The Reality of Online Publishing: Ad Blockers and Revenue Streams

As we navigate the online publishing landscape, it's essential to acknowledge the elephant in the room – ad blockers. These tools have become increasingly popular, with many users employing them to block ads on their websites, including our own Apple Insider. While we understand the reasons behind this trend – faster loading times and reduced clutter – the impact on our revenue streams cannot be overstated.

The numbers are telling: if a million visitors to our website only see 100,000 ad views, it's a serious problem for publishers like ourselves who rely on advertising revenue to sustain our operations. This is why we're seeing a shift towards alternative models, such as sponsored posts and other forms of content monetization. These approaches allow us to reach our audience while still generating revenue, albeit in different ways.

The Rise of Ad Blockers: A New Reality

One can't deny the rise of ad blockers has changed the online publishing landscape forever. With more people using these tools, we're witnessing a significant decrease in advertising revenue across various industries. According to Neil Hughes, our host, "I think it'll be smaller now for our readership be larger for people that for unfortunately for us since we're in the online publishing business a lot of our readers already use ad blockers and obviously it's not good for business for us um but that's just the reality of it."

This shift has significant implications for publishers like ourselves. We must adapt to new revenue streams, such as sponsored content and affiliate marketing, to sustain our operations. It's essential to acknowledge that this change is not just about reducing clutter or speeding up loading times; it's also about ensuring our writers and editors can continue producing high-quality content.

The Evolution of Online Publishing: Entitlement and Revenue Streams

As we navigate this new landscape, there's another issue at play – entitlement. Some readers feel they don't need to be advertised to or that they deserve the content for free. While we understand these sentiments, it's essential to acknowledge the reality of online publishing. Our writers and editors are human beings who require compensation for their work.

Shane Cole, our co-host, emphasizes this point: "We do not take money for posts no we do not do that." This stance is rooted in our commitment to ethics and transparency. We're proud to be a product of the journalism school at the University of Florida, where Shane obtained his degree. Ethics are paramount to us, and we strive to maintain the highest standards.

The Impact on Apple Insider: An Honest Approach

As Apple Insider, we're committed to providing in-depth coverage of all things tech-related. Our approach is built on transparency and honesty – we don't solicit ad revenue or take money from external sources. Instead, we rely on the support of our readers and the generosity of our sponsors.

Neil Hughes shares his perspective: "I come from the newspaper business I'm a product of the journalism school at the University of Florida I take ethics very seriously yeah gogators." This emphasis on ethics is core to our identity as Apple Insider. We're not just a publication – we're a community built on trust and respect.

Conclusion

As we navigate this ever-changing landscape, it's essential to acknowledge the complexities surrounding online publishing. Ad blockers have forced us to adapt, leading to new revenue streams and alternative monetization models. However, we must also address the issue of entitlement, where some readers feel they deserve content for free or don't need advertising.

At Apple Insider, we're committed to transparency, ethics, and honesty. Our approach is built on trust, respect, and a deep understanding of the online publishing industry. We invite our readers to join us on this journey, as we continue to evolve and adapt in response to the changing needs of our audience.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to episode 29 of our show where we discuss the latest news about Apple iPhone iPad mac and more we're recording on Thursday August 13 2015 I'm Victor marks and with me I've got Neil managing editor of Apple Insider hi Neil hey how's it going and we've also got joining us from the Far Far Side of the World Shane Cole hello welcome back you were on vacation before I was we are so glad you returned how was it uh it was fantastic I highly recommend leaving your job and moving to the beach in Thailand there you have it job recommendations career path not you specifically I mean people who are listening and need advice from me life Pro tips from Shane excellent you know actually it's not a bad idea Thailand huh yes specifically uh puket is nice really uh the little islands around it very fun mhm cool I'm going to have to look into that so if if you find that I'm gone next time around it's because I'm in puket but let's talk instead about what's going on in the world of Apple so we think there's an Apple event coming up on September 9th do we have any kind of announcement about that Neil no there hasn't been an announcement but um Apple traditionally leaks to the same guy John patkowski who used to work for all things digital and then recod and he's now strangely enough at BuzzFeed of all websites but um yeah uh he usually gets the scoop on this early and he's usually right um I'm not so sure about some of the claims he made about the event itself specifically um I mean I think everybody knows there's going to be an iPhone there iPhone 6s um and the Apple TV is a strong possibility but he also suggested that iPads would be there I'm not sold on that rumor because that would mean no October event or an October event that would just be about Max and assuming that L copy is going to come later than iOS 9 as it did last year I would think that Apple would still want to have some sort of October event and iPads would be a good thing to introduce there but that's the rumor as it is right now um new iPhones Apple TV and then maybe iPads all right I I totally think the iPads will be there I mean what are they going to do to the iPads the iPad do you just want a new iPad is that your deal well actually I have to get one because my iPad Air 2 died an unceremonious death just the other day and it had still sitting looking at me taunting me uh because it took me three days to get an appointment at the Apple Store but um the pain no Ian it's a mid it's essentially an iPad midcycle refresh right the iPad Mini is going to get a little bit smaller and get some better internals but it's not going to be a major redesign what else can they do to the iPad iPad Pro well yeah I suppose if there's a hypothetical iPad Pro which I do not believe then I think you're that's a good point but if it's just a new iPad mini and a spec bumped iPad Air guts to run all the cool iOS 9 stuff yeah but that it's just a faster processor right that's the only difference it's an iPad Mini with an A9 so why does that uh earn its own event it's not that it earns its own event it's just a matter of spreading it out because I mean presumably we're going to have a 21.5 inch iMac with retina display soon right that should be on tap the Mac Pro hasn't been updated in a while uh El copy Ton's coming out is that enough to justify an event or would you have iPads headline that event I'm not saying that I think that this year's iPad upgrade is going to be that great especially if there is no mythical iPad Pro it's really just the question of how much do they want to pack into this September event because I feel like the new iPhones explaining Force touch recapping all the iOS 9 features um and then uh Apple TV app store maybe a subscription TV service maybe not that's a lot to have at one event uh you know you do have have watch OS 2 coming later this fall so that could be something for an October event as well and there were also some rumors earlier this year although they kind of died out that maybe Apple was going to introduce some new casing materials for the Apple watch to kind of expand the lineup um and I wouldn't be surprised if you saw some new watch bands or something like that to to just kind of boost holiday sales but I don't know that watch os2 and some new watch bands and some mac stuff is enough to carry the October event I wouldn't be surprised if they'd stick with their traditional strategy and announce new iPads on October well we don't really know and apple as we do know is not afraid of having a long event right the Apple music event with Eddie Q went on for seemingly for was insufferable so they could Jam as much as they want into this thing but I I certainly agree I hope they balance it out as long as they don't bring Drake back'll be fine or Phil Schiller yeah I don't like Schiller either but I would much rather watch Schiller than Drake for an hour but I mean right it seems like they have a lot of stuff that they still need to update that the Mac Mini uh would team overdue that not that anyone cares about it really but the iMac definitely overdue especially in the 21.5 in size there's the long rumored uh retina uh Cinema display Thunderbolt display the Mac Pro is getting very long in the tooth a lot of this is just beholden to Intel and their timing of the chips but there's a lot of stuff that wouldn't fit into a September event so I I think they're going to have an event in October um I just don't know if Max are enough to carry the event I just I think you could see I could easily see a scenario which they decide to bifurcate to two events a year with room for a special spring event right two events a year one mobile one non mobile and be done well it'll be interesting to see what they do with the watch are they going to continue to launch new Hardware in April or are they going to move it to the fall like they did with the iPad because remember the first iPad was announced in January it came out in April of 2010 and then a couple years later they moved after they did the iPad 4 uh two releases in one year they moved it to the fall so I wonder if the Apple watch watch continues to have that spot in April that spring event or are they going to wait like a year and a half or they going to do two Hardware upgrades in a year it'll be interesting to see how that plays out I'm curious to see if it's going to be on a yearly upgrade cycle to begin with truthfully I I wonder if the Apple watch is going to be more akin to the iPod in its sort of middle years where the iPods went two years between refreshes for a while yeah yeah maybe I mean what after you make the watch thinner what what else are you going to do to the watch I mean they got to add GPS they could improve uh battery life they could uh you know I could Envision for example a future model that has good enough battery life that a certain low power watch screen is always on and gets 24 hours of uptime stuff like that little efficiencies I I I think um I I see what you're saying and I can see that happening a few years down the road but I think in the first years of the watch you're going to get new hardware every year just because um I think there's a lot of room for upgrades on the current device I I'm foreseeing with my totally usually incorrect uh Mind's Eye you're prognosticating here right you're yes yes I am uh you didn't know this but I am actually miss Clea I'm I can see a scenario in which we get one really big uh watch version two update you it's thinner it's got better battery life it's got GPS it has you know whatever awesome whizbang God I'm getting old whizbang thing that you can come up with you Whipper Snappers I know and uh which I I think you probably will see sometime in the middle of next year and then after that you know I think it's it's a let's try and get more Market penetration rather than trying to uh uh take over more of the exist let's try to okay let me explain this in a way that actually makes sense let's try to spread the Smartwatch around rather than trying to gain share in an existing Market because right now there for all intents and purposes is no Smartwatch Market it doesn't exist so so that's where I'm going with this yeah I I I I I can agree with you there you know I still think that there are room for upgrades for the next few years though Mikey had a really interesting observation that I hadn't even thought of on uh last week's podcast we were talking about um how you might make the watch an independent device that doesn't require an iPhone to do the basic functions and obviously a big step toward that is native apps um but you know the security element of it he was saying touch ID we were talking about well do you somehow find a way to integrate Touch ID into the screen or something like that and Mikey said put it in the digital Crown button which is the equivalent of the home button on the iPhone and that was really interesting I hadn't thought of that if they could somehow squeeze it into there that would be a good upgrade too um and you know when you look to the future of the watch and as we think about what it could become and stuff you wonder too does Apple go down the road of allowing the watch to connect to like Android phones for example and receive notifications from them could that be on the road map and I'm thinking obviously very well down the road four five six years or something but it would be interesting to see it'll be interesting to see what they do wow I think Apple hopes Android won't even exist you kind of blew my mind there with this idea of the the watch working with Android I just I don't see it at all no I don't see it either not at least in its current form but I mean look five years down the road right that would be like a very different Apple company that would do that that doesn't make sense well it doesn't make sense until you start to think about it in the sense of like the iPod and iTunes on Windows and stuff like that if 5 years down the road Android is still 7 80% of the smartphone market that's a huge number of untapped people that Apple could sell Hardware to and if the iPhone you know doesn't grow to 50% of the market or something and the Apple watch has margins that are comparable to the iPhone let's say that the margins are 45% on the watch or something I don't know I'm just making up numbers right but if they were selling a product with that much margin and that would be a way to get people into the Apple ecosystem I can see them doing it down the road I don't see it happening anytime soon but I could see it for or 6 years down the road it's not outside of the realm of possibility I don't think it will happen but I it's not it's not that crazy of an idea when you start to think about it okay I think you you need to not look at the iPhone market share as Android has 80% of the market right you need to look at the iPhone market share is Apple has 50% of their market right and putting the watch I think that the the various wearable platforms make awesome walled Gardens they're another another Post in the wall right and this is one reason why Android Weare doesn't work great with iOS yet there's absolutely no technical reason that it can't right there's none but it doesn't because it's Android Weare and the apple and the Apple watch will always be the Apple watch it will never be the general purpose Smartwatch it will be I'm absolutely certain that one day there will be an Apple Watch with an LTE radio I'm absolutely certain that there will probably one day be an Apple Watch with some form of biometric authentication although I don't think it'll be a touch ID I think it will be vain ID but creepy no no no vain ID it's totally legitimate it's it's just to think about like I use it to get into Data Centers all the time there's there's a uh there's a heart rate ID based uh payment bracelet being trial in Canada right now actually does have a patent on that actually some question because there it's it's a One Bank Trial it's in Canada only right now now um and you wear their bracelet and that works as the NFC payment well I I just think it's I think it's fun to think about right the iPod used to have what they called the halo effect and then it became the iPhone the iPod sold Macs the iPhone helps to sell Macs people get into the ecosystem and as you bring down those barriers slowly and allow devices that are more independent then it gets people more interested in Apple products and more interested in buying into the ecosystem I mean we're going to get apple music on Android so it's not that crazy if you had told me three years ago that was going to have a music app on Android I would have said you're full of it can we please can we please just get FaceTime on Android and other systems now it was originally supp to be an open spec I know I'm asking for that to actually be followed through on I wish yeah but that's not going to happen I would love to have FaceTime and IM message for those other platforms so that yeah got tied up in patent yeah FaceTime got tied up in patent disputes iMessage is Apple's version of BBM yeah iMessage will never be open I could see FaceTime being opened up but it's not really necessary because you can just use other platforms I don't think FaceTime ever will primarily because they had to rearchitecturing an iPhone to do it where you can merge people in yeah yeah but we used to have I chat AV and we used to be able to pull in people from IAT and from AOL instant messenger and have multiple people in a call max out at four people I believe right on I chat something like that I remember it being more but but four people sounds fine too I I would love to get that back we don't have that anymore yeah I agree it sucks that we're doing all these cool things and we've lost something along the way yeah so September you getting a new iPhone uh I'm I'm actually curious about this uh iPhone 6c um the rumors came out uh this week and they were kind of dead for a while people were saying no iPhone 6c but now it's sounding like maybe Apple will take the iPhone six components and do what they did in 2013 and squeeze them into a uh different design slightly different design in this case a smaller phone that uh would allow it to uh not eat away market share from the high-end model which which would have a different design so if the iPhone 6s and the 6s plus are going to look largely the same as the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus respectively then Apple wouldn't want to sell the iPhone 6 for $100 and uh have people look at them and not the difference to just buy the $100 phone because it's cheaper so the the rumor that is going around now is that maybe they'll take the six parts cram them into a 4-in screen much like they did with the iPod touch and give it a color aluminum back and sell that at the $100 price range so I think that could be a pretty compelling device the question becomes how useful is force touch on the 6s and 6s plus um that's going to be a decision for me because I like the smaller form factor but I also like the better camera that I'm presumably going to get on the 6s and force touch could be a big change to how you interact with your phone so I'm it'll it really will depend on how they Implement Force touch and what it brings to the table and how useful that will be to me Shane are you going to get a new phone yes because uh my wife's iPhone Apple Care will be her 5s's Apple Care will be running out so we'll sell it while it still has some warranty left and buy a new one I can't say which one it'll be because she doesn't want a bigger phone she is like Neil all Maybe not as Extreme as Neil is she doesn't want a 2 and a half inch phone Neil is pretty extreme but yes we will be getting some variation of a new iPhone what what do you think our listeners should take away from this you know there there's a phone coming should they wait for it should they not wait for it wait you agree Shane yeah the events is in less than a month yeah I mean why would you buy a phone unless you really had to buy a phone now let's say you wanted to get an iPhone 6 right uh it costs $200 on contract right now in less than a month they're going to announce a phone that is going to cost the same as the current iPhone 6 have a better processor and a better camera Force touch and all these other features so you could get that or you could get a discount iPhone 6 as they clear out inventory of those you know you're going to have more options and better prices so yeah wait the bottom line there this is always the question with Apple products right is should I buy now or should I wait for whatever this is the bottom line we know at this point in Apple's life essentially when their events are going to be right there's going to be WWDC which used to have Hardware but actually hasn't been uh that great lately there's always going to be a fall event with new iPhones there's always going to be a fall event with new iPads there's probably always going to be a fall or spring event with new um desktops and laptops if it's out if it's within like a month of those times just hold off unless you have to buy one otherwise just buy a new damn device there's always going to be a new device there's always going to be something that makes yours feel old you be waiting forever yeah you know it's like people saying oh I'm going to wait till version two of the Apple watch or whatever well now youve just spent a year without the Apple watch so you know you waited and you got the next one but you missed out on all the opportunities and the advantages it was going to give you in the meantimes Define advantages well it makes me stand up once an hour so I won't get a blood clot in my leg so that's an advantage no deep vein thrombosis for Neil no embolisms for Neil awesome cool so tell me about conventional watch sales sliding after the launch of the Apple watch you know we we were that's a thing that's a question for me because you know we it's it's what what sales slid was it sales of big names like Rolex and tago or was it sales of fossil watches what's what's slid here no nobody who's rolling in to buy a Submariner is going to suddenly not do it because there's an Apple Watch available yeah I didn't think so but that's the question is what happened did anything happen well I have't article here that says conventional watch sales slide after Apple watch launch and it's coming from NPD data so what are they looking at they're looking at register sales from jewelry stores or they're looking at registered sales on the Pebble smart watch which of course they're looking at traditional watch sales and they're saying they were down 14% And it's the biggest decline since 2008 here's my reaction post Hawk ero propter Hawk no nobody nobody with the Latin after it therefore because of it do you care to elaborate on that sir for some of our our non-latin Scholars all right after it therefore because of it something happened after something else therefore was caused by the other thing right but that's not always in fact it's hard anybody who's ever watched the west wings to call me out right now because this is a direct quote it's not always true in fact it's hardly ever true right say correlation does not imply causation just because watch sales are falling does not mean they're falling because of the Apple watch watch sales have been falling for quite a while people don't wear watches anymore correct this was this was side in when the Apple watch was coming out this was cited as one of Apple's major obstacles is trying to get people to wear watches again watches aren't cool yeah nobody who was going to buy a Rolex or an AP uh before is suddenly not going to buy them because they're buying an Apple Watch well dude if you don't buy the AP you can buy two Apple watch editions well yes you could I mean on the highend on the high end yes but what what if you were looking at like a $100 timx or something yeah I was going to say next was some people who may have bought fossils or some people are going to buy fossils may have switched to an Apple Watch right but I think that's still a small number of people so we do we think that this NPD report is kind of specious I mean I'm I'm sure they have hard data that shows that watch sales are down but it it could be any reason maybe maybe people are taking a a waitand see approach maybe they're saying I want to uh you know hear from more people about the Apple watch um and then decide what watch I want to buy or something like that maybe not it's hard to say you know it's probably a little from column A a little from column B it's probably did the Apple watch affect traditional watch sales sure is it the reason that they're down so much or the primary reason probably not I'm interested to know how much watch sales fell in 2013 right so you want data from before Apple watch well in advance yeah so that then I can go write an article that says traditional watch sales down x% in Wake of Android Wear launch well but this says it was the the largest decline since 2008 so yeah but could just mean that the other years were 11 and a half per. right no I I agree with you it's you can't read into this stuff too much well and partly NPD wants to sell you the report right yeah and also partly it doesn't get clicks if it doesn't have the word Apple in the title as we well know yes do this one weird thing you won't believe and yeah one weird trick doctors you'll never believe what Apple did to this employee oh God speaking of you'll never believe you'll never believe what Google did this one weird trick so instead of very weird well it is kind of weird because instead of spinning off a subsidiary companies they spun off a parent company right Google makes perfect sense Google decided instead of spinning off smaller things and being Google as the parent organization which most companies would do Google spun off a parent company and made Google the subsidiary so the new parent company is called alphabet and basically all of the other things that are Google businesses that are are moonshots or strange Explorations that aren't related to search necessarily got turned into small companies on their own is that right basically yes okay so Larry Larry Paige and Sergey Bren are the head of alphabet now is that right yes and Sundar Pai is the uh the head of Google at this point yes he was formerly running Android after Andy Rubin got kicked out and he was running uh Chrome and Chrome OS after Vic gondra got turned out and then most recently he was running most of the other things that also mattered which is why he's pretty much the CEO yes yeah not this is I mean it doesn't really change much except for you know it allows them to kind of fend off Wall Street critics a little easier well it also here's the Wall Street branch I no we're not going to have the Wall Street R because I'm going to say something much more interesting beautiful also it also lets Larry not be a day-to-day CEO anymore which anyone in the valley who's ever talked to anyone who works at Google will tell you he hates doing right go doesn't so Larry Page no longer has to run a boring essentially a boring company right right those two guys are I don't have a great term for this they're wor they they want to do cool stuff yes right they built Google because they want to do cool stuff Google X exists because they want to do cool stuff now they can go do cool stuff on their own and nobody will say anything to them about it Neil is a little bit right in that it satisfies Wall Street so there's a little more visibility into these various other Financial black holes and it probably has some positive tax implications as many people have have said but at the end of the day it's one solidifies Larry and sergey's control over their um I guess their domain to because it's not a company anymore I mean honestly Google is not at this point it's not a or alphabet sorry it's not a company it's a you know it's it's something Beyond a company which sounds ridiculous but it's true it's solies their it solidifies their control over it they've become omnipotent they've transcended company Hood Dimension it puts a really really competent executive who's well-liked by everyone in charge of the businesses that actually make money yeah and it frees them up to go do what they do best which is Imagine cool stuff and then get it built that's entirely what this is about that's an excellent summary Google is an advertising company yeah everything that makes money from ads is now run by synar right and everything that uh drains money from ads is now run by laran Serge perfect it's brilliant we've been talking a lot about alarm.com these past few weeks and I'm I'm going to go ahead and bring it up again because they are one of our two sponsors this week alarm.com is a technology that is is about really making your home smart with an alarm system that's smarter than traditional alarm systems and what makes it like this is the ability to control all of the different parts of the alarm system and also a thermostat from your phone and your Apple watch they are reliable and secure they use 100% dedicated Cellular Connection into your home so you're not vulnerable to a cut line or a down broadband connection and alarm.com accounts are professionally monitored so a real person at a central monitoring station will help get a emergency response to your home in case of an emergency instead of trying to control all of these different smart things in your house with five or six different apps alarm.com integrates everything into its top rated mobile apps you can use security thermostat video monitoring lights locks and your garage door all from their one application the systems are professionally installed and maintained by a trusted security expert which means you're not stuck inside all weekend trying to figure out how to get all of the different parts to work together now if you're listening to this program you probably love apple and you love the way that apple innovates and alarm.com is an Invader as well they pioneered the smart home security space they were the first to launch a native app control your home and they launched the first location based automation feature they were the first smart home app for the Apple watch alarm.com is the leading technology provider of smart home security and it's sold through over 5,000 trusted Security Professionals across the United States if you wanted to see what it's like to control your home from your Apple watch alarm.com has a product demo on their site that you can check out and if you're interested in having a smarter home you can sign up for smart home security this month and receive a free free smart thermostat go to alarm.com inssider to find a dealer that's right for you and actually it's it's pretty cool stuff I I like the idea of the thermostat and the lighting and the garage door opener all being a part of that one system and unifying those things really makes for a good experience yeah it's awesome it's it's one of the kinds of things that I'm looking through looking for out of out of homekit and some of those other things but being able to buy it from a single supplier and getting all the parts to work together right away seems like a good value yeah the stuff needs to be simp simpied definitely do you have any kind of home automation stuff in your house I have a nest thermostat and I have um uh I have hue light bulbs where do you put your hue light bulbs I have uh one in uh I have a couple in the bedroom one in the kitchen one up at the front of the house and I think I have like seven of them total and and I have cool things that I do with it too like I have a movie mode on one that's just one light in the kitchen and so I just tap that mode it puts it on the lowest light settings so if I want to go in there and get a drink and not turn all the lights in the house and stuff while I'm watching a movie um you can do neat stuff like that cool I'm going ask you more about that offline cool so Samsung made an announcement this is Samsung Insider by the way and Samsung announced a 5.7in Galaxy Note 5 and an S6 Edge Plus and they're also launching Samsung pay on the 28th of next month so this is kind of a big thing coming from Samsung right they they've and I say that pun intended right the Galaxy Note 5 it's big so what should we know about these devices it's a pretty obvious effort by Samsung to beat Apple to the punch they did this last year too it was kind of funny they um they announced their new uh note note 4 before Apple held their iPhone event even though uh it launched after Apple's iPhone 6 Plus so hilariously uh Samsung announced like late August and then the product didn't ship till October meanwhile Apple announced in September and shipped in September and it just absolutely killed Samsung sales of their note lineup because people were waiting for Apple fablet so it's pretty transparent what they're doing here they're just trying to get the jump on the iPhone they're actually uh shipping in fewer markets this time around so they can get the launch out more quickly and hopefully not get caught flat footed by Apple but everything that Samsung does is very reactionary to Apple and this is no different now I'm a big fan of Apple pay I like Apple pay a lot and I keep hoping for more financial institutions to get their act together and get on board tell me about Samsung pay should I should I get out of Apple pay should I get up my iPhone go get an S um an what the hell is it it's called a S6 Edge Plus should I get one of those and use Samsung pay if you want to I guess go on tell tell me tell me why it's a bad idea cuz you know if you if you want to I mean no no no it's it's it's not a terrible truth truthfully if we're if we're being honest here the worldwide market for smartphones is Apple versus Samsung nobody else matters for for anybody who's listening to this podcast I clarify that nobody else matters but Apple and Samsung not even we're not even counting Motorola because they're not they're not in the conversation the whole reason Apple pay and Samsung pay exists is the same reason that s music or whatever that crap is and iTunes exist and every other single thing that locks you into one or the other ecosystem Samsung pay is going to be exactly the same as Apple pay with the exception of the pretty cool uh mag what is it what do we actually what is the name for that technology the stuff they got from Lupe magnetic something yeah it's does have a name I don't know if it has a name but it like spoofs the magnetic stripe on your credit card and then wirelessly transmits it to the reader so it works with like Legacy readers it's very cool technology so we'll call it spoofy magnets then yes aside from the spoofy magnet technology Samsung pay Apple pay and Android pay for that matter are all exactly the same damn thing right and and the spoofy Magnetic technology um isn't really going to be that relevant come October November once a lot of most Merchants presumably switch over to Chip and signature uh systems in the US because then swipes will be irrelevant so supposedly Samsung's working out some deals with banks so that it'll still work on those Legacy readers but it's not really going to matter because most of these readers are going to be upgraded to uh also accept NFC transactions because it's just built into the readers now so it's cool technology U much like the coin that's out now very cool technology but doesn't matter that the industry is changing so quickly and it's going to be in a few months yeah the idea is just that the idea is to reach feature parody among the platforms that's that's all it is if you like Android and you like Google Play buy a Galaxy S6 because actually it's a pretty cool phone if you prefer iTunes and Apple pay buy an iPhone well but what about Android pay I was just I was getting there hold hold your hold your drone Neil anyway if you prefer vanilla Android then buy the latest Nexus you know that's it is what it is well but it's just interesting to me that you continue to see this uh feature disparity competing uh products from Samsung and Google you know Android pay is going to be built into nonam Samsung phones but Samsung has their own payment service are they going to be blocking Android pay like how's that going to work well you wouldn't you wouldn't have Android pay presumably if you bought truthfully I actually don't know the answer to this question yeah um but I'm thinking somewhere right now I think you're probably G have the choice of either one I will guess but down the road uh I fully expect Samsung to eventually have their own for Android yeah I I think that's almost inevitable at this point I mean it essentially is a fork of Android in many ways now because it touch whiz and you can't get updates and all that and you get the phone and it comes with all this crap on there the uh you know heart rate monitor that uses the camera on the back the uh uh you know all these S voice apps and s wallet and all this stuff and it's just like and it all duplicates functionality that's already built into Android it just allows them to differentiate so someone who maybe doesn't know so well goes into to a store and ask for another Samsung phone because they're used to that experience yeah TI in is never going to matter so in five years you're either going to have Samsung Droid right or Samsung will just bow out of trying to be a premium manufacturer altogether and become another OEM one of those two things is going to happen this the status quo cannot exist for much long yeah there's too much animosity between Google and and Samsung and Samsung's just terrified as well they should be right that going to be commoditized out of the market right yeah exactly right and Google doesn't like having Samsung having so much power but they're so dependent on each other right now that it's just a it's a SmartPhone cold war going on yeah I mean it's not I mean it's a little bit different but it's not super unlike Microsoft and Nokia right the reason Microsoft bot Nokia is to keep the one and only manufacturer of yeah Windows phones alive yeah and that worked out well yeah and Google and Samsung have a a hateful symbiotic relationship yep well and Google tried buying a car a handset manufacturer in the past and that didn't very much work out for them it worked out extremely well for them well I don't know what you guys are talking about but that was a fantastic deal from a from a product standpoint they from a product standpoint it didn't do it but we don't know that they wanted that products in the first place they they took the advanced projects team they kept that back they sold off the setop ha division to make a ton of their money back they got a great tax deduction from Motorola's losses and then they sold them for $2 billion so if if I'm Larry Page I'm looking at that and saying hey job well done let's make another company and call it alphabet yes but if you look at if you look at it from a different perspective and that they were trying to fix the problems of Android and specifically the power that Samsung had uh and they wanted to start making in-house Nexus phones uh and sell them through carriers and get more control over Android and get people updated to the latest software and kind of streamline the lineup that was not a success but yes from a financial perspective absolutely how good it was for the health of Android I don't know I think Google at this point their Nexus devices started out as showing Android manufacturers what phone setting a benchmark for Android phones right yeah and I think that they may have briefly flirted with the idea of doing it themselves but really what else can you do you know I mean they're work who are they working with this time is HTC building the new Nexus is that the rumor yeah yeah what can motorol do that HTC can't so I think that it was it may have been a little bit of a flirtatious idea hey we'll build Nexus phones ourselves but I think realistically the driver of the deal was exactly what ended up happening they got what they wanted from Motorola and then sold the mere dead carcass on you know and and they may have financially too poorly they may have been afraid of scaring off their Partners too who knows if they they got cold feet because Samsung said they were gonna walk and just completely Fork Android yeah that would have been that that's I think that was the prevailing wisdom at the time right is what the hell are they doing nobody's going to make an Android phone of Google and so by not going down that road they didn't scare off their Partners at least not that not that it really did any good for HTC or any of these other companies that PO HTC yeah poor poor HTC they're way they're way below cash on hand now they czy yeah their name is worthless and it's funny to think too I mean back when Windows mobile was your only option they were the only good Windows mobile phone because they their skinning of Windows mobile actually made it taller and tech people you have a funny definition of tolerable I just want to say cuz well this is before the HTC diamond and stuff like oh my God that was brutal what was the name what's the name of Their Skin Sense is that what it's called yeah well they've used that name for everything there was Sensei on uh on Android yeah there was Sense on that's what I'm saying sense was originally for Windows mobile and it took a garbage product that relied on a stylus and made it somewhat taller and put one layer between garbage and right yeah yeah it was a big Improvement I mean obviously it wasn't that good but you know it was compared to what was on the market and HTC was the doing the best job I think you HTC and Sony to a lesser extent are examples of what happens when Samsung has the Samsung rules mind share yeah right Samsung's Hardware until this most recent Series has not been amazing right the S6 is actually really nice the S6 Edge is also really nice but the S5 and before have just been you know not not exactly living up to standards of engineering Excellence Sony's Experia the Z3 the Z4 amazing phones this the stuff they do with Android fantastic nobody's buying them's losing tons of cash HTC's 1m9 great phone 1 M8 even better the 1m9 is a little bit of a step back the 1 M8 amazing phone nobody bought it Samsung or Sony I'm sorry gets what they deserve because Sony has been trying to lock people into an ecosystem for years in the worst possible ways you know Sony wishes they could be like apple right now so much and they've done it with their proprietary uh card readers and their proprietary everything they deserve everything that happened to them somebody's still butt hurt about memory sticks oh and all the different formats of memory stick and yeah you know what I'm annoyed about I'm still annoyed about IBO being gone what IBO Sony IBO oh the dog yeah uh the New York Times had a a interesting like short film film about the ibow and how they're they're dying like and they had this like older Japanese couple that's like they keep their ibow robot dog around and it's like harder and harder to find replacement parts and it was really like sweet and sad and creepy all at the same time where this family like was like taking their eyebow with them to like on vacation taking photos of it places and like the thing is like slowly dying this little robot dog oh my goodness the robot dog was incredible and they had three models of it and for a while was a robot dog soccer league it was awesome yeah there was a Sony IBO soccer league and you you played soccer with the dogs pushing a ball around on a course it was incredible Sony has fallen so far and I still use a lot of Sony products I'm wearing Sony headphones right now I have a PlayStation 4 PlayStation vaita I have a Sony uh compact digital camera that I absolutely love but they deserve everything that happened to them because they did it to themselves yeah the only Sony product I have or have had in the last five years this uh my RX100 great camera yeah Sony still makes great cameras but I don't own one of those cameras and I I occasionally you know this Neil I I talked to you about you know what camera should I use when I shoot CES and things like that and someday maybe maybe I'll own another Sony product but it's been a long time since I purchased one Sony Alpha n ex cameras are awesome they're really you know what Sony's most profitable division is now paper shredders they make a damn fun paper shredder is that what it is you know if you had said fax machines that would have been a more culturally relevant thing but no it's Insurance really yeah their insurance division props of the rest of the company I I realize we're going deep down the rabbit hole here but um Samsung or I'm I keep saying Samsung Sony is uh uh so such a big name and and they're so prominent and all that that the knockoffs of their products are so good that they even fool Amazon I I years ago bought a um a uh PlayStation 3 controller like a a dual shock controller and it came in the packaging it looked like a Sony thing and everything but some of the fonts and stuff on it looked kind of weird and I was slightly suspicious so I started Googling it and I found out that there are like these knockoff controllers I had a knockoff little microphone adapter for uh for devices that like capture stereo sound it turned out it was a fake one too and they're like sold just regularly on Amazon know does care they don't do anything to vet whether or not a product is counterfeit or not I I had product when I was back manufa ing product I had products that were counterfeited and would show up on Amazon and I bought several of the counterfeits to figure out just how bad the Clones were and some were terrible fonts somewhere they one of the things they do is they totally redraw all of the packaging artwork so even if you've got artwork that's done and they could just copy it they redraw it all so you can see where they've screwed up yeah and it's it's you know the Amazon doesn't care Amazon doesn't nothing it's just amazing to me how good these Sony knockoffs were like any average person would not have known known and Sony's just losing money on that stuff and it's probably hurts their business tremendously because I was almost faked out by it and I do this crap for a living so so one thing that actually happens a lot um in China Sony has moved a lot of their production out of Japan now and as a result they and many other companies who have who have done so have had problem this happens a lot in uh SD cards and yeah SD cards are terrible yeah so what they what happens is PE cards that are fabbed by small manufacturers not I mean foxc this isn't happening at foxcon right but it's happening at smaller contract manufacturers they'll run ghost lines at night like the the supervisors will come in at night and run the same line with worse materials and so what you get are fake products that came off the same production line with the same tooling as the real products but they're worse because they use worse materials like um for memory cards they'll use uh seconded memory chips you know yeah all of the reject rejected yeah all everything that was rejected will be rerun and then the supervisor will take his cut from the guy who's smuggling the out of China and there you go that's amazing where you see the really good quality fakes that's what happens that's crazy yeah they're really high quality and Sam or Sony deserves everything bad that that has happened to them but they don't deserve that that's just terrible so we're talking about large companies like Samsung and we're talking about large companies like Google Now I'm going to talk about a company called soft layer and soft layer is an IBM company company and what they do is they deliver a cloud so if you're working in a uh a startup or if you're working in a business and you need Cloud infrastructure soft La is this IBM company that delivers a cloud infrastructure foundation and it's the foundation of all IBM's Cloud products and services so what they deliver is uh you know you put your business your applications your compute Lo workload they're all different from everyone else's so you need Cloud resources that meet your unique needs some workloads need to scale up and down quickly they benefit from virtual servers and some workloads need the raw power of bare metal or dedicated servers soft lare is the only cloud provider that Provisions bare metal servers and virtual servers from a single seamless platform all on demand all connected to the same API and all connected to a global private Network even if you're not looking for infrastructure you can benefit from soft layer infrastructure when you use a platform or software service for IBM cloud and all of our listeners have the opportunity to get $500 of cloud infrastructure by visiting soft layer.com podcast and that is specifically podcast with a capital P because URLs are hard you can order bare metal servers virtual servers storage networking and Security Services in your choice of 24 data centers around the world and all of those servers and services are connected soft layer unique network of networks separates public private and management traffic so that traffic to and from your Cloud infrastructure travels more efficiently you can automate and control your Cloud infrastructure with a granular API or you can perform any necessary management actions in the easy to use soft layer customer portal visit soft layer.com podcast with a capital P to get started with your $500 off of servers storage Network and security on a cloud built to compete from soft layer so before we move on I Didn't Know soft layer was a sponsor and aside from the uh terrible terrible case sensitive URLs I just want to say soft lay is amazing uh my day job is web and mobile product development and I've been with software for a really long time and it's a great company cool so what would you say is the best experience you've had that should tell someone to go there besides you telling that is good uh soft layer's absolute best feature is their customer support if you are a person if you're a person who's listening to this and cares about the fact that Victor said bare metal servers then you should know that you can escalate your case to a network engineer in five minutes if it comes to that that fast absolutely amazing it's it's as good as Rackspace and if you're in this business and you have been in here for a while you know that as good as Rackspace is really really good wow that is good to hear thank you for that so before we got to call an audible here Victor so we'll call an audible here Shane just sent me the link for this Samsung just announced the gear S2 Smartwatch I'm gonna iMessage it to you Victor oh Lord at the IFA trade show in Berlin and is EA on already that's that's pronounced the IFA trade show in Berlin Neil is pronounced epha well then why is it all capital letters because it's in Berlin anyhow do you want capital letters Neil that's how you get capital letters It's it's epha okay well anyhow um this thing is the most blatant ridiculous ripoff of the Apple watch UI no no no no you know what this looks like this reminds me of the Audi Smartwatch from January CES powered by web OS well I mean the friends thing in the upper left is like the fact that the fact that all the icons are around I can forgive because it's a round watch but the little friends thing that has a bunch of Color Dots yeah the phone dial yeah yeah that's just I mean I'm just looking at this thing and it's like the calendar icon the phone icon I mean I guess there's only so many ways you can do those icons but still like why is the phone icon green just like Apple's the the microphone icon is pretty similar there was actually some research into the cloud icon that came up with the notion that the cloud icon has to be that way for pretty much everyone because there's some mathematical formula to the curves and proportions that says that's how you draw a cloud so pretty much everyone's Cloud icon looks the same no no no this Cloud if you'll notice has sun rays coming out of the upper right which makes it horrifically visually unbalanced is it is it weather or is it what what I assum it's weather yeah it's probably weather yeah it's weather designed by an imbecile and I'm also surprised surprised that there's Nike Plus support uh considering Nike's close relationship with apple yes that is interesting isn't it I would have thought that maybe they wouldn't uh have that well you know looking at it that swoosh is uh not correctly that's not a regulation swoosh it's not that's not but so let me ask you because there's the swoosh with a plus next to it right below an icon of a person running yeah it's probably their native uh fitness app and then a Nike plus uh running app I didn't realize that was a person running I thought it was an arrow pointing down toward a horizon but Apple's Apple's app has someone running to the right Samsungs has someone running to the and Samsungs has like ground in the sky yeah we were talking about knockoffs that reminds me of a t-shirt I saw once with a Nike logo on it there's no way it could be an actual Nike product that said uh lazy but talented I don't think that's I'm absolutely certain that that's a that's a real Nike product think you think that's a real Nike product have you seen the stuff they're doing recently I had a Nik all about working hard earning it all that stuff go into a Nike store yeah and look at some of the shirts they're doing now I just had uh I I used to have a pair of Nike shoes that were run on one of these lunch breaks or after hours kinds of things like we were talking about and they were Nike tops with K Swiss souls and they were from a legitimate Factory but they used some crazy kind of uh fabric that for the swoosh that that wasn't exactly a fabric you'd find on any other kind of Nike but it was it was very clearly legitimate stuff just done with after hours Parts well anyhow I had to interject there because this thing is insane how much of a ripoff it is of the watch UI but before I move on I it is on a round display yes I don't I don't know if Nike is selling the shirt in America but here in Hong Kong they have a shirt that says you know the shirts they're doing that are just giant words with patterns in the back yeah the shirt says scoring never stops it's by far my favorite Nike t-shirt ever they also have one that says all money no bank which is fantastic but no scoring never stops is by far oh basketball is my girlfriend that's another one wow so I'm absolutely certain that lazy but talented is that does not strike me as Nike's brand but maybe I don't know all right well it's it's time to hold our drones because Neil's going to tell us all about the DJI Phantom 3 professional yeah um I we ran the review of this last weekend uh I tested the highend one it's uh 12250 is what it costs and it's awesome wait 1,250 us yes that is actually a competitive price compared to what he's used to cost just wanted to clarify because 1250 could be a lot of things no it sounds it cost actually it's $1,249 this is the highend one um there's a mid-range one that costs $1,000 that just downgrades the camera to 1080p uh the high-end one the professional has 4K and there's an entry level one for $800 that uh that also does 1080p but at 30 frames per second instead of 60 uh I think most people will be happy with the mid-range model um considering most people don't have 4K video cameras uh they both have the same controller and that's really what I enjoyed about this the most it has a mount that is big enough to hold an iPad and it also has a built-in USB port so you can plug in a lightning cable and you don't have to connect to a sh Wi-Fi network anymore so you don't have to mess around with it to uh uh to get the connection and get the live video feed but it gets signals from up to a mile away it's easy to fly um if you're on the market for like a pro suer high-end kind of drone uh that you can fly on its own uh this is still the best one out there at that price range and at that uh level of the market um obviously at over $1,200 this isn't for everybody um you know there are some cheaper options out there like the parrot um and I actually tested a super secret one today that I can't talk about till next week that'll be another lowend option so the Market's growing there at the low end and um I think that's a good thing but if you're looking for something that offers really high quality 4K video footage that's super smooth it looks like it's a crane shot when it's taken off um this thing you just can't go wrong with it it's awesome cool now when you're out there flying drones how do people react uh when I started flying them a few years ago and they weren't as common people would come up to me and start asking me questions they still do not as much people just kind of point and take pictures of it and stuff but like I was flying in Central Park for my review and a family came up to me they were um Italian and they were like what is it did you one of the questions that people always ask me which I think is funny they always ask me if I invented it like if I'm the creator of it or something I got asked that when I was flying it here in Brooklyn Heights a few weeks ago too people always ask me like oh did you make this um when I reviewed an electric skateboard last year too people were stopping me and like did you make this are you are you famous is something ask it's like no I just I just write about this stuff for a living but uh yeah people want to take photos with it um they people are just fascinated by how much does it cost what does it do that kind of stuff um I didn't I haven't been stopped by law enforcement yet which is good um but I'm very conservative about where I fly it I make sure that I'm in a legal area to fly it I make sure that I don't go too high um that I don't let it get out of my line of sight and stuff like that partially because I don't want to lose the thing because it's not mine and they're just sending it to me to review but also uh because you just want to be careful with this kind of stuff I did have one crash a couple years ago and quite frankly if this thing crashed into a person it would do serious damage so um fly safe out there it's a really cool way to get great shots but you don't have to overdo it and and go crazy with it brilliant so you recommend this one yeah I I like I said I think that the mid-range one is probably the best for most consumers if you have no need for 4K video um but the high-end one's awesome too um the lowend one $800 is is still pretty good but I like the upgraded controller and I think it's worth the extra $200 so I would say if you're on the market for a DJI drone um go with the mid-range Phantom 2 Advanced or Phantom 3 Advanced sorry brilliant now ahead of iOS 9 we've been seeing that there's this ad blocker technology in the iOS n betas and it it allows us to use ad blocking in iOS and and strip ads out of web pages and things like this so there's a study and the study says that ad blockers have already cost Publishers $22 billion a year which is kind of crazy since since uh ad blockers haven't been out for iOS 9 that long are they talking about ad blockers for all of web browsers what are they talking about NE yeah they're just talking about ad blockers on desktops and stuff like that but the reason this story is relevant for Apple users is because iOS 9 is going to allow uh for the for people to install thirdparty apps that plug into Safari and can block ads when you're browsing the web on your iPhone or your iPad so presumably the uh availability and the impact of these ad blockers is going to grow when iOS 9 launches the study actually said what did the study say wow I forgot already dude dude I'm sorry that was terrible the study actually said okay the study actually said that the release of iOS 9 would be a game Cher and that they expect once iOS 9 is in wide distribution they expect the percentage of iOS users running AB blockers in Safari to roughly equal the percentag that are using ad blockers in uh mobile Firefox which is about 16% so when you consider that uh mobile Safari which is the the version which is what Safari on iOS is actually called mobile Safari for those of you who don't know nobody on this podcast with me doesn't know that but for the rest of you you have a little information uh mobile Safari accounts for a huge portion of web traffic um even we've seen that at Apple Insider uh huge spike in the number of people visiting from mobile Safari versus desktop Safari uh it's 52% of the mobile browsing market so more than half of people who use the web on a smartphone or a tablet use iOS and mobile Safari and it's 14 this is important it's 14% of all web browsing in general like the desktop laptop smartphone tablet McDonald's kiosk mobile Safari is 14% of the entire internet so if you consider that there's a huge proportion of people who are suddenly not going to be seeing ads anymore then the the CPM Market is not in uh is not in it's gonna be a rough time ahead it's gonna be a rough time ahead yeah for those of you who are yeah you do have to opt into it but the idea is that uh many people because it'll be super easy right it's just download an app and then turn one setting into fari the idea is that the number of people who do that will also do it or the number of people who do it on desktop Saar will be broadly comparable to the number number of people who will do it on mobile Safari but you said that they were comparing it to Firefox right they were saying 17% on Firefox yeah so they think that sounds it's going to be a lot bigger than it's been on Firefox because installing something on what installing stuff on Firefox is always freakishly annoying no I I I think people who use Firefox are enthusiasts I think that putting on it's going to be far easier it'll be larger no I don't think it'll be larger I think most people just won't know or don't care I would bet it would be smaller now for our readership be larger for people that for unfortunately for us since we're in the online publishing business a lot of our readers already use ad blockers and obviously it's not good for business for us um but that's just the reality of it and you know I understand why people do it it makes websites load faster there's a lot of junk JavaScript and everything else it makes websites take forever to load you seen the ads on our website and I don't I don't you know I I don't blame people for doing that it's not good for us I mean we have to be paid in order to do this otherwise you know that's how we keep the lights on right but I I don't think that it will be as high as it is in Firefox because I think people that are using Firefox are already in iast that would be inclined to do those types of things I would not be surprised if the percentage of people on mobile Safari specifically that are installing these after iOS 9 launches is going to be smaller I don't see someone like my parents installing an ad blocker on their iPhone or iPad well no but by sheer by sheer volume even if it is a smaller overall number by sheer volume it's still a Major Impact for those I think it's gonna be a Major Impact yes if you're listening and you don't know ads on the internet most of the time are sold by CPM it's X number of dollarss per thousand ad views uh there are some alternative models but that's primarily where all the money is and if you're getting a million hits a month on your website and only 100 thousand of those people are seeing ads then it's a serious problem and this is why you're seeing a lot of major online Publishers like even recode um are doing sponsored posts now and stuff like that because ad blockers can't block that kind of content so it allows them to get eyeballs on content in a different way so there's going to be a lot of turmoil and a lot of evolution in the online publishing industry For Better or For Worse um and you know there's also a problem of you know not to be patronizing to people that read our website but uh there's also an entitlement issue with people that feel like they don't need to be advertised to or that they deserve the content for free or it's not worth paying for and uh while I understand why some people feel that way um also if you want people to continue writing and producing this content it needs to be a living for them need to get paid to do it so uh you know it's it's a complex issue now some of you are going to misunderstand what Neil just said and I'm going to clarify it we do not take money for posts no we do not do that it doesn't happen but for those we do not take money for posts no and I I had aerating I had a discussion with a reader the other day um who messaged me on our forums and accused me of being paid to run an analyst note and then I explained to him and thank thank y he was very pleasant about it but I explained to him in very explicit detail that we do not get paid to write any articles we do not get paid by any analysts uh we're not paid for any reviews um I don't even own stock in Apple I come from the newspaper business Shane and I don't invoice we don't get paid anyway I I come from the newspaper business I'm a a product of the journalism school at the University of Florida I take ethics very seriously yeah gogators um we we are not that kind of site certainly there are sites out there like that I understand why people think that but uh no but uh we definitely take that kind of stuff very seriously we're not paid R anything any content that you see on Apple Insider is on there solely because myself or one of our team thought that it was interesting enough to write we are not asked to write anything specifically like that but for those of you who hate content marketing and also use an ad blocker you brought this up on yourself yes well should we wrap it up gentan why not okay okay this has been the Apple Insider podcast recording on Thursday August 13th I'm your host Victor marks and with us has been Shane Cole Shane where can people find you on the internet uh I am on Apple Insider and Neil Hughes where can people find you on the internet you can find me on Twitter at this is Neil and you can read my daily musings at Apple Insider and if you can find Neil in puket holding his drone or Shane Cole is wearing a lazy but talented t-shirt we'll tell you all about it next week on the apple and cider podcastyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to episode 29 of our show where we discuss the latest news about Apple iPhone iPad mac and more we're recording on Thursday August 13 2015 I'm Victor marks and with me I've got Neil managing editor of Apple Insider hi Neil hey how's it going and we've also got joining us from the Far Far Side of the World Shane Cole hello welcome back you were on vacation before I was we are so glad you returned how was it uh it was fantastic I highly recommend leaving your job and moving to the beach in Thailand there you have it job recommendations career path not you specifically I mean people who are listening and need advice from me life Pro tips from Shane excellent you know actually it's not a bad idea Thailand huh yes specifically uh puket is nice really uh the little islands around it very fun mhm cool I'm going to have to look into that so if if you find that I'm gone next time around it's because I'm in puket but let's talk instead about what's going on in the world of Apple so we think there's an Apple event coming up on September 9th do we have any kind of announcement about that Neil no there hasn't been an announcement but um Apple traditionally leaks to the same guy John patkowski who used to work for all things digital and then recod and he's now strangely enough at BuzzFeed of all websites but um yeah uh he usually gets the scoop on this early and he's usually right um I'm not so sure about some of the claims he made about the event itself specifically um I mean I think everybody knows there's going to be an iPhone there iPhone 6s um and the Apple TV is a strong possibility but he also suggested that iPads would be there I'm not sold on that rumor because that would mean no October event or an October event that would just be about Max and assuming that L copy is going to come later than iOS 9 as it did last year I would think that Apple would still want to have some sort of October event and iPads would be a good thing to introduce there but that's the rumor as it is right now um new iPhones Apple TV and then maybe iPads all right I I totally think the iPads will be there I mean what are they going to do to the iPads the iPad do you just want a new iPad is that your deal well actually I have to get one because my iPad Air 2 died an unceremonious death just the other day and it had still sitting looking at me taunting me uh because it took me three days to get an appointment at the Apple Store but um the pain no Ian it's a mid it's essentially an iPad midcycle refresh right the iPad Mini is going to get a little bit smaller and get some better internals but it's not going to be a major redesign what else can they do to the iPad iPad Pro well yeah I suppose if there's a hypothetical iPad Pro which I do not believe then I think you're that's a good point but if it's just a new iPad mini and a spec bumped iPad Air guts to run all the cool iOS 9 stuff yeah but that it's just a faster processor right that's the only difference it's an iPad Mini with an A9 so why does that uh earn its own event it's not that it earns its own event it's just a matter of spreading it out because I mean presumably we're going to have a 21.5 inch iMac with retina display soon right that should be on tap the Mac Pro hasn't been updated in a while uh El copy Ton's coming out is that enough to justify an event or would you have iPads headline that event I'm not saying that I think that this year's iPad upgrade is going to be that great especially if there is no mythical iPad Pro it's really just the question of how much do they want to pack into this September event because I feel like the new iPhones explaining Force touch recapping all the iOS 9 features um and then uh Apple TV app store maybe a subscription TV service maybe not that's a lot to have at one event uh you know you do have have watch OS 2 coming later this fall so that could be something for an October event as well and there were also some rumors earlier this year although they kind of died out that maybe Apple was going to introduce some new casing materials for the Apple watch to kind of expand the lineup um and I wouldn't be surprised if you saw some new watch bands or something like that to to just kind of boost holiday sales but I don't know that watch os2 and some new watch bands and some mac stuff is enough to carry the October event I wouldn't be surprised if they'd stick with their traditional strategy and announce new iPads on October well we don't really know and apple as we do know is not afraid of having a long event right the Apple music event with Eddie Q went on for seemingly for was insufferable so they could Jam as much as they want into this thing but I I certainly agree I hope they balance it out as long as they don't bring Drake back'll be fine or Phil Schiller yeah I don't like Schiller either but I would much rather watch Schiller than Drake for an hour but I mean right it seems like they have a lot of stuff that they still need to update that the Mac Mini uh would team overdue that not that anyone cares about it really but the iMac definitely overdue especially in the 21.5 in size there's the long rumored uh retina uh Cinema display Thunderbolt display the Mac Pro is getting very long in the tooth a lot of this is just beholden to Intel and their timing of the chips but there's a lot of stuff that wouldn't fit into a September event so I I think they're going to have an event in October um I just don't know if Max are enough to carry the event I just I think you could see I could easily see a scenario which they decide to bifurcate to two events a year with room for a special spring event right two events a year one mobile one non mobile and be done well it'll be interesting to see what they do with the watch are they going to continue to launch new Hardware in April or are they going to move it to the fall like they did with the iPad because remember the first iPad was announced in January it came out in April of 2010 and then a couple years later they moved after they did the iPad 4 uh two releases in one year they moved it to the fall so I wonder if the Apple watch watch continues to have that spot in April that spring event or are they going to wait like a year and a half or they going to do two Hardware upgrades in a year it'll be interesting to see how that plays out I'm curious to see if it's going to be on a yearly upgrade cycle to begin with truthfully I I wonder if the Apple watch is going to be more akin to the iPod in its sort of middle years where the iPods went two years between refreshes for a while yeah yeah maybe I mean what after you make the watch thinner what what else are you going to do to the watch I mean they got to add GPS they could improve uh battery life they could uh you know I could Envision for example a future model that has good enough battery life that a certain low power watch screen is always on and gets 24 hours of uptime stuff like that little efficiencies I I I think um I I see what you're saying and I can see that happening a few years down the road but I think in the first years of the watch you're going to get new hardware every year just because um I think there's a lot of room for upgrades on the current device I I'm foreseeing with my totally usually incorrect uh Mind's Eye you're prognosticating here right you're yes yes I am uh you didn't know this but I am actually miss Clea I'm I can see a scenario in which we get one really big uh watch version two update you it's thinner it's got better battery life it's got GPS it has you know whatever awesome whizbang God I'm getting old whizbang thing that you can come up with you Whipper Snappers I know and uh which I I think you probably will see sometime in the middle of next year and then after that you know I think it's it's a let's try and get more Market penetration rather than trying to uh uh take over more of the exist let's try to okay let me explain this in a way that actually makes sense let's try to spread the Smartwatch around rather than trying to gain share in an existing Market because right now there for all intents and purposes is no Smartwatch Market it doesn't exist so so that's where I'm going with this yeah I I I I I can agree with you there you know I still think that there are room for upgrades for the next few years though Mikey had a really interesting observation that I hadn't even thought of on uh last week's podcast we were talking about um how you might make the watch an independent device that doesn't require an iPhone to do the basic functions and obviously a big step toward that is native apps um but you know the security element of it he was saying touch ID we were talking about well do you somehow find a way to integrate Touch ID into the screen or something like that and Mikey said put it in the digital Crown button which is the equivalent of the home button on the iPhone and that was really interesting I hadn't thought of that if they could somehow squeeze it into there that would be a good upgrade too um and you know when you look to the future of the watch and as we think about what it could become and stuff you wonder too does Apple go down the road of allowing the watch to connect to like Android phones for example and receive notifications from them could that be on the road map and I'm thinking obviously very well down the road four five six years or something but it would be interesting to see it'll be interesting to see what they do wow I think Apple hopes Android won't even exist you kind of blew my mind there with this idea of the the watch working with Android I just I don't see it at all no I don't see it either not at least in its current form but I mean look five years down the road right that would be like a very different Apple company that would do that that doesn't make sense well it doesn't make sense until you start to think about it in the sense of like the iPod and iTunes on Windows and stuff like that if 5 years down the road Android is still 7 80% of the smartphone market that's a huge number of untapped people that Apple could sell Hardware to and if the iPhone you know doesn't grow to 50% of the market or something and the Apple watch has margins that are comparable to the iPhone let's say that the margins are 45% on the watch or something I don't know I'm just making up numbers right but if they were selling a product with that much margin and that would be a way to get people into the Apple ecosystem I can see them doing it down the road I don't see it happening anytime soon but I could see it for or 6 years down the road it's not outside of the realm of possibility I don't think it will happen but I it's not it's not that crazy of an idea when you start to think about it okay I think you you need to not look at the iPhone market share as Android has 80% of the market right you need to look at the iPhone market share is Apple has 50% of their market right and putting the watch I think that the the various wearable platforms make awesome walled Gardens they're another another Post in the wall right and this is one reason why Android Weare doesn't work great with iOS yet there's absolutely no technical reason that it can't right there's none but it doesn't because it's Android Weare and the apple and the Apple watch will always be the Apple watch it will never be the general purpose Smartwatch it will be I'm absolutely certain that one day there will be an Apple Watch with an LTE radio I'm absolutely certain that there will probably one day be an Apple Watch with some form of biometric authentication although I don't think it'll be a touch ID I think it will be vain ID but creepy no no no vain ID it's totally legitimate it's it's just to think about like I use it to get into Data Centers all the time there's there's a uh there's a heart rate ID based uh payment bracelet being trial in Canada right now actually does have a patent on that actually some question because there it's it's a One Bank Trial it's in Canada only right now now um and you wear their bracelet and that works as the NFC payment well I I just think it's I think it's fun to think about right the iPod used to have what they called the halo effect and then it became the iPhone the iPod sold Macs the iPhone helps to sell Macs people get into the ecosystem and as you bring down those barriers slowly and allow devices that are more independent then it gets people more interested in Apple products and more interested in buying into the ecosystem I mean we're going to get apple music on Android so it's not that crazy if you had told me three years ago that was going to have a music app on Android I would have said you're full of it can we please can we please just get FaceTime on Android and other systems now it was originally supp to be an open spec I know I'm asking for that to actually be followed through on I wish yeah but that's not going to happen I would love to have FaceTime and IM message for those other platforms so that yeah got tied up in patent yeah FaceTime got tied up in patent disputes iMessage is Apple's version of BBM yeah iMessage will never be open I could see FaceTime being opened up but it's not really necessary because you can just use other platforms I don't think FaceTime ever will primarily because they had to rearchitecturing an iPhone to do it where you can merge people in yeah yeah but we used to have I chat AV and we used to be able to pull in people from IAT and from AOL instant messenger and have multiple people in a call max out at four people I believe right on I chat something like that I remember it being more but but four people sounds fine too I I would love to get that back we don't have that anymore yeah I agree it sucks that we're doing all these cool things and we've lost something along the way yeah so September you getting a new iPhone uh I'm I'm actually curious about this uh iPhone 6c um the rumors came out uh this week and they were kind of dead for a while people were saying no iPhone 6c but now it's sounding like maybe Apple will take the iPhone six components and do what they did in 2013 and squeeze them into a uh different design slightly different design in this case a smaller phone that uh would allow it to uh not eat away market share from the high-end model which which would have a different design so if the iPhone 6s and the 6s plus are going to look largely the same as the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus respectively then Apple wouldn't want to sell the iPhone 6 for $100 and uh have people look at them and not the difference to just buy the $100 phone because it's cheaper so the the rumor that is going around now is that maybe they'll take the six parts cram them into a 4-in screen much like they did with the iPod touch and give it a color aluminum back and sell that at the $100 price range so I think that could be a pretty compelling device the question becomes how useful is force touch on the 6s and 6s plus um that's going to be a decision for me because I like the smaller form factor but I also like the better camera that I'm presumably going to get on the 6s and force touch could be a big change to how you interact with your phone so I'm it'll it really will depend on how they Implement Force touch and what it brings to the table and how useful that will be to me Shane are you going to get a new phone yes because uh my wife's iPhone Apple Care will be her 5s's Apple Care will be running out so we'll sell it while it still has some warranty left and buy a new one I can't say which one it'll be because she doesn't want a bigger phone she is like Neil all Maybe not as Extreme as Neil is she doesn't want a 2 and a half inch phone Neil is pretty extreme but yes we will be getting some variation of a new iPhone what what do you think our listeners should take away from this you know there there's a phone coming should they wait for it should they not wait for it wait you agree Shane yeah the events is in less than a month yeah I mean why would you buy a phone unless you really had to buy a phone now let's say you wanted to get an iPhone 6 right uh it costs $200 on contract right now in less than a month they're going to announce a phone that is going to cost the same as the current iPhone 6 have a better processor and a better camera Force touch and all these other features so you could get that or you could get a discount iPhone 6 as they clear out inventory of those you know you're going to have more options and better prices so yeah wait the bottom line there this is always the question with Apple products right is should I buy now or should I wait for whatever this is the bottom line we know at this point in Apple's life essentially when their events are going to be right there's going to be WWDC which used to have Hardware but actually hasn't been uh that great lately there's always going to be a fall event with new iPhones there's always going to be a fall event with new iPads there's probably always going to be a fall or spring event with new um desktops and laptops if it's out if it's within like a month of those times just hold off unless you have to buy one otherwise just buy a new damn device there's always going to be a new device there's always going to be something that makes yours feel old you be waiting forever yeah you know it's like people saying oh I'm going to wait till version two of the Apple watch or whatever well now youve just spent a year without the Apple watch so you know you waited and you got the next one but you missed out on all the opportunities and the advantages it was going to give you in the meantimes Define advantages well it makes me stand up once an hour so I won't get a blood clot in my leg so that's an advantage no deep vein thrombosis for Neil no embolisms for Neil awesome cool so tell me about conventional watch sales sliding after the launch of the Apple watch you know we we were that's a thing that's a question for me because you know we it's it's what what sales slid was it sales of big names like Rolex and tago or was it sales of fossil watches what's what's slid here no nobody who's rolling in to buy a Submariner is going to suddenly not do it because there's an Apple Watch available yeah I didn't think so but that's the question is what happened did anything happen well I have't article here that says conventional watch sales slide after Apple watch launch and it's coming from NPD data so what are they looking at they're looking at register sales from jewelry stores or they're looking at registered sales on the Pebble smart watch which of course they're looking at traditional watch sales and they're saying they were down 14% And it's the biggest decline since 2008 here's my reaction post Hawk ero propter Hawk no nobody nobody with the Latin after it therefore because of it do you care to elaborate on that sir for some of our our non-latin Scholars all right after it therefore because of it something happened after something else therefore was caused by the other thing right but that's not always in fact it's hard anybody who's ever watched the west wings to call me out right now because this is a direct quote it's not always true in fact it's hardly ever true right say correlation does not imply causation just because watch sales are falling does not mean they're falling because of the Apple watch watch sales have been falling for quite a while people don't wear watches anymore correct this was this was side in when the Apple watch was coming out this was cited as one of Apple's major obstacles is trying to get people to wear watches again watches aren't cool yeah nobody who was going to buy a Rolex or an AP uh before is suddenly not going to buy them because they're buying an Apple Watch well dude if you don't buy the AP you can buy two Apple watch editions well yes you could I mean on the highend on the high end yes but what what if you were looking at like a $100 timx or something yeah I was going to say next was some people who may have bought fossils or some people are going to buy fossils may have switched to an Apple Watch right but I think that's still a small number of people so we do we think that this NPD report is kind of specious I mean I'm I'm sure they have hard data that shows that watch sales are down but it it could be any reason maybe maybe people are taking a a waitand see approach maybe they're saying I want to uh you know hear from more people about the Apple watch um and then decide what watch I want to buy or something like that maybe not it's hard to say you know it's probably a little from column A a little from column B it's probably did the Apple watch affect traditional watch sales sure is it the reason that they're down so much or the primary reason probably not I'm interested to know how much watch sales fell in 2013 right so you want data from before Apple watch well in advance yeah so that then I can go write an article that says traditional watch sales down x% in Wake of Android Wear launch well but this says it was the the largest decline since 2008 so yeah but could just mean that the other years were 11 and a half per. right no I I agree with you it's you can't read into this stuff too much well and partly NPD wants to sell you the report right yeah and also partly it doesn't get clicks if it doesn't have the word Apple in the title as we well know yes do this one weird thing you won't believe and yeah one weird trick doctors you'll never believe what Apple did to this employee oh God speaking of you'll never believe you'll never believe what Google did this one weird trick so instead of very weird well it is kind of weird because instead of spinning off a subsidiary companies they spun off a parent company right Google makes perfect sense Google decided instead of spinning off smaller things and being Google as the parent organization which most companies would do Google spun off a parent company and made Google the subsidiary so the new parent company is called alphabet and basically all of the other things that are Google businesses that are are moonshots or strange Explorations that aren't related to search necessarily got turned into small companies on their own is that right basically yes okay so Larry Larry Paige and Sergey Bren are the head of alphabet now is that right yes and Sundar Pai is the uh the head of Google at this point yes he was formerly running Android after Andy Rubin got kicked out and he was running uh Chrome and Chrome OS after Vic gondra got turned out and then most recently he was running most of the other things that also mattered which is why he's pretty much the CEO yes yeah not this is I mean it doesn't really change much except for you know it allows them to kind of fend off Wall Street critics a little easier well it also here's the Wall Street branch I no we're not going to have the Wall Street R because I'm going to say something much more interesting beautiful also it also lets Larry not be a day-to-day CEO anymore which anyone in the valley who's ever talked to anyone who works at Google will tell you he hates doing right go doesn't so Larry Page no longer has to run a boring essentially a boring company right right those two guys are I don't have a great term for this they're wor they they want to do cool stuff yes right they built Google because they want to do cool stuff Google X exists because they want to do cool stuff now they can go do cool stuff on their own and nobody will say anything to them about it Neil is a little bit right in that it satisfies Wall Street so there's a little more visibility into these various other Financial black holes and it probably has some positive tax implications as many people have have said but at the end of the day it's one solidifies Larry and sergey's control over their um I guess their domain to because it's not a company anymore I mean honestly Google is not at this point it's not a or alphabet sorry it's not a company it's a you know it's it's something Beyond a company which sounds ridiculous but it's true it's solies their it solidifies their control over it they've become omnipotent they've transcended company Hood Dimension it puts a really really competent executive who's well-liked by everyone in charge of the businesses that actually make money yeah and it frees them up to go do what they do best which is Imagine cool stuff and then get it built that's entirely what this is about that's an excellent summary Google is an advertising company yeah everything that makes money from ads is now run by synar right and everything that uh drains money from ads is now run by laran Serge perfect it's brilliant we've been talking a lot about alarm.com these past few weeks and I'm I'm going to go ahead and bring it up again because they are one of our two sponsors this week alarm.com is a technology that is is about really making your home smart with an alarm system that's smarter than traditional alarm systems and what makes it like this is the ability to control all of the different parts of the alarm system and also a thermostat from your phone and your Apple watch they are reliable and secure they use 100% dedicated Cellular Connection into your home so you're not vulnerable to a cut line or a down broadband connection and alarm.com accounts are professionally monitored so a real person at a central monitoring station will help get a emergency response to your home in case of an emergency instead of trying to control all of these different smart things in your house with five or six different apps alarm.com 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demo on their site that you can check out and if you're interested in having a smarter home you can sign up for smart home security this month and receive a free free smart thermostat go to alarm.com inssider to find a dealer that's right for you and actually it's it's pretty cool stuff I I like the idea of the thermostat and the lighting and the garage door opener all being a part of that one system and unifying those things really makes for a good experience yeah it's awesome it's it's one of the kinds of things that I'm looking through looking for out of out of homekit and some of those other things but being able to buy it from a single supplier and getting all the parts to work together right away seems like a good value yeah the stuff needs to be simp simpied definitely do you have any kind of home automation stuff in your house I have a nest thermostat and I have um uh I have hue light bulbs where do you put your hue light bulbs I have uh one in uh I have a couple in the bedroom one in the kitchen one up at the front of the house and I think I have like seven of them total and and I have cool things that I do with it too like I have a movie mode on one that's just one light in the kitchen and so I just tap that mode it puts it on the lowest light settings so if I want to go in there and get a drink and not turn all the lights in the house and stuff while I'm watching a movie um you can do neat stuff like that cool I'm going ask you more about that offline cool so Samsung made an announcement this is Samsung Insider by the way and Samsung announced a 5.7in Galaxy Note 5 and an S6 Edge Plus and they're also launching Samsung pay on the 28th of next month so this is kind of a big thing coming from Samsung right they they've and I say that pun intended right the Galaxy Note 5 it's big so what should we know about these devices it's a pretty obvious effort by Samsung to beat Apple to the punch they did this last year too it was kind of funny they um they announced their new uh note note 4 before Apple held their iPhone event even though uh it launched after Apple's iPhone 6 Plus so hilariously uh Samsung announced like late August and then the product didn't ship till October meanwhile Apple announced in September and shipped in September and it just absolutely killed Samsung sales of their note lineup because people were waiting for Apple fablet so it's pretty transparent what they're doing here they're just trying to get the jump on the iPhone they're actually uh shipping in fewer markets this time around so they can get the launch out more quickly and hopefully not get caught flat footed by Apple but everything that Samsung does is very reactionary to Apple and this is no different now I'm a big fan of Apple pay I like Apple pay a lot and I keep hoping for more financial institutions to get their act together and get on board tell me about Samsung pay should I should I get out of Apple pay should I get up my iPhone go get an S um an what the hell is it it's called a S6 Edge Plus should I get one of those and use Samsung pay if you want to I guess go on tell tell me tell me why it's a bad idea cuz you know if you if you want to I mean no no no it's it's it's not a terrible truth truthfully if we're if we're being honest here the worldwide market for smartphones is Apple versus Samsung nobody else matters for for anybody who's listening to this podcast I clarify that nobody else matters but Apple and Samsung not even we're not even counting Motorola because they're not they're not in the conversation the whole reason Apple pay and Samsung pay exists is the same reason that s music or whatever that crap is and iTunes exist and every other single thing that locks you into one or the other ecosystem Samsung pay is going to be exactly the same as Apple pay with the exception of the pretty cool uh mag what is it what do we actually what is the name for that technology the stuff they got from Lupe magnetic something yeah it's does have a name I don't know if it has a name but it like spoofs the magnetic stripe on your credit card and then wirelessly transmits it to the reader so it works with like Legacy readers it's very cool technology so we'll call it spoofy magnets then yes aside from the spoofy magnet technology Samsung pay Apple pay and Android pay for that matter are all exactly the same damn thing right and and the spoofy Magnetic technology um isn't really going to be that relevant come October November once a lot of most Merchants presumably switch over to Chip and signature uh systems in the US because then swipes will be irrelevant so supposedly Samsung's working out some deals with banks so that it'll still work on those Legacy readers but it's not really going to matter because most of these readers are going to be upgraded to uh also accept NFC transactions because it's just built into the readers now so it's cool technology U much like the coin that's out now very cool technology but doesn't matter that the industry is changing so quickly and it's going to be in a few months yeah the idea is just that the idea is to reach feature parody among the platforms that's that's all it is if you like Android and you like Google Play buy a Galaxy S6 because actually it's a pretty cool phone if you prefer iTunes and Apple pay buy an iPhone well but what about Android pay I was just I was getting there hold hold your hold your drone Neil anyway if you prefer vanilla Android then buy the latest Nexus you know that's it is what it is well but it's just interesting to me that you continue to see this uh feature disparity competing uh products from Samsung and Google you know Android pay is going to be built into nonam Samsung phones but Samsung has their own payment service are they going to be blocking Android pay like how's that going to work well you wouldn't you wouldn't have Android pay presumably if you bought truthfully I actually don't know the answer to this question yeah um but I'm thinking somewhere right now I think you're probably G have the choice of either one I will guess but down the road uh I fully expect Samsung to eventually have their own for Android yeah I I think that's almost inevitable at this point I mean it essentially is a fork of Android in many ways now because it touch whiz and you can't get updates and all that and you get the phone and it comes with all this crap on there the uh you know heart rate monitor that uses the camera on the back the uh uh you know all these S voice apps and s wallet and all this stuff and it's just like and it all duplicates functionality that's already built into Android it just allows them to differentiate so someone who maybe doesn't know so well goes into to a store and ask for another Samsung phone because they're used to that experience yeah TI in is never going to matter so in five years you're either going to have Samsung Droid right or Samsung will just bow out of trying to be a premium manufacturer altogether and become another OEM one of those two things is going to happen this the status quo cannot exist for much long yeah there's too much animosity between Google and and Samsung and Samsung's just terrified as well they should be right that going to be commoditized out of the market right yeah exactly right and Google doesn't like having Samsung having so much power but they're so dependent on each other right now that it's just a it's a SmartPhone cold war going on yeah I mean it's not I mean it's a little bit different but it's not super unlike Microsoft and Nokia right the reason Microsoft bot Nokia is to keep the one and only manufacturer of yeah Windows phones alive yeah and that worked out well yeah and Google and Samsung have a a hateful symbiotic relationship yep well and Google tried buying a car a handset manufacturer in the past and that didn't very much work out for them it worked out extremely well for them well I don't know what you guys are talking about but that was a fantastic deal from a from a product standpoint they from a product standpoint it didn't do it but we don't know that they wanted that products in the first place they they took the advanced projects team they kept that back they sold off the setop ha division to make a ton of their money back they got a great tax deduction from Motorola's losses and then they sold them for $2 billion so if if I'm Larry Page I'm looking at that and saying hey job well done let's make another company and call it alphabet yes but if you look at if you look at it from a different perspective and that they were trying to fix the problems of Android and specifically the power that Samsung had uh and they wanted to start making in-house Nexus phones uh and sell them through carriers and get more control over Android and get people updated to the latest software and kind of streamline the lineup that was not a success but yes from a financial perspective absolutely how good it was for the health of Android I don't know I think Google at this point their Nexus devices started out as showing Android manufacturers what phone setting a benchmark for Android phones right yeah and I think that they may have briefly flirted with the idea of doing it themselves but really what else can you do you know I mean they're work who are they working with this time is HTC building the new Nexus is that the rumor yeah yeah what can motorol do that HTC can't so I think that it was it may have been a little bit of a flirtatious idea hey we'll build Nexus phones ourselves but I think realistically the driver of the deal was exactly what ended up happening they got what they wanted from Motorola and then sold the mere dead carcass on you know and and they may have financially too poorly they may have been afraid of scaring off their Partners too who knows if they they got cold feet because Samsung said they were gonna walk and just completely Fork Android yeah that would have been that that's I think that was the prevailing wisdom at the time right is what the hell are they doing nobody's going to make an Android phone of Google and so by not going down that road they didn't scare off their Partners at least not that not that it really did any good for HTC or any of these other companies that PO HTC yeah poor poor HTC they're way they're way below cash on hand now they czy yeah their name is worthless and it's funny to think too I mean back when Windows mobile was your only option they were the only good Windows mobile phone because they their skinning of Windows mobile actually made it taller and tech people you have a funny definition of tolerable I just want to say cuz well this is before the HTC diamond and stuff like oh my God that was brutal what was the name what's the name of Their Skin Sense is that what it's called yeah well they've used that name for everything there was Sensei on uh on Android yeah there was Sense on that's what I'm saying sense was originally for Windows mobile and it took a garbage product that relied on a stylus and made it somewhat taller and put one layer between garbage and right yeah yeah it was a big Improvement I mean obviously it wasn't that good but you know it was compared to what was on the market and HTC was the doing the best job I think you HTC and Sony to a lesser extent are examples of what happens when Samsung has the Samsung rules mind share yeah right Samsung's Hardware until this most recent Series has not been amazing right the S6 is actually really nice the S6 Edge is also really nice but the S5 and before have just been you know not not exactly living up to standards of engineering Excellence Sony's Experia the Z3 the Z4 amazing phones this the stuff they do with Android fantastic nobody's buying them's losing tons of cash HTC's 1m9 great phone 1 M8 even better the 1m9 is a little bit of a step back the 1 M8 amazing phone nobody bought it Samsung or Sony I'm sorry gets what they deserve because Sony has been trying to lock people into an ecosystem for years in the worst possible ways you know Sony wishes they could be like apple right now so much and they've done it with their proprietary uh card readers and their proprietary everything they deserve everything that happened to them somebody's still butt hurt about memory sticks oh and all the different formats of memory stick and yeah you know what I'm annoyed about I'm still annoyed about IBO being gone what IBO Sony IBO oh the dog yeah uh the New York Times had a a interesting like short film film about the ibow and how they're they're dying like and they had this like older Japanese couple that's like they keep their ibow robot dog around and it's like harder and harder to find replacement parts and it was really like sweet and sad and creepy all at the same time where this family like was like taking their eyebow with them to like on vacation taking photos of it places and like the thing is like slowly dying this little robot dog oh my goodness the robot dog was incredible and they had three models of it and for a while was a robot dog soccer league it was awesome yeah there was a Sony IBO soccer league and you you played soccer with the dogs pushing a ball around on a course it was incredible Sony has fallen so far and I still use a lot of Sony products I'm wearing Sony headphones right now I have a PlayStation 4 PlayStation vaita I have a Sony uh compact digital camera that I absolutely love but they deserve everything that happened to them because they did it to themselves yeah the only Sony product I have or have had in the last five years this uh my RX100 great camera yeah Sony still makes great cameras but I don't own one of those cameras and I I occasionally you know this Neil I I talked to you about you know what camera should I use when I shoot CES and things like that and someday maybe maybe I'll own another Sony product but it's been a long time since I purchased one Sony Alpha n ex cameras are awesome they're really you know what Sony's most profitable division is now paper shredders they make a damn fun paper shredder is that what it is you know if you had said fax machines that would have been a more culturally relevant thing but no it's Insurance really yeah their insurance division props of the rest of the company I I realize we're going deep down the rabbit hole here but um Samsung or I'm I keep saying Samsung Sony is uh uh so such a big name and and they're so prominent and all that that the knockoffs of their products are so good that they even fool Amazon I I years ago bought a um a uh PlayStation 3 controller like a a dual shock controller and it came in the packaging it looked like a Sony thing and everything but some of the fonts and stuff on it looked kind of weird and I was slightly suspicious so I started Googling it and I found out that there are like these knockoff controllers I had a knockoff little microphone adapter for uh for devices that like capture stereo sound it turned out it was a fake one too and they're like sold just regularly on Amazon know does care they don't do anything to vet whether or not a product is counterfeit or not I I had product when I was back manufa ing product I had products that were counterfeited and would show up on Amazon and I bought several of the counterfeits to figure out just how bad the Clones were and some were terrible fonts somewhere they one of the things they do is they totally redraw all of the packaging artwork so even if you've got artwork that's done and they could just copy it they redraw it all so you can see where they've screwed up yeah and it's it's you know the Amazon doesn't care Amazon doesn't nothing it's just amazing to me how good these Sony knockoffs were like any average person would not have known known and Sony's just losing money on that stuff and it's probably hurts their business tremendously because I was almost faked out by it and I do this crap for a living so so one thing that actually happens a lot um in China Sony has moved a lot of their production out of Japan now and as a result they and many other companies who have who have done so have had problem this happens a lot in uh SD cards and yeah SD cards are terrible yeah so what they what happens is PE cards that are fabbed by small manufacturers not I mean foxc this isn't happening at foxcon right but it's happening at smaller contract manufacturers they'll run ghost lines at night like the the supervisors will come in at night and run the same line with worse materials and so what you get are fake products that came off the same production line with the same tooling as the real products but they're worse because they use worse materials like um for memory cards they'll use uh seconded memory chips you know yeah all of the reject rejected yeah all everything that was rejected will be rerun and then the supervisor will take his cut from the guy who's smuggling the out of China and there you go that's amazing where you see the really good quality fakes that's what happens that's crazy yeah they're really high quality and Sam or Sony deserves everything bad that that has happened to them but they don't deserve that that's just terrible so we're talking about large companies like Samsung and we're talking about large companies like Google Now I'm going to talk about a company called soft layer and soft layer is an IBM company company and what they do is they deliver a cloud so if you're working in a uh a startup or if you're working in a business and you need Cloud infrastructure soft La is this IBM company that delivers a cloud infrastructure foundation and it's the foundation of all IBM's Cloud products and services so what they deliver is uh you know you put your business your applications your compute Lo workload they're all different from everyone else's so you need Cloud resources that meet your unique needs some workloads need to scale up and down quickly they benefit from virtual servers and some workloads need the raw power of bare metal or dedicated servers soft lare is the only cloud provider that Provisions bare metal servers and virtual servers from a single seamless platform all on demand all connected to the same API and all connected to a global private Network even if you're not looking for infrastructure you can benefit from soft layer infrastructure when you use a platform or software service for IBM cloud and all of our listeners have the opportunity to get $500 of cloud infrastructure by visiting soft layer.com podcast and that is specifically podcast with a capital P because URLs are hard you can order bare metal servers virtual servers storage networking and Security Services in your choice of 24 data centers around the world and all of those servers and services are connected soft layer unique network of networks separates public private and management traffic so that traffic to and from your Cloud infrastructure travels more efficiently you can automate and control your Cloud infrastructure with a granular API or you can perform any necessary management actions in the easy to use soft layer customer portal visit soft layer.com podcast with a capital P to get started with your $500 off of servers storage Network and security on a cloud built to compete from soft layer so before we move on I Didn't Know soft layer was a sponsor and aside from the uh terrible terrible case sensitive URLs I just want to say soft lay is amazing uh my day job is web and mobile product development and I've been with software for a really long time and it's a great company cool so what would you say is the best experience you've had that should tell someone to go there besides you telling that is good uh soft layer's absolute best feature is their customer support if you are a person if you're a person who's listening to this and cares about the fact that Victor said bare metal servers then you should know that you can escalate your case to a network engineer in five minutes if it comes to that that fast absolutely amazing it's it's as good as Rackspace and if you're in this business and you have been in here for a while you know that as good as Rackspace is really really good wow that is good to hear thank you for that so before we got to call an audible here Victor so we'll call an audible here Shane just sent me the link for this Samsung just announced the gear S2 Smartwatch I'm gonna iMessage it to you Victor oh Lord at the IFA trade show in Berlin and is EA on already that's that's pronounced the IFA trade show in Berlin Neil is pronounced epha well then why is it all capital letters because it's in Berlin anyhow do you want capital letters Neil that's how you get capital letters It's it's epha okay well anyhow um this thing is the most blatant ridiculous ripoff of the Apple watch UI no no no no you know what this looks like this reminds me of the Audi Smartwatch from January CES powered by web OS well I mean the friends thing in the upper left is like the fact that the fact that all the icons are around I can forgive because it's a round watch but the little friends thing that has a bunch of Color Dots yeah the phone dial yeah yeah that's just I mean I'm just looking at this thing and it's like the calendar icon the phone icon I mean I guess there's only so many ways you can do those icons but still like why is the phone icon green just like Apple's the the microphone icon is pretty similar there was actually some research into the cloud icon that came up with the notion that the cloud icon has to be that way for pretty much everyone because there's some mathematical formula to the curves and proportions that says that's how you draw a cloud so pretty much everyone's Cloud icon looks the same no no no this Cloud if you'll notice has sun rays coming out of the upper right which makes it horrifically visually unbalanced is it is it weather or is it what what I assum it's weather yeah it's probably weather yeah it's weather designed by an imbecile and I'm also surprised surprised that there's Nike Plus support uh considering Nike's close relationship with apple yes that is interesting isn't it I would have thought that maybe they wouldn't uh have that well you know looking at it that swoosh is uh not correctly that's not a regulation swoosh it's not that's not but so let me ask you because there's the swoosh with a plus next to it right below an icon of a person running yeah it's probably their native uh fitness app and then a Nike plus uh running app I didn't realize that was a person running I thought it was an arrow pointing down toward a horizon but Apple's Apple's app has someone running to the right Samsungs has someone running to the and Samsungs has like ground in the sky yeah we were talking about knockoffs that reminds me of a t-shirt I saw once with a Nike logo on it there's no way it could be an actual Nike product that said uh lazy but talented I don't think that's I'm absolutely certain that that's a that's a real Nike product think you think that's a real Nike product have you seen the stuff they're doing recently I had a Nik all about working hard earning it all that stuff go into a Nike store yeah and look at some of the shirts they're doing now I just had uh I I used to have a pair of Nike shoes that were run on one of these lunch breaks or after hours kinds of things like we were talking about and they were Nike tops with K Swiss souls and they were from a legitimate Factory but they used some crazy kind of uh fabric that for the swoosh that that wasn't exactly a fabric you'd find on any other kind of Nike but it was it was very clearly legitimate stuff just done with after hours Parts well anyhow I had to interject there because this thing is insane how much of a ripoff it is of the watch UI but before I move on I it is on a round display yes I don't I don't know if Nike is selling the shirt in America but here in Hong Kong they have a shirt that says you know the shirts they're doing that are just giant words with patterns in the back yeah the shirt says scoring never stops it's by far my favorite Nike t-shirt ever they also have one that says all money no bank which is fantastic but no scoring never stops is by far oh basketball is my girlfriend that's another one wow so I'm absolutely certain that lazy but talented is that does not strike me as Nike's brand but maybe I don't know all right well it's it's time to hold our drones because Neil's going to tell us all about the DJI Phantom 3 professional yeah um I we ran the review of this last weekend uh I tested the highend one it's uh 12250 is what it costs and it's awesome wait 1,250 us yes that is actually a competitive price compared to what he's used to cost just wanted to clarify because 1250 could be a lot of things no it sounds it cost actually it's $1,249 this is the highend one um there's a mid-range one that costs $1,000 that just downgrades the camera to 1080p uh the high-end one the professional has 4K and there's an entry level one for $800 that uh that also does 1080p but at 30 frames per second instead of 60 uh I think most people will be happy with the mid-range model um considering most people don't have 4K video cameras uh they both have the same controller and that's really what I enjoyed about this the most it has a mount that is big enough to hold an iPad and it also has a built-in USB port so you can plug in a lightning cable and you don't have to connect to a sh Wi-Fi network anymore so you don't have to mess around with it to uh uh to get the connection and get the live video feed but it gets signals from up to a mile away it's easy to fly um if you're on the market for like a pro suer high-end kind of drone uh that you can fly on its own uh this is still the best one out there at that price range and at that uh level of the market um obviously at over $1,200 this isn't for everybody um you know there are some cheaper options out there like the parrot um and I actually tested a super secret one today that I can't talk about till next week that'll be another lowend option so the Market's growing there at the low end and um I think that's a good thing but if you're looking for something that offers really high quality 4K video footage that's super smooth it looks like it's a crane shot when it's taken off um this thing you just can't go wrong with it it's awesome cool now when you're out there flying drones how do people react uh when I started flying them a few years ago and they weren't as common people would come up to me and start asking me questions they still do not as much people just kind of point and take pictures of it and stuff but like I was flying in Central Park for my review and a family came up to me they were um Italian and they were like what is it did you one of the questions that people always ask me which I think is funny they always ask me if I invented it like if I'm the creator of it or something I got asked that when I was flying it here in Brooklyn Heights a few weeks ago too people always ask me like oh did you make this um when I reviewed an electric skateboard last year too people were stopping me and like did you make this are you are you famous is something ask it's like no I just I just write about this stuff for a living but uh yeah people want to take photos with it um they people are just fascinated by how much does it cost what does it do that kind of stuff um I didn't I haven't been stopped by law enforcement yet which is good um but I'm very conservative about where I fly it I make sure that I'm in a legal area to fly it I make sure that I don't go too high um that I don't let it get out of my line of sight and stuff like that partially because I don't want to lose the thing because it's not mine and they're just sending it to me to review but also uh because you just want to be careful with this kind of stuff I did have one crash a couple years ago and quite frankly if this thing crashed into a person it would do serious damage so um fly safe out there it's a really cool way to get great shots but you don't have to overdo it and and go crazy with it brilliant so you recommend this one yeah I I like I said I think that the mid-range one is probably the best for most consumers if you have no need for 4K video um but the high-end one's awesome too um the lowend one $800 is is still pretty good but I like the upgraded controller and I think it's worth the extra $200 so I would say if you're on the market for a DJI drone um go with the mid-range Phantom 2 Advanced or Phantom 3 Advanced sorry brilliant now ahead of iOS 9 we've been seeing that there's this ad blocker technology in the iOS n betas and it it allows us to use ad blocking in iOS and and strip ads out of web pages and things like this so there's a study and the study says that ad blockers have already cost Publishers $22 billion a year which is kind of crazy since since uh ad blockers haven't been out for iOS 9 that long are they talking about ad blockers for all of web browsers what are they talking about NE yeah they're just talking about ad blockers on desktops and stuff like that but the reason this story is relevant for Apple users is because iOS 9 is going to allow uh for the for people to install thirdparty apps that plug into Safari and can block ads when you're browsing the web on your iPhone or your iPad so presumably the uh availability and the impact of these ad blockers is going to grow when iOS 9 launches the study actually said what did the study say wow I forgot already dude dude I'm sorry that was terrible the study actually said okay the study actually said that the release of iOS 9 would be a game Cher and that they expect once iOS 9 is in wide distribution they expect the percentage of iOS users running AB blockers in Safari to roughly equal the percentag that are using ad blockers in uh mobile Firefox which is about 16% so when you consider that uh mobile Safari which is the the version which is what Safari on iOS is actually called mobile Safari for those of you who don't know nobody on this podcast with me doesn't know that but for the rest of you you have a little information uh mobile Safari accounts for a huge portion of web traffic um even we've seen that at Apple Insider uh huge spike in the number of people visiting from mobile Safari versus desktop Safari uh it's 52% of the mobile browsing market so more than half of people who use the web on a smartphone or a tablet use iOS and mobile Safari and it's 14 this is important it's 14% of all web browsing in general like the desktop laptop smartphone tablet McDonald's kiosk mobile Safari is 14% of the entire internet so if you consider that there's a huge proportion of people who are suddenly not going to be seeing ads anymore then the the CPM Market is not in uh is not in it's gonna be a rough time ahead it's gonna be a rough time ahead yeah for those of you who are yeah you do have to opt into it but the idea is that uh many people because it'll be super easy right it's just download an app and then turn one setting into fari the idea is that the number of people who do that will also do it or the number of people who do it on desktop Saar will be broadly comparable to the number number of people who will do it on mobile Safari but you said that they were comparing it to Firefox right they were saying 17% on Firefox yeah so they think that sounds it's going to be a lot bigger than it's been on Firefox because installing something on what installing stuff on Firefox is always freakishly annoying no I I I think people who use Firefox are enthusiasts I think that putting on it's going to be far easier it'll be larger no I don't think it'll be larger I think most people just won't know or don't care I would bet it would be smaller now for our readership be larger for people that for unfortunately for us since we're in the online publishing business a lot of our readers already use ad blockers and obviously it's not good for business for us um but that's just the reality of it and you know I understand why people do it it makes websites load faster there's a lot of junk JavaScript and everything else it makes websites take forever to load you seen the ads on our website and I don't I don't you know I I don't blame people for doing that it's not good for us I mean we have to be paid in order to do this otherwise you know that's how we keep the lights on right but I I don't think that it will be as high as it is in Firefox because I think people that are using Firefox are already in iast that would be inclined to do those types of things I would not be surprised if the percentage of people on mobile Safari specifically that are installing these after iOS 9 launches is going to be smaller I don't see someone like my parents installing an ad blocker on their iPhone or iPad well no but by sheer by sheer volume even if it is a smaller overall number by sheer volume it's still a Major Impact for those I think it's gonna be a Major Impact yes if you're listening and you don't know ads on the internet most of the time are sold by CPM it's X number of dollarss per thousand ad views uh there are some alternative models but that's primarily where all the money is and if you're getting a million hits a month on your website and only 100 thousand of those people are seeing ads then it's a serious problem and this is why you're seeing a lot of major online Publishers like even recode um are doing sponsored posts now and stuff like that because ad blockers can't block that kind of content so it allows them to get eyeballs on content in a different way so there's going to be a lot of turmoil and a lot of evolution in the online publishing industry For Better or For Worse um and you know there's also a problem of you know not to be patronizing to people that read our website but uh there's also an entitlement issue with people that feel like they don't need to be advertised to or that they deserve the content for free or it's not worth paying for and uh while I understand why some people feel that way um also if you want people to continue writing and producing this content it needs to be a living for them need to get paid to do it so uh you know it's it's a complex issue now some of you are going to misunderstand what Neil just said and I'm going to clarify it we do not take money for posts no we do not do that it doesn't happen but for those we do not take money for posts no and I I had aerating I had a discussion with a reader the other day um who messaged me on our forums and accused me of being paid to run an analyst note and then I explained to him and thank thank y he was very pleasant about it but I explained to him in very explicit detail that we do not get paid to write any articles we do not get paid by any analysts uh we're not paid for any reviews um I don't even own stock in Apple I come from the newspaper business Shane and I don't invoice we don't get paid anyway I I come from the newspaper business I'm a a product of the journalism school at the University of Florida I take ethics very seriously yeah gogators um we we are not that kind of site certainly there are sites out there like that I understand why people think that but uh no but uh we definitely take that kind of stuff very seriously we're not paid R anything any content that you see on Apple Insider is on there solely because myself or one of our team thought that it was interesting enough to write we are not asked to write anything specifically like that but for those of you who hate content marketing and also use an ad blocker you brought this up on yourself yes well should we wrap it up gentan why not okay okay this has been the Apple Insider podcast recording on Thursday August 13th I'm your host Victor marks and with us has been Shane Cole Shane where can people find you on the internet uh I am on Apple Insider and Neil Hughes where can people find you on the internet you can find me on Twitter at this is Neil and you can read my daily musings at Apple Insider and if you can find Neil in puket holding his drone or Shane Cole is wearing a lazy but talented t-shirt we'll tell you all about it next week on the apple and cider podcastyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to episode 29 of our show where we discuss the latest news about Apple iPhone iPad mac and more we're recording on Thursday August 13 2015 I'm Victor marks and with me I've got Neil managing editor of Apple Insider hi Neil hey how's it going and we've also got joining us from the Far Far Side of the World Shane Cole hello welcome back you were on vacation before I was we are so glad you returned how was it uh it was fantastic I highly recommend leaving your job and moving to the beach in Thailand there you have it job recommendations career path not you specifically I mean people who are listening and need advice from me life Pro tips from Shane excellent you know actually it's not a bad idea Thailand huh yes specifically uh puket is nice really uh the little islands around it very fun mhm cool I'm going to have to look into that so if if you find that I'm gone next time around it's because I'm in puket but let's talk instead about what's going on in the world of Apple so we think there's an Apple event coming up on September 9th do we have any kind of announcement about that Neil no there hasn't been an announcement but um Apple traditionally leaks to the same guy John patkowski who used to work for all things digital and then recod and he's now strangely enough at BuzzFeed of all websites but um yeah uh he usually gets the scoop on this early and he's usually right um I'm not so sure about some of the claims he made about the event itself specifically um I mean I think everybody knows there's going to be an iPhone there iPhone 6s um and the Apple TV is a strong possibility but he also suggested that iPads would be there I'm not sold on that rumor because that would mean no October event or an October event that would just be about Max and assuming that L copy is going to come later than iOS 9 as it did last year I would think that Apple would still want to have some sort of October event and iPads would be a good thing to introduce there but that's the rumor as it is right now um new iPhones Apple TV and then maybe iPads all right I I totally think the iPads will be there I mean what are they going to do to the iPads the iPad do you just want a new iPad is that your deal well actually I have to get one because my iPad Air 2 died an unceremonious death just the other day and it had still sitting looking at me taunting me uh because it took me three days to get an appointment at the Apple Store but um the pain no Ian it's a mid it's essentially an iPad midcycle refresh right the iPad Mini is going to get a little bit smaller and get some better internals but it's not going to be a major redesign what else can they do to the iPad iPad Pro well yeah I suppose if there's a hypothetical iPad Pro which I do not believe then I think you're that's a good point but if it's just a new iPad mini and a spec bumped iPad Air guts to run all the cool iOS 9 stuff yeah but that it's just a faster processor right that's the only difference it's an iPad Mini with an A9 so why does that uh earn its own event it's not that it earns its own event it's just a matter of spreading it out because I mean presumably we're going to have a 21.5 inch iMac with retina display soon right that should be on tap the Mac Pro hasn't been updated in a while uh El copy Ton's coming out is that enough to justify an event or would you have iPads headline that event I'm not saying that I think that this year's iPad upgrade is going to be that great especially if there is no mythical iPad Pro it's really just the question of how much do they want to pack into this September event because I feel like the new iPhones explaining Force touch recapping all the iOS 9 features um and then uh Apple TV app store maybe a subscription TV service maybe not that's a lot to have at one event uh you know you do have have watch OS 2 coming later this fall so that could be something for an October event as well and there were also some rumors earlier this year although they kind of died out that maybe Apple was going to introduce some new casing materials for the Apple watch to kind of expand the lineup um and I wouldn't be surprised if you saw some new watch bands or something like that to to just kind of boost holiday sales but I don't know that watch os2 and some new watch bands and some mac stuff is enough to carry the October event I wouldn't be surprised if they'd stick with their traditional strategy and announce new iPads on October well we don't really know and apple as we do know is not afraid of having a long event right the Apple music event with Eddie Q went on for seemingly for was insufferable so they could Jam as much as they want into this thing but I I certainly agree I hope they balance it out as long as they don't bring Drake back'll be fine or Phil Schiller yeah I don't like Schiller either but I would much rather watch Schiller than Drake for an hour but I mean right it seems like they have a lot of stuff that they still need to update that the Mac Mini uh would team overdue that not that anyone cares about it really but the iMac definitely overdue especially in the 21.5 in size there's the long rumored uh retina uh Cinema display Thunderbolt display the Mac Pro is getting very long in the tooth a lot of this is just beholden to Intel and their timing of the chips but there's a lot of stuff that wouldn't fit into a September event so I I think they're going to have an event in October um I just don't know if Max are enough to carry the event I just I think you could see I could easily see a scenario which they decide to bifurcate to two events a year with room for a special spring event right two events a year one mobile one non mobile and be done well it'll be interesting to see what they do with the watch are they going to continue to launch new Hardware in April or are they going to move it to the fall like they did with the iPad because remember the first iPad was announced in January it came out in April of 2010 and then a couple years later they moved after they did the iPad 4 uh two releases in one year they moved it to the fall so I wonder if the Apple watch watch continues to have that spot in April that spring event or are they going to wait like a year and a half or they going to do two Hardware upgrades in a year it'll be interesting to see how that plays out I'm curious to see if it's going to be on a yearly upgrade cycle to begin with truthfully I I wonder if the Apple watch is going to be more akin to the iPod in its sort of middle years where the iPods went two years between refreshes for a while yeah yeah maybe I mean what after you make the watch thinner what what else are you going to do to the watch I mean they got to add GPS they could improve uh battery life they could uh you know I could Envision for example a future model that has good enough battery life that a certain low power watch screen is always on and gets 24 hours of uptime stuff like that little efficiencies I I I think um I I see what you're saying and I can see that happening a few years down the road but I think in the first years of the watch you're going to get new hardware every year just because um I think there's a lot of room for upgrades on the current device I I'm foreseeing with my totally usually incorrect uh Mind's Eye you're prognosticating here right you're yes yes I am uh you didn't know this but I am actually miss Clea I'm I can see a scenario in which we get one really big uh watch version two update you it's thinner it's got better battery life it's got GPS it has you know whatever awesome whizbang God I'm getting old whizbang thing that you can come up with you Whipper Snappers I know and uh which I I think you probably will see sometime in the middle of next year and then after that you know I think it's it's a let's try and get more Market penetration rather than trying to uh uh take over more of the exist let's try to okay let me explain this in a way that actually makes sense let's try to spread the Smartwatch around rather than trying to gain share in an existing Market because right now there for all intents and purposes is no Smartwatch Market it doesn't exist so so that's where I'm going with this yeah I I I I I can agree with you there you know I still think that there are room for upgrades for the next few years though Mikey had a really interesting observation that I hadn't even thought of on uh last week's podcast we were talking about um how you might make the watch an independent device that doesn't require an iPhone to do the basic functions and obviously a big step toward that is native apps um but you know the security element of it he was saying touch ID we were talking about well do you somehow find a way to integrate Touch ID into the screen or something like that and Mikey said put it in the digital Crown button which is the equivalent of the home button on the iPhone and that was really interesting I hadn't thought of that if they could somehow squeeze it into there that would be a good upgrade too um and you know when you look to the future of the watch and as we think about what it could become and stuff you wonder too does Apple go down the road of allowing the watch to connect to like Android phones for example and receive notifications from them could that be on the road map and I'm thinking obviously very well down the road four five six years or something but it would be interesting to see it'll be interesting to see what they do wow I think Apple hopes Android won't even exist you kind of blew my mind there with this idea of the the watch working with Android I just I don't see it at all no I don't see it either not at least in its current form but I mean look five years down the road right that would be like a very different Apple company that would do that that doesn't make sense well it doesn't make sense until you start to think about it in the sense of like the iPod and iTunes on Windows and stuff like that if 5 years down the road Android is still 7 80% of the smartphone market that's a huge number of untapped people that Apple could sell Hardware to and if the iPhone you know doesn't grow to 50% of the market or something and the Apple watch has margins that are comparable to the iPhone let's say that the margins are 45% on the watch or something I don't know I'm just making up numbers right but if they were selling a product with that much margin and that would be a way to get people into the Apple ecosystem I can see them doing it down the road I don't see it happening anytime soon but I could see it for or 6 years down the road it's not outside of the realm of possibility I don't think it will happen but I it's not it's not that crazy of an idea when you start to think about it okay I think you you need to not look at the iPhone market share as Android has 80% of the market right you need to look at the iPhone market share is Apple has 50% of their market right and putting the watch I think that the the various wearable platforms make awesome walled Gardens they're another another Post in the wall right and this is one reason why Android Weare doesn't work great with iOS yet there's absolutely no technical reason that it can't right there's none but it doesn't because it's Android Weare and the apple and the Apple watch will always be the Apple watch it will never be the general purpose Smartwatch it will be I'm absolutely certain that one day there will be an Apple Watch with an LTE radio I'm absolutely certain that there will probably one day be an Apple Watch with some form of biometric authentication although I don't think it'll be a touch ID I think it will be vain ID but creepy no no no vain ID it's totally legitimate it's it's just to think about like I use it to get into Data Centers all the time there's there's a uh there's a heart rate ID based uh payment bracelet being trial in Canada right now actually does have a patent on that actually some question because there it's it's a One Bank Trial it's in Canada only right now now um and you wear their bracelet and that works as the NFC payment well I I just think it's I think it's fun to think about right the iPod used to have what they called the halo effect and then it became the iPhone the iPod sold Macs the iPhone helps to sell Macs people get into the ecosystem and as you bring down those barriers slowly and allow devices that are more independent then it gets people more interested in Apple products and more interested in buying into the ecosystem I mean we're going to get apple music on Android so it's not that crazy if you had told me three years ago that was going to have a music app on Android I would have said you're full of it can we please can we please just get FaceTime on Android and other systems now it was originally supp to be an open spec I know I'm asking for that to actually be followed through on I wish yeah but that's not going to happen I would love to have FaceTime and IM message for those other platforms so that yeah got tied up in patent yeah FaceTime got tied up in patent disputes iMessage is Apple's version of BBM yeah iMessage will never be open I could see FaceTime being opened up but it's not really necessary because you can just use other platforms I don't think FaceTime ever will primarily because they had to rearchitecturing an iPhone to do it where you can merge people in yeah yeah but we used to have I chat AV and we used to be able to pull in people from IAT and from AOL instant messenger and have multiple people in a call max out at four people I believe right on I chat something like that I remember it being more but but four people sounds fine too I I would love to get that back we don't have that anymore yeah I agree it sucks that we're doing all these cool things and we've lost something along the way yeah so September you getting a new iPhone uh I'm I'm actually curious about this uh iPhone 6c um the rumors came out uh this week and they were kind of dead for a while people were saying no iPhone 6c but now it's sounding like maybe Apple will take the iPhone six components and do what they did in 2013 and squeeze them into a uh different design slightly different design in this case a smaller phone that uh would allow it to uh not eat away market share from the high-end model which which would have a different design so if the iPhone 6s and the 6s plus are going to look largely the same as the iPhone 6 and the iPhone 6 Plus respectively then Apple wouldn't want to sell the iPhone 6 for $100 and uh have people look at them and not the difference to just buy the $100 phone because it's cheaper so the the rumor that is going around now is that maybe they'll take the six parts cram them into a 4-in screen much like they did with the iPod touch and give it a color aluminum back and sell that at the $100 price range so I think that could be a pretty compelling device the question becomes how useful is force touch on the 6s and 6s plus um that's going to be a decision for me because I like the smaller form factor but I also like the better camera that I'm presumably going to get on the 6s and force touch could be a big change to how you interact with your phone so I'm it'll it really will depend on how they Implement Force touch and what it brings to the table and how useful that will be to me Shane are you going to get a new phone yes because uh my wife's iPhone Apple Care will be her 5s's Apple Care will be running out so we'll sell it while it still has some warranty left and buy a new one I can't say which one it'll be because she doesn't want a bigger phone she is like Neil all Maybe not as Extreme as Neil is she doesn't want a 2 and a half inch phone Neil is pretty extreme but yes we will be getting some variation of a new iPhone what what do you think our listeners should take away from this you know there there's a phone coming should they wait for it should they not wait for it wait you agree Shane yeah the events is in less than a month yeah I mean why would you buy a phone unless you really had to buy a phone now let's say you wanted to get an iPhone 6 right uh it costs $200 on contract right now in less than a month they're going to announce a phone that is going to cost the same as the current iPhone 6 have a better processor and a better camera Force touch and all these other features so you could get that or you could get a discount iPhone 6 as they clear out inventory of those you know you're going to have more options and better prices so yeah wait the bottom line there this is always the question with Apple products right is should I buy now or should I wait for whatever this is the bottom line we know at this point in Apple's life essentially when their events are going to be right there's going to be WWDC which used to have Hardware but actually hasn't been uh that great lately there's always going to be a fall event with new iPhones there's always going to be a fall event with new iPads there's probably always going to be a fall or spring event with new um desktops and laptops if it's out if it's within like a month of those times just hold off unless you have to buy one otherwise just buy a new damn device there's always going to be a new device there's always going to be something that makes yours feel old you be waiting forever yeah you know it's like people saying oh I'm going to wait till version two of the Apple watch or whatever well now youve just spent a year without the Apple watch so you know you waited and you got the next one but you missed out on all the opportunities and the advantages it was going to give you in the meantimes Define advantages well it makes me stand up once an hour so I won't get a blood clot in my leg so that's an advantage no deep vein thrombosis for Neil no embolisms for Neil awesome cool so tell me about conventional watch sales sliding after the launch of the Apple watch you know we we were that's a thing that's a question for me because you know we it's it's what what sales slid was it sales of big names like Rolex and tago or was it sales of fossil watches what's what's slid here no nobody who's rolling in to buy a Submariner is going to suddenly not do it because there's an Apple Watch available yeah I didn't think so but that's the question is what happened did anything happen well I have't article here that says conventional watch sales slide after Apple watch launch and it's coming from NPD data so what are they looking at they're looking at register sales from jewelry stores or they're looking at registered sales on the Pebble smart watch which of course they're looking at traditional watch sales and they're saying they were down 14% And it's the biggest decline since 2008 here's my reaction post Hawk ero propter Hawk no nobody nobody with the Latin after it therefore because of it do you care to elaborate on that sir for some of our our non-latin Scholars all right after it therefore because of it something happened after something else therefore was caused by the other thing right but that's not always in fact it's hard anybody who's ever watched the west wings to call me out right now because this is a direct quote it's not always true in fact it's hardly ever true right say correlation does not imply causation just because watch sales are falling does not mean they're falling because of the Apple watch watch sales have been falling for quite a while people don't wear watches anymore correct this was this was side in when the Apple watch was coming out this was cited as one of Apple's major obstacles is trying to get people to wear watches again watches aren't cool yeah nobody who was going to buy a Rolex or an AP uh before is suddenly not going to buy them because they're buying an Apple Watch well dude if you don't buy the AP you can buy two Apple watch editions well yes you could I mean on the highend on the high end yes but what what if you were looking at like a $100 timx or something yeah I was going to say next was some people who may have bought fossils or some people are going to buy fossils may have switched to an Apple Watch right but I think that's still a small number of people so we do we think that this NPD report is kind of specious I mean I'm I'm sure they have hard data that shows that watch sales are down but it it could be any reason maybe maybe people are taking a a waitand see approach maybe they're saying I want to uh you know hear from more people about the Apple watch um and then decide what watch I want to buy or something like that maybe not it's hard to say you know it's probably a little from column A a little from column B it's probably did the Apple watch affect traditional watch sales sure is it the reason that they're down so much or the primary reason probably not I'm interested to know how much watch sales fell in 2013 right so you want data from before Apple watch well in advance yeah so that then I can go write an article that says traditional watch sales down x% in Wake of Android Wear launch well but this says it was the the largest decline since 2008 so yeah but could just mean that the other years were 11 and a half per. right no I I agree with you it's you can't read into this stuff too much well and partly NPD wants to sell you the report right yeah and also partly it doesn't get clicks if it doesn't have the word Apple in the title as we well know yes do this one weird thing you won't believe and yeah one weird trick doctors you'll never believe what Apple did to this employee oh God speaking of you'll never believe you'll never believe what Google did this one weird trick so instead of very weird well it is kind of weird because instead of spinning off a subsidiary companies they spun off a parent company right Google makes perfect sense Google decided instead of spinning off smaller things and being Google as the parent organization which most companies would do Google spun off a parent company and made Google the subsidiary so the new parent company is called alphabet and basically all of the other things that are Google businesses that are are moonshots or strange Explorations that aren't related to search necessarily got turned into small companies on their own is that right basically yes okay so Larry Larry Paige and Sergey Bren are the head of alphabet now is that right yes and Sundar Pai is the uh the head of Google at this point yes he was formerly running Android after Andy Rubin got kicked out and he was running uh Chrome and Chrome OS after Vic gondra got turned out and then most recently he was running most of the other things that also mattered which is why he's pretty much the CEO yes yeah not this is I mean it doesn't really change much except for you know it allows them to kind of fend off Wall Street critics a little easier well it also here's the Wall Street branch I no we're not going to have the Wall Street R because I'm going to say something much more interesting beautiful also it also lets Larry not be a day-to-day CEO anymore which anyone in the valley who's ever talked to anyone who works at Google will tell you he hates doing right go doesn't so Larry Page no longer has to run a boring essentially a boring company right right those two guys are I don't have a great term for this they're wor they they want to do cool stuff yes right they built Google because they want to do cool stuff Google X exists because they want to do cool stuff now they can go do cool stuff on their own and nobody will say anything to them about it Neil is a little bit right in that it satisfies Wall Street so there's a little more visibility into these various other Financial black holes and it probably has some positive tax implications as many people have have said but at the end of the day it's one solidifies Larry and sergey's control over their um I guess their domain to because it's not a company anymore I mean honestly Google is not at this point it's not a or alphabet sorry it's not a company it's a you know it's it's something Beyond a company which sounds ridiculous but it's true it's solies their it solidifies their control over it they've become omnipotent they've transcended company Hood Dimension it puts a really really competent executive who's well-liked by everyone in charge of the businesses that actually make money yeah and it frees them up to go do what they do best which is Imagine cool stuff and then get it built that's entirely what this is about that's an excellent summary Google is an advertising company yeah everything that makes money from ads is now run by synar right and everything that uh drains money from ads is now run by laran Serge perfect it's brilliant we've been talking a lot about alarm.com these past few weeks and I'm I'm going to go ahead and bring it up again because they are one of our two sponsors this week alarm.com is a technology that is is about really making your home smart with an alarm system that's smarter than traditional alarm systems and what makes it like this is the ability to control all of the different parts of the alarm system and also a thermostat from your phone and your Apple watch they are reliable and secure they use 100% dedicated Cellular Connection into your home so you're not vulnerable to a cut line or a down broadband connection and alarm.com accounts are professionally monitored so a real person at a central monitoring station will help get a emergency response to your home in case of an emergency instead of trying to control all of these different smart things in your house with five or six different apps alarm.com integrates everything into its top rated mobile apps you can use security thermostat video monitoring lights locks and your garage door all from their one application the systems are professionally installed and maintained by a trusted security expert which means you're not stuck inside all weekend trying to figure out how to get all of the different parts to work together now if you're listening to this program you probably love apple and you love the way that apple innovates and alarm.com is an Invader as well they pioneered the smart home security space they were the first to launch a native app control your home and they launched the first location based automation feature they were the first smart home app for the Apple watch alarm.com is the leading technology provider of smart home security and it's sold through over 5,000 trusted Security Professionals across the United States if you wanted to see what it's like to control your home from your Apple watch alarm.com has a product demo on their site that you can check out and if you're interested in having a smarter home you can sign up for smart home security this month and receive a free free smart thermostat go to alarm.com inssider to find a dealer that's right for you and actually it's it's pretty cool stuff I I like the idea of the thermostat and the lighting and the garage door opener all being a part of that one system and unifying those things really makes for a good experience yeah it's awesome it's it's one of the kinds of things that I'm looking through looking for out of out of homekit and some of those other things but being able to buy it from a single supplier and getting all the parts to work together right away seems like a good value yeah the stuff needs to be simp simpied definitely do you have any kind of home automation stuff in your house I have a nest thermostat and I have um uh I have hue light bulbs where do you put your hue light bulbs I have uh one in uh I have a couple in the bedroom one in the kitchen one up at the front of the house and I think I have like seven of them total and and I have cool things that I do with it too like I have a movie mode on one that's just one light in the kitchen and so I just tap that mode it puts it on the lowest light settings so if I want to go in there and get a drink and not turn all the lights in the house and stuff while I'm watching a movie um you can do neat stuff like that cool I'm going ask you more about that offline cool so Samsung made an announcement this is Samsung Insider by the way and Samsung announced a 5.7in Galaxy Note 5 and an S6 Edge Plus and they're also launching Samsung pay on the 28th of next month so this is kind of a big thing coming from Samsung right they they've and I say that pun intended right the Galaxy Note 5 it's big so what should we know about these devices it's a pretty obvious effort by Samsung to beat Apple to the punch they did this last year too it was kind of funny they um they announced their new uh note note 4 before Apple held their iPhone event even though uh it launched after Apple's iPhone 6 Plus so hilariously uh Samsung announced like late August and then the product didn't ship till October meanwhile Apple announced in September and shipped in September and it just absolutely killed Samsung sales of their note lineup because people were waiting for Apple fablet so it's pretty transparent what they're doing here they're just trying to get the jump on the iPhone they're actually uh shipping in fewer markets this time around so they can get the launch out more quickly and hopefully not get caught flat footed by Apple but everything that Samsung does is very reactionary to Apple and this is no different now I'm a big fan of Apple pay I like Apple pay a lot and I keep hoping for more financial institutions to get their act together and get on board tell me about Samsung pay should I should I get out of Apple pay should I get up my iPhone go get an S um an what the hell is it it's called a S6 Edge Plus should I get one of those and use Samsung pay if you want to I guess go on tell tell me tell me why it's a bad idea cuz you know if you if you want to I mean no no no it's it's it's not a terrible truth truthfully if we're if we're being honest here the worldwide market for smartphones is Apple versus Samsung nobody else matters for for anybody who's listening to this podcast I clarify that nobody else matters but Apple and Samsung not even we're not even counting Motorola because they're not they're not in the conversation the whole reason Apple pay and Samsung pay exists is the same reason that s music or whatever that crap is and iTunes exist and every other single thing that locks you into one or the other ecosystem Samsung pay is going to be exactly the same as Apple pay with the exception of the pretty cool uh mag what is it what do we actually what is the name for that technology the stuff they got from Lupe magnetic something yeah it's does have a name I don't know if it has a name but it like spoofs the magnetic stripe on your credit card and then wirelessly transmits it to the reader so it works with like Legacy readers it's very cool technology so we'll call it spoofy magnets then yes aside from the spoofy magnet technology Samsung pay Apple pay and Android pay for that matter are all exactly the same damn thing right and and the spoofy Magnetic technology um isn't really going to be that relevant come October November once a lot of most Merchants presumably switch over to Chip and signature uh systems in the US because then swipes will be irrelevant so supposedly Samsung's working out some deals with banks so that it'll still work on those Legacy readers but it's not really going to matter because most of these readers are going to be upgraded to uh also accept NFC transactions because it's just built into the readers now so it's cool technology U much like the coin that's out now very cool technology but doesn't matter that the industry is changing so quickly and it's going to be in a few months yeah the idea is just that the idea is to reach feature parody among the platforms that's that's all it is if you like Android and you like Google Play buy a Galaxy S6 because actually it's a pretty cool phone if you prefer iTunes and Apple pay buy an iPhone well but what about Android pay I was just I was getting there hold hold your hold your drone Neil anyway if you prefer vanilla Android then buy the latest Nexus you know that's it is what it is well but it's just interesting to me that you continue to see this uh feature disparity competing uh products from Samsung and Google you know Android pay is going to be built into nonam Samsung phones but Samsung has their own payment service are they going to be blocking Android pay like how's that going to work well you wouldn't you wouldn't have Android pay presumably if you bought truthfully I actually don't know the answer to this question yeah um but I'm thinking somewhere right now I think you're probably G have the choice of either one I will guess but down the road uh I fully expect Samsung to eventually have their own for Android yeah I I think that's almost inevitable at this point I mean it essentially is a fork of Android in many ways now because it touch whiz and you can't get updates and all that and you get the phone and it comes with all this crap on there the uh you know heart rate monitor that uses the camera on the back the uh uh you know all these S voice apps and s wallet and all this stuff and it's just like and it all duplicates functionality that's already built into Android it just allows them to differentiate so someone who maybe doesn't know so well goes into to a store and ask for another Samsung phone because they're used to that experience yeah TI in is never going to matter so in five years you're either going to have Samsung Droid right or Samsung will just bow out of trying to be a premium manufacturer altogether and become another OEM one of those two things is going to happen this the status quo cannot exist for much long yeah there's too much animosity between Google and and Samsung and Samsung's just terrified as well they should be right that going to be commoditized out of the market right yeah exactly right and Google doesn't like having Samsung having so much power but they're so dependent on each other right now that it's just a it's a SmartPhone cold war going on yeah I mean it's not I mean it's a little bit different but it's not super unlike Microsoft and Nokia right the reason Microsoft bot Nokia is to keep the one and only manufacturer of yeah Windows phones alive yeah and that worked out well yeah and Google and Samsung have a a hateful symbiotic relationship yep well and Google tried buying a car a handset manufacturer in the past and that didn't very much work out for them it worked out extremely well for them well I don't know what you guys are talking about but that was a fantastic deal from a from a product standpoint they from a product standpoint it didn't do it but we don't know that they wanted that products in the first place they they took the advanced projects team they kept that back they sold off the setop ha division to make a ton of their money back they got a great tax deduction from Motorola's losses and then they sold them for $2 billion so if if I'm Larry Page I'm looking at that and saying hey job well done let's make another company and call it alphabet yes but if you look at if you look at it from a different perspective and that they were trying to fix the problems of Android and specifically the power that Samsung had uh and they wanted to start making in-house Nexus phones uh and sell them through carriers and get more control over Android and get people updated to the latest software and kind of streamline the lineup that was not a success but yes from a financial perspective absolutely how good it was for the health of Android I don't know I think Google at this point their Nexus devices started out as showing Android manufacturers what phone setting a benchmark for Android phones right yeah and I think that they may have briefly flirted with the idea of doing it themselves but really what else can you do you know I mean they're work who are they working with this time is HTC building the new Nexus is that the rumor yeah yeah what can motorol do that HTC can't so I think that it was it may have been a little bit of a flirtatious idea hey we'll build Nexus phones ourselves but I think realistically the driver of the deal was exactly what ended up happening they got what they wanted from Motorola and then sold the mere dead carcass on you know and and they may have financially too poorly they may have been afraid of scaring off their Partners too who knows if they they got cold feet because Samsung said they were gonna walk and just completely Fork Android yeah that would have been that that's I think that was the prevailing wisdom at the time right is what the hell are they doing nobody's going to make an Android phone of Google and so by not going down that road they didn't scare off their Partners at least not that not that it really did any good for HTC or any of these other companies that PO HTC yeah poor poor HTC they're way they're way below cash on hand now they czy yeah their name is worthless and it's funny to think too I mean back when Windows mobile was your only option they were the only good Windows mobile phone because they their skinning of Windows mobile actually made it taller and tech people you have a funny definition of tolerable I just want to say cuz well this is before the HTC diamond and stuff like oh my God that was brutal what was the name what's the name of Their Skin Sense is that what it's called yeah well they've used that name for everything there was Sensei on uh on Android yeah there was Sense on that's what I'm saying sense was originally for Windows mobile and it took a garbage product that relied on a stylus and made it somewhat taller and put one layer between garbage and right yeah yeah it was a big Improvement I mean obviously it wasn't that good but you know it was compared to what was on the market and HTC was the doing the best job I think you HTC and Sony to a lesser extent are examples of what happens when Samsung has the Samsung rules mind share yeah right Samsung's Hardware until this most recent Series has not been amazing right the S6 is actually really nice the S6 Edge is also really nice but the S5 and before have just been you know not not exactly living up to standards of engineering Excellence Sony's Experia the Z3 the Z4 amazing phones this the stuff they do with Android fantastic nobody's buying them's losing tons of cash HTC's 1m9 great phone 1 M8 even better the 1m9 is a little bit of a step back the 1 M8 amazing phone nobody bought it Samsung or Sony I'm sorry gets what they deserve because Sony has been trying to lock people into an ecosystem for years in the worst possible ways you know Sony wishes they could be like apple right now so much and they've done it with their proprietary uh card readers and their proprietary everything they deserve everything that happened to them somebody's still butt hurt about memory sticks oh and all the different formats of memory stick and yeah you know what I'm annoyed about I'm still annoyed about IBO being gone what IBO Sony IBO oh the dog yeah uh the New York Times had a a interesting like short film film about the ibow and how they're they're dying like and they had this like older Japanese couple that's like they keep their ibow robot dog around and it's like harder and harder to find replacement parts and it was really like sweet and sad and creepy all at the same time where this family like was like taking their eyebow with them to like on vacation taking photos of it places and like the thing is like slowly dying this little robot dog oh my goodness the robot dog was incredible and they had three models of it and for a while was a robot dog soccer league it was awesome yeah there was a Sony IBO soccer league and you you played soccer with the dogs pushing a ball around on a course it was incredible Sony has fallen so far and I still use a lot of Sony products I'm wearing Sony headphones right now I have a PlayStation 4 PlayStation vaita I have a Sony uh compact digital camera that I absolutely love but they deserve everything that happened to them because they did it to themselves yeah the only Sony product I have or have had in the last five years this uh my RX100 great camera yeah Sony still makes great cameras but I don't own one of those cameras and I I occasionally you know this Neil I I talked to you about you know what camera should I use when I shoot CES and things like that and someday maybe maybe I'll own another Sony product but it's been a long time since I purchased one Sony Alpha n ex cameras are awesome they're really you know what Sony's most profitable division is now paper shredders they make a damn fun paper shredder is that what it is you know if you had said fax machines that would have been a more culturally relevant thing but no it's Insurance really yeah their insurance division props of the rest of the company I I realize we're going deep down the rabbit hole here but um Samsung or I'm I keep saying Samsung Sony is uh uh so such a big name and and they're so prominent and all that that the knockoffs of their products are so good that they even fool Amazon I I years ago bought a um a uh PlayStation 3 controller like a a dual shock controller and it came in the packaging it looked like a Sony thing and everything but some of the fonts and stuff on it looked kind of weird and I was slightly suspicious so I started Googling it and I found out that there are like these knockoff controllers I had a knockoff little microphone adapter for uh for devices that like capture stereo sound it turned out it was a fake one too and they're like sold just regularly on Amazon know does care they don't do anything to vet whether or not a product is counterfeit or not I I had product when I was back manufa ing product I had products that were counterfeited and would show up on Amazon and I bought several of the counterfeits to figure out just how bad the Clones were and some were terrible fonts somewhere they one of the things they do is they totally redraw all of the packaging artwork so even if you've got artwork that's done and they could just copy it they redraw it all so you can see where they've screwed up yeah and it's it's you know the Amazon doesn't care Amazon doesn't nothing it's just amazing to me how good these Sony knockoffs were like any average person would not have known known and Sony's just losing money on that stuff and it's probably hurts their business tremendously because I was almost faked out by it and I do this crap for a living so so one thing that actually happens a lot um in China Sony has moved a lot of their production out of Japan now and as a result they and many other companies who have who have done so have had problem this happens a lot in uh SD cards and yeah SD cards are terrible yeah so what they what happens is PE cards that are fabbed by small manufacturers not I mean foxc this isn't happening at foxcon right but it's happening at smaller contract manufacturers they'll run ghost lines at night like the the supervisors will come in at night and run the same line with worse materials and so what you get are fake products that came off the same production line with the same tooling as the real products but they're worse because they use worse materials like um for memory cards they'll use uh seconded memory chips you know yeah all of the reject rejected yeah all everything that was rejected will be rerun and then the supervisor will take his cut from the guy who's smuggling the out of China and there you go that's amazing where you see the really good quality fakes that's what happens that's crazy yeah they're really high quality and Sam or Sony deserves everything bad that that has happened to them but they don't deserve that that's just terrible so we're talking about large companies like Samsung and we're talking about large companies like Google Now I'm going to talk about a company called soft layer and soft layer is an IBM company company and what they do is they deliver a cloud so if you're working in a uh a startup or if you're working in a business and you need Cloud infrastructure soft La is this IBM company that delivers a cloud infrastructure foundation and it's the foundation of all IBM's Cloud products and services so what they deliver is uh you know you put your business your applications your compute Lo workload they're all different from everyone else's so you need Cloud resources that meet your unique needs some workloads need to scale up and down quickly they benefit from virtual servers and some workloads need the raw power of bare metal or dedicated servers soft lare is the only cloud provider that Provisions bare metal servers and virtual servers from a single seamless platform all on demand all connected to the same API and all connected to a global private Network even if you're not looking for infrastructure you can benefit from soft layer infrastructure when you use a platform or software service for IBM cloud and all of our listeners have the opportunity to get $500 of cloud infrastructure by visiting soft layer.com podcast and that is specifically podcast with a capital P because URLs are hard you can order bare metal servers virtual servers storage networking and Security Services in your choice of 24 data centers around the world and all of those servers and services are connected soft layer unique network of networks separates public private and management traffic so that traffic to and from your Cloud infrastructure travels more efficiently you can automate and control your Cloud infrastructure with a granular API or you can perform any necessary management actions in the easy to use soft layer customer portal visit soft layer.com podcast with a capital P to get started with your $500 off of servers storage Network and security on a cloud built to compete from soft layer so before we move on I Didn't Know soft layer was a sponsor and aside from the uh terrible terrible case sensitive URLs I just want to say soft lay is amazing uh my day job is web and mobile product development and I've been with software for a really long time and it's a great company cool so what would you say is the best experience you've had that should tell someone to go there besides you telling that is good uh soft layer's absolute best feature is their customer support if you are a person if you're a person who's listening to this and cares about the fact that Victor said bare metal servers then you should know that you can escalate your case to a network engineer in five minutes if it comes to that that fast absolutely amazing it's it's as good as Rackspace and if you're in this business and you have been in here for a while you know that as good as Rackspace is really really good wow that is good to hear thank you for that so before we got to call an audible here Victor so we'll call an audible here Shane just sent me the link for this Samsung just announced the gear S2 Smartwatch I'm gonna iMessage it to you Victor oh Lord at the IFA trade show in Berlin and is EA on already that's that's pronounced the IFA trade show in Berlin Neil is pronounced epha well then why is it all capital letters because it's in Berlin anyhow do you want capital letters Neil that's how you get capital letters It's it's epha okay well anyhow um this thing is the most blatant ridiculous ripoff of the Apple watch UI no no no no you know what this looks like this reminds me of the Audi Smartwatch from January CES powered by web OS well I mean the friends thing in the upper left is like the fact that the fact that all the icons are around I can forgive because it's a round watch but the little friends thing that has a bunch of Color Dots yeah the phone dial yeah yeah that's just I mean I'm just looking at this thing and it's like the calendar icon the phone icon I mean I guess there's only so many ways you can do those icons but still like why is the phone icon green just like Apple's the the microphone icon is pretty similar there was actually some research into the cloud icon that came up with the notion that the cloud icon has to be that way for pretty much everyone because there's some mathematical formula to the curves and proportions that says that's how you draw a cloud so pretty much everyone's Cloud icon looks the same no no no this Cloud if you'll notice has sun rays coming out of the upper right which makes it horrifically visually unbalanced is it is it weather or is it what what I assum it's weather yeah it's probably weather yeah it's weather designed by an imbecile and I'm also surprised surprised that there's Nike Plus support uh considering Nike's close relationship with apple yes that is interesting isn't it I would have thought that maybe they wouldn't uh have that well you know looking at it that swoosh is uh not correctly that's not a regulation swoosh it's not that's not but so let me ask you because there's the swoosh with a plus next to it right below an icon of a person running yeah it's probably their native uh fitness app and then a Nike plus uh running app I didn't realize that was a person running I thought it was an arrow pointing down toward a horizon but Apple's Apple's app has someone running to the right Samsungs has someone running to the and Samsungs has like ground in the sky yeah we were talking about knockoffs that reminds me of a t-shirt I saw once with a Nike logo on it there's no way it could be an actual Nike product that said uh lazy but talented I don't think that's I'm absolutely certain that that's a that's a real Nike product think you think that's a real Nike product have you seen the stuff they're doing recently I had a Nik all about working hard earning it all that stuff go into a Nike store yeah and look at some of the shirts they're doing now I just had uh I I used to have a pair of Nike shoes that were run on one of these lunch breaks or after hours kinds of things like we were talking about and they were Nike tops with K Swiss souls and they were from a legitimate Factory but they used some crazy kind of uh fabric that for the swoosh that that wasn't exactly a fabric you'd find on any other kind of Nike but it was it was very clearly legitimate stuff just done with after hours Parts well anyhow I had to interject there because this thing is insane how much of a ripoff it is of the watch UI but before I move on I it is on a round display yes I don't I don't know if Nike is selling the shirt in America but here in Hong Kong they have a shirt that says you know the shirts they're doing that are just giant words with patterns in the back yeah the shirt says scoring never stops it's by far my favorite Nike t-shirt ever they also have one that says all money no bank which is fantastic but no scoring never stops is by far oh basketball is my girlfriend that's another one wow so I'm absolutely certain that lazy but talented is that does not strike me as Nike's brand but maybe I don't know all right well it's it's time to hold our drones because Neil's going to tell us all about the DJI Phantom 3 professional yeah um I we ran the review of this last weekend uh I tested the highend one it's uh 12250 is what it costs and it's awesome wait 1,250 us yes that is actually a competitive price compared to what he's used to cost just wanted to clarify because 1250 could be a lot of things no it sounds it cost actually it's $1,249 this is the highend one um there's a mid-range one that costs $1,000 that just downgrades the camera to 1080p uh the high-end one the professional has 4K and there's an entry level one for $800 that uh that also does 1080p but at 30 frames per second instead of 60 uh I think most people will be happy with the mid-range model um considering most people don't have 4K video cameras uh they both have the same controller and that's really what I enjoyed about this the most it has a mount that is big enough to hold an iPad and it also has a built-in USB port so you can plug in a lightning cable and you don't have to connect to a sh Wi-Fi network anymore so you don't have to mess around with it to uh uh to get the connection and get the live video feed but it gets signals from up to a mile away it's easy to fly um if you're on the market for like a pro suer high-end kind of drone uh that you can fly on its own uh this is still the best one out there at that price range and at that uh level of the market um obviously at over $1,200 this isn't for everybody um you know there are some cheaper options out there like the parrot um and I actually tested a super secret one today that I can't talk about till next week that'll be another lowend option so the Market's growing there at the low end and um I think that's a good thing but if you're looking for something that offers really high quality 4K video footage that's super smooth it looks like it's a crane shot when it's taken off um this thing you just can't go wrong with it it's awesome cool now when you're out there flying drones how do people react uh when I started flying them a few years ago and they weren't as common people would come up to me and start asking me questions they still do not as much people just kind of point and take pictures of it and stuff but like I was flying in Central Park for my review and a family came up to me they were um Italian and they were like what is it did you one of the questions that people always ask me which I think is funny they always ask me if I invented it like if I'm the creator of it or something I got asked that when I was flying it here in Brooklyn Heights a few weeks ago too people always ask me like oh did you make this um when I reviewed an electric skateboard last year too people were stopping me and like did you make this are you are you famous is something ask it's like no I just I just write about this stuff for a living but uh yeah people want to take photos with it um they people are just fascinated by how much does it cost what does it do that kind of stuff um I didn't I haven't been stopped by law enforcement yet which is good um but I'm very conservative about where I fly it I make sure that I'm in a legal area to fly it I make sure that I don't go too high um that I don't let it get out of my line of sight and stuff like that partially because I don't want to lose the thing because it's not mine and they're just sending it to me to review but also uh because you just want to be careful with this kind of stuff I did have one crash a couple years ago and quite frankly if this thing crashed into a person it would do serious damage so um fly safe out there it's a really cool way to get great shots but you don't have to overdo it and and go crazy with it brilliant so you recommend this one yeah I I like I said I think that the mid-range one is probably the best for most consumers if you have no need for 4K video um but the high-end one's awesome too um the lowend one $800 is is still pretty good but I like the upgraded controller and I think it's worth the extra $200 so I would say if you're on the market for a DJI drone um go with the mid-range Phantom 2 Advanced or Phantom 3 Advanced sorry brilliant now ahead of iOS 9 we've been seeing that there's this ad blocker technology in the iOS n betas and it it allows us to use ad blocking in iOS and and strip ads out of web pages and things like this so there's a study and the study says that ad blockers have already cost Publishers $22 billion a year which is kind of crazy since since uh ad blockers haven't been out for iOS 9 that long are they talking about ad blockers for all of web browsers what are they talking about NE yeah they're just talking about ad blockers on desktops and stuff like that but the reason this story is relevant for Apple users is because iOS 9 is going to allow uh for the for people to install thirdparty apps that plug into Safari and can block ads when you're browsing the web on your iPhone or your iPad so presumably the uh availability and the impact of these ad blockers is going to grow when iOS 9 launches the study actually said what did the study say wow I forgot already dude dude I'm sorry that was terrible the study actually said okay the study actually said that the release of iOS 9 would be a game Cher and that they expect once iOS 9 is in wide distribution they expect the percentage of iOS users running AB blockers in Safari to roughly equal the percentag that are using ad blockers in uh mobile Firefox which is about 16% so when you consider that uh mobile Safari which is the the version which is what Safari on iOS is actually called mobile Safari for those of you who don't know nobody on this podcast with me doesn't know that but for the rest of you you have a little information uh mobile Safari accounts for a huge portion of web traffic um even we've seen that at Apple Insider uh huge spike in the number of people visiting from mobile Safari versus desktop Safari uh it's 52% of the mobile browsing market so more than half of people who use the web on a smartphone or a tablet use iOS and mobile Safari and it's 14 this is important it's 14% of all web browsing in general like the desktop laptop smartphone tablet McDonald's kiosk mobile Safari is 14% of the entire internet so if you consider that there's a huge proportion of people who are suddenly not going to be seeing ads anymore then the the CPM Market is not in uh is not in it's gonna be a rough time ahead it's gonna be a rough time ahead yeah for those of you who are yeah you do have to opt into it but the idea is that uh many people because it'll be super easy right it's just download an app and then turn one setting into fari the idea is that the number of people who do that will also do it or the number of people who do it on desktop Saar will be broadly comparable to the number number of people who will do it on mobile Safari but you said that they were comparing it to Firefox right they were saying 17% on Firefox yeah so they think that sounds it's going to be a lot bigger than it's been on Firefox because installing something on what installing stuff on Firefox is always freakishly annoying no I I I think people who use Firefox are enthusiasts I think that putting on it's going to be far easier it'll be larger no I don't think it'll be larger I think most people just won't know or don't care I would bet it would be smaller now for our readership be larger for people that for unfortunately for us since we're in the online publishing business a lot of our readers already use ad blockers and obviously it's not good for business for us um but that's just the reality of it and you know I understand why people do it it makes websites load faster there's a lot of junk JavaScript and everything else it makes websites take forever to load you seen the ads on our website and I don't I don't you know I I don't blame people for doing that it's not good for us I mean we have to be paid in order to do this otherwise you know that's how we keep the lights on right but I I don't think that it will be as high as it is in Firefox because I think people that are using Firefox are already in iast that would be inclined to do those types of things I would not be surprised if the percentage of people on mobile Safari specifically that are installing these after iOS 9 launches is going to be smaller I don't see someone like my parents installing an ad blocker on their iPhone or iPad well no but by sheer by sheer volume even if it is a smaller overall number by sheer volume it's still a Major Impact for those I think it's gonna be a Major Impact yes if you're listening and you don't know ads on the internet most of the time are sold by CPM it's X number of dollarss per thousand ad views uh there are some alternative models but that's primarily where all the money is and if you're getting a million hits a month on your website and only 100 thousand of those people are seeing ads then it's a serious problem and this is why you're seeing a lot of major online Publishers like even recode um are doing sponsored posts now and stuff like that because ad blockers can't block that kind of content so it allows them to get eyeballs on content in a different way so there's going to be a lot of turmoil and a lot of evolution in the online publishing industry For Better or For Worse um and you know there's also a problem of you know not to be patronizing to people that read our website but uh there's also an entitlement issue with people that feel like they don't need to be advertised to or that they deserve the content for free or it's not worth paying for and uh while I understand why some people feel that way um also if you want people to continue writing and producing this content it needs to be a living for them need to get paid to do it so uh you know it's it's a complex issue now some of you are going to misunderstand what Neil just said and I'm going to clarify it we do not take money for posts no we do not do that it doesn't happen but for those we do not take money for posts no and I I had aerating I had a discussion with a reader the other day um who messaged me on our forums and accused me of being paid to run an analyst note and then I explained to him and thank thank y he was very pleasant about it but I explained to him in very explicit detail that we do not get paid to write any articles we do not get paid by any analysts uh we're not paid for any reviews um I don't even own stock in Apple I come from the newspaper business Shane and I don't invoice we don't get paid anyway I I come from the newspaper business I'm a a product of the journalism school at the University of Florida I take ethics very seriously yeah gogators um we we are not that kind of site certainly there are sites out there like that I understand why people think that but uh no but uh we definitely take that kind of stuff very seriously we're not paid R anything any content that you see on Apple Insider is on there solely because myself or one of our team thought that it was interesting enough to write we are not asked to write anything specifically like that but for those of you who hate content marketing and also use an ad blocker you brought this up on yourself yes well should we wrap it up gentan why not okay okay this has been the Apple Insider podcast recording on Thursday August 13th I'm your host Victor marks and with us has been Shane Cole Shane where can people find you on the internet uh I am on Apple Insider and Neil Hughes where can people find you on the internet you can find me on Twitter at this is Neil and you can read my daily musings at Apple Insider and if you can find Neil in puket holding his drone or Shane Cole is wearing a lazy but talented t-shirt we'll tell you all about it next week on the apple and cider podcast\n"