Net Neutrality: A Complex Issue

Net neutrality is a topic that has been debated by many experts and users alike. According to Peter, it's a choice between distribution costs and targeted all consumers fund network costs. He wonders why not target people specifically, but then explains that the concept of net neutrality is not as simple as it sounds.

For instance, Major League Baseball came out saying that they don't want these Fast Lanes. Gruber linked to it, stating that it would not be good for them because they're a major streamer who uses video streaming services like Netflix. MLB streams a lot of video, and the idea that carriers can block their content and charge more is believed to end up costing them more money, which in turn will cost end users more money.

This concept has also been linked to the theory that there's an "Uber Predator" out there that's hard to see but does its job extremely well. This theory suggests that 5% of users use untold amounts of resources and if they could be controlled, it would make it better for everybody else. Peter pokes fun at this idea, calling it the Illuminati.

Regarding Apple's products, Peter discusses the possibility of live updated weather icons on iPhones. He wonders why Apple can't make accurate weather forecasts, citing examples such as their calendar functionality and clock app. He believes that if they can make these tasks work, they should be able to make accurate weather forecasts as well. However, he doesn't know what mechanism is in place to store and display weather images.

Peter also mentions the availability of live tiles on Windows phones, which seems to be a feature that iPhones are missing. He jokingly suggests that he can find out if his phone is telling him that it's cold outside by just looking outside and then bringing his frozen head back inside. This lighthearted moment breaks up the seriousness of the topic.

Investing in Betterment

For listeners interested in investing, Peter recommends betterment.com. The company offers automated investment management services, which aim to make intelligent investing accessible to everyone, regardless of their account balance. To celebrate their offer, betterment.com is providing six months of free automated investment management for new users. This service allows investors to invest intelligently without having to constantly monitor the market or make decisions based on emotions.

The Betterment Podcast

For those who can't listen to Peter's podcast live, it's available every Thursday at 11 am Pacific Time and 2 pm Eastern Time on iTunes and RSS. Listeners can also ask questions and interact with Peter and his team in the chat room during the live broadcast. The chat room is a great place for users to correct mistakes, ask questions, and engage with the hosts.

Conclusion

Peter thanks his listeners for tuning in to this episode of the iMore show. He invites them to visit betterment.com for more information on automated investment management services and to take advantage of their six-month free promotion. Before ending, Peter wishes his audience a good weekend and looks forward to seeing them next week.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe imore show is brought to you by betterment the automated investment service built on the idea that investing intelligently should be intuitive it should be automated and accessible to everyone whether you have $10,000 or $10 million over 36,000 customers are already using betterments userfriendly web and smartphone applications to improve their returns save time and money and minimize their taxes for limited time listeners of this show can get up to six months of free automated investment management by visiting betterment.com imore that's betterment /im okay it is July 31 2014 I'm Renee Richie and right now we're going to talk about new Macbook Pro bumps we're going to talk about the best apps for so many things and we're going to talk about a bunch of other stuff you know why because this is the imore show joining me as always we have the managing editor of imore and the chief Kaiju in charge Peter Cohen how are you Peter I am good how are you Renee I'm doing you're looking fabulous today Peter if I might say oh thank you very much and also joining us and you're looking very uh you're looking very birthday yourself Renee oh thank you yeah I'm getting older when year closer to death I told my actually last year on my birthday my God kids uh came up to me and they're they were three and seven at the time and they said we don't want you to have more birthdays because it means you're closer to dead wow that's somebody's got to stop reading them nche before their bedtime or something that's awful from the mouth of babes that voice you heard also joining us is the how-to editor and cheap app whiz at imore Ali casmo how are you Ali I am fantastic looks like you're getting a lot of sun in the midwest is that normal for about two more months take advantage of it as long as I can and then it turns into Canada for a couple months are you at your fancy new standing desk I am I am too I I love this standing thing it feels like I'm not falling down yeah I'm I'm liking it so far I'm only up to like I'm standing probably about half the day that's better than none yeah so all right so Ally unfortunately can't join us for the whole show so we're going to frontload um a lot of what she's here to talk about but we're going to try and get allly on more often because she writes about all these fantastic apps every week instead of me and Peter looking at each other going huh I don't know uh I don't know we're get Ali to talk about them a little bit so Ally one of the things you wrote about recently was the best invoicing apps for iPhone and how to get paperless yeah so the collection of apps that we did for best invoicing apps I really looked at Freelancers and small businesses for that mainly because of the fact that those are the people that benefit the most from those apps they may not need to necessarily pay for a subscription fee or you know pay a a company to do invoicing for them so there's a a lot of options and no one really wants to sit at the their desk at the end of the day to you know punch out a bunch of invoices so we looked at a bunch of apps that basically focus on small business and help them figure out how to invoice the most efficiently um some of those are also time trackers which kind of lets it double up on usefulness so any what were your favorites um I really like there's a new one I reviewed it recently 2 hours um that's a time tracker and an invoicing app in one technically it's more of a time tracker than it is an invoicing app but it does invoice so for people that maybe don't have you know a 100 clients but only have a few clients that they work with closely or they have to track time in order to be build that would probably be my pick um just because it's very easy to use it works as a series of timers so basically if you forget to stop something it'll pester you every once in a while to say hey did you mean to leave this timer running do you need to start a timer because you haven't so it makes it a little a little harder to forget to track your time and he was actually that's Jeremy olon and his company tap and he was actually on iterate last week talking about it and it took him a couple years to get that done but I think he got it done really well yeah I would agree just the way the color coding is done and the way that the app is laid out it makes it really easy for you to see where you're spending your time at um it can also help anyone who's self-employed maybe use their time a little bit better and become a little bit more efficient with time management because you can see how your days are plotted out and if you have maybe a a bulk of the day every day that you're not spending time on something you can kind of figure out where you can take new projects on and where you can't so I G to get all my invoices from you in this app now Ally maybe Peter you took a look at the best Mac apps for July how did how did July do for the Mac App Store H July was kind of a lean month for the Mac App Store to be honest with you um you know the the um summer months are often sort of the doldrum time uh for for Mac developers and you know for Apple in general it seems when it comes to the Mac although you know we've seen a little bit of movement but having said that uh there were still some very exciting apps out there that are definitely worth checking out um if you do any kind of web design for example or if you do any kind of um uh user experience or user interface work um in in uh application design you need to check out xcope you can go to xcope app.com that's xco or XS ca.com um and check out this new app from the Icon Factory it's a new version of an app that that's been around for a while but it is an incredibly detailed tool for taking a look at um uh images on your screen and understanding exactly how they relate to each other so if you're a web designer doing responsive web design for example and you want to make sure all the page elements that you're working with are working well together or if you need to see very detailed um character information for type that you're typography that you're working with xcope can help you it's a fantastic app it puts up um you know it helps you do pixel specific placement it helps you uh do uh very precise measurements in pixels and other units um it's it's uh it's very cool stuff um also I love that app before you go on I I use that app all the time especially when I was a web developer I used it constantly I still have it running all the time gon mayia and uh Craig um I'm BL kenberry yeah hackenberry fantastic job fellow Kaiju by the way yeah he's like nine feet tall they they did a fantastic job they knocked this one out of the park yes for sure uh another app that I really loved um that came out this well technically it didn't come out this month it came out in late June but forgive me we we haven't really looked at it too closely so I thought thought this would be a good opportunity to showcase it was launch bar now um if if you're excited about what's coming in os10 Yos uh with the the revised Spotlight that sort of does everything your One-Stop shop for for accessing all kinds of neat data launch bar uh will fill that Gap in fact it works the same way it pops up a search field um in the center of your screen um just like uh uh Spotlight on yosity does uh but it goes much much further than that you can uh drill down and get re really detailed information about the um uh the documents or the files that you're trying to access you can you can do nice Transformations with them like you can open them in different apps um you can send them you can you know you can embed uh embed them in in different documents and so on it is an incredibly useful productivity tool um that's definitely worth uh um worth checking out you can download ask about that Peter because I use Spotlight okay and I know I lose massive nerd points by just using Spotlight you know Seth Clifford deer bone have told me I have to use Alfred some people tell me I have to use um this app some people tell me I have to use Quicksilver do you have any advice on that you know it's like shoes right or or even gloves for that matter um or buying a new mouse everyone's taste in these things is different based on how they work uh based on how they're comfortable for working um I really get a kick out a launch bar I like the way that it works it's very simple it's very intuitive for me it's got a lot of features that uh that that that I can use um uh what I want to and other stuff that I just never touch but the features are there and uh you know it can do all sorts of really cool stuff um launch bar 6 specifically was a completely red redesigned user interface so if you've tried launch bar before and you've not liked it now might be a good time but my recommendation with all these things is to download them all and find out which one if any of them really suit your workflow you may find that Spotlight is perfectly acceptable or that you don't need um an additional productivity tool to help you get access to stuff because you're really comfortable working the way that you are but if you if you are the nice thing is that apps like launch bar exists so you can tweak your user interface a little bit and really be as productive as you can on your Mac allly do you use any of these I don't I'm kind of really OCD about my Macs like being organized so I pretty much pathetic and know where everything is so the only time I use Spotlight just because it's quick and if I'm trying to get to an application fast but since I pretty much know where my stuff is I don't really see I have no idea I have I use I don't use Spotlight this is interesting Peter see I don't I use command space just to launch apps but I don't like the way that Spotlight in Maverick's on down actually finds files for me so then I use finder and I use the search window in finder because I you know that to me makes more sense but when I'm on yosity now it works so much better that I think I'm going to swap from using the search field and finder to using yosity Spotlight I think that a lot of sorry sorry Ally I'm the opposite I don't like Spotlight I think the thing that irks me with Spotlight in Yos is that it's smack in the middle of the screen I love that see I don't because sometimes I need to see like I use the calculator feature of Spotlight all the time and when it's smack in the middle of the screen I can't see the numbers I'm trying to add or you know I just feel like sometimes it's in the way that's fair you know like I said it it's uh uh and and change is hard you know going from uh from from from one user uh interface to another can can be hard and as far as launch board's concerned some people are going to like it some people are going to hate it but I think it's worth checking out because it's a free download anyway you don't have to pay anything to to uh to take a look at it you can download it straight from the website and if you like it it's 29 bucks and I think syracusa likes it which is as good a recommendation as any there you go uh and it was I think I interrupted you Peter was there one more on your list um uh there were a couple um kappo 3.1 uh significant update if you are a fan of Super Ultra Mega groovy um uh musicians tool for slowing down songs uh yeah seriously without um changing the pitch of the songs so you can slow them down and hear them um it can automatically extract cords now um and uh it it also has iCloud sync so if you've got um uh Capo touch for your iPad um you can you have a continuous workflow from IOS to uh uh to the mac and then there's flowboard which is a really cool alternative to things like um PowerPoint or a keynote for that matter that help you build interactive presentations that you can send to anyone presentations can contain text they can contain video they can contain audio um it's a real reimagining of the way that presentations work done it a very intuitive way um for people who are accustomed to um uh you know sort of clicking and experiencing whatever it is that they're they're working with um and it's just it's a it's a really neat application we have um I counted flowboard as one of my favorite presentation apps for iOS a while back so I think the version the Mac version of flowboard doesn't that sync with iOS too because it's been out for iOS for a while it sure does and yes it has I forgot to mention that alley flowboard if you're already familiar with flowboard from IOS this is flowboard but with a Mac experience and you know they they haven't just ported the iOS version to the Mac they've actually added some really cool features you get some stuff like shape creation tools uh a full color wheel with opacity control as well uh Rich tech support very important for uh Mac users who uh who want to be able to do typ of graphical stuff um uh support for Vimeo um sorry you can include PDF documents PDF documents yes um I don't think any other presentation software includes and uh of course a full support for uh Mac keyboard shortcuts so you can keep your fingers on the keyboard where they belong instead of clicking on things so our our friend Simon Sage did the um iOS version of this best iPhone and iPad apps for July and I'll just throw some of them out there to get your opinion on it right at the top he has Modern Combat 5 blackout and you talked about that last Peter it is it is what Game Loft does best it really is you know I love them rump them Game Loft is a very talented game developer and they don't have an original idea in their heads but they are better at cloning games than just about anybody out there for the max Bas I think I mean at doing licensed properties too like they'll get an Iron Man game out you know when the movie comes out and stuff like that exactly yeah I know and they're very good at what they do so you know it's it's always worth checking their stuff out I think there was always Fates there was also Fates forever Magic 2015 Civilization Revolution 2 if your first Riz Revolution sorry didn't stick right exactly uh The Wolf Among Us Now The Wolf Among Us I have to take uh a moment to talk about because it is such a cool game uh first of all Telltale Games um is a really cool game developer they make um uh graphical adventure games um uh designed for um just about every platform imaginable you can download them on the Mac you can download them on PC uh you can get them through Steam you can't get them through the Mac App Store you can download them directly from ttail games website uh the App Store of course for uh for iOS Android everything everything gets these games these days but they do these really really cool games that are part Choose Your Own Adventure and part like uh you kind of button Masher sort of games uh but they're they're beautifully detailed they're very well acted um and they are a continuation if you played games you know adventure games whether you go back to the old uh text based games of like you know zorc like infocom games and uh even king's quest you know the Sierra online stuff that was really popular in the 80s and 90s this is sort of the ultimate example of what that genre has turned into in a way um they're really beautiful games The Wolf Among Us um in particular is really neat it's actually based off of a um I don't think it's a too well known uh uh graphic novel series called um fables if I remember correctly and the idea basically is that um is that that that's Bill Willingham Series right that that is yeah exactly yeah I love I love Bill Willingham he's awesome you love everything that's graphic novel and comic book related you take that but he did Elementals Peter okay that was seminal yeah no this is true so um uh the idea is that you're Big B wolf you're actually the big bad wolf in human form um and I'm not going to get into to all of them but The Wolf Among Us is in many ways even better than The Walking Dead which they have done as a series of games as well one one of the things that makes Telltale Games kind of cool is that they release their stuff um episodically so um if you want you can pay up front and just download the new episodes as they come out uh but The Wolf Among Us recently wrapped its uh it it's it's it's its current season so uh you've got a complete game to play now um just very cool stuff uh check it out Telltale Game neat neat neat stuff now I'm going to check it out just because of Bill Willingham see see all that difference that makes to me Peter there you go so Ally for the appside we have npr1 and overcast which both want to sort of change the way that we listen to stuff um I have only had a chance to briefly look at overcast I haven't really had a chance to really listen to many podcasts lately minus I don't think you do though do you listen to a lot of podcasts um occasionally I do but not on a regular ongoing basis no so I was on the beta for overcast I've been using it for a long time and I I really like it it is limited there's no video for example and I don't think he's going to support video it's iPhone only right now though there is a web client which is really good we had Marco on debug this week you can listen to guy English and myself talk to him for three hours if and you can do it in overcast if you want to um it's podcasts are remember Ally we went through phases like everybody made a Twitter app and then everybody made a weather app and now everybody's making a podcast app yeah yeah it's like the it's like the I think Gruber calls it the the design playground and I think it's true but if you're interested in the way that Marco listens to podcasts it's good to it's good to check the one thing because I'm in Canada I haven't had a chance to play with was npr1 I don't know if you've tried it but I wonder like I know you use a lot of streaming services and does the idea of streaming talk radio appeal to you as much as music no I don't really listen to any kind of talk radio so I don't think that would have had an appeal I haven't looked at that have you texed to look at it at all Peter not at all I am with Ali I am not a talk radio person this is like one of those neelon surveys where everyone checks off they watch PBS but we're all really watching TMZ yeah I listen to a lot of NPR but that doesn't count as talk radio does it oh I don't know what is NPR see I'm Canadian I might not know what the hell I'm talking about uh this like CBC Radio yeah probably yeah okay all right so with with this app at least you know you can take all their audio programming um and podcasts and there's curated selections and it looks like you can choose your own adventure when it comes to your NPR listening so if you have listened to it tell us what you think um because I'm interested to know because this is you know Apple just bought um I forget the name now but Apple just bought a streaming um sway or something like that swell swell yeah so Apple bought swell which does and you this is hard for me because like I woke up in the morning and I heard that Apple bought uh you know streaming they bought the Pandora of X and to me because I don't have Pandora I just thought they meant they had streaming stuff oh Apple's got streaming books and streaming talk radio now but they what they really meant was the recommendation engines that you know Pandora apparently guys correct me if I'm wrong is really good at figuring out the like what kind of music to put together Pandora does a pretty decent job of that um Pandora has a much smaller Library by far than streaming services like Spotify and Ario those typically are in the 20 million range I think Pandora I'm pretty sure they only have a library of less than like a million songs I know it's under two million but they're really really good at curation so and I think the only company that probably comes close to that is Beats they were really really good at curation and it didn't take as long for you for it to kind of figure out your likes and tastes I guess and you know Peter this might be the problem now is that there is so much content available that we just don't know what to listen to and the theory behind this is it could recommend better book almost I guess like Netflix does with they're recommended and they famously had a contest I think where you could win a million dollars by helping them make a better recommendation engine that being able to help people find what to listen to next is becoming more important well I think that yeah I and I think that that content stretches across multiple um uh media forms you know it's not just music it's understanding what to watch on television it's understanding what apps to download for your iOS devices um and this is why curation is something that we hear about over and over again and why why you know folks like us uh try to do roundups of what we think are the best apps because there is just it's like drinking from a fire hose constantly you know you're you're constantly barraged uh with new content all the time how do you make sense of it I don't Peter I mean I read imore I try allly tells me what to get yeah and that's true I mean especially you know apple or whoever can make 80 billion app collections but you know it is it's like drinking from a fire hose and you know I experience that sometimes with best apps those collections take a while to put together because they're so much and same thing goes for audio it's you know what streaming service do you buy they're pretty much level footed now I mean you can like basically you're drilling down to little technical things like audio quality um you know Spotify might have different like exclusive deals with certain artists like Metallica or whatever so and it's it's coming down to where they're they're fighting over those little nitty-gritty details to to sway users so it's it's becoming more of a what do I choose type scenario yeah uh and I don't have I don't have a good answer that I know some people I don't even use playlists I mean I I generally I declare bankruptcy in everything all the time so I go to Twitter there's a thousand messages I read down from the top until I get as far as I can go then I give up when I come to my email I have a thousand messages waiting I read down as far as I can go and I give up when I have new podcast downloaded or new stuff waiting I I go as far as I go and then I Mark everything as red I know that's horrible I know I'm abdicating my Humanity in a way by doing that but it just feels like there's too much of everything all the time there is no yeah there's no question Renee that we are inundated constantly and it's I you know I think think that um as as developers come up with more clever expert systems for managing this it's it's an important thing and I mean that that was one of the reasons why Apple acquired beats music right you know because they said you know right up front that they thought that beats did curation better than um uh better than anyone and I mean okay I iTunes is absent of so much functionality that we kind of and iTunes radio is absent of so much functionality that we demand and sort of expect out of our our streaming services but beats music is a very different experience and that's because there are humans that are actually putting together the playlists and figuring out uh what you should listen to so I you know I think that that that element cannot be um cannot be underrated Ally I know you've been going back and forth with your war with Cate with curated uh Services what are you using now I have all of them you gave up and got all of them mainly for I mean mainly for imore purposes just so I can actually evaluate and you know know what each one is offering but I guess if I think about which ones I'm using the most these days right now I'm kind of on a Spotify kick I don't really know why just since our app got overhauled I think I was kind of messing with that and you know getting a good perspective on that and I get stuck where I'll you know start making small playlists or favoriting things in one app and then I stick to that for a while and then when I'm tired of that I'll switch to a different service and but uh if I just want to listen into something and just like be able to hit play and not have to look for anything I typically open Beats or Pandora all right so moving us along we have a new uh series of columns we've been doing a lot for accessibility and inclusivity lately and you can go to imore.com SL accessibility if you want to see all of it um and a couple things struck me here one was we did a debug a while ago on the Swift language and we had Natalia berus uh join us she makes uh kudu kitchen which is a great app for cooking with kids and she did a talk at WWDC about uh helping people with Autism and designing for accessibility but the word she uses is inclusivity because it for her it goes beyond people with visual impairments or audio impairments or physical impairments and really you know making it more accessible for anyone whether it's kids or grandparents getting their first computer ever or you know basically anyone who needs help getting into computers and we decided to start a series of columns because you know and Ally and I and Peter have talked about this before even when something is silly not silly but you know something like best apps we don't know everything like best apps for Pilots I don't know you know best apps for elevator mechanics I have no idea you know so there's going to be times where we have to go beyond ourselves and I've written quite a bit about accessibility you know Peter's spoken about it with the Mac alli's talked about it in context of apps before but we wanted to get people who that that was their expertise so we have the first one up already and that's by Steven Aquino really well-known iOS accessibility writer and he wrote about something I hadn't even considered and that's hardware and he called it the often overlooked aspect of accessibility and how big a difference it can mean for him and he has some motor um um motor function challenges just going from an iPad 4 to an iPad Air because it was so much lighter and he wanted the bigger screen but it was it was a struggle for him to use it he could never use it for very long and the iPad Air is just light enough now that he can use it for long periods of time and that was pretty much transformative for him and we're going to keep doing these series we're going to have several different contributors St is going to keep contributing we'll have a few other guests but I'm really happy that we're doing this because we've spoken about this before Apple does a lot of the heavy lifting for free like if you just use a UI kit you get the audio stuff the motor stuff that's you know those stuff's all pretty much just works the visual stuff the speak selection and voice over that works if you use UI kit but if you make a custom interface it goes away and often developers do that because they want their apps to stand out but then they don't have the resources or time to go back and read accessibility but it makes such a big difference to so many lives and I was I don't know how you feel al Ally but I'm starting to check every app now that we look at as sort of just like a basic layer of accessibility yeah I kind of feel the same way um I have a lot of friends that are teachers and some of them have dealt with disabled or um taught special education and they use iPads a lot and I think it's interesting sometimes to hear about the different experiences and you know the different apps that they use and I kind of uh have been doing the same thing just because right now I've kind of been focusing on you know tips and howtos and how to better use accessibility features and I kind of catch myself doing that like seeing what apps support what and you know how it differs when you get into App Store experiences and different apps that are third party where does that end you know yeah the one the couple complaints we have gotten is more on the Mac s here and that surprised me because you always hear about the Mac being really good for this but people seem to think that it's not doing as good a job for the speak selection and um voiceover stuff like they would like it to talk to them even more well there's certainly certainly some uh uh something for Apple to listen to there then well I think it's the I think the biggest Pro not problem but the biggest Omission from the Mac right now is still Siri because going back to the WWDC commercial where they had the blind woman basically using her phone just by using Siri and the Mac can talk to you can do all that stuff but we still don't have that um that that sort of discuss discuss ability we don't we don't have that contextually aware sequential inference engine on the Mac and I think that would make a big difference to people yeah and people I think have seen Siri ever since its introduction as something that would be very natural progression on the Mac so they're getting frustrated with apple and not understanding why it's not happening faster move faster Apple please we want Siri everywhere seriously Apple come on we ran a poll uh we're trying to we're trying to be good about our weekly polls again uh so last week we asked you how much you use the iPad you know whether you use it as much as Tim Cook uh did this week we're asking about screen size because the screen size of the iPhone 6 is really interesting there's rumors that there's a 4.7 and a 5.5 inch iPhone there's been part leaks for the 4.7 but not the 5.5 and you generally think there'd be equal part you know part leaks for both if both were coming and soon uh there haven't been part leaks for a new 4in iPhone but you know maybe they're going to keep the existing iPhone 5 s design or internals or bump up the iPhone 5C and keep a 4in device so we asked the imore readers who are all incredibly good-looking and incredibly smart um what they wanted and the results were really really interesting so uh 29.798591 by 55.3 2 percentage of imore readers by far the majority um you know it's big but it's still phone uh 12.98 so 13% of people want a 4-in phone don't change a thing and 1.91 almost a whopping two% want Apple to go back to the 3.5 inch phone does that surprise you Ally no where do you fall on this line I don't know if we've asked you this before 4.7 happy medium Motorola uh Moto X size yeah I mean if I look at my phone now and like a I don't remember how big the S5 is but this is is too big for me I hit things on accident when I try to you know I I feel like this is too big it's oversteps its bounds a little bit so I don't think that I would be comfortable using a phone even this size on a regular basis um I would get I would probably buy another 4inch phone before I would buy a phoneless size when I see the I think it's five or 5.1 the Galaxy S4 Peter whenever I see an iPhone next to it it looks to me like a Tonton ready to be hollowed out as a case I know seriously or you know like some futuris surfboard you know that you step on and magic things happen kind of like uh Alex in Back to the F or whatever his name was in Back to the Future Marty Alex from Alex P Keaton yeah Alex P Keaton from Back to the Future too right um Opie cutting ham exactly uh yeah I mean I I would like a larger phone as well um I'll leave it to you guys because you guys live in this stuff a lot more than I do to try to figure out what the right size is but uh the bottom line is the current form factor of the iPhone is too small for me I um uh maybe it's just because I have you know fat pudgy kiju fingers but I um like to be able I I you know I I find the the the the ability to navigate the iPad the full-sized iPad the iPad Mini a lot easier uh than I do the iPhone and I find myself stumbling a lot and where it comes it where where it annoys me the most or where it slows me down the most is doing things like texting you know which I feel like I should be able to do a lot faster than I can and it's just because know I I just can't hit the screen the the the areas on the screen that I need to with the amount of exactitude uh that I want to be able to do and I know that a larger screen is going to give me a little bit more wiggle R there so I would easier for you on the iPad it's certainly well it's a different if it's a completely different user experience on the iPad because on the iPhone you know I can I can go dual thumb but on the iPad it's hunting pack I use two thumbs I split the keyboard on my iPad okay and I type that way with two thumbs but I still I cannot type even either way even if I have you know my iPad laying flat with the full keyboard I cannot type as fast in my iPad as I can on my phone interesting how do you type on your phone allly uh two thumbs okay see on my iPhone I usually use one thumb like I just sort of hold it in one hand that the video and I just start tapping away like that I very rarely use two thumbs but I've seen Jesse Char who's uh now at Pacific Helm but she was at Apple and I think she won fastest typer at Apple and she used two thumbs with the keyboard clicks on because said the keyboard clicks made her type faster the other one who's an absolute like two Thum Jedi Jedi is Mark Gman at 9o5 Mac I've seen that guy just tear off immense passages of text on his phone freaks me out I saw Brian Lamb do the same thing it was scary kids today Bri of a kid no but on the iPad I don't split the keyboard but I turn it portrait mode and the iPad Air especially the iPad Mini are so thin now that in portrait I can just thumb type like I could on a large phone I think I will say this much and this is my biggest peeve with the iPad and makes and I know it's not an apple thing it's a developer thing the Facebook app is a is a prime example if you use split keyboard Developers for some reason do not think about that and sometimes that covers the keyboard if that makes sense or like what you're typing you can't see it slack does it uh the app we use um I can't stand that when you split the keyboard and all of sudden you can't see the text input field because it's covered I don't know if that's a iOS issue or if it's a developer issue I'm thinking it's a developer issue but that is incredibly irritating when you said Facebook and Incredibly irritating I thought you were going to mention the fact that they're forcing all of us out of facebook.app and into messenger.app to send IMS yeah I kind of see a pattern with that style happening it just happened with four square and swarm which I still don't necessarily understand the I don't know and Instagram and bolt I mean we have we have to have a separate picture messaging app for Instagram too like Facebook and slingshot yeah I prefer the all-in-one bundle method but I don't I don't know there has to be some incentive or I I don't know I don't understand slingshot was uh I like the way John grber um classified it he said slingshot is one of the apps that is built in and undeletable on the phone you get given in hell yeah because the whole premise of it was like if allly sent me a message I couldn't see her message until I sent her one back which was supposed to promote engagement but I promoted rage because I'm supposed to answer Ally before I've seen what she says which means all I can do is send her nonsense and then she can't see my reply then I can reply to her but she's got the nonsense to deal with first and she can't see it so she has to send nonsense back it is it is almost like just holding me down and punching me in the in the head what's going to happen there is people are going to do this and they're just going to cover the camera and snap a photo and that's you know how many uh you know blank pictures are probably sent over slingshot I that I would say for me personally my opinion if there was an award for the most useless pointless dumb app of the year it would go to slingshot I think it's fighting Yo and now it's fighting bolt for that title yeah I haven't really looked into too much about what bolt is but it's Instagram instant basically which they already had direct messages built in but now it's just there basically their Snapchat clone oh okay and I don't think Peter I don't think you use Instagram like I see Allie's dog pictures almost all the time but I haven't seen anything from you in a long time yeah exactly you know Instagram and Pinterest are just two um visually oriented social networks that I just have never caught to for some reason you know I have no idea why but I've just never gotten I I they've never hook themselves into my brain what is wrong with me it has to be something wrong with you Peter it can't be something wrong with them exactly no it's got to be I mean why all the cool kids are doing it why not me so speaking of cameras Ally and I knocked out uh mostly ali uh I just helped a little bit the the ultimate camera guide for the iPhone and I'm really psyched about this because um I know Apple said that message is the messages is the most used app on iOS but you got to think the camera is not far behind and people take so many pictures and lyanna a couple years ago did a photography guide for us but that was more you know the rule of thirds and negative space and Shadow and light and all these concepts are making your photos better but I like about this Aly is that you actually took the time to show people how to use everything that's built into that app yeah um it's amazing sometimes how many questions I've gotten whether it's friends or family or whoever I think people that are techsavvy they they take the time to poke around those apps and figure out what they can do with them but most of the mainstream public they're just going to launch it and hit the shutter button they don't really or they don't understand what HDR is or what autofocus and auto exposure are or you know how they can make photos better by taking them better so I mean and apple doesn't give us a tremendous amount of tools which will probably change in the future with iOS 8 and Beyond but they give you enough tools that you know you can produce some pretty good images if you know what you're doing with the camera app I think that's absolutely true and and again you know some people think this is too easy but I had a a family friend who worked as a computer engineer for many years and he said you know it's so frustrating I have to sync all my photos off my iPhone before I can share them with anybody and I just tapped the share button and showed them all the options you know email messages he's like I never even saw that and again this is a computer engineer so it only you can only imagine how many people aren't using this stuff to its full capacity I'm really happy about that I'm also actually I don't know how I feel about this Peter but Apple press released those Haswell bumps that you've been talking about yeah exactly so uh beginning of last week Intel um uh released uh updated um Haswell chips and apple wasted no time getting them into production in fact Apple already had them at the point where intel was announcing that they were available um it the updates are pretty mild basically the um uh the the uh the the the retina MacBook Pros get a 200 megahertz bump but Apple's also dropped the price of um the the highend 15 inch by $100 and it's doubled the ram um on the entry level model so you're you're now getting eight gigs of RAM instead of four um on the 13 and you're getting 16 gigs of RAM across the board on the 15s um so you know this makes it a little bit easier to uh to uh uh to Bear if you were thinking about getting a retina MacBook Pro the other thing that they did that's probably worthy of notice that they dropped 100 bucks off of the price of uh the standard 13-inch MacBook that venerable machine which is now 2 years old um so if you you know still want a a conventional hard drive 500 gbyte hard drive uh four gigs of RAM you're now only paying $199 instead of $199 um so there was some nice reordering um in uh in MacBook uh land or MacBook Pro land this month and this pretty much aligns the MacBook Pro uh with what Apple did in April when it refreshed uh the MacBook Air and dropped its price as well it uh refresh that with a 100 MHz processor update these updates aren't going to generate huge performance improvements compared to what you could get last week or last month um and they're not going to uh provide huge additional power savings or anything this is a very mild modest bump I think the the price realignment and the ram realignment uh were probably the most the more noteworthy um uh uh things to take away from this it tells me that apple is probably a ways away uh from adopting Broadwell the next generation of Intel uh microprocessor on any kind of uh widespread level probably because Intel is still miles away from Shipping the damn thing well that's the problem Intel is holding up production until it's got all of its issues uh worked out and Intel is months behind schedule on that so um yeah you know it just it isn't a great uh season if you were expecting amazing new things out of apple on the Macintosh line it doesn't look like yeah so I know that you have imore.com m- buers dguide where you go through all this Peter but if someone was looking for a MacBook Pro last week and waited it sounds like they'll get more for their money like it won't be a big speed boost but they'll get more RAM where they'll get a slightly lower price uh do you does this change your your buying advice at all there any particular models that you think people should be more interested in well I if I were buying a new machine today I would look very closely at the 13-inch MacBook uh MacBook Pro with with re a display I think that uh it's a great value uh I think that that the um default Ram configuration makes it a better value uh than it was before it's a very usable machine the only thing that I might tweak would be the storage capacity on it because um you know the ssds Apple's still very parsimonious when it comes to actual onboard storage for these things uh having said that um you know it really depends on what your needs are specifically I know that the md101 the standard 13-inch macb Pro continues to be really popular especially with families who are buying them for school kids whether they're in uh uh K through 12 or whether they're in college because it's a lot of space it's a decent machine uh they're great for you know doing research and homework and other assignments they've got internal super drives um so you and they're the only Macintosh the only Mac not just the only MacBook but the only Mac left with an internal superdrive um and uh some people really like that because maybe they want to watch DVD movies that they borrow from the library or rent from Redbox uh or maybe they want to listen to music that's still on audio that they haven't gotten around to RI I mean still on audio CD that they haven't gotten around ripping yet there are a lot of different reasons why people like these or just for doing backups and archival and you know being able to easily give somebody a disc that you've burned that contains content on it a lot of different reasons burning their mixtape for their sweetie yeah exactly I I personally have a MacBook Pro uh 15inch 15inch retin a display that I absolutely love but it's an edge case you know the people who need those are are not everyone else you know they're content creators they're people who are doing uh video uh editing on their machines or um uh in my cases I use it for you know my primary game system when I'm testing out new games um so uh you know that's that's not everybody and it's an expensive machine it starts at two grand so um I think the the MacBook Pro uh 13-inch the MacBook Pro Retina display is probably uh where I would focus the bulk of my attention for a lot of people right now right awesome we're going to take a quick break and I am going to tell you about one of our fantastic sponsors for today as soon as I get it loaded up man this is embarrassing uh here we go and that is one month so one month specifically one month HTML is a course that will teach you how to make a website you know I learned by buying a book and reading that book and looking at other websites and it was a painful process and yes I managed to eventually get a website up but it took me a long time and I I missed a lot of things along the way so what one month HTML is for is for anyone who wants to make a website anyone who wants to get started it's the easiest way to learn to code it's 30 minutes a day for 30 days you'll build an actual website starting from day one and you'll 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the value um of the Apple ecosystem and and it's it touched off it goes off occasionally but this time it was because of Jared Sinclair's post about his RSS reader unread and how after spending almost a year building it it didn't make uh that much money and I know Mac apps are priced typically a lot higher than iOS apps and they've been more resilient when it comes to races to the bottom but also it's a much smaller market so I think if we look on average it's still a challenge like Gus Mueller has written about this Brent Simmons has written about this a lot of really intelligent people you and I have talked about this and it it's I don't think there's any easy Solutions I still think that this is a trary problem I think you know Apple doesn't do enough to and I don't know if they really can but I think it would behoove them to take action to try to increase the value of their platform because I still have those nightmares of ET cartridges being buried in the desert which is what happens when a platform loses all value Marco Arman thinks for example they should get rid of top list that top list cater to the exactly the wrong sort of metrics uh but there's also developers who did raise to the bottom and there's also us as consumers just said we're not going to pay you know $1 $5 $10 whatever for Quality apps and it's a problem that is complex and I I don't know if there's any easy answers yeah you know in un Red's case I think that that part of the issue as well is is understanding is is well first of all is marketing you know if you if you adopt a build it they will come approach to uh uh uh to to marketing the app that you've just spent a year or two developing you're making a big mistake You' got to be able to educate uh consumers on what your product does why it's better than the competition and and what makes it so special and you figure out ways to get it to them um that's all part of a coherent marketing plan and that has got to be part of any developers uh process you know I have talked to so many developers over the years who uh you know have said what's your marketing plan for this after you've got it released when they will tell me about a cool beta product or a cool project that's that's that's in early development they're like you know well we're going to release a few videos on YouTube and you know we're hoping it'll go viral and okay well that's great you know why don't you throw some pennies into the local wishing well while you're at it you know you've got to have a solid marketing plan behind your products but if it's a niche product you know and you miss and you underestimate or you know Mis understand what the um the actual um uh market for this product is then youve put a lot of time and a lot of effort into something that just not a lot of people are going to be interested in looking at I think that has a lot to do with one of the reasons why unred has has undersold compared to what his initial expectations were I don't think that people care that much anymore about rss-based uh products you know I think that um that's unfortunate but I think it's geeky I think it's nichy and I just don't think that that that's where people want to invest their time in figuring stuff out but I could be totally off base there you know I think it's a good point though like one of one of the the points I I agree with most strongly and I've given talks about this to local um iOS and Mac User groups is the importance of marketing if you're not considering it alongside development and design from the beginning of your project then you it's the same thing as not having good code or not having a good interface it is it is incredibly harmful um and I don't know what Jared's marketing model is I know he did get a lot of good coverage but I think a couple things are that worth breaking out is that there was a gold rush when the App Store started and there were all these at least urban legends and some people did make a lot of money whether it was by selling their app or selling their app to a company that gave them a lot of money for it there was good money to be made but that's because it was brand new and there was a lot of opportunity there and now if it's not at saturation there's at least many good candidates in every category which means it's harder to get attention and it's harder to fill needs that aren't being filled uh already and I forget who linked to it but someone also linked to an article that said that you know it's when in the days of software came in boxes people had a box to hold on to and psychologically that created value for them and in the iOS age you know selling a digital copy it's the same thing that Hollywood has a problem with people don't put value in digital copies so it Trends down to a value of zero and you've got to work really hard to convince people that the value of your software isn't zero and that has to be because it makes them money like or saves them money which is what Enterprise software does and what professional software does like a timekeeper you know anything that's good we use productivity tools napkin saves me tons of money because it take me much longer to do that in photosho or you have to make you have to Delight people which is why games make money because yeah you know it's software but it's a great experience and great experiences can be valuable to people but I don't know if it hurts Apple in the long run that there that you know if there's if people can't make money they might stop making the kind of apps that you and I grew up with on the Mac or or on the early days of iOS that's very very true and you know it's a constantly evolving and changing Market uh and and there's no question the consumer tastes have changed I remember uh you know one of the one of the most um I think cogent things that I think uh have been said about um the the race to the bottom as you put it Renee was Merlin man hot dog ladies on um on on Twitter uh once said that about um you know zero price apps it's a good thing that my Viking Grill came with all these free Stakes you know it the the the phone that you're buying you people don't think twice about but you know they put up a fuss over spending a few dollars for an application yet think nothing about going out and spending four bucks for a uh a a star a Starbucks drink with uh some whipped cream on top of it you know you you've really gota uh I I think that that fundamentally there's a there's a problem here with user perception of value um and and I'm not sure what can be done about that I'm not sure if it's going to demand uh a re-education uh for consumers or just a recalibration of the market Al together I know that apple is just as concerned about the race to the bottom as many developers are uh and understand that it impacts not only how developers can make money but ultimately uh what the impact of the market is you know if if if people still get the or continue to get the association that uh everything that they're downloading is going to be Laden with ads or um is going to demand some kind of handout in the form of inapp purchases um I think that ultimately it's going to to hurt the user experience a lot on iOS and I hope that that's not the direction that we're headed for the fact is some developers price their products fairly based on what their own development costs are what they expect to recoup they stick to their guns a company that does that very well um uh and has done it very well for many years now is the Omni group you know the Omni group doesn't compromise on price you know they say our product is worth $30 our product is worth $40 and uh they stick to it um but it requires a lot of fortitude and it requires you know it requires a business plan that I don't think a lot of developers um are willing to commit to one of the ideas uh and Arman spoke about this a couple times already what he believes that the market for paid apps paid upfront apps is is over because people are just risk adverse there's too many apps even if you wanted to sample the 10 best games or the 10 best apps in a category you'd have to spend at least the very least $10 if they were all paid and probably a lot more and you and a lot of those wouldn't be to your liking uh and there's really no way of sampling apps outside that so what he did with overcast was make it free but it has a $5 inapp purchase that unlocks nominal new features but it's also a way of just saying hey thank you for this app and I know there's been some stuff written about you know upfront might be a hard time to get money from people because they don't know you very well but if you build a relationship with them you can pick moments when they're really into it or really having fun or really appreciate it and then get you know buy me a beer or tip me you know for making this app and that can be more effective but that doesn't seem to me like reliable the like the reliable kind of income that you need to feed a family you know put food on the table and not only continue developing that app but plan future apps going forward I can't fix this all Peter no no I I we should just blow it up and start over do you think Mac apps are going to continue to hold their value do you think people just are traditionally used to paying more for computer apps no because I've seen the the the same downward Trend already happen in the Mac App Store now the Mac App Store isn't or is newer than um the the the IOS app store uh but the same Trend happened almost right away and right now the Mac App Store is and I I wrote an a edit uh well not an editorial about this I well yes I did write an editorial about this uh sort of complaining about it that there's a lot of crapware flooding the Mac App Store right now these half-ass ports of iOS apps uh that are either ad supported or uh you know free for download but have some kind of inapp purchase mechanism uh to net the developers money and they're just poor user experiences all the way through it's trivially easy for somebody to make to build a Mac app out of their IOS app code uh which is why developers are doing it but developers in many cases are not taking the time to actually make a good Mac app or a good Mac app experience that is where I hope the the Mac App Store is not headed in any kind of widespread way but I do see it happening Ark sign in our chat room says while developers may not be doing their part by having a marketing plan Apple may need to develop built-in Marketing System to defend themselves in the future future from Google's AdWords web ads which I guess is AdSense um and Amazon's affiliate link system now Apple does have an affiliate system I don't know I don't know monetarily how well it compares to Amazon's but it is very effective the old joke with Amazon is that you would You' write a book put it up for sale on Amazon and then use your affiliate link and you'd make more money off the affiliate link than you would for the book the book sale because Amazon was so stingy with how much they willing to share with Publishers and authors uh and how much publish would share with authors so I don't know how that compares but um Apple bought um an ad company and they made I ads I forget the name of the company that they bought it was don't remember it right now maybe someone in the chat room remembers but they had I add and I I don't get any of them in Canada pet I don't know if you see them in the US but I I ad has not been anything like the success that Google's even admob I think enjoys no not at all uh you know I think that uh Apple's been trying to figure out how to get uh um uh I I ads working uh pretty much from the start ever since uh I ads was the thing yeah I don't think it I don't think it aligns with Apple's business Apple's business has not traditionally been the advertising model I don't think they deeply understand it and I actually don't think they like it I think that they did it because they felt like they had to but I don't think their heart was ever in it uh they would much rather just sell you something take take your money and have the end of it of that relationship they don't really like it when you have to constantly sort of do things like advertising or data leveraging or attention hoarding or stuff like that yeah they certainly don't and you know it's it's so clear when Apple is working with a technology or a product that they don't really like all right we're going to take another short break so I can tell you about betterment um what if managing your Investment Portfolio was as easy as using your favorite iPhone app it is now with betterment the most popular automated investment service with over 36,000 customers betterment has seamlessly integrated technology and years of investment exper expertise into one elegant application that will transform the way that you invest betterman's experience and interface are Ador are adored 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for supporting them all right so Peter um something wonderful has happened something I've been waiting a long time for what's that Renee your your weekly column yes NSFW NSFW I'm not going to ask you what it stands for because you know I I have you know I don't I don't want to be damaged by the possible consequences but you got you got off to a killer start thank you very much yeah I was uh I I warned people up front when uh NSFW started that it may or may not be Tech related every week uh it's my new Saturday column uh but it's just an excuse for me to to to rant about stuff that uh uh that is on my mind last week it was uh what the hell did I write about beta being careful with it the oity beta being careful with it that's right you know I saw all these people complaining about the oity public beta saying you know this is a really bad idea to put in people's hands and look you know I work at a retail store on the weekends an Apple retail store on the weekends I support people uh who uh bring their machines in and all sorts of weird damage so I understand you know why if you're an IT manager or if you're an Apple Genius you're Avers to seeing Apple throughout the Yim public beta to uh a million people which purportedly they have done uh but look these this million people it's not a general release a million people though they're PE they're all self- selecting they're people who actually went out and applied to download uh the the the app so they understand consciously what they're getting into and the bottom line is it's a public beta uh my feeling is that if Mavericks had had a public beta in some way that was similar to what Apple's doing with yosd it probably wouldn't have been the pig that Mavericks was when it was first released you know it took until 1094 for Mavericks to level out to some sort of usability that didn't want me to to tear out my non-existent hair so um you know I'm I'm I'm I'm happy that Apple's public beta betaing uh yosim to help avoid those problems in the future I am too we're going to look forward to another one of your columns this weekend I believe thank you yes I'll have it up for you on Saturday awesome so I wrote I spent way too much time talking about iOS security over the last week and that is because of the backdoor stories and they were really controversial for a number of reasons most of which didn't have to anything to do with the actual um security issues involved it was things like people disagreeing about the term back door some people said that it inscribes malice of intent and some people said it describes merely a portal of entry the way a door to a house does and I don't want to rehash any of that because I think that when the story becomes a story and not the actual subject of the story we all end up losing so what I wanted to do instead was to help people because I think you know when you Empower people and inform them it is much better than scaring them so I put together a how to better protect your iPhone and iPad against back doors and other security and privacy risk risks articles and it covers you can find it at imore.com security that's our security Hub and it does everything from telling you how to use a four-digit passcode or touch ID to how to have a strong alpha numeric password um it tells you how to secure your iPhone iPad and Mac against um pairing record theft which is the Crux of this new exploit basically how to remove them if you if you think you might have them how to restore your device if you want to make sure it's absolutely wiped out um also how to secure your Mac using Apple's configurator utility so it doesn't allow your iPhone to pair with other devices anymore and you know Peter wrote up file Val 2 and firmware passwords if you want those but also how to minimize data leaking on your on your lock screen because convenience and security are always at war with each other when you make something more convenient it's often less secure when you make it more secure it's often less convenient so for example on an iPhone or iPad you can access Siri and passbook and Control Center and notification center and emergency calling which is actually required by law all through the lock screen which is a data leak I mean people can turn off turn off your wi-fi turn off airplane mode they can read your the the bits of your messages uh they can tell Siri to do things without using your passcode that's absolutely a security and privacy problem but if you turn them off then you have to access your phone it's less convenient no glanceable data on your lock screen so what I wanted to do is not really tell people you know how they should live their lives but if you do want to make your iPhone more secure and more private all the information is there it'll be in the show notes but just go go to imore.com security okay time for a couple questions um gagen wants to know what will be the price of Apple's iPhone 6 uh they haven't announced one yet based on prior history Apple has since I think the iPhone 3G Peter if I'm not mistaken always put out the new iPhone at $199 for the lowest model I think that's correct I believe that is yes so I I would think that Apple will have a $199 iPhone uh it's always possible they do go up if it's a substantially more expensive device to make uh it's unlikely they'll go down because that's an established price point but you know to quote Peter um you know past is not always prologue but Apple has been doing this for a long time and so far they stuck with 199 so don't don't it's not a guarantee by any measure but I would not be surprised at least to start yeah one for you Peter with T-Mobile announcing Nationwide voice over LTE today do you think the iPhone 5s and possibly the iPhone 5 will get the feature activated in iOS 8 or will they hold back as a lure for people to buy new iPhone models no I think it'll be uh a um uh my expectation is that it will be a marketing L decision that it'll be something that we might get in a new iPhone but I believe I may be wrong on this but I do think that the iPhone 5 and Up can't support uh voice over LTE isn't that right Renee I or is Alli gone no Allie's gone but I don't recall offand um voice over LTE for people who aren't familiar with it it's just completely packet based so instead of your phone calls going over a separate voice channel the way they do now they they just turn into bits it's like voice over IP like making a Skype call and everything goes over data and because there's data radios and all these devices and LTE data radio specifically uh theoretically I imagine that it's possible but you never know for example it might not be battery efficient with the way it's currently set up or there might be limitations in the chips that Apple was using so I think Apple tries to push down as much as they can but apple is also not willing to do a bad experience like where other companies might say ah it works okay we'll just give it to everybody Apple won't do that because you know they they want 30 frames per second video recording not 15 frames they want 30 frames per second and they're going to want fairly Rock socket Rod Rock Solid volty and if they don't get it they'll probably hold it off for the models that can do it yeah and this is part of the problem especially when you're dealing with a carrier Network like T-Mobile I mean it's great that T-Mobile's doing volti in the areas that it can do but for example in the area that I live in Southeastern Massachusetts I'm on edge all the freaking time it drives me crazy you know I feel lucky when I'm actually in LTE range and believe me I do use it like I was at a Starbucks the other day that was stuck with AT&T Wi-Fi and I actually could get I think like three bands of three maybe four bands of L te um on my phone I've got a T-Mobile uh phone and uh I was rocking it I was very happy with that but you know T-Mobile's coverage is still squirly now T-Mobile did announce today that they're starting to get 700 megahertz out into the world they're starting to deploy 700 megahertz um so maybe that'll help them increase their LTE footprint in a significant way um in areas that are underserved like mine in the months to come but H you know six and one half dozen of the other right now as interested as I am in volti uh in In fairness to T-Mobile their discreet uh voice um uh uh quality is actually really good compared to other services I've used like Verizon and and and AT&T so I I don't really care if the voices is Packet based or if it's a separate radio channel I'm you know as as long as I've got coverage that's the important thing and T-Mobile still has to work uh to improve its footprint before does anything else yeah and that was Matt Wilkins and it sadly reminds me of some of the the dumbassery that we saw this week in media uh there was an article that did some research into this idea that Apple I forget who wrote the original dumbass article that Apple purposely sabotages old phones to force people to upgrade to new ones and they did some psychological testing to see what it was and it turns out that when there's a new upgrade cycle uh you know people upgrade their phone and they're paying closer attention to it and it's easier for them to see someone else with a newer device performing better and suddenly feel that their device is perceptively slower or a new operating system is is more demanding so it feels perceptively slower but that got reported as Apple was actually doing this nonsense again and this is one of those areas where apple is damned if they do damned if they don't and I'm sure we talked about this before but this idea that Apple holds off features for the high-end they build new features into the high-end um and they build new chipsets like the A7 chipset can do things that the A6 can't so those phones don't get those features like touch ID and like the uh Burst Mode photography and things like that but so here's Apple's choice they cannot push down iOS 8 to the iPhone 4S and and older devices and then people go Apple's deliberately withholding the software so I have to upgrade or they can push it down and do the best job they can to make older more constrained lower speed lower RAM lower resource uh devices run it and then people say oh it doesn't run as well as on the new ones Apple's trying to make my life miserable so I buy the new phone um and it's you know that if you want to have that opinion it's very hard to empirically argue with you because we'd have to run large scale testing with numerous devices over many years to see what the actual results are but another way of thinking is that apple is providing software I know you've written about this in the past Peter that it might be nice for he to be able to opt out but then they opt out of security updates too which could leave them vulnerable and then Apple gets Smash in the media for not securing people's iPhones so I it's a tricky problem and I think with no good answer yeah exactly all right we had a couple more questions we'll just finish these off quickly um to the twitters so am I the only one who doesn't like the tiny left and right arrows in Safari for iPad Mini any chance of a late change in ios8 uh probably I mean you never know probably not I'd have to check and see which ones you're referring to here's a good one for you Peter is net neutrality a choice between um distribution costs and targeted all consumers fund Network costs whether high or low users why not Target people specifically I don't really know what that means okay so all everybody well I mean Major League Baseball came out saying that they don't want these Fast Lanes I think that was really interesting Gruber linked to it saying that it would not be good for them because they're a major streamer turns out like Netflix MLB streams a lot of of video and the idea that carriers can block their more search charge and they believe will end up costing them more money and by costing them more money will charge end up costing end users more money yeah I mean don't be deceived one way or the other you as the consumer are going to end up shouldering the burden of increased costs whether it's coming from uh the content provider or the company that you're buying this the stuff uh buying me access from you know and the FCC wrote to Verizon today about their desire to um throttle unlimited users I believe okay because that was that's one of the things too is that there there is this this Theory it's almost like you know the Megalodon Peter that there's or or suspect zero that there's this Uber Predator out there that you can't really see but is so good at doing what they do that they're basically unseeable that there are these 5% of users that use untold amounts of resources and if we could just control them it would make it better for everybody ah the Illuminati uh pretty much all right so yeah net neutrality complex issue maybe we'll get Peter to tackle it again when next is in the news what is the uh chance that the iPhone 6 Designs that have been and the part leaks that have been on the web lately are actually the finished product um pretty good I mean last they people who leaked these parts are getting them from the supply chain which is making when you're making hundreds of tens of millions of devices it's really hard to keep every single one of them locked down so I would not be surprised at all um if that were to happen another one for you Peter are we ever going to see a live updated Apple weather icon if Apple can make the clock work if they can make the calendar change why can't they make the weather accurate well to yeah I guess they could I I don't know that I think it's you maybe diminishing returns you can also look outside just saying I don't know what the mechanism was I believe it used to be like for the date there was a limited number of assets you needed to show every day and date combination and they could just pull the actual one I don't know what they're doing the clock it might just be a set of pngs or that seems not useful to me but they don't have anything in place like the live tile system on Windows phone and I don't know what how many weather images they store although it does seem to me like it should be possible given those other two icons you like I said stick your head outside and see what it's doing out then bring your Frozen head back inside shiver and say damn my phone didn't warn me there you go all right Peter that is it for us for today if people are interested in finding you reading more of your stuff where can they go they can go to uh flar LG on h f l GH on Twitter and imore imore.com is where I'm writing all my stuff these days awesome and you can find me at Renee Richie you can find me on imore as well I want to once again thank betterment uh for bringing you this episode The automated investment service built on the idea that investing intelligently should be intuitive automated and accessible to everyone whether you have 10,000 000 or 10 million for a limited time listeners can get up to six months of free automated investment management by visiting betterment.com imore that's betterment.com imore uh the imore show is brought to you every week two uh one sorry 11 amm Pacific 2 pm Eastern on Thursdays listening live is the best way to do it because you get to ask us questions and interact with us and correct our mistakes in the chat room and also that you are a lovely bunch of people if you can't listen to us live you can go to iTunes you can go to RSS and catch up on previous episodes Peter once again thank you very much for your time today thank you very much Renee I'll see you next week man absolutely oh and I should say you can find Ali at IM muggle IM m u ggle e that way she doesn't throw a cookie at me when she gets back that's right yes all right have a good weekend everybodythe imore show is brought to you by betterment the automated investment service built on the idea that investing intelligently should be intuitive it should be automated and accessible to everyone whether you have $10,000 or $10 million over 36,000 customers are already using betterments userfriendly web and smartphone applications to improve their returns save time and money and minimize their taxes for limited time listeners of this show can get up to six months of free automated investment management by visiting betterment.com imore that's betterment /im okay it is July 31 2014 I'm Renee Richie and right now we're going to talk about new Macbook Pro bumps we're going to talk about the best apps for so many things and we're going to talk about a bunch of other stuff you know why because this is the imore show joining me as always we have the managing editor of imore and the chief Kaiju in charge Peter Cohen how are you Peter I am good how are you Renee I'm doing you're looking fabulous today Peter if I might say oh thank you very much and also joining us and you're looking very uh you're looking very birthday yourself Renee oh thank you yeah I'm getting older when year closer to death I told my actually last year on my birthday my God kids uh came up to me and they're they were three and seven at the time and they said we don't want you to have more birthdays because it means you're closer to dead wow that's somebody's got to stop reading them nche before their bedtime or something that's awful from the mouth of babes that voice you heard also joining us is the how-to editor and cheap app whiz at imore Ali casmo how are you Ali I am fantastic looks like you're getting a lot of sun in the midwest is that normal for about two more months take advantage of it as long as I can and then it turns into Canada for a couple months are you at your fancy new standing desk I am I am too I I love this standing thing it feels like I'm not falling down yeah I'm I'm liking it so far I'm only up to like I'm standing probably about half the day that's better than none yeah so all right so Ally unfortunately can't join us for the whole show so we're going to frontload um a lot of what she's here to talk about but we're going to try and get allly on more often because she writes about all these fantastic apps every week instead of me and Peter looking at each other going huh I don't know uh I don't know we're get Ali to talk about them a little bit so Ally one of the things you wrote about recently was the best invoicing apps for iPhone and how to get paperless yeah so the collection of apps that we did for best invoicing apps I really looked at Freelancers and small businesses for that mainly because of the fact that those are the people that benefit the most from those apps they may not need to necessarily pay for a subscription fee or you know pay a a company to do invoicing for them so there's a a lot of options and no one really wants to sit at the their desk at the end of the day to you know punch out a bunch of invoices so we looked at a bunch of apps that basically focus on small business and help them figure out how to invoice the most efficiently um some of those are also time trackers which kind of lets it double up on usefulness so any what were your favorites um I really like there's a new one I reviewed it recently 2 hours um that's a time tracker and an invoicing app in one technically it's more of a time tracker than it is an invoicing app but it does invoice so for people that maybe don't have you know a 100 clients but only have a few clients that they work with closely or they have to track time in order to be build that would probably be my pick um just because it's very easy to use it works as a series of timers so basically if you forget to stop something it'll pester you every once in a while to say hey did you mean to leave this timer running do you need to start a timer because you haven't so it makes it a little a little harder to forget to track your time and he was actually that's Jeremy olon and his company tap and he was actually on iterate last week talking about it and it took him a couple years to get that done but I think he got it done really well yeah I would agree just the way the color coding is done and the way that the app is laid out it makes it really easy for you to see where you're spending your time at um it can also help anyone who's self-employed maybe use their time a little bit better and become a little bit more efficient with time management because you can see how your days are plotted out and if you have maybe a a bulk of the day every day that you're not spending time on something you can kind of figure out where you can take new projects on and where you can't so I G to get all my invoices from you in this app now Ally maybe Peter you took a look at the best Mac apps for July how did how did July do for the Mac App Store H July was kind of a lean month for the Mac App Store to be honest with you um you know the the um summer months are often sort of the doldrum time uh for for Mac developers and you know for Apple in general it seems when it comes to the Mac although you know we've seen a little bit of movement but having said that uh there were still some very exciting apps out there that are definitely worth checking out um if you do any kind of web design for example or if you do any kind of um uh user experience or user interface work um in in uh application design you need to check out xcope you can go to xcope app.com that's xco or XS ca.com um and check out this new app from the Icon Factory it's a new version of an app that that's been around for a while but it is an incredibly detailed tool for taking a look at um uh images on your screen and understanding exactly how they relate to each other so if you're a web designer doing responsive web design for example and you want to make sure all the page elements that you're working with are working well together or if you need to see very detailed um character information for type that you're typography that you're working with xcope can help you it's a fantastic app it puts up um you know it helps you do pixel specific placement it helps you uh do uh very precise measurements in pixels and other units um it's it's uh it's very cool stuff um also I love that app before you go on I I use that app all the time especially when I was a web developer I used it constantly I still have it running all the time gon mayia and uh Craig um I'm BL kenberry yeah hackenberry fantastic job fellow Kaiju by the way yeah he's like nine feet tall they they did a fantastic job they knocked this one out of the park yes for sure uh another app that I really loved um that came out this well technically it didn't come out this month it came out in late June but forgive me we we haven't really looked at it too closely so I thought thought this would be a good opportunity to showcase it was launch bar now um if if you're excited about what's coming in os10 Yos uh with the the revised Spotlight that sort of does everything your One-Stop shop for for accessing all kinds of neat data launch bar uh will fill that Gap in fact it works the same way it pops up a search field um in the center of your screen um just like uh uh Spotlight on yosity does uh but it goes much much further than that you can uh drill down and get re really detailed information about the um uh the documents or the files that you're trying to access you can you can do nice Transformations with them like you can open them in different apps um you can send them you can you know you can embed uh embed them in in different documents and so on it is an incredibly useful productivity tool um that's definitely worth uh um worth checking out you can download ask about that Peter because I use Spotlight okay and I know I lose massive nerd points by just using Spotlight you know Seth Clifford deer bone have told me I have to use Alfred some people tell me I have to use um this app some people tell me I have to use Quicksilver do you have any advice on that you know it's like shoes right or or even gloves for that matter um or buying a new mouse everyone's taste in these things is different based on how they work uh based on how they're comfortable for working um I really get a kick out a launch bar I like the way that it works it's very simple it's very intuitive for me it's got a lot of features that uh that that that I can use um uh what I want to and other stuff that I just never touch but the features are there and uh you know it can do all sorts of really cool stuff um launch bar 6 specifically was a completely red redesigned user interface so if you've tried launch bar before and you've not liked it now might be a good time but my recommendation with all these things is to download them all and find out which one if any of them really suit your workflow you may find that Spotlight is perfectly acceptable or that you don't need um an additional productivity tool to help you get access to stuff because you're really comfortable working the way that you are but if you if you are the nice thing is that apps like launch bar exists so you can tweak your user interface a little bit and really be as productive as you can on your Mac allly do you use any of these I don't I'm kind of really OCD about my Macs like being organized so I pretty much pathetic and know where everything is so the only time I use Spotlight just because it's quick and if I'm trying to get to an application fast but since I pretty much know where my stuff is I don't really see I have no idea I have I use I don't use Spotlight this is interesting Peter see I don't I use command space just to launch apps but I don't like the way that Spotlight in Maverick's on down actually finds files for me so then I use finder and I use the search window in finder because I you know that to me makes more sense but when I'm on yosity now it works so much better that I think I'm going to swap from using the search field and finder to using yosity Spotlight I think that a lot of sorry sorry Ally I'm the opposite I don't like Spotlight I think the thing that irks me with Spotlight in Yos is that it's smack in the middle of the screen I love that see I don't because sometimes I need to see like I use the calculator feature of Spotlight all the time and when it's smack in the middle of the screen I can't see the numbers I'm trying to add or you know I just feel like sometimes it's in the way that's fair you know like I said it it's uh uh and and change is hard you know going from uh from from from one user uh interface to another can can be hard and as far as launch board's concerned some people are going to like it some people are going to hate it but I think it's worth checking out because it's a free download anyway you don't have to pay anything to to uh to take a look at it you can download it straight from the website and if you like it it's 29 bucks and I think syracusa likes it which is as good a recommendation as any there you go uh and it was I think I interrupted you Peter was there one more on your list um uh there were a couple um kappo 3.1 uh significant update if you are a fan of Super Ultra Mega groovy um uh musicians tool for slowing down songs uh yeah seriously without um changing the pitch of the songs so you can slow them down and hear them um it can automatically extract cords now um and uh it it also has iCloud sync so if you've got um uh Capo touch for your iPad um you can you have a continuous workflow from IOS to uh uh to the mac and then there's flowboard which is a really cool alternative to things like um PowerPoint or a keynote for that matter that help you build interactive presentations that you can send to anyone presentations can contain text they can contain video they can contain audio um it's a real reimagining of the way that presentations work done it a very intuitive way um for people who are accustomed to um uh you know sort of clicking and experiencing whatever it is that they're they're working with um and it's just it's a it's a really neat application we have um I counted flowboard as one of my favorite presentation apps for iOS a while back so I think the version the Mac version of flowboard doesn't that sync with iOS too because it's been out for iOS for a while it sure does and yes it has I forgot to mention that alley flowboard if you're already familiar with flowboard from IOS this is flowboard but with a Mac experience and you know they they haven't just ported the iOS version to the Mac they've actually added some really cool features you get some stuff like shape creation tools uh a full color wheel with opacity control as well uh Rich tech support very important for uh Mac users who uh who want to be able to do typ of graphical stuff um uh support for Vimeo um sorry you can include PDF documents PDF documents yes um I don't think any other presentation software includes and uh of course a full support for uh Mac keyboard shortcuts so you can keep your fingers on the keyboard where they belong instead of clicking on things so our our friend Simon Sage did the um iOS version of this best iPhone and iPad apps for July and I'll just throw some of them out there to get your opinion on it right at the top he has Modern Combat 5 blackout and you talked about that last Peter it is it is what Game Loft does best it really is you know I love them rump them Game Loft is a very talented game developer and they don't have an original idea in their heads but they are better at cloning games than just about anybody out there for the max Bas I think I mean at doing licensed properties too like they'll get an Iron Man game out you know when the movie comes out and stuff like that exactly yeah I know and they're very good at what they do so you know it's it's always worth checking their stuff out I think there was always Fates there was also Fates forever Magic 2015 Civilization Revolution 2 if your first Riz Revolution sorry didn't stick right exactly uh The Wolf Among Us Now The Wolf Among Us I have to take uh a moment to talk about because it is such a cool game uh first of all Telltale Games um is a really cool game developer they make um uh graphical adventure games um uh designed for um just about every platform imaginable you can download them on the Mac you can download them on PC uh you can get them through Steam you can't get them through the Mac App Store you can download them directly from ttail games website uh the App Store of course for uh for iOS Android everything everything gets these games these days but they do these really really cool games that are part Choose Your Own Adventure and part like uh you kind of button Masher sort of games uh but they're they're beautifully detailed they're very well acted um and they are a continuation if you played games you know adventure games whether you go back to the old uh text based games of like you know zorc like infocom games and uh even king's quest you know the Sierra online stuff that was really popular in the 80s and 90s this is sort of the ultimate example of what that genre has turned into in a way um they're really beautiful games The Wolf Among Us um in particular is really neat it's actually based off of a um I don't think it's a too well known uh uh graphic novel series called um fables if I remember correctly and the idea basically is that um is that that that's Bill Willingham Series right that that is yeah exactly yeah I love I love Bill Willingham he's awesome you love everything that's graphic novel and comic book related you take that but he did Elementals Peter okay that was seminal yeah no this is true so um uh the idea is that you're Big B wolf you're actually the big bad wolf in human form um and I'm not going to get into to all of them but The Wolf Among Us is in many ways even better than The Walking Dead which they have done as a series of games as well one one of the things that makes Telltale Games kind of cool is that they release their stuff um episodically so um if you want you can pay up front and just download the new episodes as they come out uh but The Wolf Among Us recently wrapped its uh it it's it's it's its current season so uh you've got a complete game to play now um just very cool stuff uh check it out Telltale Game neat neat neat stuff now I'm going to check it out just because of Bill Willingham see see all that difference that makes to me Peter there you go so Ally for the appside we have npr1 and overcast which both want to sort of change the way that we listen to stuff um I have only had a chance to briefly look at overcast I haven't really had a chance to really listen to many podcasts lately minus I don't think you do though do you listen to a lot of podcasts um occasionally I do but not on a regular ongoing basis no so I was on the beta for overcast I've been using it for a long time and I I really like it it is limited there's no video for example and I don't think he's going to support video it's iPhone only right now though there is a web client which is really good we had Marco on debug this week you can listen to guy English and myself talk to him for three hours if and you can do it in overcast if you want to um it's podcasts are remember Ally we went through phases like everybody made a Twitter app and then everybody made a weather app and now everybody's making a podcast app yeah yeah it's like the it's like the I think Gruber calls it the the design playground and I think it's true but if you're interested in the way that Marco listens to podcasts it's good to it's good to check the one thing because I'm in Canada I haven't had a chance to play with was npr1 I don't know if you've tried it but I wonder like I know you use a lot of streaming services and does the idea of streaming talk radio appeal to you as much as music no I don't really listen to any kind of talk radio so I don't think that would have had an appeal I haven't looked at that have you texed to look at it at all Peter not at all I am with Ali I am not a talk radio person this is like one of those neelon surveys where everyone checks off they watch PBS but we're all really watching TMZ yeah I listen to a lot of NPR but that doesn't count as talk radio does it oh I don't know what is NPR see I'm Canadian I might not know what the hell I'm talking about uh this like CBC Radio yeah probably yeah okay all right so with with this app at least you know you can take all their audio programming um and podcasts and there's curated selections and it looks like you can choose your own adventure when it comes to your NPR listening so if you have listened to it tell us what you think um because I'm interested to know because this is you know Apple just bought um I forget the name now but Apple just bought a streaming um sway or something like that swell swell yeah so Apple bought swell which does and you this is hard for me because like I woke up in the morning and I heard that Apple bought uh you know streaming they bought the Pandora of X and to me because I don't have Pandora I just thought they meant they had streaming stuff oh Apple's got streaming books and streaming talk radio now but they what they really meant was the recommendation engines that you know Pandora apparently guys correct me if I'm wrong is really good at figuring out the like what kind of music to put together Pandora does a pretty decent job of that um Pandora has a much smaller Library by far than streaming services like Spotify and Ario those typically are in the 20 million range I think Pandora I'm pretty sure they only have a library of less than like a million songs I know it's under two million but they're really really good at curation so and I think the only company that probably comes close to that is Beats they were really really good at curation and it didn't take as long for you for it to kind of figure out your likes and tastes I guess and you know Peter this might be the problem now is that there is so much content available that we just don't know what to listen to and the theory behind this is it could recommend better book almost I guess like Netflix does with they're recommended and they famously had a contest I think where you could win a million dollars by helping them make a better recommendation engine that being able to help people find what to listen to next is becoming more important well I think that yeah I and I think that that content stretches across multiple um uh media forms you know it's not just music it's understanding what to watch on television it's understanding what apps to download for your iOS devices um and this is why curation is something that we hear about over and over again and why why you know folks like us uh try to do roundups of what we think are the best apps because there is just it's like drinking from a fire hose constantly you know you're you're constantly barraged uh with new content all the time how do you make sense of it I don't Peter I mean I read imore I try allly tells me what to get yeah and that's true I mean especially you know apple or whoever can make 80 billion app collections but you know it is it's like drinking from a fire hose and you know I experience that sometimes with best apps those collections take a while to put together because they're so much and same thing goes for audio it's you know what streaming service do you buy they're pretty much level footed now I mean you can like basically you're drilling down to little technical things like audio quality um you know Spotify might have different like exclusive deals with certain artists like Metallica or whatever so and it's it's coming down to where they're they're fighting over those little nitty-gritty details to to sway users so it's it's becoming more of a what do I choose type scenario yeah uh and I don't have I don't have a good answer that I know some people I don't even use playlists I mean I I generally I declare bankruptcy in everything all the time so I go to Twitter there's a thousand messages I read down from the top until I get as far as I can go then I give up when I come to my email I have a thousand messages waiting I read down as far as I can go and I give up when I have new podcast downloaded or new stuff waiting I I go as far as I go and then I Mark everything as red I know that's horrible I know I'm abdicating my Humanity in a way by doing that but it just feels like there's too much of everything all the time there is no yeah there's no question Renee that we are inundated constantly and it's I you know I think think that um as as developers come up with more clever expert systems for managing this it's it's an important thing and I mean that that was one of the reasons why Apple acquired beats music right you know because they said you know right up front that they thought that beats did curation better than um uh better than anyone and I mean okay I iTunes is absent of so much functionality that we kind of and iTunes radio is absent of so much functionality that we demand and sort of expect out of our our streaming services but beats music is a very different experience and that's because there are humans that are actually putting together the playlists and figuring out uh what you should listen to so I you know I think that that that element cannot be um cannot be underrated Ally I know you've been going back and forth with your war with Cate with curated uh Services what are you using now I have all of them you gave up and got all of them mainly for I mean mainly for imore purposes just so I can actually evaluate and you know know what each one is offering but I guess if I think about which ones I'm using the most these days right now I'm kind of on a Spotify kick I don't really know why just since our app got overhauled I think I was kind of messing with that and you know getting a good perspective on that and I get stuck where I'll you know start making small playlists or favoriting things in one app and then I stick to that for a while and then when I'm tired of that I'll switch to a different service and but uh if I just want to listen into something and just like be able to hit play and not have to look for anything I typically open Beats or Pandora all right so moving us along we have a new uh series of columns we've been doing a lot for accessibility and inclusivity lately and you can go to imore.com SL accessibility if you want to see all of it um and a couple things struck me here one was we did a debug a while ago on the Swift language and we had Natalia berus uh join us she makes uh kudu kitchen which is a great app for cooking with kids and she did a talk at WWDC about uh helping people with Autism and designing for accessibility but the word she uses is inclusivity because it for her it goes beyond people with visual impairments or audio impairments or physical impairments and really you know making it more accessible for anyone whether it's kids or grandparents getting their first computer ever or you know basically anyone who needs help getting into computers and we decided to start a series of columns because you know and Ally and I and Peter have talked about this before even when something is silly not silly but you know something like best apps we don't know everything like best apps for Pilots I don't know you know best apps for elevator mechanics I have no idea you know so there's going to be times where we have to go beyond ourselves and I've written quite a bit about accessibility you know Peter's spoken about it with the Mac alli's talked about it in context of apps before but we wanted to get people who that that was their expertise so we have the first one up already and that's by Steven Aquino really well-known iOS accessibility writer and he wrote about something I hadn't even considered and that's hardware and he called it the often overlooked aspect of accessibility and how big a difference it can mean for him and he has some motor um um motor function challenges just going from an iPad 4 to an iPad Air because it was so much lighter and he wanted the bigger screen but it was it was a struggle for him to use it he could never use it for very long and the iPad Air is just light enough now that he can use it for long periods of time and that was pretty much transformative for him and we're going to keep doing these series we're going to have several different contributors St is going to keep contributing we'll have a few other guests but I'm really happy that we're doing this because we've spoken about this before Apple does a lot of the heavy lifting for free like if you just use a UI kit you get the audio stuff the motor stuff that's you know those stuff's all pretty much just works the visual stuff the speak selection and voice over that works if you use UI kit but if you make a custom interface it goes away and often developers do that because they want their apps to stand out but then they don't have the resources or time to go back and read accessibility but it makes such a big difference to so many lives and I was I don't know how you feel al Ally but I'm starting to check every app now that we look at as sort of just like a basic layer of accessibility yeah I kind of feel the same way um I have a lot of friends that are teachers and some of them have dealt with disabled or um taught special education and they use iPads a lot and I think it's interesting sometimes to hear about the different experiences and you know the different apps that they use and I kind of uh have been doing the same thing just because right now I've kind of been focusing on you know tips and howtos and how to better use accessibility features and I kind of catch myself doing that like seeing what apps support what and you know how it differs when you get into App Store experiences and different apps that are third party where does that end you know yeah the one the couple complaints we have gotten is more on the Mac s here and that surprised me because you always hear about the Mac being really good for this but people seem to think that it's not doing as good a job for the speak selection and um voiceover stuff like they would like it to talk to them even more well there's certainly certainly some uh uh something for Apple to listen to there then well I think it's the I think the biggest Pro not problem but the biggest Omission from the Mac right now is still Siri because going back to the WWDC commercial where they had the blind woman basically using her phone just by using Siri and the Mac can talk to you can do all that stuff but we still don't have that um that that sort of discuss discuss ability we don't we don't have that contextually aware sequential inference engine on the Mac and I think that would make a big difference to people yeah and people I think have seen Siri ever since its introduction as something that would be very natural progression on the Mac so they're getting frustrated with apple and not understanding why it's not happening faster move faster Apple please we want Siri everywhere seriously Apple come on we ran a poll uh we're trying to we're trying to be good about our weekly polls again uh so last week we asked you how much you use the iPad you know whether you use it as much as Tim Cook uh did this week we're asking about screen size because the screen size of the iPhone 6 is really interesting there's rumors that there's a 4.7 and a 5.5 inch iPhone there's been part leaks for the 4.7 but not the 5.5 and you generally think there'd be equal part you know part leaks for both if both were coming and soon uh there haven't been part leaks for a new 4in iPhone but you know maybe they're going to keep the existing iPhone 5 s design or internals or bump up the iPhone 5C and keep a 4in device so we asked the imore readers who are all incredibly good-looking and incredibly smart um what they wanted and the results were really really interesting so uh 29.798591 by 55.3 2 percentage of imore readers by far the majority um you know it's big but it's still phone uh 12.98 so 13% of people want a 4-in phone don't change a thing and 1.91 almost a whopping two% want Apple to go back to the 3.5 inch phone does that surprise you Ally no where do you fall on this line I don't know if we've asked you this before 4.7 happy medium Motorola uh Moto X size yeah I mean if I look at my phone now and like a I don't remember how big the S5 is but this is is too big for me I hit things on accident when I try to you know I I feel like this is too big it's oversteps its bounds a little bit so I don't think that I would be comfortable using a phone even this size on a regular basis um I would get I would probably buy another 4inch phone before I would buy a phoneless size when I see the I think it's five or 5.1 the Galaxy S4 Peter whenever I see an iPhone next to it it looks to me like a Tonton ready to be hollowed out as a case I know seriously or you know like some futuris surfboard you know that you step on and magic things happen kind of like uh Alex in Back to the F or whatever his name was in Back to the Future Marty Alex from Alex P Keaton yeah Alex P Keaton from Back to the Future too right um Opie cutting ham exactly uh yeah I mean I I would like a larger phone as well um I'll leave it to you guys because you guys live in this stuff a lot more than I do to try to figure out what the right size is but uh the bottom line is the current form factor of the iPhone is too small for me I um uh maybe it's just because I have you know fat pudgy kiju fingers but I um like to be able I I you know I I find the the the the ability to navigate the iPad the full-sized iPad the iPad Mini a lot easier uh than I do the iPhone and I find myself stumbling a lot and where it comes it where where it annoys me the most or where it slows me down the most is doing things like texting you know which I feel like I should be able to do a lot faster than I can and it's just because know I I just can't hit the screen the the the areas on the screen that I need to with the amount of exactitude uh that I want to be able to do and I know that a larger screen is going to give me a little bit more wiggle R there so I would easier for you on the iPad it's certainly well it's a different if it's a completely different user experience on the iPad because on the iPhone you know I can I can go dual thumb but on the iPad it's hunting pack I use two thumbs I split the keyboard on my iPad okay and I type that way with two thumbs but I still I cannot type even either way even if I have you know my iPad laying flat with the full keyboard I cannot type as fast in my iPad as I can on my phone interesting how do you type on your phone allly uh two thumbs okay see on my iPhone I usually use one thumb like I just sort of hold it in one hand that the video and I just start tapping away like that I very rarely use two thumbs but I've seen Jesse Char who's uh now at Pacific Helm but she was at Apple and I think she won fastest typer at Apple and she used two thumbs with the keyboard clicks on because said the keyboard clicks made her type faster the other one who's an absolute like two Thum Jedi Jedi is Mark Gman at 9o5 Mac I've seen that guy just tear off immense passages of text on his phone freaks me out I saw Brian Lamb do the same thing it was scary kids today Bri of a kid no but on the iPad I don't split the keyboard but I turn it portrait mode and the iPad Air especially the iPad Mini are so thin now that in portrait I can just thumb type like I could on a large phone I think I will say this much and this is my biggest peeve with the iPad and makes and I know it's not an apple thing it's a developer thing the Facebook app is a is a prime example if you use split keyboard Developers for some reason do not think about that and sometimes that covers the keyboard if that makes sense or like what you're typing you can't see it slack does it uh the app we use um I can't stand that when you split the keyboard and all of sudden you can't see the text input field because it's covered I don't know if that's a iOS issue or if it's a developer issue I'm thinking it's a developer issue but that is incredibly irritating when you said Facebook and Incredibly irritating I thought you were going to mention the fact that they're forcing all of us out of facebook.app and into messenger.app to send IMS yeah I kind of see a pattern with that style happening it just happened with four square and swarm which I still don't necessarily understand the I don't know and Instagram and bolt I mean we have we have to have a separate picture messaging app for Instagram too like Facebook and slingshot yeah I prefer the all-in-one bundle method but I don't I don't know there has to be some incentive or I I don't know I don't understand slingshot was uh I like the way John grber um classified it he said slingshot is one of the apps that is built in and undeletable on the phone you get given in hell yeah because the whole premise of it was like if allly sent me a message I couldn't see her message until I sent her one back which was supposed to promote engagement but I promoted rage because I'm supposed to answer Ally before I've seen what she says which means all I can do is send her nonsense and then she can't see my reply then I can reply to her but she's got the nonsense to deal with first and she can't see it so she has to send nonsense back it is it is almost like just holding me down and punching me in the in the head what's going to happen there is people are going to do this and they're just going to cover the camera and snap a photo and that's you know how many uh you know blank pictures are probably sent over slingshot I that I would say for me personally my opinion if there was an award for the most useless pointless dumb app of the year it would go to slingshot I think it's fighting Yo and now it's fighting bolt for that title yeah I haven't really looked into too much about what bolt is but it's Instagram instant basically which they already had direct messages built in but now it's just there basically their Snapchat clone oh okay and I don't think Peter I don't think you use Instagram like I see Allie's dog pictures almost all the time but I haven't seen anything from you in a long time yeah exactly you know Instagram and Pinterest are just two um visually oriented social networks that I just have never caught to for some reason you know I have no idea why but I've just never gotten I I they've never hook themselves into my brain what is wrong with me it has to be something wrong with you Peter it can't be something wrong with them exactly no it's got to be I mean why all the cool kids are doing it why not me so speaking of cameras Ally and I knocked out uh mostly ali uh I just helped a little bit the the ultimate camera guide for the iPhone and I'm really psyched about this because um I know Apple said that message is the messages is the most used app on iOS but you got to think the camera is not far behind and people take so many pictures and lyanna a couple years ago did a photography guide for us but that was more you know the rule of thirds and negative space and Shadow and light and all these concepts are making your photos better but I like about this Aly is that you actually took the time to show people how to use everything that's built into that app yeah um it's amazing sometimes how many questions I've gotten whether it's friends or family or whoever I think people that are techsavvy they they take the time to poke around those apps and figure out what they can do with them but most of the mainstream public they're just going to launch it and hit the shutter button they don't really or they don't understand what HDR is or what autofocus and auto exposure are or you know how they can make photos better by taking them better so I mean and apple doesn't give us a tremendous amount of tools which will probably change in the future with iOS 8 and Beyond but they give you enough tools that you know you can produce some pretty good images if you know what you're doing with the camera app I think that's absolutely true and and again you know some people think this is too easy but I had a a family friend who worked as a computer engineer for many years and he said you know it's so frustrating I have to sync all my photos off my iPhone before I can share them with anybody and I just tapped the share button and showed them all the options you know email messages he's like I never even saw that and again this is a computer engineer so it only you can only imagine how many people aren't using this stuff to its full capacity I'm really happy about that I'm also actually I don't know how I feel about this Peter but Apple press released those Haswell bumps that you've been talking about yeah exactly so uh beginning of last week Intel um uh released uh updated um Haswell chips and apple wasted no time getting them into production in fact Apple already had them at the point where intel was announcing that they were available um it the updates are pretty mild basically the um uh the the uh the the the retina MacBook Pros get a 200 megahertz bump but Apple's also dropped the price of um the the highend 15 inch by $100 and it's doubled the ram um on the entry level model so you're you're now getting eight gigs of RAM instead of four um on the 13 and you're getting 16 gigs of RAM across the board on the 15s um so you know this makes it a little bit easier to uh to uh uh to Bear if you were thinking about getting a retina MacBook Pro the other thing that they did that's probably worthy of notice that they dropped 100 bucks off of the price of uh the standard 13-inch MacBook that venerable machine which is now 2 years old um so if you you know still want a a conventional hard drive 500 gbyte hard drive uh four gigs of RAM you're now only paying $199 instead of $199 um so there was some nice reordering um in uh in MacBook uh land or MacBook Pro land this month and this pretty much aligns the MacBook Pro uh with what Apple did in April when it refreshed uh the MacBook Air and dropped its price as well it uh refresh that with a 100 MHz processor update these updates aren't going to generate huge performance improvements compared to what you could get last week or last month um and they're not going to uh provide huge additional power savings or anything this is a very mild modest bump I think the the price realignment and the ram realignment uh were probably the most the more noteworthy um uh uh things to take away from this it tells me that apple is probably a ways away uh from adopting Broadwell the next generation of Intel uh microprocessor on any kind of uh widespread level probably because Intel is still miles away from Shipping the damn thing well that's the problem Intel is holding up production until it's got all of its issues uh worked out and Intel is months behind schedule on that so um yeah you know it just it isn't a great uh season if you were expecting amazing new things out of apple on the Macintosh line it doesn't look like yeah so I know that you have imore.com m- buers dguide where you go through all this Peter but if someone was looking for a MacBook Pro last week and waited it sounds like they'll get more for their money like it won't be a big speed boost but they'll get more RAM where they'll get a slightly lower price uh do you does this change your your buying advice at all there any particular models that you think people should be more interested in well I if I were buying a new machine today I would look very closely at the 13-inch MacBook uh MacBook Pro with with re a display I think that uh it's a great value uh I think that that the um default Ram configuration makes it a better value uh than it was before it's a very usable machine the only thing that I might tweak would be the storage capacity on it because um you know the ssds Apple's still very parsimonious when it comes to actual onboard storage for these things uh having said that um you know it really depends on what your needs are specifically I know that the md101 the standard 13-inch macb Pro continues to be really popular especially with families who are buying them for school kids whether they're in uh uh K through 12 or whether they're in college because it's a lot of space it's a decent machine uh they're great for you know doing research and homework and other assignments they've got internal super drives um so you and they're the only Macintosh the only Mac not just the only MacBook but the only Mac left with an internal superdrive um and uh some people really like that because maybe they want to watch DVD movies that they borrow from the library or rent from Redbox uh or maybe they want to listen to music that's still on audio that they haven't gotten around to RI I mean still on audio CD that they haven't gotten around ripping yet there are a lot of different reasons why people like these or just for doing backups and archival and you know being able to easily give somebody a disc that you've burned that contains content on it a lot of different reasons burning their mixtape for their sweetie yeah exactly I I personally have a MacBook Pro uh 15inch 15inch retin a display that I absolutely love but it's an edge case you know the people who need those are are not everyone else you know they're content creators they're people who are doing uh video uh editing on their machines or um uh in my cases I use it for you know my primary game system when I'm testing out new games um so uh you know that's that's not everybody and it's an expensive machine it starts at two grand so um I think the the MacBook Pro uh 13-inch the MacBook Pro Retina display is probably uh where I would focus the bulk of my attention for a lot of people right now right awesome we're going to take a quick break and I am going to tell you about one of our fantastic sponsors for today as soon as I get it loaded up man this is embarrassing uh here we go and that is one month so one month specifically one month HTML is a course that will teach you how to make a website you know I learned by buying a book and reading that book and looking at other websites and it was a painful process and yes I managed to eventually get a website up but it took me a long time and I I missed a lot of things along the way so what one month HTML is for is for anyone who wants to make a website anyone who wants to get started it's the easiest way to learn to code it's 30 minutes a day for 30 days you'll build an actual website starting from day one and you'll be welcomed into a community of 12,000 other students all learning online you'll launch three projects including an online portfolio a b blog template and a landing page and the best part is if you get stuck there's always someone to help you out while you're learned a real actual human being type person so what I want you to do is to go to www.1 month.com thee imor show and again it's one month HTML 30 minutes a day for 30 days and you'll be able to code HTML and CSS on your own looks great on your resume if you're going for that promotion if you're going for that new job even if you just want to build a website you know for your family for your sports team for your hobby for anything enrollment is typically $99 but if you join now you'll get a one-time discount 25% off for joining and as always you'll be helping to support the imore show so I want to thank one month and I want to thank you guys all right so Peter um there is once again a bit of a brewhaha in the App Store and about the value um of the Apple ecosystem and and it's it touched off it goes off occasionally but this time it was because of Jared Sinclair's post about his RSS reader unread and how after spending almost a year building it it didn't make uh that much money and I know Mac apps are priced typically a lot higher than iOS apps and they've been more resilient when it comes to races to the bottom but also it's a much smaller market so I think if we look on average it's still a challenge like Gus Mueller has written about this Brent Simmons has written about this a lot of really intelligent people you and I have talked about this and it it's I don't think there's any easy Solutions I still think that this is a trary problem I think you know Apple doesn't do enough to and I don't know if they really can but I think it would behoove them to take action to try to increase the value of their platform because I still have those nightmares of ET cartridges being buried in the desert which is what happens when a platform loses all value Marco Arman thinks for example they should get rid of top list that top list cater to the exactly the wrong sort of metrics uh but there's also developers who did raise to the bottom and there's also us as consumers just said we're not going to pay you know $1 $5 $10 whatever for Quality apps and it's a problem that is complex and I I don't know if there's any easy answers yeah you know in un Red's case I think that that part of the issue as well is is understanding is is well first of all is marketing you know if you if you adopt a build it they will come approach to uh uh uh to to marketing the app that you've just spent a year or two developing you're making a big mistake You' got to be able to educate uh consumers on what your product does why it's better than the competition and and what makes it so special and you figure out ways to get it to them um that's all part of a coherent marketing plan and that has got to be part of any developers uh process you know I have talked to so many developers over the years who uh you know have said what's your marketing plan for this after you've got it released when they will tell me about a cool beta product or a cool project that's that's that's in early development they're like you know well we're going to release a few videos on YouTube and you know we're hoping it'll go viral and okay well that's great you know why don't you throw some pennies into the local wishing well while you're at it you know you've got to have a solid marketing plan behind your products but if it's a niche product you know and you miss and you underestimate or you know Mis understand what the um the actual um uh market for this product is then youve put a lot of time and a lot of effort into something that just not a lot of people are going to be interested in looking at I think that has a lot to do with one of the reasons why unred has has undersold compared to what his initial expectations were I don't think that people care that much anymore about rss-based uh products you know I think that um that's unfortunate but I think it's geeky I think it's nichy and I just don't think that that that's where people want to invest their time in figuring stuff out but I could be totally off base there you know I think it's a good point though like one of one of the the points I I agree with most strongly and I've given talks about this to local um iOS and Mac User groups is the importance of marketing if you're not considering it alongside development and design from the beginning of your project then you it's the same thing as not having good code or not having a good interface it is it is incredibly harmful um and I don't know what Jared's marketing model is I know he did get a lot of good coverage but I think a couple things are that worth breaking out is that there was a gold rush when the App Store started and there were all these at least urban legends and some people did make a lot of money whether it was by selling their app or selling their app to a company that gave them a lot of money for it there was good money to be made but that's because it was brand new and there was a lot of opportunity there and now if it's not at saturation there's at least many good candidates in every category which means it's harder to get attention and it's harder to fill needs that aren't being filled uh already and I forget who linked to it but someone also linked to an article that said that you know it's when in the days of software came in boxes people had a box to hold on to and psychologically that created value for them and in the iOS age you know selling a digital copy it's the same thing that Hollywood has a problem with people don't put value in digital copies so it Trends down to a value of zero and you've got to work really hard to convince people that the value of your software isn't zero and that has to be because it makes them money like or saves them money which is what Enterprise software does and what professional software does like a timekeeper you know anything that's good we use productivity tools napkin saves me tons of money because it take me much longer to do that in photosho or you have to make you have to Delight people which is why games make money because yeah you know it's software but it's a great experience and great experiences can be valuable to people but I don't know if it hurts Apple in the long run that there that you know if there's if people can't make money they might stop making the kind of apps that you and I grew up with on the Mac or or on the early days of iOS that's very very true and you know it's a constantly evolving and changing Market uh and and there's no question the consumer tastes have changed I remember uh you know one of the one of the most um I think cogent things that I think uh have been said about um the the race to the bottom as you put it Renee was Merlin man hot dog ladies on um on on Twitter uh once said that about um you know zero price apps it's a good thing that my Viking Grill came with all these free Stakes you know it the the the phone that you're buying you people don't think twice about but you know they put up a fuss over spending a few dollars for an application yet think nothing about going out and spending four bucks for a uh a a star a Starbucks drink with uh some whipped cream on top of it you know you you've really gota uh I I think that that fundamentally there's a there's a problem here with user perception of value um and and I'm not sure what can be done about that I'm not sure if it's going to demand uh a re-education uh for consumers or just a recalibration of the market Al together I know that apple is just as concerned about the race to the bottom as many developers are uh and understand that it impacts not only how developers can make money but ultimately uh what the impact of the market is you know if if if people still get the or continue to get the association that uh everything that they're downloading is going to be Laden with ads or um is going to demand some kind of handout in the form of inapp purchases um I think that ultimately it's going to to hurt the user experience a lot on iOS and I hope that that's not the direction that we're headed for the fact is some developers price their products fairly based on what their own development costs are what they expect to recoup they stick to their guns a company that does that very well um uh and has done it very well for many years now is the Omni group you know the Omni group doesn't compromise on price you know they say our product is worth $30 our product is worth $40 and uh they stick to it um but it requires a lot of fortitude and it requires you know it requires a business plan that I don't think a lot of developers um are willing to commit to one of the ideas uh and Arman spoke about this a couple times already what he believes that the market for paid apps paid upfront apps is is over because people are just risk adverse there's too many apps even if you wanted to sample the 10 best games or the 10 best apps in a category you'd have to spend at least the very least $10 if they were all paid and probably a lot more and you and a lot of those wouldn't be to your liking uh and there's really no way of sampling apps outside that so what he did with overcast was make it free but it has a $5 inapp purchase that unlocks nominal new features but it's also a way of just saying hey thank you for this app and I know there's been some stuff written about you know upfront might be a hard time to get money from people because they don't know you very well but if you build a relationship with them you can pick moments when they're really into it or really having fun or really appreciate it and then get you know buy me a beer or tip me you know for making this app and that can be more effective but that doesn't seem to me like reliable the like the reliable kind of income that you need to feed a family you know put food on the table and not only continue developing that app but plan future apps going forward I can't fix this all Peter no no I I we should just blow it up and start over do you think Mac apps are going to continue to hold their value do you think people just are traditionally used to paying more for computer apps no because I've seen the the the same downward Trend already happen in the Mac App Store now the Mac App Store isn't or is newer than um the the the IOS app store uh but the same Trend happened almost right away and right now the Mac App Store is and I I wrote an a edit uh well not an editorial about this I well yes I did write an editorial about this uh sort of complaining about it that there's a lot of crapware flooding the Mac App Store right now these half-ass ports of iOS apps uh that are either ad supported or uh you know free for download but have some kind of inapp purchase mechanism uh to net the developers money and they're just poor user experiences all the way through it's trivially easy for somebody to make to build a Mac app out of their IOS app code uh which is why developers are doing it but developers in many cases are not taking the time to actually make a good Mac app or a good Mac app experience that is where I hope the the Mac App Store is not headed in any kind of widespread way but I do see it happening Ark sign in our chat room says while developers may not be doing their part by having a marketing plan Apple may need to develop built-in Marketing System to defend themselves in the future future from Google's AdWords web ads which I guess is AdSense um and Amazon's affiliate link system now Apple does have an affiliate system I don't know I don't know monetarily how well it compares to Amazon's but it is very effective the old joke with Amazon is that you would You' write a book put it up for sale on Amazon and then use your affiliate link and you'd make more money off the affiliate link than you would for the book the book sale because Amazon was so stingy with how much they willing to share with Publishers and authors uh and how much publish would share with authors so I don't know how that compares but um Apple bought um an ad company and they made I ads I forget the name of the company that they bought it was don't remember it right now maybe someone in the chat room remembers but they had I add and I I don't get any of them in Canada pet I don't know if you see them in the US but I I ad has not been anything like the success that Google's even admob I think enjoys no not at all uh you know I think that uh Apple's been trying to figure out how to get uh um uh I I ads working uh pretty much from the start ever since uh I ads was the thing yeah I don't think it I don't think it aligns with Apple's business Apple's business has not traditionally been the advertising model I don't think they deeply understand it and I actually don't think they like it I think that they did it because they felt like they had to but I don't think their heart was ever in it uh they would much rather just sell you something take take your money and have the end of it of that relationship they don't really like it when you have to constantly sort of do things like advertising or data leveraging or attention hoarding or stuff like that yeah they certainly don't and you know it's it's so clear when Apple is working with a technology or a product that they don't really like all right we're going to take another short break so I can tell you about betterment um what if managing your Investment Portfolio was as easy as using your favorite iPhone app it is now with betterment the most popular automated investment service with over 36,000 customers betterment has seamlessly integrated technology and years of investment exper expertise into one elegant application that will transform the way that you invest betterman's experience and interface are Ador are adored by Tech and design enthusiasts alike especially since signup is 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happened something I've been waiting a long time for what's that Renee your your weekly column yes NSFW NSFW I'm not going to ask you what it stands for because you know I I have you know I don't I don't want to be damaged by the possible consequences but you got you got off to a killer start thank you very much yeah I was uh I I warned people up front when uh NSFW started that it may or may not be Tech related every week uh it's my new Saturday column uh but it's just an excuse for me to to to rant about stuff that uh uh that is on my mind last week it was uh what the hell did I write about beta being careful with it the oity beta being careful with it that's right you know I saw all these people complaining about the oity public beta saying you know this is a really bad idea to put in people's hands and look you know I work at a retail store on the weekends an Apple retail store on the weekends I support people uh who uh bring their machines in and all sorts of weird damage so I understand you know why if you're an IT manager or if you're an Apple Genius you're Avers to seeing Apple throughout the Yim public beta to uh a million people which purportedly they have done uh but look these this million people it's not a general release a million people though they're PE they're all self- selecting they're people who actually went out and applied to download uh the the the app so they understand consciously what they're getting into and the bottom line is it's a public beta uh my feeling is that if Mavericks had had a public beta in some way that was similar to what Apple's doing with yosd it probably wouldn't have been the pig that Mavericks was when it was first released you know it took until 1094 for Mavericks to level out to some sort of usability that didn't want me to to tear out my non-existent hair so um you know I'm I'm I'm I'm happy that Apple's public beta betaing uh yosim to help avoid those problems in the future I am too we're going to look forward to another one of your columns this weekend I believe thank you yes I'll have it up for you on Saturday awesome so I wrote I spent way too much time talking about iOS security over the last week and that is because of the backdoor stories and they were really controversial for a number of reasons most of which didn't have to anything to do with the actual um security issues involved it was things like people disagreeing about the term back door some people said that it inscribes malice of intent and some people said it describes merely a portal of entry the way a door to a house does and I don't want to rehash any of that because I think that when the story becomes a story and not the actual subject of the story we all end up losing so what I wanted to do instead was to help people because I think you know when you Empower people and inform them it is much better than scaring them so I put together a how to better protect your iPhone and iPad against back doors and other security and privacy risk risks articles and it covers you can find it at imore.com security that's our security Hub and it does everything from telling you how to use a four-digit passcode or touch ID to how to have a strong alpha numeric password um it tells you how to secure your iPhone iPad and Mac against um pairing record theft which is the Crux of this new exploit basically how to remove them if you if you think you might have them how to restore your device if you want to make sure it's absolutely wiped out um also how to secure your Mac using Apple's configurator utility so it doesn't allow your iPhone to pair with other devices anymore and you know Peter wrote up file Val 2 and firmware passwords if you want those but also how to minimize data leaking on your on your lock screen because convenience and security are always at war with each other when you make something more convenient it's often less secure when you make it more secure it's often less convenient so for example on an iPhone or iPad you can access Siri and passbook and Control Center and notification center and emergency calling which is actually required by law all through the lock screen which is a data leak I mean people can turn off turn off your wi-fi turn off airplane mode they can read your the the bits of your messages uh they can tell Siri to do things without using your passcode that's absolutely a security and privacy problem but if you turn them off then you have to access your phone it's less convenient no glanceable data on your lock screen so what I wanted to do is not really tell people you know how they should live their lives but if you do want to make your iPhone more secure and more private all the information is there it'll be in the show notes but just go go to imore.com security okay time for a couple questions um gagen wants to know what will be the price of Apple's iPhone 6 uh they haven't announced one yet based on prior history Apple has since I think the iPhone 3G Peter if I'm not mistaken always put out the new iPhone at $199 for the lowest model I think that's correct I believe that is yes so I I would think that Apple will have a $199 iPhone uh it's always possible they do go up if it's a substantially more expensive device to make uh it's unlikely they'll go down because that's an established price point but you know to quote Peter um you know past is not always prologue but Apple has been doing this for a long time and so far they stuck with 199 so don't don't it's not a guarantee by any measure but I would not be surprised at least to start yeah one for you Peter with T-Mobile announcing Nationwide voice over LTE today do you think the iPhone 5s and possibly the iPhone 5 will get the feature activated in iOS 8 or will they hold back as a lure for people to buy new iPhone models no I think it'll be uh a um uh my expectation is that it will be a marketing L decision that it'll be something that we might get in a new iPhone but I believe I may be wrong on this but I do think that the iPhone 5 and Up can't support uh voice over LTE isn't that right Renee I or is Alli gone no Allie's gone but I don't recall offand um voice over LTE for people who aren't familiar with it it's just completely packet based so instead of your phone calls going over a separate voice channel the way they do now they they just turn into bits it's like voice over IP like making a Skype call and everything goes over data and because there's data radios and all these devices and LTE data radio specifically uh theoretically I imagine that it's possible but you never know for example it might not be battery efficient with the way it's currently set up or there might be limitations in the chips that Apple was using so I think Apple tries to push down as much as they can but apple is also not willing to do a bad experience like where other companies might say ah it works okay we'll just give it to everybody Apple won't do that because you know they they want 30 frames per second video recording not 15 frames they want 30 frames per second and they're going to want fairly Rock socket Rod Rock Solid volty and if they don't get it they'll probably hold it off for the models that can do it yeah and this is part of the problem especially when you're dealing with a carrier Network like T-Mobile I mean it's great that T-Mobile's doing volti in the areas that it can do but for example in the area that I live in Southeastern Massachusetts I'm on edge all the freaking time it drives me crazy you know I feel lucky when I'm actually in LTE range and believe me I do use it like I was at a Starbucks the other day that was stuck with AT&T Wi-Fi and I actually could get I think like three bands of three maybe four bands of L te um on my phone I've got a T-Mobile uh phone and uh I was rocking it I was very happy with that but you know T-Mobile's coverage is still squirly now T-Mobile did announce today that they're starting to get 700 megahertz out into the world they're starting to deploy 700 megahertz um so maybe that'll help them increase their LTE footprint in a significant way um in areas that are underserved like mine in the months to come but H you know six and one half dozen of the other right now as interested as I am in volti uh in In fairness to T-Mobile their discreet uh voice um uh uh quality is actually really good compared to other services I've used like Verizon and and and AT&T so I I don't really care if the voices is Packet based or if it's a separate radio channel I'm you know as as long as I've got coverage that's the important thing and T-Mobile still has to work uh to improve its footprint before does anything else yeah and that was Matt Wilkins and it sadly reminds me of some of the the dumbassery that we saw this week in media uh there was an article that did some research into this idea that Apple I forget who wrote the original dumbass article that Apple purposely sabotages old phones to force people to upgrade to new ones and they did some psychological testing to see what it was and it turns out that when there's a new upgrade cycle uh you know people upgrade their phone and they're paying closer attention to it and it's easier for them to see someone else with a newer device performing better and suddenly feel that their device is perceptively slower or a new operating system is is more demanding so it feels perceptively slower but that got reported as Apple was actually doing this nonsense again and this is one of those areas where apple is damned if they do damned if they don't and I'm sure we talked about this before but this idea that Apple holds off features for the high-end they build new features into the high-end um and they build new chipsets like the A7 chipset can do things that the A6 can't so those phones don't get those features like touch ID and like the uh Burst Mode photography and things like that but so here's Apple's choice they cannot push down iOS 8 to the iPhone 4S and and older devices and then people go Apple's deliberately withholding the software so I have to upgrade or they can push it down and do the best job they can to make older more constrained lower speed lower RAM lower resource uh devices run it and then people say oh it doesn't run as well as on the new ones Apple's trying to make my life miserable so I buy the new phone um and it's you know that if you want to have that opinion it's very hard to empirically argue with you because we'd have to run large scale testing with numerous devices over many years to see what the actual results are but another way of thinking is that apple is providing software I know you've written about this in the past Peter that it might be nice for he to be able to opt out but then they opt out of security updates too which could leave them vulnerable and then Apple gets Smash in the media for not securing people's iPhones so I it's a tricky problem and I think with no good answer yeah exactly all right we had a couple more questions we'll just finish these off quickly um to the twitters so am I the only one who doesn't like the tiny left and right arrows in Safari for iPad Mini any chance of a late change in ios8 uh probably I mean you never know probably not I'd have to check and see which ones you're referring to here's a good one for you Peter is net neutrality a choice between um distribution costs and targeted all consumers fund Network costs whether high or low users why not Target people specifically I don't really know what that means okay so all everybody well I mean Major League Baseball came out saying that they don't want these Fast Lanes I think that was really interesting Gruber linked to it saying that it would not be good for them because they're a major streamer turns out like Netflix MLB streams a lot of of video and the idea that carriers can block their more search charge and they believe will end up costing them more money and by costing them more money will charge end up costing end users more money yeah I mean don't be deceived one way or the other you as the consumer are going to end up shouldering the burden of increased costs whether it's coming from uh the content provider or the company that you're buying this the stuff uh buying me access from you know and the FCC wrote to Verizon today about their desire to um throttle unlimited users I believe okay because that was that's one of the things too is that there there is this this Theory it's almost like you know the Megalodon Peter that there's or or suspect zero that there's this Uber Predator out there that you can't really see but is so good at doing what they do that they're basically unseeable that there are these 5% of users that use untold amounts of resources and if we could just control them it would make it better for everybody ah the Illuminati uh pretty much all right so yeah net neutrality complex issue maybe we'll get Peter to tackle it again when next is in the news what is the uh chance that the iPhone 6 Designs that have been and the part leaks that have been on the web lately are actually the finished product um pretty good I mean last they people who leaked these parts are getting them from the supply chain which is making when you're making hundreds of tens of millions of devices it's really hard to keep every single one of them locked down so I would not be surprised at all um if that were to happen another one for you Peter are we ever going to see a live updated Apple weather icon if Apple can make the clock work if they can make the calendar change why can't they make the weather accurate well to yeah I guess they could I I don't know that I think it's you maybe diminishing returns you can also look outside just saying I don't know what the mechanism was I believe it used to be like for the date there was a limited number of assets you needed to show every day and date combination and they could just pull the actual one I don't know what they're doing the clock it might just be a set of pngs or that seems not useful to me but they don't have anything in place like the live tile system on Windows phone and I don't know what how many weather images they store although it does seem to me like it should be possible given those other two icons you like I said stick your head outside and see what it's doing out then bring your Frozen head back inside shiver and say damn my phone didn't warn me there you go all right Peter that is it for us for today if people are interested in finding you reading more of your stuff where can they go they can go to uh flar LG on h f l GH on Twitter and imore imore.com is where I'm writing all my stuff these days awesome and you can find me at Renee Richie you can find me on imore as well I want to once again thank betterment uh for bringing you this episode The automated investment service built on the idea that investing intelligently should be intuitive automated and accessible to everyone whether you have 10,000 000 or 10 million for a limited time listeners can get up to six months of free automated investment management by visiting betterment.com imore that's betterment.com imore uh the imore show is brought to you every week two uh one sorry 11 amm Pacific 2 pm Eastern on Thursdays listening live is the best way to do it because you get to ask us questions and interact with us and correct our mistakes in the chat room and also that you are a lovely bunch of people if you can't listen to us live you can go to iTunes you can go to RSS and catch up on previous episodes Peter once again thank you very much for your time today thank you very much Renee I'll see you next week man absolutely oh and I should say you can find Ali at IM muggle IM m u ggle e that way she doesn't throw a cookie at me when she gets back that's right yes all right have a good weekend everybody\n"