordingly right so firstly firstly the controller controls the lighting and what Nano Leaf does is they make uh both triangular and soon Square panels that attach to each other and can display beautiful colored lights all over your wall in a pattern and the doc aedin controls those and controls colors and brightness and things like that but because it's a homekit device it can also act as the trigger for scenes and other devices which makes it kind of fun yeah it's kind of wacky it's like something that a Logan's Run well I mean the idea is is they they originally started by making light bulbs and their light bulbs were DOTA katron shaped LED bulbs where the DOTA krin part was black and you saw the LEDs actually mounted on the outside of the black bit very unique look and that was they launched through a crowdfunding effort I have some of those bulbs they're kind of cool but they're not nearly as cool as doing this whole wall art kind of lighting which is is no one else is doing that you can buy a bunch of different kind of homekit light bulbs if you want but doing it their way means they're doing something that only they can do hang on one second okay I'm back sorry about that so let's let's do this in Reverse normally at this point in the show Neil asks me so what's the most interesting thing you've seen at CES which is a hard question to answer anyway so I'm going to go ahead and flip it Mike what's the most interesting thing you've seen come out of our reporting and and coverage well I briefly talked about the external gpus but I understand that's kind of a niche thing the CES is kind of I'm actually going to flip the switch on you a little bit here the yeah the the interesting thing about CEs is it actually looks like this year that most of the stuff we're talking about is actually going to ship when when you deal with CES coverage you get a lot of press releases across your desk and you over time you get a feel for what's going to ship and what you don't think is going to ship and what's going to make their first quarter and what's you know you're going to see again at next year C yes hold your fork tongue but there's nothing there's nothing that I've seen this year that we've talked about throughout all the hit peripherals and everything else that we've talked about that suggests to me that the ship dates are not going to get met yeah and and to be fair we're not talking about the weird and wonderful CES that has like the robot assistant for elderly living kind of thing um where the idea is is take people who've never seen a robot before and then put it in their house as the caretaker yeah we're not yeah I'm not talking about that stuff that stuff we put that right right over there on this pile I'm looking at right over here for the crazy side of CES and we'll talk about some of that Apple Insider in fact by the time you listen this you may already see an article or two about it but I'm just I'm talking about the regular stuff I'm I'm talking about announcements like the new Thunderbolt 3 controller that now has a failback where if you have a thunderbolt enclosure you can plug it into a USB 3.1 type-c device like a Macbook and it will still work we're going to see that and I know we're going to see that right and I've been asking all of these vendors and exhibitors when are these things going to ship and the answer is generally q1 or Q2 which means this thing's real and it's in production now and we actually have them occasionally it's Q3 is which means there's a chance that it may ship this year or a chance it may die it may not go at all but but for the most part we're hearing things that are real yeah and and that's different that is totally different than even last year's CES and and that to that to me is the best thing out of CES this year is it's not it's not a vaporware Fest now you know it I want to talk some of the automotive accessory kind of products for a second because there's one I want to call out you know in years past we talked about Pearl and pearl had the rearview camera that cost $500 it was a license plate frame setup and there was another one that I was sent to review that we actually didn't review because it was simply not functioning and and you know I I sometimes get accusations from readers and listeners that say that I must be Shilling for products because I'm only saying good things but the truth is I only want to talk about products that are good enough I only really want to talk about products that are interesting if something's not good enough and it's going to disappoint you I don't even want to bother mentioning it and and I hope I'm not doing you disservice in this way but I just feel like wasting your time on something that's terrible isn't beneficial to anyone so we we sometimes turn those away we actually use the products we're reviewing we don't we don't sit down with a product and roll it over in our hands for two hours and take some pictures and talk about it like for instance I did a uh a landing Zone I I wouldn't even talk about it until I had sat it on my desk and actually used it for two weeks and I didn't do the full review for a few months afterwards that's a pretty long timeline so in in a lot of cases we'll get we'll get hey I want you to review this kickstarted product on day one and we're not really that interested in that because it doesn't look solid it doesn't look that interesting and frankly the software probably does work want one exception to that we will review products that are going on Kickstarter if they have shipped something previously right and or we can hold it in our hands and use it we have to be able to see I won't take a Skype briefing that shows me video of someone using it I have to hold it in my hands and if you're launching on Kickstarter but you've got one you can send me and I can write about and then post on day one we can do that but the rule is yeah but have the danger of that is yeah if if you send us your Kickstarter this is an exception to the not writing about garbage if you send us a Kickstarter and it's garbage we're going to say so yes there's that's the you take the risk but you know if if you insist that you're doing Kickstarter and you're going to go ahead and and get it out there that and fine but we have to have physical we have to have something we can hold and use yeah I yeah like I said and I've had the same accusations well you give everything like two and a half to five stars I'm like well the the stuff that's one star I know it's one star within the first week and I I have limited amount of hours in the day and I'm I'm not going to spend I send it back to the vendor and say thanks but no thanks and carry on move on that's just how it's got to go in that vein we've seen people try and do the license plate camera frame that's connected to an IOS app so you have a backup camera on a car that doesn't ship with a backup camera and the first one was 500 bucks and went out of business started by Apple Engineers great the second one was was done and done badly and I just ended up talking about it because it just didn't work right nand is a company that we saw last year making essentially a a tile or track R integrated into a cigar lighter adapter charger so that when you parked your car you could find your car on the map using their app and it would also be your car charger this year they have tire pressure sensors and that work with the app and a rear viiew license plate frame and they're doing that at a retail price of $119 and will be selling it in Walmart and so they have mastered the the backup camera license plate frame which I think is worth noting you know here's a company that's taking a weird kind of segment of of Auto space which is the aftermarket and upgrading cars that are a little bit older to have capabilities that are shipping in in new vehicles and tire pressure error is is a reasonable thing to do so you know TR there was also let's see Alpine had that uh one unit car carplay enclosure it's wired but it's a much larger screen than you'd normally be able to get in a in a stereo system that you've only got one unit to put in to put in something so you're talking about the Halo um F39 no that just rolls off the tongue doesn't well now to be fair the original Alpine carplay unit was the ILX 007 well okay that that does roll off the second unit the second unit that we reviewed which you can see on our site here is the Alpine ILX 107 which is the wireless carplay unit now they made a 207 that is carplay and Android auto and stuff like this and we didn't really you know we didn't even talk to them about it because well I like Alpine very much when they do their carplay only only units the radio interface when you're outside of carplay mimics Apple's interface for what iOS should look like almost precisely when they do it with the Android auto compatible units also they end up making What I Call Radio OS where where they've decided to make their own interface language that's neither Android auto or carplay and I I really let them have it because I already have two different visual interfaces in the radio I really don't want to have to learn a third that's branded as Alpine because they feel they have to be different and there's a little bit of ego attached to that for them but what they ought to do is try and find a design language that doesn't feel entirely out of place with either Android auto or carplay so that when you you switch between your FM tuner or your radio settings or any of these other things that you aren't sub thrown out of one world into another the f309 is an interesting product it's an Android auto carplay product so it's got that radio OS feel to it when you're outside of either of those worlds but it is a single D unit instead of a double D unit and so it will work with radios that are with cars that are much older and have only a single hole space the screen on a double D unit has traditionally been limited to six 6.9 almost 7even inches basically this is nine is it not the f309 unit is a 9in display and what they're doing here is they're attaching this giant display to the single D unit and having it have a tilt control on it you can you can rock it back and forth and adjust it so you get less glare and it looks a lot like for all the world the kinds of displays that are shipped by oems in cars like BMW and Mercedes where the display floats in front of the dashboard and so it's a huge upgrade for a car that has a single de unit yeah I'm not going to lie I think this is a great thing but I use my car trips just I put my phone down and I just drive you know so this isn't particularly for me but man it it looks like a solid product we we know that people using their phones while driving is a very real problem and we know that that people texting while driving is a very real problem and carplay does a lot to address that it does I yeah I Ely agree with you but this is just a a psychology thing I I spend all day at Apple Insider staring at the screen you are unique you alone in this one um I might and having that nav screen with Apple Maps is really gorgeous too having that full screen and you don't necessarily have to look over at it but having the uh the turn by turn showing there so you know that your left turn coming up in 500 MERS is is there that's huge I I really do like the idea of the F3 9 and um you know Pioneer released some single D units early in the year Pioneer's got some some updated units coming but Alpine continues to to do good things now we're going to end up trying to review that Alpine unit we're also going to review the cool things that Pioneer is showing and we we do this because first of all I like carplay second of all I do these radio installs in a snap but I I really like bringing them to you because CU I think having carplay in the car is something everyone should have if you have an iOS device if you use an iOS device I have a hard time saying anything other than yes you should have carplay okay I I'll go with that you know I have no arguments there what else should we talk about here what else is good well shifting over to Apple news we've got shareholders are asking Apple to study the impact of iPhone Addiction on young users and want Apple to take steps in the form of more restrictive parental controls on the iPhone and the iPad so this is interesting because this goes back for me to something Johnny I said in the interview that he gave to the New Yorker which Neil covered and uh we used to have that on our site until the New Yorker asked us to take it down I think but one of the quotes from that was Johnny I talking about how important it is to not be glued to the screen and he I think he alluded to using the Apple watch as a way of not doing that that he said we we were using our phones too much and by using the Apple watch it cuts down on that screen time because what happens is that you use the Apple watch more during the day but you use it for smaller amounts of time and smaller amounts of interactions when you use a phone you're using it for longer sessions yeah what in terms of restrictions the shareholder letter proposes modifying initial setup on iPhone for age gating and what they want is more control over over usable hours of the day what social media Services a child can access and more monitoring information on how a device is used and where the kids go on the internet now here's the interesting thing Victor and I are both parents yes I admit that um while I am okay with hours of the day you can only use it between X and Y hour I I I think that the vast majority of this goes to the parent I I think that shunting a restriction to a device so the parent can point well no your iPhone says you're done I I think that's cheating the issue I I would I would be happy with better controls for the parental restrictions and and being able to do things a little more finely grained than I can currently but I don't need someone else to decide by ageg gating for me because it's it's my job to determine what's acceptable and what isn't and I I locked out YouTube on the girls iPads and they don't get YouTube and their social media accounts are private accounts and they have accounts on Instagram and musically and they're not allowed to post to musically they're allowed to use it to create local videos saved to the photos folder they use Instagram to post on their private they're only allowed to follow people they actually know in real life or celebrities and if people they don't know try and follow them they block them so that their experience is one where they get to see a little bit about what public figures post and what people they actually know Post Yeah we haven't quite gotten to that level in this house yet the kids are a little bit too young to start dealing with social media and that kind of thing but I I agree with your approach on that I'm I have 12y olds and I'm trying to create a an environment that's safe for them that I can monitor without being um too much of a nanny about it and and yet ease them into understanding that when they post something it's out there forever and they lose control of it you know one of the things that that I did when they were a little younger was we'd look at the back of other people's cars and what bumper stickers were there and what were the stick figure families that they posted on them and I said you know what do you know about that person well their kid goes to this school they like going to this beach for vacation and they have a family with a mother a father a boy and a girl and a cat and I'm like how much information did they give away just by the back of their car and you know their eyes opened and said a lot you know we actually know quite a a bit of stuff about that person now and I said when you post something on social media it's like doing this on the back of the car but for the whole world and you can't take it back and so yeah I agree I I think that I have no problem with additional optional settings I'd rather Apple not be the curator of what my children get to see and watch based on an age that they have you know that they have established I I think that too much of this takes too much responsibility out of the hands of parents and they can just say oh no hey Apple put this restriction on and I'm just going by that and I have a problem with that I also think that the American educational system needs to do a slightly better job about discussing social media I don't think they very much about it at all so I'm while this is I I don't think this is a bad move I think that poorly executed this is going to be a problem and I so in Ence I'm of a mixed mind about it it's when my son was young he and I would have battles about the volume switch on his on his iPod where I would turn it down this is in the early days of iOS where there weren't that many controls on what kids could do as far as maximum volume and being that he was monkeying with an education appp he wanted at the maximum volume possible so to curtail that I ultimately just snipped off the end of a headphone jack and and put that in his it put that in his iPod at the time and his iPod Touch so he could get the reading lessons but I didn't have to hear whatever the song the app was playing 10,000 times in an hour so with one of my daughters uh we we initially had to years ago teach her about volume levels of of the iPad and the easiest way to tell her what to adjust the volume to was by naming the number of squares in yeah we call them dots we yeah and we did and so you know I I had to make and and and with her I make social stories so I made a keynote deck on my iPhone and then sent it to her and the keynote deck showed her all the squares and then showed her setting the volume at three squares and by doing that that that taught her to turn the volume down and you know she was one day run through the house shouting something and and I told her Maya you have to go to three squares and she turned to me and said I am not an iPad the old indoor Voice doesn't work anymore it does not but even now now with music she listens to musically over and over musically uses short segments of songs they don't license a full song and so you hear the same chorus over and over and over again and so we tell her you know bring it down three squares bring it down four squares we have to be able to hear why are you doing this to me because we're trying to have a conversation on the phone honey yeah because I think that's the best example I think that's parental involvement and that's how they should be taken care of rather than leaving it to Silicon Valley yeah that that's that's my stance on this and uh it's maybe it's not a popular stance you know people are going to criticize me saying well you can't pay attention your children all the time to which I say I work at home I most certainly can no I I understand the difficulty that parenting presents especially when both parents are working but I I really think the ultimate Authority has to lie with you as parents and and apple can provide tools to assist but they have to be an assist once once you start delegating everything to to Apple then you end up with the same kind of problems with with um with while you end up in regulatory problems you end up in legal problems with with expectations that Apple will look after you it it's it gets weird and it gets weird pretty fast yeah I agree I mean there have been lawsuits Apple has actually had to suffer from some lawsuits regarding this not necessarily with children but with adults saying well you you led me astray Apple you let me view this content which ruined my marriage we're not going to delve into it that far but you already know what I'm talking about and that that's not Apple's responsibility that it's not even Apple's responsibility to provide parental control R really it's it is 100% so there are some very real problems that that Apple can limit and there are the things like the old stories about inapp purchases um and you know Apple should totally be able to prevent $3,000 in an app purchases by a child I agree yep yep I'm with you on that you know Apple had initially created the App Store in such a way that there was no objectionable content ever and had to end up allowing content that said this content is advisable for children for people over the age of 17 right mhm and so they they have to walk these very fine lines and these very difficult propositions and there there has to be a way where they don't end up being responsible for everyone yeah keep in mind I said that apple is not responsible for this I'm not saying that Apple shouldn't give you the tools to do it I I think think that the tools they have are okay they they work for what I need them to work with if they Implement more that's fine but as long as it's not ham-handed as long as they're implemented well and with sanity and with granularity so parents can pick what they want to implement what they don't I'm finally now I want to talk for a second about another thing that I saw at CES and then we're going to post the interview and I want to wrap it up so sounds good the cool thing that I saw last night is a skateboard now you ask why is that cool it's a skateboard and and Neil has covered some of the motorized skateboards in the past we had onboard we've talked about boosted things like that what makes this one different is that all of those other ones had a controller in your hand to control the motorized part of the skateboard or had a iPhone app that you could use to control the skateboard this one this one is special this one you don't ride like a normal skateboard you ride it more like a snowboard or a surfboard and so you shift your weight in order for it to move forward or you shift weight back to cause it to reverse orak break and I can't ride a skateboard to save my life I'm pretty hopeless but I was able to stand on this and within 10 seconds I was navigating just fine around the show floor a muds people which is Testament to how good a job they've done and the IOS app exists to do things like speed limiting so you don't run away at 20 M an hour uh to talk about your battery life and your range and things like that and the batteries on this one pop off very easily so that you can take them inside and charge them and uh you know if you wanted to extend your range you could just buy some more batteries and pop them on when you need to it is a really impressive thing and the cost for it is significantly less than other boards that we've seen you know usually a board an electric skateboard is like 1,000 bucks and here we're talking on the order of around 500 and so that yeah that's app enabled electric skateboard that an idiot like me can ride without killing himself around a Convention Show floor amongst other people and it's 500 bucks I what could possibly go wrong ask please I don't want to know at this point I like it too much now so what I'm hoping for and what I was talking to them for and this is kind of a long shot was asking them to supply us with two boards one for Neil the experienced rider to take around Brooklyn and one for me the the uh hapless uh you know the person who needs a helmet and elbow pads and everything wondering where and and to have us both ride them and trade experiences yeah that work so we're going to try and do that and I gave you pictures and information about it last night hopefully we can post a story we'll see how that goes and now I want to to go ahead and introduce dearra from Pioneer welcome to this portion of the Apple Insider podcast from CES 2018 and it's kind of Staggering to say that cuz I'm still not ready to say 2018 yeah I I'm here with deerra from Pioneer and first of all introduce yourself tell me a little bit about what your role is okay I'm U part of the pioneer raise product team and I'm primarily responsible for uh marketing and um in addition to doing some user insights and consumer product testing and things like that fantastic so I'm I'm looking at the Pioneer Rays smart noise cancelling lightning powered headphones they're there're some in your earbuds mhm with noise cancellation yes and what what makes them smart noise cancelling number of things that make them smart I would say fundamentally it's the ability of the headphones to connect to your phone and TR and get information um via our app so what that means is our headphones know what mode the phone is in um our app can deliver um feature up updates over time and so this now becomes a product that is longer lasting and more valuable over time and can accept uh new features much like your iPhone would with traditional updates cool and and they have a number of features to them that also make them smart yes couple of great features let me just jump in on those um my my favorite feature is smart mute and um what smart mute really allows me to do is um Carry On A conversation um in a way that when I stop talking the microphone will know the microphones in the headset will know I'm not talking and automatically mute the phone mic so now people on the other end of the line aren't hearing all of my background noise and it's smart enough to know that as soon as I start talking to unmute the microphone so now I can have a very natural conversation and the entire conversation is not bothered by that background noise um that's one of the smart features that I love um another one that I love is uh one we call Smart noise cancelling and what this allows us to do is actually fine-tune the performance of the noise cancelling uniquely to each person so as you know um my ears are different from your ears um my ears are different left to right and so um the fit of the headphones can often impact the quality of the noise cancelling performance that you get so we're able to now um through a very short sequence of calibration um update the algorithm for noise cancelling real time so that it's optimized based on the fit to your ears leading to better performance very cool I I'm still excited about smart mute I can't tell you how many times I've been on a conference call and you know there's always someone on the conference call who's calling from the airport or calling from from the zoo or the swimming pool and the noise is going can can that guy please mute his phone can everyone mute their phones yeah and then the other one is when they call on you to speak Victor what do you think about this and my touchcreen is frozen and I can't take it off mute and they Victor Victor did we lose you and they think you've gone they they're sure I've gone yes and it takes too long sometimes to get that back and smart those are a couple of very real problems that we see um our Target customer um dealing with and we think we've got a very um simple yet Innovative way of addressing that amazing how many microphones are on this thing because my understanding is that the way that noise cancellation works is that you have microphones specifically to hear the outside noise to know how to filter it out yes uh we actually have six microphones and we use a combination of a feed forward feed back noise cancelling design so we're listening not only to the outside noise but we're also um listening to the the noise cancelling that's happening in your ear and we do that with the two microphones in each earpiece and we use the two microphones in the remote um in combination to enable these other smart features like smart mute um like smart noise cancelling and we've also introduced um the capability to uh use voice activated Hy Siri and so as a result of having these microphones specifically placed and specifically tuned we can do some very uh novel things with the headset okay I need to go into airplane mode for a second and I'm going to have to ask you to repeat that because when it gets notifications it will put a beep through the middle of the sound oh so tell tell me again about hyeri functionality yes so I love hay Siri that's another um it's another handsfree um experience that uh that I think our customer um will really benefit from so we're uniquely positioned to be able to allow you to activate hey Siri with only your voice and what does that mean it means that I can now leave the phone in my pocket I can say Hey Siri you know text Victor or hey Siri call Victor and as I'm walking down the street so it's all handsfree and being very present and can see my surroundings and yet I can have all of these um these benefits um enabled by my voice and then as we move into the phone call we just talked about the benefit of smart mute and so this is how these smart features all work together to really give you a um a seamless experience one of the coolest things that I know uh one of our other editors Neil Hughes is going to love Yeah is the fact that you've got the female lightning port on the headphones yeah yes so you can go ahead and charge your device mhm while you're you're listening right right we saw um you know there's there's so many advantages um to new uh new iPhones when they come out right there's always um you know improvements in screen and processing and with the removal of the 3 and a half millimeter Jack um when they moved to the iPhone 7 we saw a lot of people were were upset but we saw it really as a great a great moment where now we were really going to start to be able to offer these new features and benefits we've been talking about but what that left consumers with is the frustration of not being able to charge while they had the headphone plugged in and so that was really the idea behind this port so now you can be talking on the phone if you're like me on the phone all day long um I can plug my lightning cable in I can charge my phone um and still continue to use the headset you know one thing it also um often leads to is uh a question well am I charging the headset or am I charging the phone and the beauty of lightning power is that the headphones have no battery so you never need to charge them you plug them in and they're ready to go they power the noise cancelling and and all of these things work well together so um we're pretty excited about um being the first to be able to give you you the benefit of charging and talking at the same time let me ask is there a significant power drain because it's doing all this active noise cancellation with the six microphones and everything that's going on with the app that's a great question that is an it's a great question because we know you and I know and we believe our consumers all have this um angst about what's the battery life of my phone is it going to make it through the day am I going be charet yes charge anxiety you know we're carrying these power bricks around and I think one of the the the important pieces to talk about here is that within the headphone is um a new package of electronics um that we were the first to to Launch and it's it's essentially the apple lightning audio module too and that's a mouthful but what that really means is we've been able to design this product um with efficiency in mind and through the testing that we've done on the product we found that consumers should expect no more of a battery drain using our product with all of its smart features um as they would if they were using a standard pair of um apple lightning Earp pods wow yeah you know it's it's really kind of incredible because I'm looking at these and there're you classically you'd look at at earbuds that had noise cancellation and there was a giant lump that carried a AAA battery and a giant lump that carried the microphone and the noise cancelling technology and here if we didn't know that these were were smart noise cancelling lightning powered headphones they would look just like any other pair of headphones you've really concealed all of the technology and that you know you um you and I were talking earlier about sort of the vision behind the product and um in the very early days the team took a challenge to make sure that we designed a product that fit the physical expectations of the consumer right and so today you look at some of the passive products that are out there and they are very small they're very portable and the benefit of earbuds and earphones is that they they can go anywhere so for us to introduce new technology that caused a compromise in terms of size or excess battery drain or all of these other new behaviors we felt it didn't really add value and so um our team really took that as a personal Challenge and I was really excited to see what they were able to do in terms of packing in all of these features benefits keeping it efficient and yet making it small so you can just roll it up put it in your pocket and it's ready to go whenever you are so one of the things that I struggle with a lot when I I look at products is you know who is this for and what what problem do they have that's the most important for them to solve because you know as well as I do that when people say they've made a product for everybody it it means that they've made it for nobody because they haven't thought it through G live right so so who what what is the biggest problem that they solve for people this is um this is great you know we we look at the world that we live in today and how we work how we communicate with people uh whether it's through work or our friends through our social media channel the phone is really the center of of everything and to some extent um tablets and and laptops but if you think about it um we're not using landline conference systems anymore we're not using these these big old phones it's all on our phone we have the benefit of FaceTime Skype um all these unified communication systems and so when we when we see what that enables that now enables us to work anywhere we want Wherever Whenever and we see that the current Workforce is um is evolving to um offer that benefit of working in a collaborative workspace or work from home or we travel we live in a 24/7 World some of us and so you need to be able to be um able to talk to your team or your family from wherever you are so we look at the problems that that opens up for people that now means um you know being able to connect to my phone very quickly and simply I don't have to go through a a pairing process which can take time it means that um I want to be able to have a conversation in the airport or I want to catch up with my friends as I'm walking from the commuter train to my office in a noisy environment or I want to be able to have um my headset be smart enough to know when I need to stop listening to music or when I want to restart listening to music so I can have a conversation so we've really looked at this holistically kind of a day in the life of and some of the problems we've identified specifically are how do you have have a better conversation in noise and features like smart mute have addressed that um how do you have a conversation with a co-worker who wants to come up and talk to you and features like um either hearr which allows you to have a conversation uh without taking the earphones out or autop pause if you want to take them out and have a longer conversation we'll pause your music so you don't lose your place um so it's really designed for um today's upand cominging mobile worker right somebody we call them the remote workers or the hash work from anywhere generation because you really want to be able to do it and you want to be good at it um and you don't want the drawbacks that come along with making the phone call from the airport or someplace else yes cool now there's a second product called the raise rally yes and this is a portable conference speaker phone kind of thing yes I love it it's one of my favorite products I'm biased but I do love it um okay so this was the one that was made for you you well this was made for us really for our team when when you guys were sitting around and talking about the product spec this was this was your product they made it for me pretty much yeah well you know um it's funny that you say that but our team that created this we're all remote um so we have a virtual office we use a lot of these tools that I just talked about so we're on Skype calls with the team in Europe or the team in Japan um we're calling from airports or we're calling from hotel rooms or we want to have a quick team call Two of Us in the San Francisco office office two of us in Boston so how do you do that and a lot of um a lot of what we found people doing was using their iPhone and putting it in speaker phone mode MH it works you mostly mostly you can hear people mostly what we found is that people would be hunched over the table they'd be trying to huddle around it to hear or they feel like they had to shout in order to communicate to the person on the other line and we just said what if there was a way to just simply plug a speaker in and all of a sudden you get a virtual conference call experience almost like you're talking on a polycom plugged into your iPhone so so I don't need to have three people leaning over my shoulders crowding around my laptop no no because we designed it to be flexible enough to either plug directly into the lightning port on your phone or you can use that lightning to USB cable and plug it into the USB port on your laptop and have a Skype call um put the phone in the middle of the table and it is the microphone is ruay tune to pick up everybody's voice so if you have four or five people around a table they can have a conversation just like you and I are having right now and the microphone will pick that up so to describe this to the people listening okay there's a a lightning Port light lightning plug at one end the lightning plug carries the microphone it does and then uh a short you know 2 or 3 inch length of cable to the main unit which has the speaker and the mute button correct and then at the very end of all that is a female lightning Port correct and I can use a regular us usba to lightning connector for any laptop made since whenever yes absolutely or I could use the USBC to lightning cable that's the fancy one and use that with a modern MacBook Pro yes and you will get the benefit of this conference called quality sound um when you have it plugged into your um iPhone it is um smart enough to know if you're in phone mode or say music mode and that smart button will serve as uh mute unmute and we've got a little ring around the button that flashes either green when the microphone is active or it goes to red when you have it on mute so you have a visual indication just like the old phones um of when you're in mute and when you're not does it also do smart mute the way that uh it does not do smart mute yeah I know I know people um get so excited about that but it's really um smart mute we're able to do that because of the six microphones that we have and the proximity to your mouth and your ears um that um speaker is designed to be sort of in the middle of the table so you have to manually mute it but again we think one button turns red when you're on mute green when you're off should be um a great addition and make it simple for you to yeah um point of feedback that I have to give you about that color in a moment okay after after we finish talking I'll tell you about colors but um but the beauty of this is that when it's plugged into a lightning device like an iPad or an iPhone and you're using it for a conference call you can also charge using that that pass through female boort absolutely you don't have to about your battery right running down while you're on the call true that's a great Point um and it does it does not have a battery in it itself and so it draws power from uh from your iPhone um directly or from your laptop and fun fact um we've done some tests that have shown that it actually the raise rally consumes less of your battery than using your phone in speaker mode the amplifier for running this louder speaker is more efficient than trying to run the the speaker phone mode on the phone it is wow yeah isn't that amazing that is so you get better sound better speech and you don't consume as much of your battery very cool yeah I'm excited about it now you know why I love it I know so what what else am I missing what else should I know you know this product is um is super simple right it's um it connects to our Pioneer raise app just like the headphones do when you connect to the app the app is smart enough to recog I whether it's rally speaker phone or the raise earphone and it'll serve you up the menu options that you need um it like the um earphones C is updatable over time so we may be able to do some interesting things in the future in terms of speaker microphone tuning and our customers who buy the product today will get full advantage of any of those improvements that happen over time just by updating the software through the app so cool thank you so much dear thank you Victor this has been a lot of fun H have a fantastic CES you too and have a fantastic recovery from CES yes I will thank you this has been the Apple Insider podcast fantastic episode 155 live from CS C 2018 and I want to thank you for joining us and thank Mike for all his support during this event and we will be back next week mostly recovered well I wouldn't count on that you can catch my podcast on Monday at space javelin and and thank you so much and please feel free to leave us positive reviews on iTunes and and catch us on Twitter and email and let us know your feedback we'd love to be able to answer questions from you guys we'd love it thank you so much have a good day everybodyyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to the Apple Insider podcast coming to you live recorded from CES 2018 I'm your host Victor I'm back and joining me is Mike worthley hello again everybody I am not at CES I'm at my desk but you should probably expect that by now and I know you're grateful that you're not here yeah the the CES environment is just not for me it's the the crowds i' I've done my bit in overcrowded environments and I'm done with that so it's it's an astoundingly well attended show there are a huge number of people here the show sprawls across three convention floor Halls uh at least two Hotel convention centers and a third one for press events not to mention that there are tons of companies that have a smattering of suets all up and down the Las Vegas Strip and so if you're trying to cover this event it's very difficult to see everything it's very difficult to see the things you want to see just because you lose two hours trying to get anywhere other than the hall that you're actually in and and a non-sarcastic shout out to Nevada Power for getting the power back on yesterday after about an hour and a half outage on the main floor yeah North and Central Halls lost power yesterday for for a good bit and I have already begun to receive PR pitches telling me that uh we need to switch to their power Banks well and and amusingly amusingly one of the power Banks product name is coal so we need to switch to coal in order to get the power back oh boy yeah there was a social media a bunch of Brands took to social media to take advantage of the blackout yesterday like uh dell with the XPS 13 saying it's lit after many hours of darkness and and other assorted little tidbits like that it was uh interesting to watch it develop on social media as it happened and every smart light bulb company gets a tag in there and it's it's fun yeah but I this has been a weird year right I've been coming to this show for 7 years there are a lot of people who are veterans who've been coming for much longer than I have as much as 22 years even one guy I know and they've never seen flooding in the streets of Las Vegas from the rains MH they've never seen rains one guy who's an Oldtimer recalled a snowfall one year but most of the people that I run into can't even recall that I think that was 2004 that they had the snow during the CES that year it was 2004 or 2005 really and the rain actually shut down Google's booth for the better part of the day because their their trailer wasn't sufficiently weatherproofed yeah well nothing here is you know because they never experienced rain they don't know that the roof has a leak well that makes sense in a strange kind of desert way I suppose yeah you you find out when you have buckets all over the Casino floors it's really something uh but that's not the important thing I don't want to bring you the news about the weather I want to bring you the news about some of the bizarre and wonderful things that we've been seeing and as an Apple user before you flip out about this there's a couple Market factors at work this year the first one being Apple shift in homekit from a hardware solution to being able to be done in software so that means we're seeing more homekit this year than we've seen before and also Intel is loosening up Thunderbolt 3 license ing requirements of 2018 so USBC and Thunderbolt peripherals were actually seeing a lot of this year as well well I want to temper that a little bit by saying a lot because there are still many people on the show floor exhibiting products that are suitable for Amazon Alexa and Google home assistant or Google Assistant that have no idea that Apple has loosened the restrictions around homekit authentication yeah I think this is going to be a multi-year process I I Apple kind of slipped that in during the during the WWDC they didn't it was huge if you knew to watch for it but if you didn't know to watch for it you missed it right and the and the Intel thing was kind of a kind of a subdued press release and I want to say November as well so I think that both are going to be a multi-year Evolution I I think that this year there is more homekit than we've seen I think next year will be ridiculous yes no but I've been going around the show floor and and actually educating people to look into homekit and to find out about what's required now because the requirements are so much easier easier to deal with and and this is interesting but there are products out here like there are X Jimmy projectors which we've got a review unit of and we're going to get more eventually that are android-based but have AirPlay compatibility so you can AirPlay video to them which is pretty cool um there are devices that have Amazon Alexa built in and are going to have Google Assistant built in but also accept AirPlay audio AirPlay video which are interesting and I I say that because traditionally when you have an Android product and you're shipping it with with the Android OS you you wouldn't necessarily concern yourself with AirPlay but they have which I like to bring to light you know what I'm actually finding a little disturbing is we're not seeing anything with AirPlay 2 this is on Apple is what I'm thinking I think you're right and and there are companies that I've talked to that have said AirPlay 2 is absolutely a yes but you can't speak anything about it with our company name it's under embargo because we will be there when Apple is ready to be there we actually don't have much more from vendors other than yes we will support AirPlay 2 when it is available we don't have any kind of product lists as far as say what dayon receivers are going to have it we don't have any kind of guidance as to future products you be careful you should be careful to not call out one manufacturer with that because I'm I'm hearing this from every audience AIO manufacturer that you can think of I I'm going around and I'm asking and I'm not just asking you know the one that you mentioned I'm asking all of their competitors and and that's why I want to avoid naming names because they're all giving the same answer which is we intend to do it as soon as we are able as soon as apple is ready yeah the only reason why I picked Anon is well number one because I have one and number two they're on that slide when they were talking about AirPlay 2 at the WWDC back in the summer so this that's that's a good reason yeah this isn't inside knowledge or anything like that I haven't we we have had some email exchanges with just about every Audio company asking about AirPlay 2 and we we keep getting the same canned response so yeah but I you know I want to mention we're going to have an interview later in the show with uh with the the head of marketing for Pioneer rays which is a a very interesting audio product and uh they they've provided to us the currently released version of raay the earphones and raise rally which are lightning audio products that have female lightning ports on them so that you can do the pass through charging and uh that's that's pretty cool but the charge it's not just a charge port it's also a data compatible Port so you could hook up your headphones and be listening and also sync to a computer or the rally product is a speaker phone and the thing beauty of it there is that it's a conference calling kind of phone which works way better than when you just put your iPhone on speaker on a table and everyone tries to crowd around it and it has a female lightning port on it so that you can charge your phone while you're doing it or if you want to use your computer and not have four people crowding over your shoulders while you're on Skype or something or FaceTime for that matter you can just use your regular USB or USBC to lightning cable and connect it to that and use it as a speaker phone for your computer the Rays with the Z that is RA YZ they were it was one of the first products actually embrac the lightning plug for an audio peripheral as opposed to just say a docking station for a stereo or something like that right it's a solid product I I had a chance to mess around with the headset I I haven't really examined it in any kind of depth I'm very pleased with the build quality I saw with what I what with what I had used God I want to say this is eight months ago at this point yeah so but you had mentioned that we we have these on hand now we I have them in my hot little hands oh that's fantastic and they have the headphones the earbuds are smart active noise cancelling earbuds that do not have a giant battery wart on them do not have a giant remote control wart in the middle they have a remote control lump but it's a very small spelt one you if you looked at them you would not notice there's anything out of the ordinary for these things that's how good they've done that's how accomplished they are at making this stuff shrink down and what I have to really say is is that they've got six microphones on these and so they use microphones to calibrate the audio for your ears for the noise cancellation they use it to set the noise floor for the noise cancellation they use to do cool tricks like you can take the earphones out of your ear and the music will pause because they can tell that they're no longer in ears you put them back it starts playing again if you're on a conference call they can do super cool things like they smart mute so when you're speaking you come off mute and when you stop speaking it automatically mutes you so you don't end up being the guy in the conference call where everyone says can the guy in the airport please put himself on mute it's really really pretty awesome and the the thing that I think they have a hard time communicating sometimes is that because these are lightning products they can update them via the app so they can update the firmware via the app and not just bug fix but add functionality yeah I was going to bring that up Victor and I have been on this beat for a long time and that we have part of the initial hazing ritual I think for lack of a better term and in when you first get on this beat is you get batter hey hey there there were no paddles involved no there weren't but there were but there were an assortment of various audio accessories starting with very early very bad Bluetooth ones and just an array of earbuds and things like that and they have come even in the last 5 years they have come so far and I was originally skeptical with the lightning only thing versus I mean I want to be careful and say that that the bad products were not from Pioneer in this case they were you know yeah I'm not I'm not speaking a wide variety of Manufacturers Bluetooth stuff years ago yeah I'm not speaking of pioneers specifically here this is just General we'd get a wide array of stuff and what lightning has done is now we have a a digital all the way through to your ear hole kind of connection where you can do things like adding adding features and software and previously you'd get the you know the TRS Jack and you'd plug it in and what you got is what you got and if something didn't work something didn't work and that's the way it goes and and so I think the thing to point out here is that historically people had a lot of love for the the TRS or trrs Jack but the the thing to do is to not look at at the removal of that that Jack removal of the headphone jack as a negative thing look it as an opportunity for all the cool things that are now possible when you go all digital like that yeah now it's important to point out that many of the audio people here at the show are focused on Bluetooth that lightning audio is not necessarily setting the world on fire here in terms of what's being exhibited um and that's why I'm highlighting Pioneer because they're really showing off what can be done there are a lot of our our friends from other shows and other booths um exhibiting that are doing Bluetooth and doing Bluetooth well and I want to point out libratone for example who are launching a a Bluetooth earbud set that are pretty awesome lione we've been reviewing them for years and they just keep updating their products using firmware updates available over the air to fix things and make them better you know they integrated Amazon Alexa's voice into the libratone zip speaker product just by a software update they're they're doing interesting things I want to mention uh another one called aftershocks which we're going to review and aftershocks is a bone conduction Bluetooth headphone set so you don't actually have anything in your ear it conducts the noise through the bones on the side of your skull and they're so light and I think they're the only approved earphone or headset that you can use while running a marathon because they don't actually block your ears so you're you're not in danger of you know outside noises kind of thing yeah Bluetooth for sure has come a long way just the same as as lightning audio has versus the TRS stuff it's um yeah a lot has happened in the way of Bluetooth the first stuff that like I said that Victor and I have seen and reviewed with Bluetooth 2 and so not so good but the Bluetooth four and five stuff is solid the auto quality is nice it it's it's well for lack of better term it's very pleasant to see how how this is improved over time right now Bluetooth is a little bit dependent on audio codecs and the way that works is that the the audio has to be encoded over the a to get to the other side and you know the old stuff we were using was using SBC or the the typical subband communication for doing the audio Yeah it's the lowest common denominator everything defaults to it when nothing else Works uh apt X is something that CSR is giving away basically and everyone can have make makes a product can use appex to go ahead and have that be their codec for good audio but the downside here is that from Apple Macintosh supports Apex audio so you can pair a Bluetooth headset that uses it to your uh to your Mac and get great sound but iOS does not yeah and the reason there is that Apple has always preferred and was trying to make stick the idea of using AAC as the audio codec and so the iPhone favors that and the products that are equipped with the W1 chipset are using AAC as the audio codec there over Bluetooth which is something that was always possible with CSR as the Bluetooth chip provider but you had to pay the license fee to do it which is why Apex was successful on Android and other places so you know you'll still you'll get good sound out of modern Bluetooth air sets but with an iPhone you really need to be using the W1 of the Power Beats or a wired lightning solution like the Pioneer Rays or in years past Philips Fidelio now Phillips here at the show is not showing any lightning products this time they're they're going all in on Bluetooth this year well I mean that makes sense from a business perspective I would think it it really is about making one skew that can be used across as many products as possible you want to hear what I'm excited about at CES you sound very excited already I actually am there are a ton of new external GPU enclosures that are at CES and you haven't done a lot of work on those uh primarily because frankly the press releases are just as good as looking them at an empty enclosure at the show but this year we're seeing a whole bunch of different form factors we're seeing a bunch of different sizes if you're not planning on using a full width card or a 10inch long card they're now smaller enclosures so you don't have to have this Behemoth on your desk anymore there are all-in ones like Lenovo we're not certain about Mac compatibility with this one yet but it's got a it's got an Nvidia 1050 card integrated into it and it's about the size of a of a paperback book so the nice thing about a solution like that is that instead of having to assemble one yourself you're you're using one that's already been together with heat management and all the thermal considerations in mind which is a big problem when you have a very hot GPU right now to be perfectly clear on this a high Seer support doesn't fully launch until the spring and right now you're limited to a small handful of AMD cards including the Vega 56 and 64 mind you I'm hoping that there isn't going to be a blessed configuration like Apple only allow these six cards or something like that we'll see what happens when it when it fully evolves you can do Nvidia cards right now with with some hacks but I having a hard time recommending those I'm just happy that the ecosystem is growing well the thing to remember is that Apple likes having multiple suppliers of different things and that Apple has a history of having used Nvidia in the MacBook Pros mhm so it's entirely reasonable to to have hopes that Nvidia will have full support at some point at present Nvidia external GPU support is better in Sierra than it is in High Sierra but the solution in Sierra is a hack and not Apple supported in any way High Sierra at least is Apple blessed at least in part right I'm just saying that that full support and and blessed support as you say right right is I have not out of the realm of possibility yeah I have full hope that full Nvidia support will arrive in the spring when when the full support for the for the technology arrives we'll see but like I said the the the availability of the enclosures not for $500 is huge yeah that's for sure other things we've seen you know we were talking about home kit and there are a decent number of homekit accessories here that are some some that are updates and some that are totally new products that we haven't seen before for example the Netgear Arlo camera uh that's focused on children is said to be homekit compatible uh First Alert who formerly had made a homekit compatible smoke alarm and carbon monoxide detector are now making one where they're trying to reach a sort of broader Market than just homekit provides so they they've integrated in the Amazon Alexa Voice Assistant into the smoke detector they're using really good audio I think it's from JBL but don't hold me to it and it will also be one of those kinds of products that I expect will be AirPlay to down the road when Apple goes ahead and releases it so you could instead of trying to figure out how you're going to do whole home audio the the truth is you ought to have a smoke detector in every bedroom in the central space between bedrooms and in your main living areas for your your kitchen and living room well if you do that you've now got whole house audio curtisy fair play 2o so that's an interesting kind of thing Philips hu of course updated their their app and as doing continuing to do homekit with their Bridge um let's see there are a couple of security systems we covered Abode and I'm talking to Honeywell later today to to hear about what they're going to do and how they're exploring the possibilities of homekit um simply sa the weo bridge the weimo bridge is a big one from belcon yeah but hold up I talked I talked with the founder of Simply Safe and simply safe is a DIY home security system and they're going all in on homekit good and I just it's really cool because you know we we talk about doing this kind of thing in in homekit on your own where you have the door lock and you have camera and you have these these uh Door and Window sensor kind of things and you you sort of rig it together using automation scripts in home to to pull it all together but the idea of having a provider back it and create the scenes for you that say you know here's my away scene here's my armed scene and all these things and be able to control them by a voice command from hiri and things like this is huge I just triggered a Hy Siri somewhere yeah I heard that it's a big deal I think it's important so now talk to me about weimo Bridge cuz I had a party with those guys and and that's one of the other things that happens here at CS you want to repeat yourself there that's one of the other I may I may leave it in to be honest but that's one of the things that happens here at CES is that you go to the exhibits during the day and at night you may or may not get invited into receptions or parties or or cocktail hours to really meet with the people behind the products and talk with them and it's a good opportunity to ask questions about why the decisions were made that were made and one of the things that I I did was I went to a balcon reception that was all about their wireless charging and how great it was that that they could do CH charging for everything and I said that's pretty nice but but where is homekit and weimo and they said I'm glad you asked let me introduce you to the product manager for linkis and weimo and here you go and he goes yeah we launched this $39 bridge and it makes all of our existing weimo stuff home kit compatible to which I said that's awesome but what about the future our future products going to be Wi-Fi already and they're going to have homekit built into them and he said we have a huge number of people who have existing weimo stuff that needs to be made homid and we're doing that now later on you know maybe and we all took another drink it was really now to to give you some perspective let me set the scene this reception took place in a bar called minus5 and minus5 is a a thing where they have lockers at the entrance you you put your stuff in a locker so you're carrying around a bag full of business cards and and samples of product and stuff like that you put that in a a locker you lock it they hand you a fake fur parka and a a fake fur hat to wear and gloves and you go into the minus5 bar it's all ice everything is ice sculpture and the furniture is ice sculpture and the glasses from which you drink are carved out of ice and you you have to hold the glass with your gloves to prevent your hands from sticking to the glass as they pour your drink it's really quite cold after a while you can't feel your feet so we're all in here in these these fur jackets with hats that have belcon and lynx's branding on them having drinks talking about weimo and that's what it's like at nerdfest 2018 um Victor marks apple and cider uh Apple insiders um your loyal cores name our loyal our loyal our loyal correspondent and our Hunter S Thompson in the flesh there we go I got the name out anyway so that's that's that's when the lizards and the bats started flying through and uh you have to be careful cuz this is Bat Country out here oh boy the uh you said it now the the cool thing is I I was never interested in using wio before this because I've I've done some exercise with homebridge on Raspberry Pi as as Neil but having weimo have full support means now I can look at using wio in my house and being very happy with it knowing that it's a a well sused Out product simply more options are better and the the weimo stuff has been around a very long time relatively 2011 2012 so this is this is a big addition with support to for people looking at homekit build outs and I cannot stress enough that homekit is homekit is hard to get into peace meal you really have to consider the other people in your house that are not you like for instance I'm fine with a powerocket adapter that's that's makes perfect sense for me I know what it is I know to control it but I know that if it's attached to a power switch I maybe I shouldn't touch that power switch but my children for instance or my senior citizens in the house don't m the so in that case a switch is appropriate so I it's just something you've got to look at the you've got to look at the available pieces to homekit and figure out what's going to work the best there's no Universal solution well but yeah given the weimo given the weimo infrastructure given what they've built out this gives people many more options to choose from the best Solutions are the ones that when installed don't act any different than what you would expect them to do if they weren't smart yeah I think I'm out of if you have if you have a hue bulb screwed into a light socket when you flip the switch on the wall just as you have done for the past 100 years the light has to come on you you need to have user expectations and with a hue product it does the issue is that if you want the Hue to be a smart product you have to leave the light switch on on the wall and then control the rest of it from right you know the the assistant or the home app or this kind of thing and that breaks the expectation and that's why I like replacing the inwall switch or doing something to convert the in-wall switch rather than the light bulb approach yeah I'm with you on that that that's uh I think we've spoken about this about six months ago on this very podcast but this is I'm very much with you on that and I think that like I said I think my word quotient for the week is is full and I think that's why I'm having trouble extracting my thoughts this morning well we we've put you know I I should explain when I'm here at CES I am doing a lot to go between the booths and between the convention halls and try and capture the stories Mike is on the back end sitting at home and well no sitting in his his Apple Insider cabal office in my bunker right yes and is grinding out the stories based on the information and pictures and things that I'm relating to him so he work as a tight team and I have been overworking him and I I owe everyone apologies for this but it's it's really that's how we function effectively as a team and so Mike when you're out of your word quotient we understand why well plus to say nothing the fact that connectivity in Las Vegas with everybody doing the same thing that you and I are that that sometimes leads to some interesting gaps in conversations where I'll send you a question and I'll get a response an hour later because you just got the message yeah so yeah it's it's difficult you know and there are tons of vendors that have products that could be converted to homekit that could be adapted to homekit but they just don't know that it's possible yet and so I was actually at a booth and was showing someone how I've converted using homebridge their product to work with homekit when they didn't want to support it because they thought they had to spend the money on the secure authentication chip there's a huge education thing at work there but being able to demonstrate that that they need to get on board with it is a fun thing to do so so yeah it's kind of a mixed role being an advocate for Apple stuff as well as trying to find it here but uh so we said Netgear we said Philips Hugh we said weimo we said uh we didn't mention Nano Leaf Nano Leaf's is a good one so oh yeah Nano Leaf's got an interesting Dungeons and Dragons style controller now it's a a 12-sided rotational homekit compatible controller decahedron yep do decahedron and you put the side for the for the action you want up and then your leaf or your other homekit gear that you've got set up in conjunction with the leaf lighting will respond accordingly right so firstly firstly the controller controls the lighting and what Nano Leaf does is they make uh both triangular and soon Square panels that attach to each other and can display beautiful colored lights all over your wall in a pattern and the doc aedin controls those and controls colors and brightness and things like that but because it's a homekit device it can also act as the trigger for scenes and other devices which makes it kind of fun yeah it's kind of wacky it's like something that a Logan's Run well I mean the idea is is they they originally started by making light bulbs and their light bulbs were DOTA katron shaped LED bulbs where the DOTA krin part was black and you saw the LEDs actually mounted on the outside of the black bit very unique look and that was they launched through a crowdfunding effort I have some of those bulbs they're kind of cool but they're not nearly as cool as doing this whole wall art kind of lighting which is is no one else is doing that you can buy a bunch of different kind of homekit light bulbs if you want but doing it their way means they're doing something that only they can do hang on one second okay I'm back sorry about that so let's let's do this in Reverse normally at this point in the show Neil asks me so what's the most interesting thing you've seen at CES which is a hard question to answer anyway so I'm going to go ahead and flip it Mike what's the most interesting thing you've seen come out of our reporting and and coverage well I briefly talked about the external gpus but I understand that's kind of a niche thing the CES is kind of I'm actually going to flip the switch on you a little bit here the yeah the the interesting thing about CEs is it actually looks like this year that most of the stuff we're talking about is actually going to ship when when you deal with CES coverage you get a lot of press releases across your desk and you over time you get a feel for what's going to ship and what you don't think is going to ship and what's going to make their first quarter and what's you know you're going to see again at next year C yes hold your fork tongue but there's nothing there's nothing that I've seen this year that we've talked about throughout all the hit peripherals and everything else that we've talked about that suggests to me that the ship dates are not going to get met yeah and and to be fair we're not talking about the weird and wonderful CES that has like the robot assistant for elderly living kind of thing um where the idea is is take people who've never seen a robot before and then put it in their house as the caretaker yeah we're not yeah I'm not talking about that stuff that stuff we put that right right over there on this pile I'm looking at right over here for the crazy side of CES and we'll talk about some of that Apple Insider in fact by the time you listen this you may already see an article or two about it but I'm just I'm talking about the regular stuff I'm I'm talking about announcements like the new Thunderbolt 3 controller that now has a failback where if you have a thunderbolt enclosure you can plug it into a USB 3.1 type-c device like a Macbook and it will still work we're going to see that and I know we're going to see that right and I've been asking all of these vendors and exhibitors when are these things going to ship and the answer is generally q1 or Q2 which means this thing's real and it's in production now and we actually have them occasionally it's Q3 is which means there's a chance that it may ship this year or a chance it may die it may not go at all but but for the most part we're hearing things that are real yeah and and that's different that is totally different than even last year's CES and and that to that to me is the best thing out of CES this year is it's not it's not a vaporware Fest now you know it I want to talk some of the automotive accessory kind of products for a second because there's one I want to call out you know in years past we talked about Pearl and pearl had the rearview camera that cost $500 it was a license plate frame setup and there was another one that I was sent to review that we actually didn't review because it was simply not functioning and and you know I I sometimes get accusations from readers and listeners that say that I must be Shilling for products because I'm only saying good things but the truth is I only want to talk about products that are good enough I only really want to talk about products that are interesting if something's not good enough and it's going to disappoint you I don't even want to bother mentioning it and and I hope I'm not doing you disservice in this way but I just feel like wasting your time on something that's terrible isn't beneficial to anyone so we we sometimes turn those away we actually use the products we're reviewing we don't we don't sit down with a product and roll it over in our hands for two hours and take some pictures and talk about it like for instance I did a uh a landing Zone I I wouldn't even talk about it until I had sat it on my desk and actually used it for two weeks and I didn't do the full review for a few months afterwards that's a pretty long timeline so in in a lot of cases we'll get we'll get hey I want you to review this kickstarted product on day one and we're not really that interested in that because it doesn't look solid it doesn't look that interesting and frankly the software probably does work want one exception to that we will review products that are going on Kickstarter if they have shipped something previously right and or we can hold it in our hands and use it we have to be able to see I won't take a Skype briefing that shows me video of someone using it I have to hold it in my hands and if you're launching on Kickstarter but you've got one you can send me and I can write about and then post on day one we can do that but the rule is yeah but have the danger of that is yeah if if you send us your Kickstarter this is an exception to the not writing about garbage if you send us a Kickstarter and it's garbage we're going to say so yes there's that's the you take the risk but you know if if you insist that you're doing Kickstarter and you're going to go ahead and and get it out there that and fine but we have to have physical we have to have something we can hold and use yeah I yeah like I said and I've had the same accusations well you give everything like two and a half to five stars I'm like well the the stuff that's one star I know it's one star within the first week and I I have limited amount of hours in the day and I'm I'm not going to spend I send it back to the vendor and say thanks but no thanks and carry on move on that's just how it's got to go in that vein we've seen people try and do the license plate camera frame that's connected to an IOS app so you have a backup camera on a car that doesn't ship with a backup camera and the first one was 500 bucks and went out of business started by Apple Engineers great the second one was was done and done badly and I just ended up talking about it because it just didn't work right nand is a company that we saw last year making essentially a a tile or track R integrated into a cigar lighter adapter charger so that when you parked your car you could find your car on the map using their app and it would also be your car charger this year they have tire pressure sensors and that work with the app and a rear viiew license plate frame and they're doing that at a retail price of $119 and will be selling it in Walmart and so they have mastered the the backup camera license plate frame which I think is worth noting you know here's a company that's taking a weird kind of segment of of Auto space which is the aftermarket and upgrading cars that are a little bit older to have capabilities that are shipping in in new vehicles and tire pressure error is is a reasonable thing to do so you know TR there was also let's see Alpine had that uh one unit car carplay enclosure it's wired but it's a much larger screen than you'd normally be able to get in a in a stereo system that you've only got one unit to put in to put in something so you're talking about the Halo um F39 no that just rolls off the tongue doesn't well now to be fair the original Alpine carplay unit was the ILX 007 well okay that that does roll off the second unit the second unit that we reviewed which you can see on our site here is the Alpine ILX 107 which is the wireless carplay unit now they made a 207 that is carplay and Android auto and stuff like this and we didn't really you know we didn't even talk to them about it because well I like Alpine very much when they do their carplay only only units the radio interface when you're outside of carplay mimics Apple's interface for what iOS should look like almost precisely when they do it with the Android auto compatible units also they end up making What I Call Radio OS where where they've decided to make their own interface language that's neither Android auto or carplay and I I really let them have it because I already have two different visual interfaces in the radio I really don't want to have to learn a third that's branded as Alpine because they feel they have to be different and there's a little bit of ego attached to that for them but what they ought to do is try and find a design language that doesn't feel entirely out of place with either Android auto or carplay so that when you you switch between your FM tuner or your radio settings or any of these other things that you aren't sub thrown out of one world into another the f309 is an interesting product it's an Android auto carplay product so it's got that radio OS feel to it when you're outside of either of those worlds but it is a single D unit instead of a double D unit and so it will work with radios that are with cars that are much older and have only a single hole space the screen on a double D unit has traditionally been limited to six 6.9 almost 7even inches basically this is nine is it not the f309 unit is a 9in display and what they're doing here is they're attaching this giant display to the single D unit and having it have a tilt control on it you can you can rock it back and forth and adjust it so you get less glare and it looks a lot like for all the world the kinds of displays that are shipped by oems in cars like BMW and Mercedes where the display floats in front of the dashboard and so it's a huge upgrade for a car that has a single de unit yeah I'm not going to lie I think this is a great thing but I use my car trips just I put my phone down and I just drive you know so this isn't particularly for me but man it it looks like a solid product we we know that people using their phones while driving is a very real problem and we know that that people texting while driving is a very real problem and carplay does a lot to address that it does I yeah I Ely agree with you but this is just a a psychology thing I I spend all day at Apple Insider staring at the screen you are unique you alone in this one um I might and having that nav screen with Apple Maps is really gorgeous too having that full screen and you don't necessarily have to look over at it but having the uh the turn by turn showing there so you know that your left turn coming up in 500 MERS is is there that's huge I I really do like the idea of the F3 9 and um you know Pioneer released some single D units early in the year Pioneer's got some some updated units coming but Alpine continues to to do good things now we're going to end up trying to review that Alpine unit we're also going to review the cool things that Pioneer is showing and we we do this because first of all I like carplay second of all I do these radio installs in a snap but I I really like bringing them to you because CU I think having carplay in the car is something everyone should have if you have an iOS device if you use an iOS device I have a hard time saying anything other than yes you should have carplay okay I I'll go with that you know I have no arguments there what else should we talk about here what else is good well shifting over to Apple news we've got shareholders are asking Apple to study the impact of iPhone Addiction on young users and want Apple to take steps in the form of more restrictive parental controls on the iPhone and the iPad so this is interesting because this goes back for me to something Johnny I said in the interview that he gave to the New Yorker which Neil covered and uh we used to have that on our site until the New Yorker asked us to take it down I think but one of the quotes from that was Johnny I talking about how important it is to not be glued to the screen and he I think he alluded to using the Apple watch as a way of not doing that that he said we we were using our phones too much and by using the Apple watch it cuts down on that screen time because what happens is that you use the Apple watch more during the day but you use it for smaller amounts of time and smaller amounts of interactions when you use a phone you're using it for longer sessions yeah what in terms of restrictions the shareholder letter proposes modifying initial setup on iPhone for age gating and what they want is more control over over usable hours of the day what social media Services a child can access and more monitoring information on how a device is used and where the kids go on the internet now here's the interesting thing Victor and I are both parents yes I admit that um while I am okay with hours of the day you can only use it between X and Y hour I I I think that the vast majority of this goes to the parent I I think that shunting a restriction to a device so the parent can point well no your iPhone says you're done I I think that's cheating the issue I I would I would be happy with better controls for the parental restrictions and and being able to do things a little more finely grained than I can currently but I don't need someone else to decide by ageg gating for me because it's it's my job to determine what's acceptable and what isn't and I I locked out YouTube on the girls iPads and they don't get YouTube and their social media accounts are private accounts and they have accounts on Instagram and musically and they're not allowed to post to musically they're allowed to use it to create local videos saved to the photos folder they use Instagram to post on their private they're only allowed to follow people they actually know in real life or celebrities and if people they don't know try and follow them they block them so that their experience is one where they get to see a little bit about what public figures post and what people they actually know Post Yeah we haven't quite gotten to that level in this house yet the kids are a little bit too young to start dealing with social media and that kind of thing but I I agree with your approach on that I'm I have 12y olds and I'm trying to create a an environment that's safe for them that I can monitor without being um too much of a nanny about it and and yet ease them into understanding that when they post something it's out there forever and they lose control of it you know one of the things that that I did when they were a little younger was we'd look at the back of other people's cars and what bumper stickers were there and what were the stick figure families that they posted on them and I said you know what do you know about that person well their kid goes to this school they like going to this beach for vacation and they have a family with a mother a father a boy and a girl and a cat and I'm like how much information did they give away just by the back of their car and you know their eyes opened and said a lot you know we actually know quite a a bit of stuff about that person now and I said when you post something on social media it's like doing this on the back of the car but for the whole world and you can't take it back and so yeah I agree I I think that I have no problem with additional optional settings I'd rather Apple not be the curator of what my children get to see and watch based on an age that they have you know that they have established I I think that too much of this takes too much responsibility out of the hands of parents and they can just say oh no hey Apple put this restriction on and I'm just going by that and I have a problem with that I also think that the American educational system needs to do a slightly better job about discussing social media I don't think they very much about it at all so I'm while this is I I don't think this is a bad move I think that poorly executed this is going to be a problem and I so in Ence I'm of a mixed mind about it it's when my son was young he and I would have battles about the volume switch on his on his iPod where I would turn it down this is in the early days of iOS where there weren't that many controls on what kids could do as far as maximum volume and being that he was monkeying with an education appp he wanted at the maximum volume possible so to curtail that I ultimately just snipped off the end of a headphone jack and and put that in his it put that in his iPod at the time and his iPod Touch so he could get the reading lessons but I didn't have to hear whatever the song the app was playing 10,000 times in an hour so with one of my daughters uh we we initially had to years ago teach her about volume levels of of the iPad and the easiest way to tell her what to adjust the volume to was by naming the number of squares in yeah we call them dots we yeah and we did and so you know I I had to make and and and with her I make social stories so I made a keynote deck on my iPhone and then sent it to her and the keynote deck showed her all the squares and then showed her setting the volume at three squares and by doing that that that taught her to turn the volume down and you know she was one day run through the house shouting something and and I told her Maya you have to go to three squares and she turned to me and said I am not an iPad the old indoor Voice doesn't work anymore it does not but even now now with music she listens to musically over and over musically uses short segments of songs they don't license a full song and so you hear the same chorus over and over and over again and so we tell her you know bring it down three squares bring it down four squares we have to be able to hear why are you doing this to me because we're trying to have a conversation on the phone honey yeah because I think that's the best example I think that's parental involvement and that's how they should be taken care of rather than leaving it to Silicon Valley yeah that that's that's my stance on this and uh it's maybe it's not a popular stance you know people are going to criticize me saying well you can't pay attention your children all the time to which I say I work at home I most certainly can no I I understand the difficulty that parenting presents especially when both parents are working but I I really think the ultimate Authority has to lie with you as parents and and apple can provide tools to assist but they have to be an assist once once you start delegating everything to to Apple then you end up with the same kind of problems with with um with while you end up in regulatory problems you end up in legal problems with with expectations that Apple will look after you it it's it gets weird and it gets weird pretty fast yeah I agree I mean there have been lawsuits Apple has actually had to suffer from some lawsuits regarding this not necessarily with children but with adults saying well you you led me astray Apple you let me view this content which ruined my marriage we're not going to delve into it that far but you already know what I'm talking about and that that's not Apple's responsibility that it's not even Apple's responsibility to provide parental control R really it's it is 100% so there are some very real problems that that Apple can limit and there are the things like the old stories about inapp purchases um and you know Apple should totally be able to prevent $3,000 in an app purchases by a child I agree yep yep I'm with you on that you know Apple had initially created the App Store in such a way that there was no objectionable content ever and had to end up allowing content that said this content is advisable for children for people over the age of 17 right mhm and so they they have to walk these very fine lines and these very difficult propositions and there there has to be a way where they don't end up being responsible for everyone yeah keep in mind I said that apple is not responsible for this I'm not saying that Apple shouldn't give you the tools to do it I I think think that the tools they have are okay they they work for what I need them to work with if they Implement more that's fine but as long as it's not ham-handed as long as they're implemented well and with sanity and with granularity so parents can pick what they want to implement what they don't I'm finally now I want to talk for a second about another thing that I saw at CES and then we're going to post the interview and I want to wrap it up so sounds good the cool thing that I saw last night is a skateboard now you ask why is that cool it's a skateboard and and Neil has covered some of the motorized skateboards in the past we had onboard we've talked about boosted things like that what makes this one different is that all of those other ones had a controller in your hand to control the motorized part of the skateboard or had a iPhone app that you could use to control the skateboard this one this one is special this one you don't ride like a normal skateboard you ride it more like a snowboard or a surfboard and so you shift your weight in order for it to move forward or you shift weight back to cause it to reverse orak break and I can't ride a skateboard to save my life I'm pretty hopeless but I was able to stand on this and within 10 seconds I was navigating just fine around the show floor a muds people which is Testament to how good a job they've done and the IOS app exists to do things like speed limiting so you don't run away at 20 M an hour uh to talk about your battery life and your range and things like that and the batteries on this one pop off very easily so that you can take them inside and charge them and uh you know if you wanted to extend your range you could just buy some more batteries and pop them on when you need to it is a really impressive thing and the cost for it is significantly less than other boards that we've seen you know usually a board an electric skateboard is like 1,000 bucks and here we're talking on the order of around 500 and so that yeah that's app enabled electric skateboard that an idiot like me can ride without killing himself around a Convention Show floor amongst other people and it's 500 bucks I what could possibly go wrong ask please I don't want to know at this point I like it too much now so what I'm hoping for and what I was talking to them for and this is kind of a long shot was asking them to supply us with two boards one for Neil the experienced rider to take around Brooklyn and one for me the the uh hapless uh you know the person who needs a helmet and elbow pads and everything wondering where and and to have us both ride them and trade experiences yeah that work so we're going to try and do that and I gave you pictures and information about it last night hopefully we can post a story we'll see how that goes and now I want to to go ahead and introduce dearra from Pioneer welcome to this portion of the Apple Insider podcast from CES 2018 and it's kind of Staggering to say that cuz I'm still not ready to say 2018 yeah I I'm here with deerra from Pioneer and first of all introduce yourself tell me a little bit about what your role is okay I'm U part of the pioneer raise product team and I'm primarily responsible for uh marketing and um in addition to doing some user insights and consumer product testing and things like that fantastic so I'm I'm looking at the Pioneer Rays smart noise cancelling lightning powered headphones they're there're some in your earbuds mhm with noise cancellation yes and what what makes them smart noise cancelling number of things that make them smart I would say fundamentally it's the ability of the headphones to connect to your phone and TR and get information um via our app so what that means is our headphones know what mode the phone is in um our app can deliver um feature up updates over time and so this now becomes a product that is longer lasting and more valuable over time and can accept uh new features much like your iPhone would with traditional updates cool and and they have a number of features to them that also make them smart yes couple of great features let me just jump in on those um my my favorite feature is smart mute and um what smart mute really allows me to do is um Carry On A conversation um in a way that when I stop talking the microphone will know the microphones in the headset will know I'm not talking and automatically mute the phone mic so now people on the other end of the line aren't hearing all of my background noise and it's smart enough to know that as soon as I start talking to unmute the microphone so now I can have a very natural conversation and the entire conversation is not bothered by that background noise um that's one of the smart features that I love um another one that I love is uh one we call Smart noise cancelling and what this allows us to do is actually fine-tune the performance of the noise cancelling uniquely to each person so as you know um my ears are different from your ears um my ears are different left to right and so um the fit of the headphones can often impact the quality of the noise cancelling performance that you get so we're able to now um through a very short sequence of calibration um update the algorithm for noise cancelling real time so that it's optimized based on the fit to your ears leading to better performance very cool I I'm still excited about smart mute I can't tell you how many times I've been on a conference call and you know there's always someone on the conference call who's calling from the airport or calling from from the zoo or the swimming pool and the noise is going can can that guy please mute his phone can everyone mute their phones yeah and then the other one is when they call on you to speak Victor what do you think about this and my touchcreen is frozen and I can't take it off mute and they Victor Victor did we lose you and they think you've gone they they're sure I've gone yes and it takes too long sometimes to get that back and smart those are a couple of very real problems that we see um our Target customer um dealing with and we think we've got a very um simple yet Innovative way of addressing that amazing how many microphones are on this thing because my understanding is that the way that noise cancellation works is that you have microphones specifically to hear the outside noise to know how to filter it out yes uh we actually have six microphones and we use a combination of a feed forward feed back noise cancelling design so we're listening not only to the outside noise but we're also um listening to the the noise cancelling that's happening in your ear and we do that with the two microphones in each earpiece and we use the two microphones in the remote um in combination to enable these other smart features like smart mute um like smart noise cancelling and we've also introduced um the capability to uh use voice activated Hy Siri and so as a result of having these microphones specifically placed and specifically tuned we can do some very uh novel things with the headset okay I need to go into airplane mode for a second and I'm going to have to ask you to repeat that because when it gets notifications it will put a beep through the middle of the sound oh so tell tell me again about hyeri functionality yes so I love hay Siri that's another um it's another handsfree um experience that uh that I think our customer um will really benefit from so we're uniquely positioned to be able to allow you to activate hey Siri with only your voice and what does that mean it means that I can now leave the phone in my pocket I can say Hey Siri you know text Victor or hey Siri call Victor and as I'm walking down the street so it's all handsfree and being very present and can see my surroundings and yet I can have all of these um these benefits um enabled by my voice and then as we move into the phone call we just talked about the benefit of smart mute and so this is how these smart features all work together to really give you a um a seamless experience one of the coolest things that I know uh one of our other editors Neil Hughes is going to love Yeah is the fact that you've got the female lightning port on the headphones yeah yes so you can go ahead and charge your device mhm while you're you're listening right right we saw um you know there's there's so many advantages um to new uh new iPhones when they come out right there's always um you know improvements in screen and processing and with the removal of the 3 and a half millimeter Jack um when they moved to the iPhone 7 we saw a lot of people were were upset but we saw it really as a great a great moment where now we were really going to start to be able to offer these new features and benefits we've been talking about but what that left consumers with is the frustration of not being able to charge while they had the headphone plugged in and so that was really the idea behind this port so now you can be talking on the phone if you're like me on the phone all day long um I can plug my lightning cable in I can charge my phone um and still continue to use the headset you know one thing it also um often leads to is uh a question well am I charging the headset or am I charging the phone and the beauty of lightning power is that the headphones have no battery so you never need to charge them you plug them in and they're ready to go they power the noise cancelling and and all of these things work well together so um we're pretty excited about um being the first to be able to give you you the benefit of charging and talking at the same time let me ask is there a significant power drain because it's doing all this active noise cancellation with the six microphones and everything that's going on with the app that's a great question that is an it's a great question because we know you and I know and we believe our consumers all have this um angst about what's the battery life of my phone is it going to make it through the day am I going be charet yes charge anxiety you know we're carrying these power bricks around and I think one of the the the important pieces to talk about here is that within the headphone is um a new package of electronics um that we were the first to to Launch and it's it's essentially the apple lightning audio module too and that's a mouthful but what that really means is we've been able to design this product um with efficiency in mind and through the testing that we've done on the product we found that consumers should expect no more of a battery drain using our product with all of its smart features um as they would if they were using a standard pair of um apple lightning Earp pods wow yeah you know it's it's really kind of incredible because I'm looking at these and there're you classically you'd look at at earbuds that had noise cancellation and there was a giant lump that carried a AAA battery and a giant lump that carried the microphone and the noise cancelling technology and here if we didn't know that these were were smart noise cancelling lightning powered headphones they would look just like any other pair of headphones you've really concealed all of the technology and that you know you um you and I were talking earlier about sort of the vision behind the product and um in the very early days the team took a challenge to make sure that we designed a product that fit the physical expectations of the consumer right and so today you look at some of the passive products that are out there and they are very small they're very portable and the benefit of earbuds and earphones is that they they can go anywhere so for us to introduce new technology that caused a compromise in terms of size or excess battery drain or all of these other new behaviors we felt it didn't really add value and so um our team really took that as a personal Challenge and I was really excited to see what they were able to do in terms of packing in all of these features benefits keeping it efficient and yet making it small so you can just roll it up put it in your pocket and it's ready to go whenever you are so one of the things that I struggle with a lot when I I look at products is you know who is this for and what what problem do they have that's the most important for them to solve because you know as well as I do that when people say they've made a product for everybody it it means that they've made it for nobody because they haven't thought it through G live right so so who what what is the biggest problem that they solve for people this is um this is great you know we we look at the world that we live in today and how we work how we communicate with people uh whether it's through work or our friends through our social media channel the phone is really the center of of everything and to some extent um tablets and and laptops but if you think about it um we're not using landline conference systems anymore we're not using these these big old phones it's all on our phone we have the benefit of FaceTime Skype um all these unified communication systems and so when we when we see what that enables that now enables us to work anywhere we want Wherever Whenever and we see that the current Workforce is um is evolving to um offer that benefit of working in a collaborative workspace or work from home or we travel we live in a 24/7 World some of us and so you need to be able to be um able to talk to your team or your family from wherever you are so we look at the problems that that opens up for people that now means um you know being able to connect to my phone very quickly and simply I don't have to go through a a pairing process which can take time it means that um I want to be able to have a conversation in the airport or I want to catch up with my friends as I'm walking from the commuter train to my office in a noisy environment or I want to be able to have um my headset be smart enough to know when I need to stop listening to music or when I want to restart listening to music so I can have a conversation so we've really looked at this holistically kind of a day in the life of and some of the problems we've identified specifically are how do you have have a better conversation in noise and features like smart mute have addressed that um how do you have a conversation with a co-worker who wants to come up and talk to you and features like um either hearr which allows you to have a conversation uh without taking the earphones out or autop pause if you want to take them out and have a longer conversation we'll pause your music so you don't lose your place um so it's really designed for um today's upand cominging mobile worker right somebody we call them the remote workers or the hash work from anywhere generation because you really want to be able to do it and you want to be good at it um and you don't want the drawbacks that come along with making the phone call from the airport or someplace else yes cool now there's a second product called the raise rally yes and this is a portable conference speaker phone kind of thing yes I love it it's one of my favorite products I'm biased but I do love it um okay so this was the one that was made for you you well this was made for us really for our team when when you guys were sitting around and talking about the product spec this was this was your product they made it for me pretty much yeah well you know um it's funny that you say that but our team that created this we're all remote um so we have a virtual office we use a lot of these tools that I just talked about so we're on Skype calls with the team in Europe or the team in Japan um we're calling from airports or we're calling from hotel rooms or we want to have a quick team call Two of Us in the San Francisco office office two of us in Boston so how do you do that and a lot of um a lot of what we found people doing was using their iPhone and putting it in speaker phone mode MH it works you mostly mostly you can hear people mostly what we found is that people would be hunched over the table they'd be trying to huddle around it to hear or they feel like they had to shout in order to communicate to the person on the other line and we just said what if there was a way to just simply plug a speaker in and all of a sudden you get a virtual conference call experience almost like you're talking on a polycom plugged into your iPhone so so I don't need to have three people leaning over my shoulders crowding around my laptop no no because we designed it to be flexible enough to either plug directly into the lightning port on your phone or you can use that lightning to USB cable and plug it into the USB port on your laptop and have a Skype call um put the phone in the middle of the table and it is the microphone is ruay tune to pick up everybody's voice so if you have four or five people around a table they can have a conversation just like you and I are having right now and the microphone will pick that up so to describe this to the people listening okay there's a a lightning Port light lightning plug at one end the lightning plug carries the microphone it does and then uh a short you know 2 or 3 inch length of cable to the main unit which has the speaker and the mute button correct and then at the very end of all that is a female lightning Port correct and I can use a regular us usba to lightning connector for any laptop made since whenever yes absolutely or I could use the USBC to lightning cable that's the fancy one and use that with a modern MacBook Pro yes and you will get the benefit of this conference called quality sound um when you have it plugged into your um iPhone it is um smart enough to know if you're in phone mode or say music mode and that smart button will serve as uh mute unmute and we've got a little ring around the button that flashes either green when the microphone is active or it goes to red when you have it on mute so you have a visual indication just like the old phones um of when you're in mute and when you're not does it also do smart mute the way that uh it does not do smart mute yeah I know I know people um get so excited about that but it's really um smart mute we're able to do that because of the six microphones that we have and the proximity to your mouth and your ears um that um speaker is designed to be sort of in the middle of the table so you have to manually mute it but again we think one button turns red when you're on mute green when you're off should be um a great addition and make it simple for you to yeah um point of feedback that I have to give you about that color in a moment okay after after we finish talking I'll tell you about colors but um but the beauty of this is that when it's plugged into a lightning device like an iPad or an iPhone and you're using it for a conference call you can also charge using that that pass through female boort absolutely you don't have to about your battery right running down while you're on the call true that's a great Point um and it does it does not have a battery in it itself and so it draws power from uh from your iPhone um directly or from your laptop and fun fact um we've done some tests that have shown that it actually the raise rally consumes less of your battery than using your phone in speaker mode the amplifier for running this louder speaker is more efficient than trying to run the the speaker phone mode on the phone it is wow yeah isn't that amazing that is so you get better sound better speech and you don't consume as much of your battery very cool yeah I'm excited about it now you know why I love it I know so what what else am I missing what else should I know you know this product is um is super simple right it's um it connects to our Pioneer raise app just like the headphones do when you connect to the app the app is smart enough to recog I whether it's rally speaker phone or the raise earphone and it'll serve you up the menu options that you need um it like the um earphones C is updatable over time so we may be able to do some interesting things in the future in terms of speaker microphone tuning and our customers who buy the product today will get full advantage of any of those improvements that happen over time just by updating the software through the app so cool thank you so much dear thank you Victor this has been a lot of fun H have a fantastic CES you too and have a fantastic recovery from CES yes I will thank you this has been the Apple Insider podcast fantastic episode 155 live from CS C 2018 and I want to thank you for joining us and thank Mike for all his support during this event and we will be back next week mostly recovered well I wouldn't count on that you can catch my podcast on Monday at space javelin and and thank you so much and please feel free to leave us positive reviews on iTunes and and catch us on Twitter and email and let us know your feedback we'd love to be able to answer questions from you guys we'd love it thank you so much have a good day everybody\n"