The Reliability and Functionality of Smartwatches: A User's Perspective

As someone who has been using smartwatches for several years, I have to say that the Apple Watch is one of my favorite devices. It's not just about looking good - it also provides a lot of functionality that makes it a great tool for fitness enthusiasts and busy professionals alike. For instance, the watch allows me to track my daily activity, including steps taken, distance traveled, and calories burned. This information is crucial for anyone who wants to stay fit and healthy.

One of the most significant advantages of smartwatches is their ability to motivate users to be more active. When you see that you've been sitting around all day, the watch will remind you to get moving. It's a gentle nudge in the right direction, encouraging you to take control of your health. This feature has been particularly useful for my friends who struggle with weight loss and need a push to get off the couch.

Of course, not everyone is as fortunate as I am when it comes to fitness. Some people may be less active due to various reasons such as work commitments or mobility issues. In these cases, a smartwatch can be a game-changer. For instance, the watch's built-in pedometer and GPS capabilities allow users to track their progress, even if they're not as physically active as I am. It's amazing how just knowing that you've taken 10,000 steps can motivate someone to keep going.

When it comes to using a smartwatch, there are several apps that make the experience more enjoyable. One of my favorites is Pedometer++, which provides accurate step tracking and allows users to set goals for themselves. Another app, AnyList, has been a lifesaver when it comes to grocery shopping. It allows users to create lists, check off items as they're purchased, and even share their list with others.

Speaking of apps, I've also discovered the power of Siri shortcuts on my Apple Watch. While not all features are available for smartwatches, there are some amazing options that make using your watch more convenient. For instance, users can add items to any list using Siri. This feature is particularly useful when you're out and about and need to take notes or reminders. I'm still hoping to discover more shortcuts and integrations with my favorite apps.

In terms of camera capabilities, there have been some exciting developments in the world of smartwatches. At CES, several companies showcased watches with built-in cameras, which would allow users to capture photos without needing their phone. While not all of these features have made it into production, I'm excited to see where this technology will take us.

As someone who's often on-the-go, my Apple Watch has become an indispensable tool. Whether I'm running errands or hitting the gym, I can rely on my watch to keep me connected and informed. The fact that I don't need to carry my phone with me is a bonus - it's amazing how liberating it feels to be free from the constant distractions of our mobile devices.

Of course, no smartwatch would be complete without a few drawbacks. One thing I've noticed is that some features can be slow to respond or don't work as well as I'd like. However, these minor issues are often outweighed by the benefits of using a smartwatch.

In conclusion, my experience with the Apple Watch has been nothing short of fantastic. Whether you're a fitness enthusiast, a busy professional, or simply someone who wants to stay connected on-the-go, a smartwatch is an excellent choice. With its built-in features, apps, and integrations, it's no wonder why so many people have fallen in love with this technology.

The Watch's Role in Public Health

As we discussed earlier, the Apple Watch can be a powerful tool for encouraging physical activity. For those who struggle to move as much as they'd like, the watch can provide a gentle nudge in the right direction. This feature has been particularly useful for my friends who need motivation to get off the couch.

While it's true that not everyone is as fortunate as I am when it comes to fitness, smartwatches like the Apple Watch can still make a significant impact on public health. Even if you're not as active as I am, using a pedometer and GPS tracking app can help you set goals and track progress. It may seem small, but these incremental changes can add up over time.

The watch's ability to motivate users to be more active is just one aspect of its impact on public health. By providing a constant reminder to move, the watch can help reduce the risk of chronic diseases like heart disease and diabetes. These are just a few examples of how smartwatches can contribute to better overall health.

In terms of accessibility, smartwatches offer an exciting opportunity for people with mobility issues or disabilities to engage in physical activity. For instance, using a pedometer and GPS tracking app can help individuals with mobility issues track their progress and set goals. It's amazing how just knowing that you've taken 10,000 steps can motivate someone to keep going.

The Future of Smartwatches

As technology continues to evolve, it's exciting to think about what the future holds for smartwatches like the Apple Watch. With new features and integrations on the horizon, I'm confident that these devices will become even more indispensable in our daily lives.

One area that I'm particularly interested in is the development of camera capabilities in smartwatches. While not all features have made it into production, I'm excited to see where this technology will take us. Imagine being able to capture photos without needing your phone - it's a game-changer for those who want to stay connected on-the-go.

In addition to camera capabilities, I'm also looking forward to seeing more advanced health monitoring features in smartwatches. With the ability to track vital signs like heart rate and blood oxygen levels, these devices can provide even more accurate insights into our physical health.

As we move forward, it's essential to remember that smartwatches are not just a luxury item but a tool for improving overall well-being. By providing a constant reminder to move, tracking progress, and offering integrations with favorite apps, these devices can have a significant impact on public health.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is the wonderful William G wait a minute actually it's the notorious Neil Hughes Victor how's it going where have you been I I've been on sabatical no no I've been working I feel like we lost you there for a while I'm never too far promise well I I know that's a big reassurance to all our listeners because we really miss you thank you thank you now I I really appreciate everybody who's always tweeting at me and and staying in touch and asking for my opinions on things and stuff uh you can always reach out to me on Twitter and find me there and I will respond at some point tell everyone your Twitter name uh this is Neil NE cool now in the last time since we spoke there have been all kinds of new things happening including new devices I know so what are you getting I am getting uh an iPhone 10s because as you know I don't like jumbo phones um and I am getting a Apple Watch series 4 44 mm which is is for practical purposes about the same size as the 42mm but you get a lot more screen area for the money right yeah well you can use the same bands at least which is nice unfortunately because Apple so Apple used to do this thing where because they were trying to be like high-end watch you could just order with basically whatever band you wanted and that was you know awesome but they have since gone away from that and you're limited to a very limited number of bands so I was looking at uh the Nike model this year but the problem is the Nike model ships two weeks later and it wouldn't arrive until Friday like October 6th or whatever it is and I'm going to be out of town that weekend and I didn't know exactly where I was going to be because I was going to be in transit that day so I couldn't pick a place and I couldn't sign for it so I ended up just going with the um uh the I think they call it the sport loop it's the velcro one which I already own it was like the choice was between two bands that I already own it was either the regular sport or the the the loop the sport Loop band or whatever and I was like oh jeez because then reason I was going to get the Nike One is because it has the the Nike Loop band but it's a reflective at night when you run at night and I run at night a lot but I really don't need it that badly and it was like it was one of those things I was like well I could wait like 3 weeks plus to get this watch because God knows when it'll get delivered or I could just get the one on day one and I was like I'll just get the one on day one right which one of these two bad options is more frustrating waiting around for something or getting what I already have right exactly so I figure I'm going to probably just sell this old watch to Apple because they were going to give me like cuz I have the series 3 the quote unquote old watch it's so ancient uh I'm just going to give it to Apple because they give you like 250 bucks for it which isn't bad I fig I'll probably get the same if I were to list it on you know eBay or whatever was that the cellular model or something yeah it's a cellular model so um so yeah I figure I'll just send them because I'm guessing that they require a band with it so I'll just um and what I was doing in years past was I was actually just going on Amazon and buying a cheap knockoff band and then sending that to whoever was buying my my uh watch but now it's like well I guess I already have this velcro one so I'll just get a new velcro one and replace it and that's a good idea with velcro anyway because over time so velcro is a hook and loop system and over time the Loops in the soft side tear and and no longer stick well so replacing the velcro over time is good anyway yeah exactly I I just wish that they still had the option of uh bands like where you could choose and pick and choose and get new ones and stuff um because it was nice it was like oh you know I don't have this band and then it was an opportunity every year to get a new band it was almost an incentive to buy because like well if I'm going to pay $40 for the band anyhow factor that into the price right um and then you get a new one to add to your collection now did this same kind delay drive your iPhone 10s versus 10r decision no this is going to sound sad but the reason that I'm getting the 10s more than anything um aside from the fact that I'm going to be doing the review for Apple Insider is something happened with I have an iPhone 10 and something happened where um it cracked underneath the leather case on the back so you can't tell if the phone is cracked but it really really bothers me because I've never in my life in 10 years of owning an iPhone have never ever cracked an iPhone ever the front the back none of it never cracked one and then one day and I have no idea when it cracked or how but it the corner up by the camera has like kind of a little tiny shatter and then that turned into a large crack that went all across the back case and so this is one of those things that really ticked me off and I was like how did this happen I don't even remember dropping the phone I don't know what what happened um and so I looked into getting the back replaced it turns out that if you don't have Apple Care the back of the phone is like 10 times more expensive than the front of the phone it's like $500 to get this back glass replaced so so it just bothers me it doesn't change the functionality or the usability of the phone in any way and then I looked to trade it into Apple to see like oh you know if I get the 10s how much will you pay me for it if the back weren't cracked um they would give me like $550 for this phone or something like that the fact that the back is cracked means they give me Zer for this phone and they're just like yeah you can recycle it and it's like the phone still works fine so basically long story short I came to the realization that I need to get Apple Care and I need to get on the annual iPhone upgrade plan it is now I said I would hold off on Apple Care until I cracked a phone I have cracked a phone it is now time for me to get on the Apple care plan it is now time for me to get a phone that is not cracked um and I don't like giant phones so the 10r was out uh 6.1 in was just too much um so I will stick with the size that I currently have um and I'm getting the 10s yeah so I have two theories one is that the reason that it is so much more expensive to replace the back glass is the way they assemble these things MH you know if if they put the frame and then they put the glass in from the the front of the frame and then Pile in the logic board and the battery and all the other bits that means to replace it requires disassembling the whole entire phone right which is is nuts Bonkers and too much of a cost and so that's why they say it's worthless and I have another theory I have another crazy Theory and this is this is people don't take my advice don't do this at home but you know I I think about how when you have a cracked windshield on your car if you catch it early then you can fill it with a little bit of epoxy and they have a suction cup kind of thing to force the glue into the crack so that it heals it and cures it nicely and that prevents the crack from growing but if you leave it then you know you hit a bump and the crack splits the whole windshield just like you know you hit a small bump and you never notice it with a letter case on and you split the whole back of your phone yeah so I yeah I'm I'm I'm angry at myself the that uh the first phone that I managed to crack was the one that cost about $1,300 but uh here we are so let me console you you are not irresponsible the the the uh the iPhone upgrading plan is one of those things too where it's like well if you're going to get the phone every year then having this automated system where you pay the same amount um and you trade in your old phone and you don't have to worry about that stuff um and then you just continue extending the the two-year plan it just kind of makes sense if you're going to get Apple care if you're not going to get apple care then it's not worth it but that was why I just bought the phones outright in years past CU it was like well I'm not going to get Apple Care I've never cracked a phone I don't need to and now it's like well maybe I do need to get apple care I I have always purchased Apple Care for the phones and the reason is for for cracks like that for weird things that happen to cameras I've I've had spots develop on the inside of the lens of the camera in years past I've had back when home buttons were physical home buttons I had and then they had the little square symbol on them the rounded rectangle symbol on them I've had home buttons that had the bizarre failure where they started rotating and instead of looking like a square it looked like a diamond and and so all of these things minor or not although spots on the camera was kind of major since the camera is a major function of the phone having Apple Care meant that you didn't have to worry about it you didn't have to Blink about it and that you know after about a year and and nine months go and change the battery and have a fresh battery for the next year so that you might use the phone if you're not upgrading right away yeah I would always try to get my battery replaced every year and then I found they used to just go okay and look at the phone they go yeah we'll swap the battery and then in recent years they've gotten a little more difficult about it which obviously led to the whole battery gate slash the de now now now we can check the health of our battery or whatever so what happened was like it got increasingly comical so a couple years ago I had like the iPhone 6 or the 6s I don't remember which one it was but it was one that had the random shutdown problem and I brought it in and they were like no your battery is healthy and I said no it's not it's definitely randomly shutting down and uh and so they finally you know it all came came out and then I went back in and then they replaced it so then a year later I had an SE and it was dropping from like it would get to like 50 or 40% and then drop to like 5% and I was like well this is crazy so I brought into the store and they said oh no your battery health is fine we won't swap it out and this was probably like a month before the iPhone 10 came out and then they said what we can do is we can open it up and see if there's like some sort of issue with it or something like that and and then if we replace the battery you know we'll charge you x amount of money or whatever I said okay so apparently they went back and had the machine open up with the sheen messed up and it ripped one of the ribbon cables so they ended up just giving me a uh they ended up just giving me a refurbished phone for free uh so it worked out but it was like it was one of those things where I was like I really shouldn't have to haggle this much when you guys have had a number of battery issues that are proven that are out there like I'm not making this up uh and you know I ended up getting an iPhone 10 like a month later anyhow but um yeah at this point it's like I don't want to do all that haggling regarding batteries and and arguing with them about stuff not working it's just easier to get a new phone every year yeah and I have yet to go for the upgrade plan I think about it but it's it's something that I'm not there on yet I I used to change my phone every year or every other year and I somehow got into keeping the iPhone 6 for four years I mean these phones are great there's you don't need to upgraded every year you know it's it's just I'm just an insane person so well I'm right there with you in spirit but iOS 12 has really done right by me yeah it's a great update uh you know iOS 12 on iPhone 6 and 6s and 6 Plus and 6s plus has has really proved itself I think that you know one one of the anecdotes is that when people were at WWDC they saw Apple Engineers wandering around using iPhone 6 and by having the engineers use the old Hardware they really tuned iOS 12 properly for it yeah I I I think it runs great um I've been very happy with it I I'm super excited about the shortcuts app I've been a long time um workflow user uh however um it's one of those things where like if if it was like 15 years ago I I would be all about shortcuts and sitting down and learning it I just don't have the time now so I opened it up and it was like man this is cool wow this is really intimidating uh I don't know I don't know how I can like make this work like I've done like some custom Siri commands and stuff like that which is cool and a lot of the apps have integration so now I can make it so that the default weather comes from carrot instead of uh Apple weather app just by customizing commands and stuff but like you know when I was a kid I had uh an old Windows PC with like 4 megab of ram rting Windows 3.1 like a compact pararo or something and it would I would make a boot disc and so I would bypass Windows and boot straight into dos so I could play like Doom or hexen or whatever and not use the ram that was required to get into Windows and then get out because the system would just not give back the memory so that kind of stuff was fun for me at a time when I was a kid but now it's like uh I just want it to work you know like I just don't want to like mess around with it so I I want to be more excited about uh the the shortcuts app in terms of being passionate about learning to use it U but I think I'm more excited just in terms of hey you build something and then I'll install it from like the gallery in the app yeah and I'm I'm concerned about that too I feel like this is awesome for for people who are going to dig into it but the people who are going to dig into it are are maybe relatively small compared to the vast majority of iPhone users the you know it's great that it makes the homepod more useful for example right but in some ways it feels like kicking the can down the road here you program as opposed to we're going to help you make Siri smarter yeah I mean I'm a big time homekit user um I am a fan of using Siri for complex multi-step tasks to simplify them so everything about it's right up my alley I just it was one of those things where like my wife uh just started school and she was like I just want to have a one day a week do not disturb like I don't want to have Monday through Friday or or seven days a week or whatever I want to just have every Monday when I'm in class my iPad automatically goes into to do not disturb and I was like hm I wonder if I can do this through uh the shortcuts app and then I went in and spent about 15 minutes trying to figure it out and then I spent another 10 minutes searching Google and Twitter to see if anybody had done it and then I had no answers and then I gave up so you like I couldn't figure it out and if I spent half hour on it and couldn't figure it out the average user probably won't be able to either and maybe it's not possible I don't know but I I want to I want to love it I want to learn it I want to embrace it I just don't have the time it it feels like one of those things like automator automator on Mac is very cool automator on Mac is very nice and no one uses it automator is even easier though because you can at least have it do um you know with mouse presses and stuff like that true and and also they give you a wide catalog that you can choose from with the options already kind of there yeah yeah you can you can be dumb and use automator and get it to work but um if you're dumb like I am and and try to use shortcuts um you know these it's a little more complicated it would be nicer if they had something similar automator where it was like you know close the window and open a new app and then tap this and it'll learn that and go okay we know how to get directly to that function of that app that that would be mind blowing that would probably be really good right I I don't know if it's possible but well it depends on how much they have in ter of os hooks that they can identify what what's being tapped on yeah and and uh you know with a lot of these apps already have some level of Siri integration anyhow the the deeper um dive into Siri that happened a few years ago so and and this is the thing like everything Apple does lays the groundwork for what comes later I was trying to explain to somebody the other day they were saying well the AR on the iPhone I don't really think it's that impressive it's like well you have to think about what this is laying the groundwork for like apple could literally launch a headset tomorrow and all all the groundwork that they've laid in iOS 12 means that they would have more AR apps on the on their platform than anybody else you look at all these other devices that are out there you know the magic leap which apparently is hugely disappointing uh Microsoft Hollow lens these are such limited markets but by leveraging a platform that Millions upon Millions upon millions of people are using and thousands upon thousands of developers are eager to use they are creating the groundwork for AR apps that are now going to be able to be on a future headset or whatever so it's the same thing with Siri and and and workflow and Now shortcuts all that integration that they've done now Builds on it so all the hooks that Siri has had into Apps before can now automatically be just click a button and Bam now you're working with shortcuts so they've laid a lot of the groundwork and they've done a nice job and I expect that really good things are going to come from shortcuts it's just going to have to be somebody else building it yeah now I I wanted to to talk about a little bit I mean we know that one of the big things that happens with the iPhone Ione 10 and 10s rather or the camera camera is kind of a huge deal right yeah so in the past there have been people that shot movies on iPhone 5 and then shot movies on iPhone 7 and we actually had a uh a movie that was in theaters that was shot on iPhone 7 and there have been a few yeah um the most recent one being the Soderberg movie unane yeah and it looks like director John Chu who uh directed crazy Rich agents shot a short film entirely on iPhone XS Max he had Early Access prior to the launch on Friday and he shot this project in partnership with wired called somewhere and it was uh sort of a glimpse into the workout routine of a a b boy star named Luigi Rosado who rehearses his dance moves in solitude on a garage and so they didn't use any special Hardware or any post-processing software they just started capturing this uh these dance moves and you know did it even they didn't even use gimbals or dollies they just kind of handheld the phone and used built-in stabilization and it came out pretty awesome yeah I mean this guy is is the new hot thing in Hollywood right crazy changes was on top of the box office for like five or six weeks or something it's made a ton of money so uh good get for Apple um very timely uh and you know talented dude uh who is clearly showing off what you can do with the really cool camera in your pocket you know it it used to be that if you wanted to make a movie there was this Camp of people that would tell you you had to go to film school and do all the right things and learn how to raise money and rent equipment and all that stuff and there was this other Camp of people that said basically go get whatever camera you possibly can put your hands on it and just start shooting something go ahead and write a script and go for it right right and you know that's how Kevin Smith kind of started that's how there there are people who have made liveaction versions of Toy Story or there there was a guy who he and his friends when they were k kids spent years recreating Indiana Jones oh yeah you know and Raiders of the Lost Arc they they reot Raiders of Lost Arc and they started out doing it on uh on VHS and there's a documentary about that yeah called Raiders and it's pretty good right and so the the ability to have a super good camera in a phone that's widely available should enable a lot more creativity right it should enable people to become filmmakers whenever they want to and the tools get out of the way and it's it's just down to your own Talent your own acting your own writing right I I went and saw a really terrible movie in theaters last week called uh I think it was it was either ninja zombie or zombie ninja I don't know which order it was in but it was actually shot in like 1992 in Chicago on 8 millimeter and uh it was recently discovered by the American film genre archive and they put it out on Blu-ray and they had like a big release in theaters and I went and saw it with like a packed house and it was about as terrible as you would expect but what was funny about it was you could see that there were like some basic understanding of basic film making chops and editing and like editing around the low budget and stuff and so yeah to your point like these guys clearly were not professional filmmakers and made a really cheesy terrible movie but they understood some of the basics of it and that and you got to start somewhere it it's said that the actual movie making happens in the edit room yeah you know obviously sure you have to have actors obviously sure you have to have a script of some kind but the script can change wildly in edit well that's why if you have a director like Michael um who uh you know is known for his many Cuts you just shoot a lot and then if you have a director who's really really bad at action um you'll be watching and it's cut too much because they don't know how to shoot a fight and you don't know who's punching who yeah I've seen that it's really disorienting yeah I'm I'm trying to think of a movie that I saw recently that that had a really bad fight scene the only one I can think of is uh uh the the uh James Bond uh Daniel Craig not Skyfall but the one that came after it uh Quantum of soless or whatever yeah oh God that was like whoever I don't know who directed that movie but the fight scenes were just so bad like you didn't know who was punching who what was going on it was like this is terrible it was such a step down from Skyfall the first five minutes of of Quantum of Solace were incredible right the the shots where they were filming in Mexico and the Day of the Dead yeah yeah know that was cool that was fantastic that was an entirely different director than the director for the rest of the movie I have it backwards though Quantum soless came before Skyfall okay so do I have skyall was the Roger deacons one he's he's the um cinematographer he was also on uh Blade Runner 2049 he does really gorgeous stuff uh so Skyfall was kind of a return to form for them but uh I think Quant of the soless was the one that came before and it was terrible did you like flade Runner 2049 I did yeah I I watched it once and the first watch didn't do a lot for me and I think what I need to do is go back and watch it again again because I'm sure there's a lot more there that I missed the first time it's a little slow I'm a big fan of Blade Runner um I thought the film was gorgeous uh like I said Roger deacons does a really great job um and I really liked the the pacing I liked a lot of the concepts of it it took some of the stuff from the first movie and kind of built on it but also turned some stuff on its ear which I liked it was his own thing um I thought it was a really great movie yeah it was we're talking about the wrong film I'm not talking about Quant of a soless I was talking about Spectre the James Bond Spectre movie Spectre oh that was the one after Skyfall I think right yeah yeah I didn't even see that one I heard it was terrible the reviews were not good well so watch the first five minutes okay because the first five minutes were great the the the opening Quant of sess was the one where they were like taking over the water supply or something I don't know we're going down the rabbit hole who who can tell but definitely definitely watch the the uh The Day of the Dead scene that opens Spectre because that was well done the rest of the movie was kind of terrible but that was great got it thinking about things that are that are related to Apple now tell me about your Apple watch you updated your Series 3 Apple watch to watch OS 5 yeah I've been running the beta for a few months now um it's good uh I'm you know it's not it's not a major update I've never used the walkie-talkie app yet um because I didn't know anybody else that was on watch OS 5 so I mean I guess I'll try that at some point um presumably when I'm reviewing the series for this weekend I'll give it a shot I like that you can custom the um uh control center where you swipe it from the bottom you put the stuff that you want up top um yeah I mean other than that I'm I'm struggling to think of what is really new in this update I guess there's support for shortcuts which I haven't set up yet there's support for shortcuts there's the uh the breathe faces there are the other complications kind of things and and one of the things that that they're supposed to be doing with watch OS 5 is the ability for apps to have complications appear on the watch face from those apps so this is supposed to bring developers back to writing watch apps yeah I mean i' I've been pretty set with my complications for a while um um so I didn't I didn't change any of my complications when I got into watch OS 5 I am curious to try out the new complications with the larger watch face though yeah the the it seems a little busy for me it's a little too colorful a little too busy I'm going to have to mess around with it I I like them a little more simple I think one of the things they're trying to do is they they piled everything into that face and turned it all on so that you could see what the options were and that was sort of what they showed us during the keynote where all of a sudden they have contacts in the center of the watch face so that you can tap and directly communicate with your contacts that way you know it's not that these are tasteful decisions are necessarily the right thing to do for everyone but by turning all of them on you start people thinking about okay I've been wearing the watch what should I change yeah I mean I think complications are one of the best features of the watch if not the best feature so I'm super happy that they're embracing them in a big way uh but for my personal use I will probably be toning it down a little on the series 4 yeah pedometer Plus+ is one of the applications that has really tried to take advantage of the things that watchos allows so I would I would tell you as you're doing your series 4 uh review go ahead and install that application and see what it does with the watch faces cuz I'm kind of curious to see how they've taken advantage of it yeah cool I'll have to check that out I my main ones that I use are um carrot weather which is a really great watch app um and then uh Nike Plus run Club well yeah cuz that's obviously the the first party partner well it's it's still a third party app um because it competes with Apple's own workouts app but they have like guided runs and stuff like that that I like if you're doing like U interval training and stuff like that yeah but I think of it as a tightener partnership just because they have the the Nike Plus version that ships with that app basically right yeah yeah exactly it it is still it still has the plague that that besets a lot of uh third party apps on the watch though where it is not as reliable as apples apps it's a little buggy um and I think that you know there's a apple gets access to apis that third party developers don't and that's been hurting the Apple watch since launch and hopefully that continues to change I know with watch OS 5 now um apps can kind of store their own audio and stuff like that so we don't have the problems that were previously coming up with OverWatch and all that the third party podcast app um but yeah they still like last night for example I went for a run and I had to tap like four or five times on the start button it's a giant button that takes up the entire screen uh but it just was not registering to start my run so I wonder if there's a forthcoming update for the Nike Plus app before the series 4 Nike Edition launches in 2 weeks um that that solves those issues I certainly hope so now one of the things that we we ran a story on this week was about the Apple watch or a similar device being required for all John Hancock life insurance policies and this this is something that John Hancock's been sort of leaning towards for a while you know they they were running Facebook ads last year saying sign up for a policy and earn a free Apple watch right where basically what they do is is based on your activity per month they will give you the the credit towards the watch like they'll ship you a watch and then based on your activity you um you either owe them money or don't based on how much you do if you're inactive then obviously you need to pay for it but if you are using it interactive then they they go ahead and credit you that and and so currently they are pivoting towards this interactive life insurance where every policy holder with them is going to have to track their Fitness and you know you save up to 15% in annual premium saving you uh you earn the Apple watch for as little as $25 by being very very active and they're throwing in other things along with that you know shopping entertainment rewards and and uh a subscription to headspace which is a meditation app that works really well and it's it's intriguing to me that they're they're pushing this so hard I mean it saves them money so that's why they do it they're an insurance company it does and and obviously they don't want to pay out on a claim but you know you could yeah I'm I'm a big fan of the Apple watch and and its health benefits um less so a fan of giving tracking capabilities to companies that don't really need know more information about us um you know no offense no offense to insurance companies they got to make money like everybody else does just like apple Insider does uh but I you know it's it's one of those things where it's like do they really need to know all that information yeah but you know it certainly beats the traditional life insurance model of sending you to a doctor to get a physical kind of thing sure yeah totally and and some people may be totally comfortable with that I would not be inclined to uh unwillingly have that data just shared with an insurance company you know you think about what Apple's doing with the EKG reader on the watch series 4 and I was talking with somebody about this the other day in terms of data privacy what's interesting is it outputs that data as a PDF that you can then share with your doctor um and presumably this is all stored you know on device and secure and gives users that are registering that data uh the ability to choose who it's shared with and who it's not you know sharing a PDF is not something that you're going to accidentally do uh but once it gets into the hand of your doctor or whoever else then then it's kind of a free frall then then if there's a data breach at uh at your hospital um then then your EKG or whatever uh Your Health Data might end up on the internet that that's where the the threat is with this stuff um having your your health information logged on your phone is not as big of a risk I don't think well and this is something that Apple's been sort of working on in the past too was the you know currently they have some 50 or 70 organizations that they synchronize health records with and so I have two local hospitals that I have records at that um you whose doctors I see from time to time and those appear in my Apple health application which is super handy it is really nice because uh you know if you if you go to another doctor for whatever reason and you need to be you know they ask so are you generally healthy you know what what was your last whatever rating like and I was able to pull up and say well you know on this date it said that my blood pressure was this right and and that was convenient that was kind of nice um one of the things that I think we've we've heard some movement towards is Apple's been talking about working with medical facilities on creating what an electronic health record should be you know epic's been doing this kind of thing for years but epic uses it as a tool for lockin get as many institutions signed up on Epic as possible and then keep those formats proprietary where Apple is is thinking about what privacy means that's not just obscurity by proprietary formats and what data sharing could be like it's it's somewh it's it's an area where the market needs somebody to take the initiative and Apple's focus on privacy and the fact that it doesn't profit from user data makes it the ideal candidate to do this it has devices in everybody's pockets and on their wrists it's already leading the charge and tracking Health Data and they don't want to collect your health data they just want to help you get healthy and sell you a watch obviously yeah so um yeah I mean I think that if anybody's the candidate to do it it's apple and and I'm happy to see that they are taking that initiative and that it's important to them they aren't the only ones doing it though Microsoft Google and Amazon are working in a Consortium to try and also fix IAL records yeah no they are and I don't know if I would trust Google with my health data so or Amazon yeah you've always been a little Lear of Amazon MH it's it's interesting I guess I can understand that because they're very much in the business of selling stuff yes and knowing more about you yeah in order to sell you more stuff right so what John Hancock's doing because again we ran a story about John Hancock is their offer is you order an Apple Watch series 3 with GPS by electronically signing at checkout a uh a retail installment agreement with their group for the retail price of the watch and then after an initial payment of $25 plus tax they do outof pocket payments over the next two years based on the number of workouts completed and and so basically the the way to get the watch for the $25 plus tax is that you agreed to this two-year program and you work out like mad you just get as fit as you've ever been you you do all the workouts you possibly can and they they don't make the monthly installment out of pocket payments because you've done those workouts completed but if you slip if you fall if you if you uh if you backslide in your fitness program then they just take the money it's it's intriguing to me that they um as much as the watch changes from year to year and and there are improvements every year that you're sticking with a watch for 2 years that's probably normal for most users who aren't Neil Hughes you know what do you think about that if you are a gadget hobbyist like yourself like I said I I I you'd never sign up for this program anyway no it's not for me no I don't I don't want to trust anybody with my sensitive data that I don't have to I I completely understand that and that's one of the appeals of Apple is they don't want my data and is stored on Vice and and they're happy to keep it that way absolutely the right hire can make a huge impact on your business and that's why it's so important to find the right person but where do you find that individual you you could try posting on job boards but can you be really sure the right person sees your job instead find the person who will help grow your business with LinkedIn as the world's largest Professional Network people go to LinkedIn every day to grow professionally and discover job opportunities and 70% of the US Workforce is already there LinkedIn jobs matches people to your role based on more of who they really are their skills their interests and even how open they are to new opportunities this way your job gets seen by more of the right people most LinkedIn members haven't recently visited the top job boards but nine out of 10 members are open to New Opportunities so you can really only reach them on LinkedIn and that's why a new hire is made every 10 seconds using LinkedIn and businesses rate LinkedIn 40% higher than job boards at delivering quality candidates hurry to linkedin.com appleinsider and get $50 off your first job post that's linkedin.com appleinsider to get $50 off your first job post post linkedin.com apppp Insider terms and conditions apply so Neil do you do you damn it what was I G to say Neil yes one of the things that we saw on the keynote that I know a lot of people were were excited about was the notion that you can use Google Maps and uh and ways in carplay yeah I mean this is a huge boost for carplay obviously Apple Maps for uh all of the hype that Apple tried when they launched it a few years ago has just not been able to catch up to Google uh in terms of data um say what you will about you know the traffic data and all that kind of stuff but the actual raw data of street level businesses all that kind of stuff they Apple just can't compete with Google on that front and so this is uh a bit of a concession on Apple's part to allow uh competing map Services both owned by Google um into its carplay platform which which in the end boosts carplay and makes it a better platform and I think that there was something of a handshake deal here too because around the same time this week um Apple also uh added support for Android auto to Apple music so I feel like there was probably a behind the- scenes deal where Apple's like we'd like to get on Android auto Google's like we'd like to get on carplay they both realized that it makes platforms better so they just said okay let's do it interestingly I I have Google Maps installed on my phone I use it especially when I travel and I plugged into carplay and tapped on an address in the Gmail application and it opened Google Maps on carplay The Voice services are not using Siri The Voice services for Google Maps in carplay run through Google's own voice Services which was really interesting for me because it's it's very much basically like almost using the Android auto version of the app yeah it's interesting it was it was really similar uh the only carplay is part about it that I could find was when you tap on the the settings gear icon in carplay on the the dashboard it gives you very large icons for things like avoid highways avoid tolls kind of stuff like that but it was it was in pretty much every respect really user friendly that's cool I I I don't use any of these platform forms I have a 12-year-old Prius that I only have because it's paid off and I live in Brooklyn and don't need a car so all good reasons yes so I would you know it's one of those things where if I had a car I'd probably you know a car where I could do the install and drove it every day then I would probably do the custom you know get one of those Pioneer put in carplay or whatever but just it's not happening well I have uh so one of the people that works at Pioneer drives a 12-year-old Prius and of course because she works at pioneer they they were able to do the install pretty easily how do they do that I mean you have the whole built-in GPS system that I think it runs on a DVD that's hidden under the driver's side seat I I saw her dashboard and it was the old Prius dashboard just like yours but they had managed to put the uh the Pioneer double D screen in it interesting yeah it's it's uh I'm sure it was probably a little more expensive than doing it on something like my uh my wife's Honda for example right yeah yeah I mean there's a there's a whole giant screen there and all that and it's not small they were able to do it interesting and you know I I asked her about it at CES a year ago and she said yeah she loves it that that having carplay and and having the PRS is a really good combination for her I am still stuck on my petrol power vehicles but um I tell you one of the um one of the things that that I love about uh uh not having a headphone jack on the phone is using it in the car because I have a car adapter that uh just takes lightning in to a USB charging thing and then it has a small 3.5 mm out on the cigarette adapter and that's where it plugs in so all I have is one lightning cable coming out of my center console in the Prius and I plug in that one cable and I can do audio so it's doing the audio over lightning or is it using that that head audio over lightning and then the cigarette adapter itself is converting from lightning to 3.5 mm oh okay yeah so there's a 3.5 mm out on the cigarette adapter got it okay neat that's that's an interesting little charger that you got there yeah exactly it's awesome so just one cable super simple um you know for all the H and cry about the headphone jack it's like this is way better yeah well so I've been using carplay for the past couple of years and in both my wife and my car and using the lightning cable obviously for audio and charging and I'm getting ready to install the Pioneer Wireless carplay unit I've had I've had the Alpine Wireless carplay unit back in January and we're getting ready to do the uh the Pioneer version of it which is the second aftermarket unit available with wireless carplay there's a lot to be said for it now obviously there's something really nice about charging when you're in the car because well you're already in the car you're not going anywhere you may as well charge but having carplay start when you get close and turn the car on is brilliant because there are a couple of times you get in the car you you're going on a short trip you forget to to plug take the phone out of the pocket plug it into the dash the whole thing it's just better you can get a wireless charger too you you could get a wireless charger too and be completely wireless but you know keeping the phone in the pocket and having carplay start is very good it's still insane to me that this new iPhone you're going to spend you know $1,500 or whatever on it if you get the large one ships with this this this dinky little charger 1amp charger and like it's insane to me because wireless charging now they made it more efficient on the new one it's not actually a faster charger they just made it so it's more efficient or whatever so it it it does it at a faster rate but it charges up to like 7.5 amps or Watts or whatever I'm I'm not an electrician but uh that's so much faster than the a built-in charger yes absolutely it is and you can get these wireless chargers for like $5 on Amazon and it's like apple can't ship it with something that sh that charges a little faster I swear if these new iPads that are expected to come out in October if they don't ship with a fast charged 29 watt adapter for like an 800 plus dollar tablet that's going to be one of the stupidest things you are going to go to war over this aren't you it's it drives me nuts like it's it's such a stupid thing to be cheap on like someone was telling me the other day that like the difference between like you know you have a sticker that peels off cleanly versus a sticker that like tears as soon as you try to take it off something like when it's on a new product like you buy something cheap from China or whatever and it's got like a sticker on it apparently the difference in price between those is like one penny per like 8,000 sheets or something it's like it's so just nickel and diming to the smallest of the scents and it's it's so frustrating to see a company like apple that will charge you an arm and a leg for their new phone and people will happily pay it and they can't just make the charger a little bit more capable so here's the other problem right which is that the fastest charging that they can do uses that USBC connector and the USBC connector is on all of their laptops yeah but it is not on all of the cigarette lighted adapters or cars or or other kinds of chargers you might have around well so the rumor that came out a few weeks ago was that the iPad itself was going to have a USBC port on it mink quo said that I don't believe I think he's got it wrong I think what happens is it ships with the USBC to lightning cable in the box with a 29 adap so you can charge the thing at full speed that's a lot more sensible than what he was proposing I yeah the switch to USBC would make no sense to me because it's not like Apple's been pushing plugging in accessories into your iPad if anything they want everything to be Wireless yeah or the failed SMART connector yeah I mean it's and I say failed only because there have been precious few accessories for it yeah I I still use my SMART connector doc to charge it uh and I like uh my my Apple Smart Keyboard uh but yeah I've been very disappointed I think that uh there should be a lot more uses for the SMART connector and I think you know Apple kind of blew it do you want to hear why I think they still ship the 1 amp charger with the fantastically expensive iPhone let's hear it I think there are two reasons reason one packaging size the oneapp charger is small the onea charger fits in the iPhone box nicely going to a larger charger means redesigning the packaging to accommodate that and giving up space in the box that they can otherwise keep small you know the worst thing in the world is to have to ship air because you're you're paying for the size of the box and and shipping an empty box stinks the using the smaller adapter means they can then use a shallower box they they don't have to dedicate that space to a larger charger and the cable and still fit the earbuds in can you say larger charger again larger charger I didn't stumble over that at all I was I was pretty happy about that so the and and there are some difficulties because obviously there are Chargers around the world that are larger like the UK charger for example which has the the very large blades that come out of it or the um the e new charger that has wider spaced pins that go into the wall outlet so they they do have to accommodate different sized larger chargers for worldwide use there you go again um but they like the small cube because it does fit there's another reason this is my other speculation which is that slow charging the phone is better longterm for its battery life now I I fully expect to get email telling me that I'm wrong but here's what we know and and that is two things age a battery one of them is leaving it charged in for extended periods of time right if you charge overnight your battery is is potentially going to age faster than if you charge it up to about 70% and then stop charging it and the reason is what happens is when you charge to 100% it the the the charge controller says okay I'm full and stops charging and then it bleeds down over a little bit of time because you know you get to 99% or 98% because it's still running this the radios it's still receiving data things like that and then it says wait I'm 99% I can be charged again and so it turns on and so you just constantly cycle between 99 and 100 99 and 100 turning it on and off which is not healthy for the battery yeah I think it's like I I think it's like the Max Capacity it'll fluctuate between 100% of real capacity and 94% of real capacity but it shows you 100% all the time so if you could somehow get access to that raw data you could take your phone off the charger at the right time and get another 6% out of your battery but of course Apple's not going to disclose that information because then it would drive people insane right and I actually have a uh a charger made by a third party that has Bluetooth low energy in it and pairs with the phone and then uses that to monitor charge status and charge cycling so that it prevents that kind of thing and it worked great except that you have to keep their app frontmost in order for it to to stay keep the connection alive with the charger to do that you know what I was saying about being exhausted by uh uh the shortcuts I'm already exhausted by you describing this yes just I know I just want I just want the phone to last all day I don't care what magic has to go on behind the scenes to make it work I know but remember the Huawei Nexus 6p and their battery debacle yeah okay so the Huawei Nexus 6p used USBC charging fast charging and and that phone charges ridiculously fast you know you get a full char in under 2 hours but the batteries aged badly because of that right so this is the tradeoff you can have your nice 7 and2 watt 7 half amp charging with your your wireless chargers but the added heat and added cycling and added fast charge has a negative impact on your battery yeah now if you're changing phones every year because you're on the upgrade plan don't care right fresh battery at the end of year anyway right and it's cheap to get the battery repl now anyhow so even if you to keep your phone another year it's like well you might as well I I don't think that cost is going to stay the same I think the reduced cost for getting your battery changed was a one-time concession to deal with the battery debacle yes I agree and and that that price is going back up to the $80 that it was previously I think they already announced that it's going up the end of the year so yeah let me see I'm going to check the health on my iPhone 10 battery right now we'll see where we're at battery health maximum capacity is at 94 %. so we we're it came out what October of last year so 11 months okay so or no it was November it was early November the phone came out so Le less than that less than 11 months and I've lost 6% of its capacity over the summer I had my iPhone 6 and at the beginning of the summer it said 94% battery health and when was the last time you had the battery replaced in that phone two years ago and then at the end of Apple Care basically when my Apple Care initially ran out on it I I went ahead and changed the battery at that time I don't like my phone battery to get below like 50% that gives me anxiety so when I'm at work my phone sits on a wireless charger all day see that's not healthy for it what you ought to do is is run it down to about 20% and then charge it back up to about 70% well I'm not a healthy person Victor so tell me about it you at least have an Apple Watch you close your rings I don't even do that you know I had a uh like a 45 day streak going on my move goal uh which probably some people are scoffing and saying oh I'm at 600 days or whatever but it was good for me so lay off me and I went to a a wedding in Calgary and I walked all around downtown and then I was dancing and all that and somehow that day of all days was the day that broke my streak and I didn't close the move goal and I was like really really like what happened here how did this happen I feel like you know and then there are some days where I'm just sitting around on my fat butt all day doing nothing and probably just like waving my hand around while I'm on the phone or something like that and then it registers a bunch of activity and I look down and it's like and it's like my my move goal is like three4 of the way closed and it's like oh like and I've done nothing all day so I mean obviously it's just a game it's not like it's an actual representation of my health and uh you know it's it h it's limited based on being on my wrist and not knowing what the rest of my body is doing but at the same time like it's hard to place too too much stock in these rings when when that's the way they operate yeah actor graphy which is the the idea of charting and and logging the movement is really imprecise it is of course but it's it's but it's something it motivates like there are a number of times especially when I had that awesome streak going where I was like I'm going to go out for a walk just so I can close out this ring you know because you know it's it's good to have that little thing that motivates you if you game a it motivates you I think that's great yeah just don't place too much faith in it or think that you know these people who have like with the Fitbit craze where it was like 10,000 steps per day and like oh yeah 10,000 steps was a madeup number you know where 10,000 steps came from where's that 10,000 steps came because in the 1960s in a cereal in Japan they placed a Cheesy pedometer and in in Japanese they called it the 10,000 step meter that's where this comes from and it's a completely fictional number it just comes from the the toy in the Cal box basically you know I I've I've met people over the years where they say oh you know I lost 50 lbs by parking my car at the back of the parking lot when I go to the grocery store and then I just and and I just lost all this weight and it's like how little were you moving before really like that that walking from the back of the parking lot to the front is like what made you lose all that weight like gez man you know like I'm out running miles and stuff and all that and it's like you know you struggle to lose weight and then some people it's like man how how inactive were you and I think for people like that the watch is probably great right like stand up close your rings do whatever um you know if if that's the little motivation they need that they're moving so little um then it's probably a huge huge uh gain for public health just for those folks alone absolutely of course I I represent that side of completely sedentary people I get all my Fitness in in January at CES walking the show floor your ancestors or your your future Generations will be the folks in Wall-E and the in the chairs oh precisely actually my kids are far more active than I am oh that's good they they are competitive swimmers they you know I just ended up finished building a bicycle for one of them they they a serious 4 watch Victory you got to get out there CL those Rings 10,000 steps do it I totally do I'm right now I'm in search of replacing my iPhone 6 that's what I'm in search of because priories it was well it was 94% at the of the summer and by the end of the summer it was 70% and dying at 30% battery life and it was just Dro it it was like it just one day dropped off a cliff it was fine one day and sad the next I'm just waiting for the day that I can get some sort of a camera on my watch and I don't have to bring my phone with me just that's my that's my perfect watch there that's when I'll buy that's when I'll buy the stainless steel model but you remember that there were people that were building a camera into the band that we saw at CES yeah I don't know that it ever shipped I don't know that it ever did but it was it was certainly I I run and go to the gym without my uh phone um so I have my YMCA card on my watch uh through the wallet app and then I'll go to the grocery store a lot of times after I get out of the gym and Trader Joe's takes Apple pay and so I just don't have my phone on me and I use any list uh which has a great native watch app and I use that to check off items on the grocery list it's awesome I love it I would love to go an afternoon and evening without having my phone on me the one thing that I miss is it'll be like oh that's I'll be out running and like that's a nice Sunset and want to take a photo of it or or look at this thing you know or whatever there's always like random things that you want to take photos of and send to people and I can't do it when I just have my watch and it's the one thing that I miss can you add items to any list using Siri yes you can and I am hoping I haven't looked yet but I'm hoping that there's some Siri shortcut integration that will make it even easier I'm saying that that could be very cool one of the Reon re that I that I went with it is because it has a native watch app and it works really well so um and you can share you know with uh other people and have a shared list and all that it's it's a great app very happy with it awesome so we've got two app recommendations for people this week we've got pedometer Plus+ and we've got any list yes and if you get a chance to try and use series shortcuts please go ahead and message me on Twitter yes send me all of your good shortcuts so that I can just install them and reap the benefits of your hard work and you can go ahead and send that to Victor appleinsider.com and we'll make sure that Neil gets it because Neil needs all that hard work yes he needs all the help he can get well this is the end of never perfectly good episode we we've been on here for about an hour or so may maybe we need to go ahead and wrap this up cool I'm I'm Victor I'm at V marks on Twitter and uh the notorious Neil Hughes is this is Neil on Twitter yes so what's what's the deal are we going to have you back again Neil what's going on yeah yeah uh would love to come back let me know when when you want me well there there is no conspiracy here I'm not being punished we are keeping Neil down we are oppressing Neil it's because you're so fit yes yeah exactly all right well we will be back next week with more Apple Insider go ahead and write positive reviews on iTunes and tell us what's going on with your new Apple watch plans your new iPhone plans and we will be back with more next week nyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is the wonderful William G wait a minute actually it's the notorious Neil Hughes Victor how's it going where have you been I I've been on sabatical no no I've been working I feel like we lost you there for a while I'm never too far promise well I I know that's a big reassurance to all our listeners because we really miss you thank you thank you now I I really appreciate everybody who's always tweeting at me and and staying in touch and asking for my opinions on things and stuff uh you can always reach out to me on Twitter and find me there and I will respond at some point tell everyone your Twitter name uh this is Neil NE cool now in the last time since we spoke there have been all kinds of new things happening including new devices I know so what are you getting I am getting uh an iPhone 10s because as you know I don't like jumbo phones um and I am getting a Apple Watch series 4 44 mm which is is for practical purposes about the same size as the 42mm but you get a lot more screen area for the money right yeah well you can use the same bands at least which is nice unfortunately because Apple so Apple used to do this thing where because they were trying to be like high-end watch you could just order with basically whatever band you wanted and that was you know awesome but they have since gone away from that and you're limited to a very limited number of bands so I was looking at uh the Nike model this year but the problem is the Nike model ships two weeks later and it wouldn't arrive until Friday like October 6th or whatever it is and I'm going to be out of town that weekend and I didn't know exactly where I was going to be because I was going to be in transit that day so I couldn't pick a place and I couldn't sign for it so I ended up just going with the um uh the I think they call it the sport loop it's the velcro one which I already own it was like the choice was between two bands that I already own it was either the regular sport or the the the loop the sport Loop band or whatever and I was like oh jeez because then reason I was going to get the Nike One is because it has the the Nike Loop band but it's a reflective at night when you run at night and I run at night a lot but I really don't need it that badly and it was like it was one of those things I was like well I could wait like 3 weeks plus to get this watch because God knows when it'll get delivered or I could just get the one on day one and I was like I'll just get the one on day one right which one of these two bad options is more frustrating waiting around for something or getting what I already have right exactly so I figure I'm going to probably just sell this old watch to Apple because they were going to give me like cuz I have the series 3 the quote unquote old watch it's so ancient uh I'm just going to give it to Apple because they give you like 250 bucks for it which isn't bad I fig I'll probably get the same if I were to list it on you know eBay or whatever was that the cellular model or something yeah it's a cellular model so um so yeah I figure I'll just send them because I'm guessing that they require a band with it so I'll just um and what I was doing in years past was I was actually just going on Amazon and buying a cheap knockoff band and then sending that to whoever was buying my my uh watch but now it's like well I guess I already have this velcro one so I'll just get a new velcro one and replace it and that's a good idea with velcro anyway because over time so velcro is a hook and loop system and over time the Loops in the soft side tear and and no longer stick well so replacing the velcro over time is good anyway yeah exactly I I just wish that they still had the option of uh bands like where you could choose and pick and choose and get new ones and stuff um because it was nice it was like oh you know I don't have this band and then it was an opportunity every year to get a new band it was almost an incentive to buy because like well if I'm going to pay $40 for the band anyhow factor that into the price right um and then you get a new one to add to your collection now did this same kind delay drive your iPhone 10s versus 10r decision no this is going to sound sad but the reason that I'm getting the 10s more than anything um aside from the fact that I'm going to be doing the review for Apple Insider is something happened with I have an iPhone 10 and something happened where um it cracked underneath the leather case on the back so you can't tell if the phone is cracked but it really really bothers me because I've never in my life in 10 years of owning an iPhone have never ever cracked an iPhone ever the front the back none of it never cracked one and then one day and I have no idea when it cracked or how but it the corner up by the camera has like kind of a little tiny shatter and then that turned into a large crack that went all across the back case and so this is one of those things that really ticked me off and I was like how did this happen I don't even remember dropping the phone I don't know what what happened um and so I looked into getting the back replaced it turns out that if you don't have Apple Care the back of the phone is like 10 times more expensive than the front of the phone it's like $500 to get this back glass replaced so so it just bothers me it doesn't change the functionality or the usability of the phone in any way and then I looked to trade it into Apple to see like oh you know if I get the 10s how much will you pay me for it if the back weren't cracked um they would give me like $550 for this phone or something like that the fact that the back is cracked means they give me Zer for this phone and they're just like yeah you can recycle it and it's like the phone still works fine so basically long story short I came to the realization that I need to get Apple Care and I need to get on the annual iPhone upgrade plan it is now I said I would hold off on Apple Care until I cracked a phone I have cracked a phone it is now time for me to get on the Apple care plan it is now time for me to get a phone that is not cracked um and I don't like giant phones so the 10r was out uh 6.1 in was just too much um so I will stick with the size that I currently have um and I'm getting the 10s yeah so I have two theories one is that the reason that it is so much more expensive to replace the back glass is the way they assemble these things MH you know if if they put the frame and then they put the glass in from the the front of the frame and then Pile in the logic board and the battery and all the other bits that means to replace it requires disassembling the whole entire phone right which is is nuts Bonkers and too much of a cost and so that's why they say it's worthless and I have another theory I have another crazy Theory and this is this is people don't take my advice don't do this at home but you know I I think about how when you have a cracked windshield on your car if you catch it early then you can fill it with a little bit of epoxy and they have a suction cup kind of thing to force the glue into the crack so that it heals it and cures it nicely and that prevents the crack from growing but if you leave it then you know you hit a bump and the crack splits the whole windshield just like you know you hit a small bump and you never notice it with a letter case on and you split the whole back of your phone yeah so I yeah I'm I'm I'm angry at myself the that uh the first phone that I managed to crack was the one that cost about $1,300 but uh here we are so let me console you you are not irresponsible the the the uh the iPhone upgrading plan is one of those things too where it's like well if you're going to get the phone every year then having this automated system where you pay the same amount um and you trade in your old phone and you don't have to worry about that stuff um and then you just continue extending the the two-year plan it just kind of makes sense if you're going to get Apple care if you're not going to get apple care then it's not worth it but that was why I just bought the phones outright in years past CU it was like well I'm not going to get Apple Care I've never cracked a phone I don't need to and now it's like well maybe I do need to get apple care I I have always purchased Apple Care for the phones and the reason is for for cracks like that for weird things that happen to cameras I've I've had spots develop on the inside of the lens of the camera in years past I've had back when home buttons were physical home buttons I had and then they had the little square symbol on them the rounded rectangle symbol on them I've had home buttons that had the bizarre failure where they started rotating and instead of looking like a square it looked like a diamond and and so all of these things minor or not although spots on the camera was kind of major since the camera is a major function of the phone having Apple Care meant that you didn't have to worry about it you didn't have to Blink about it and that you know after about a year and and nine months go and change the battery and have a fresh battery for the next year so that you might use the phone if you're not upgrading right away yeah I would always try to get my battery replaced every year and then I found they used to just go okay and look at the phone they go yeah we'll swap the battery and then in recent years they've gotten a little more difficult about it which obviously led to the whole battery gate slash the de now now now we can check the health of our battery or whatever so what happened was like it got increasingly comical so a couple years ago I had like the iPhone 6 or the 6s I don't remember which one it was but it was one that had the random shutdown problem and I brought it in and they were like no your battery is healthy and I said no it's not it's definitely randomly shutting down and uh and so they finally you know it all came came out and then I went back in and then they replaced it so then a year later I had an SE and it was dropping from like it would get to like 50 or 40% and then drop to like 5% and I was like well this is crazy so I brought into the store and they said oh no your battery health is fine we won't swap it out and this was probably like a month before the iPhone 10 came out and then they said what we can do is we can open it up and see if there's like some sort of issue with it or something like that and and then if we replace the battery you know we'll charge you x amount of money or whatever I said okay so apparently they went back and had the machine open up with the sheen messed up and it ripped one of the ribbon cables so they ended up just giving me a uh they ended up just giving me a refurbished phone for free uh so it worked out but it was like it was one of those things where I was like I really shouldn't have to haggle this much when you guys have had a number of battery issues that are proven that are out there like I'm not making this up uh and you know I ended up getting an iPhone 10 like a month later anyhow but um yeah at this point it's like I don't want to do all that haggling regarding batteries and and arguing with them about stuff not working it's just easier to get a new phone every year yeah and I have yet to go for the upgrade plan I think about it but it's it's something that I'm not there on yet I I used to change my phone every year or every other year and I somehow got into keeping the iPhone 6 for four years I mean these phones are great there's you don't need to upgraded every year you know it's it's just I'm just an insane person so well I'm right there with you in spirit but iOS 12 has really done right by me yeah it's a great update uh you know iOS 12 on iPhone 6 and 6s and 6 Plus and 6s plus has has really proved itself I think that you know one one of the anecdotes is that when people were at WWDC they saw Apple Engineers wandering around using iPhone 6 and by having the engineers use the old Hardware they really tuned iOS 12 properly for it yeah I I I think it runs great um I've been very happy with it I I'm super excited about the shortcuts app I've been a long time um workflow user uh however um it's one of those things where like if if it was like 15 years ago I I would be all about shortcuts and sitting down and learning it I just don't have the time now so I opened it up and it was like man this is cool wow this is really intimidating uh I don't know I don't know how I can like make this work like I've done like some custom Siri commands and stuff like that which is cool and a lot of the apps have integration so now I can make it so that the default weather comes from carrot instead of uh Apple weather app just by customizing commands and stuff but like you know when I was a kid I had uh an old Windows PC with like 4 megab of ram rting Windows 3.1 like a compact pararo or something and it would I would make a boot disc and so I would bypass Windows and boot straight into dos so I could play like Doom or hexen or whatever and not use the ram that was required to get into Windows and then get out because the system would just not give back the memory so that kind of stuff was fun for me at a time when I was a kid but now it's like uh I just want it to work you know like I just don't want to like mess around with it so I I want to be more excited about uh the the shortcuts app in terms of being passionate about learning to use it U but I think I'm more excited just in terms of hey you build something and then I'll install it from like the gallery in the app yeah and I'm I'm concerned about that too I feel like this is awesome for for people who are going to dig into it but the people who are going to dig into it are are maybe relatively small compared to the vast majority of iPhone users the you know it's great that it makes the homepod more useful for example right but in some ways it feels like kicking the can down the road here you program as opposed to we're going to help you make Siri smarter yeah I mean I'm a big time homekit user um I am a fan of using Siri for complex multi-step tasks to simplify them so everything about it's right up my alley I just it was one of those things where like my wife uh just started school and she was like I just want to have a one day a week do not disturb like I don't want to have Monday through Friday or or seven days a week or whatever I want to just have every Monday when I'm in class my iPad automatically goes into to do not disturb and I was like hm I wonder if I can do this through uh the shortcuts app and then I went in and spent about 15 minutes trying to figure it out and then I spent another 10 minutes searching Google and Twitter to see if anybody had done it and then I had no answers and then I gave up so you like I couldn't figure it out and if I spent half hour on it and couldn't figure it out the average user probably won't be able to either and maybe it's not possible I don't know but I I want to I want to love it I want to learn it I want to embrace it I just don't have the time it it feels like one of those things like automator automator on Mac is very cool automator on Mac is very nice and no one uses it automator is even easier though because you can at least have it do um you know with mouse presses and stuff like that true and and also they give you a wide catalog that you can choose from with the options already kind of there yeah yeah you can you can be dumb and use automator and get it to work but um if you're dumb like I am and and try to use shortcuts um you know these it's a little more complicated it would be nicer if they had something similar automator where it was like you know close the window and open a new app and then tap this and it'll learn that and go okay we know how to get directly to that function of that app that that would be mind blowing that would probably be really good right I I don't know if it's possible but well it depends on how much they have in ter of os hooks that they can identify what what's being tapped on yeah and and uh you know with a lot of these apps already have some level of Siri integration anyhow the the deeper um dive into Siri that happened a few years ago so and and this is the thing like everything Apple does lays the groundwork for what comes later I was trying to explain to somebody the other day they were saying well the AR on the iPhone I don't really think it's that impressive it's like well you have to think about what this is laying the groundwork for like apple could literally launch a headset tomorrow and all all the groundwork that they've laid in iOS 12 means that they would have more AR apps on the on their platform than anybody else you look at all these other devices that are out there you know the magic leap which apparently is hugely disappointing uh Microsoft Hollow lens these are such limited markets but by leveraging a platform that Millions upon Millions upon millions of people are using and thousands upon thousands of developers are eager to use they are creating the groundwork for AR apps that are now going to be able to be on a future headset or whatever so it's the same thing with Siri and and and workflow and Now shortcuts all that integration that they've done now Builds on it so all the hooks that Siri has had into Apps before can now automatically be just click a button and Bam now you're working with shortcuts so they've laid a lot of the groundwork and they've done a nice job and I expect that really good things are going to come from shortcuts it's just going to have to be somebody else building it yeah now I I wanted to to talk about a little bit I mean we know that one of the big things that happens with the iPhone Ione 10 and 10s rather or the camera camera is kind of a huge deal right yeah so in the past there have been people that shot movies on iPhone 5 and then shot movies on iPhone 7 and we actually had a uh a movie that was in theaters that was shot on iPhone 7 and there have been a few yeah um the most recent one being the Soderberg movie unane yeah and it looks like director John Chu who uh directed crazy Rich agents shot a short film entirely on iPhone XS Max he had Early Access prior to the launch on Friday and he shot this project in partnership with wired called somewhere and it was uh sort of a glimpse into the workout routine of a a b boy star named Luigi Rosado who rehearses his dance moves in solitude on a garage and so they didn't use any special Hardware or any post-processing software they just started capturing this uh these dance moves and you know did it even they didn't even use gimbals or dollies they just kind of handheld the phone and used built-in stabilization and it came out pretty awesome yeah I mean this guy is is the new hot thing in Hollywood right crazy changes was on top of the box office for like five or six weeks or something it's made a ton of money so uh good get for Apple um very timely uh and you know talented dude uh who is clearly showing off what you can do with the really cool camera in your pocket you know it it used to be that if you wanted to make a movie there was this Camp of people that would tell you you had to go to film school and do all the right things and learn how to raise money and rent equipment and all that stuff and there was this other Camp of people that said basically go get whatever camera you possibly can put your hands on it and just start shooting something go ahead and write a script and go for it right right and you know that's how Kevin Smith kind of started that's how there there are people who have made liveaction versions of Toy Story or there there was a guy who he and his friends when they were k kids spent years recreating Indiana Jones oh yeah you know and Raiders of the Lost Arc they they reot Raiders of Lost Arc and they started out doing it on uh on VHS and there's a documentary about that yeah called Raiders and it's pretty good right and so the the ability to have a super good camera in a phone that's widely available should enable a lot more creativity right it should enable people to become filmmakers whenever they want to and the tools get out of the way and it's it's just down to your own Talent your own acting your own writing right I I went and saw a really terrible movie in theaters last week called uh I think it was it was either ninja zombie or zombie ninja I don't know which order it was in but it was actually shot in like 1992 in Chicago on 8 millimeter and uh it was recently discovered by the American film genre archive and they put it out on Blu-ray and they had like a big release in theaters and I went and saw it with like a packed house and it was about as terrible as you would expect but what was funny about it was you could see that there were like some basic understanding of basic film making chops and editing and like editing around the low budget and stuff and so yeah to your point like these guys clearly were not professional filmmakers and made a really cheesy terrible movie but they understood some of the basics of it and that and you got to start somewhere it it's said that the actual movie making happens in the edit room yeah you know obviously sure you have to have actors obviously sure you have to have a script of some kind but the script can change wildly in edit well that's why if you have a director like Michael um who uh you know is known for his many Cuts you just shoot a lot and then if you have a director who's really really bad at action um you'll be watching and it's cut too much because they don't know how to shoot a fight and you don't know who's punching who yeah I've seen that it's really disorienting yeah I'm I'm trying to think of a movie that I saw recently that that had a really bad fight scene the only one I can think of is uh uh the the uh James Bond uh Daniel Craig not Skyfall but the one that came after it uh Quantum of soless or whatever yeah oh God that was like whoever I don't know who directed that movie but the fight scenes were just so bad like you didn't know who was punching who what was going on it was like this is terrible it was such a step down from Skyfall the first five minutes of of Quantum of Solace were incredible right the the shots where they were filming in Mexico and the Day of the Dead yeah yeah know that was cool that was fantastic that was an entirely different director than the director for the rest of the movie I have it backwards though Quantum soless came before Skyfall okay so do I have skyall was the Roger deacons one he's he's the um cinematographer he was also on uh Blade Runner 2049 he does really gorgeous stuff uh so Skyfall was kind of a return to form for them but uh I think Quant of the soless was the one that came before and it was terrible did you like flade Runner 2049 I did yeah I I watched it once and the first watch didn't do a lot for me and I think what I need to do is go back and watch it again again because I'm sure there's a lot more there that I missed the first time it's a little slow I'm a big fan of Blade Runner um I thought the film was gorgeous uh like I said Roger deacons does a really great job um and I really liked the the pacing I liked a lot of the concepts of it it took some of the stuff from the first movie and kind of built on it but also turned some stuff on its ear which I liked it was his own thing um I thought it was a really great movie yeah it was we're talking about the wrong film I'm not talking about Quant of a soless I was talking about Spectre the James Bond Spectre movie Spectre oh that was the one after Skyfall I think right yeah yeah I didn't even see that one I heard it was terrible the reviews were not good well so watch the first five minutes okay because the first five minutes were great the the the opening Quant of sess was the one where they were like taking over the water supply or something I don't know we're going down the rabbit hole who who can tell but definitely definitely watch the the uh The Day of the Dead scene that opens Spectre because that was well done the rest of the movie was kind of terrible but that was great got it thinking about things that are that are related to Apple now tell me about your Apple watch you updated your Series 3 Apple watch to watch OS 5 yeah I've been running the beta for a few months now um it's good uh I'm you know it's not it's not a major update I've never used the walkie-talkie app yet um because I didn't know anybody else that was on watch OS 5 so I mean I guess I'll try that at some point um presumably when I'm reviewing the series for this weekend I'll give it a shot I like that you can custom the um uh control center where you swipe it from the bottom you put the stuff that you want up top um yeah I mean other than that I'm I'm struggling to think of what is really new in this update I guess there's support for shortcuts which I haven't set up yet there's support for shortcuts there's the uh the breathe faces there are the other complications kind of things and and one of the things that that they're supposed to be doing with watch OS 5 is the ability for apps to have complications appear on the watch face from those apps so this is supposed to bring developers back to writing watch apps yeah I mean i' I've been pretty set with my complications for a while um um so I didn't I didn't change any of my complications when I got into watch OS 5 I am curious to try out the new complications with the larger watch face though yeah the the it seems a little busy for me it's a little too colorful a little too busy I'm going to have to mess around with it I I like them a little more simple I think one of the things they're trying to do is they they piled everything into that face and turned it all on so that you could see what the options were and that was sort of what they showed us during the keynote where all of a sudden they have contacts in the center of the watch face so that you can tap and directly communicate with your contacts that way you know it's not that these are tasteful decisions are necessarily the right thing to do for everyone but by turning all of them on you start people thinking about okay I've been wearing the watch what should I change yeah I mean I think complications are one of the best features of the watch if not the best feature so I'm super happy that they're embracing them in a big way uh but for my personal use I will probably be toning it down a little on the series 4 yeah pedometer Plus+ is one of the applications that has really tried to take advantage of the things that watchos allows so I would I would tell you as you're doing your series 4 uh review go ahead and install that application and see what it does with the watch faces cuz I'm kind of curious to see how they've taken advantage of it yeah cool I'll have to check that out I my main ones that I use are um carrot weather which is a really great watch app um and then uh Nike Plus run Club well yeah cuz that's obviously the the first party partner well it's it's still a third party app um because it competes with Apple's own workouts app but they have like guided runs and stuff like that that I like if you're doing like U interval training and stuff like that yeah but I think of it as a tightener partnership just because they have the the Nike Plus version that ships with that app basically right yeah yeah exactly it it is still it still has the plague that that besets a lot of uh third party apps on the watch though where it is not as reliable as apples apps it's a little buggy um and I think that you know there's a apple gets access to apis that third party developers don't and that's been hurting the Apple watch since launch and hopefully that continues to change I know with watch OS 5 now um apps can kind of store their own audio and stuff like that so we don't have the problems that were previously coming up with OverWatch and all that the third party podcast app um but yeah they still like last night for example I went for a run and I had to tap like four or five times on the start button it's a giant button that takes up the entire screen uh but it just was not registering to start my run so I wonder if there's a forthcoming update for the Nike Plus app before the series 4 Nike Edition launches in 2 weeks um that that solves those issues I certainly hope so now one of the things that we we ran a story on this week was about the Apple watch or a similar device being required for all John Hancock life insurance policies and this this is something that John Hancock's been sort of leaning towards for a while you know they they were running Facebook ads last year saying sign up for a policy and earn a free Apple watch right where basically what they do is is based on your activity per month they will give you the the credit towards the watch like they'll ship you a watch and then based on your activity you um you either owe them money or don't based on how much you do if you're inactive then obviously you need to pay for it but if you are using it interactive then they they go ahead and credit you that and and so currently they are pivoting towards this interactive life insurance where every policy holder with them is going to have to track their Fitness and you know you save up to 15% in annual premium saving you uh you earn the Apple watch for as little as $25 by being very very active and they're throwing in other things along with that you know shopping entertainment rewards and and uh a subscription to headspace which is a meditation app that works really well and it's it's intriguing to me that they're they're pushing this so hard I mean it saves them money so that's why they do it they're an insurance company it does and and obviously they don't want to pay out on a claim but you know you could yeah I'm I'm a big fan of the Apple watch and and its health benefits um less so a fan of giving tracking capabilities to companies that don't really need know more information about us um you know no offense no offense to insurance companies they got to make money like everybody else does just like apple Insider does uh but I you know it's it's one of those things where it's like do they really need to know all that information yeah but you know it certainly beats the traditional life insurance model of sending you to a doctor to get a physical kind of thing sure yeah totally and and some people may be totally comfortable with that I would not be inclined to uh unwillingly have that data just shared with an insurance company you know you think about what Apple's doing with the EKG reader on the watch series 4 and I was talking with somebody about this the other day in terms of data privacy what's interesting is it outputs that data as a PDF that you can then share with your doctor um and presumably this is all stored you know on device and secure and gives users that are registering that data uh the ability to choose who it's shared with and who it's not you know sharing a PDF is not something that you're going to accidentally do uh but once it gets into the hand of your doctor or whoever else then then it's kind of a free frall then then if there's a data breach at uh at your hospital um then then your EKG or whatever uh Your Health Data might end up on the internet that that's where the the threat is with this stuff um having your your health information logged on your phone is not as big of a risk I don't think well and this is something that Apple's been sort of working on in the past too was the you know currently they have some 50 or 70 organizations that they synchronize health records with and so I have two local hospitals that I have records at that um you whose doctors I see from time to time and those appear in my Apple health application which is super handy it is really nice because uh you know if you if you go to another doctor for whatever reason and you need to be you know they ask so are you generally healthy you know what what was your last whatever rating like and I was able to pull up and say well you know on this date it said that my blood pressure was this right and and that was convenient that was kind of nice um one of the things that I think we've we've heard some movement towards is Apple's been talking about working with medical facilities on creating what an electronic health record should be you know epic's been doing this kind of thing for years but epic uses it as a tool for lockin get as many institutions signed up on Epic as possible and then keep those formats proprietary where Apple is is thinking about what privacy means that's not just obscurity by proprietary formats and what data sharing could be like it's it's somewh it's it's an area where the market needs somebody to take the initiative and Apple's focus on privacy and the fact that it doesn't profit from user data makes it the ideal candidate to do this it has devices in everybody's pockets and on their wrists it's already leading the charge and tracking Health Data and they don't want to collect your health data they just want to help you get healthy and sell you a watch obviously yeah so um yeah I mean I think that if anybody's the candidate to do it it's apple and and I'm happy to see that they are taking that initiative and that it's important to them they aren't the only ones doing it though Microsoft Google and Amazon are working in a Consortium to try and also fix IAL records yeah no they are and I don't know if I would trust Google with my health data so or Amazon yeah you've always been a little Lear of Amazon MH it's it's interesting I guess I can understand that because they're very much in the business of selling stuff yes and knowing more about you yeah in order to sell you more stuff right so what John Hancock's doing because again we ran a story about John Hancock is their offer is you order an Apple Watch series 3 with GPS by electronically signing at checkout a uh a retail installment agreement with their group for the retail price of the watch and then after an initial payment of $25 plus tax they do outof pocket payments over the next two years based on the number of workouts completed and and so basically the the way to get the watch for the $25 plus tax is that you agreed to this two-year program and you work out like mad you just get as fit as you've ever been you you do all the workouts you possibly can and they they don't make the monthly installment out of pocket payments because you've done those workouts completed but if you slip if you fall if you if you uh if you backslide in your fitness program then they just take the money it's it's intriguing to me that they um as much as the watch changes from year to year and and there are improvements every year that you're sticking with a watch for 2 years that's probably normal for most users who aren't Neil Hughes you know what do you think about that if you are a gadget hobbyist like yourself like I said I I I you'd never sign up for this program anyway no it's not for me no I don't I don't want to trust anybody with my sensitive data that I don't have to I I completely understand that and that's one of the appeals of Apple is they don't want my data and is stored on Vice and and they're happy to keep it that way absolutely the right hire can make a huge impact on your business and that's why it's so important to find the right person but where do you find that individual you you could try posting on job boards but can you be really sure the right person sees your job instead find the person who will help grow your business with LinkedIn as the world's largest Professional Network people go to LinkedIn every day to grow professionally and discover job opportunities and 70% of the US Workforce is already there LinkedIn jobs matches people to your role based on more of who they really are their skills their interests and even how open they are to new opportunities this way your job gets seen by more of the right people most LinkedIn members haven't recently visited the top job boards but nine out of 10 members are open to New Opportunities so you can really only reach them on LinkedIn and that's why a new hire is made every 10 seconds using LinkedIn and businesses rate LinkedIn 40% higher than job boards at delivering quality candidates hurry to linkedin.com appleinsider and get $50 off your first job post that's linkedin.com appleinsider to get $50 off your first job post post linkedin.com apppp Insider terms and conditions apply so Neil do you do you damn it what was I G to say Neil yes one of the things that we saw on the keynote that I know a lot of people were were excited about was the notion that you can use Google Maps and uh and ways in carplay yeah I mean this is a huge boost for carplay obviously Apple Maps for uh all of the hype that Apple tried when they launched it a few years ago has just not been able to catch up to Google uh in terms of data um say what you will about you know the traffic data and all that kind of stuff but the actual raw data of street level businesses all that kind of stuff they Apple just can't compete with Google on that front and so this is uh a bit of a concession on Apple's part to allow uh competing map Services both owned by Google um into its carplay platform which which in the end boosts carplay and makes it a better platform and I think that there was something of a handshake deal here too because around the same time this week um Apple also uh added support for Android auto to Apple music so I feel like there was probably a behind the- scenes deal where Apple's like we'd like to get on Android auto Google's like we'd like to get on carplay they both realized that it makes platforms better so they just said okay let's do it interestingly I I have Google Maps installed on my phone I use it especially when I travel and I plugged into carplay and tapped on an address in the Gmail application and it opened Google Maps on carplay The Voice services are not using Siri The Voice services for Google Maps in carplay run through Google's own voice Services which was really interesting for me because it's it's very much basically like almost using the Android auto version of the app yeah it's interesting it was it was really similar uh the only carplay is part about it that I could find was when you tap on the the settings gear icon in carplay on the the dashboard it gives you very large icons for things like avoid highways avoid tolls kind of stuff like that but it was it was in pretty much every respect really user friendly that's cool I I I don't use any of these platform forms I have a 12-year-old Prius that I only have because it's paid off and I live in Brooklyn and don't need a car so all good reasons yes so I would you know it's one of those things where if I had a car I'd probably you know a car where I could do the install and drove it every day then I would probably do the custom you know get one of those Pioneer put in carplay or whatever but just it's not happening well I have uh so one of the people that works at Pioneer drives a 12-year-old Prius and of course because she works at pioneer they they were able to do the install pretty easily how do they do that I mean you have the whole built-in GPS system that I think it runs on a DVD that's hidden under the driver's side seat I I saw her dashboard and it was the old Prius dashboard just like yours but they had managed to put the uh the Pioneer double D screen in it interesting yeah it's it's uh I'm sure it was probably a little more expensive than doing it on something like my uh my wife's Honda for example right yeah yeah I mean there's a there's a whole giant screen there and all that and it's not small they were able to do it interesting and you know I I asked her about it at CES a year ago and she said yeah she loves it that that having carplay and and having the PRS is a really good combination for her I am still stuck on my petrol power vehicles but um I tell you one of the um one of the things that that I love about uh uh not having a headphone jack on the phone is using it in the car because I have a car adapter that uh just takes lightning in to a USB charging thing and then it has a small 3.5 mm out on the cigarette adapter and that's where it plugs in so all I have is one lightning cable coming out of my center console in the Prius and I plug in that one cable and I can do audio so it's doing the audio over lightning or is it using that that head audio over lightning and then the cigarette adapter itself is converting from lightning to 3.5 mm oh okay yeah so there's a 3.5 mm out on the cigarette adapter got it okay neat that's that's an interesting little charger that you got there yeah exactly it's awesome so just one cable super simple um you know for all the H and cry about the headphone jack it's like this is way better yeah well so I've been using carplay for the past couple of years and in both my wife and my car and using the lightning cable obviously for audio and charging and I'm getting ready to install the Pioneer Wireless carplay unit I've had I've had the Alpine Wireless carplay unit back in January and we're getting ready to do the uh the Pioneer version of it which is the second aftermarket unit available with wireless carplay there's a lot to be said for it now obviously there's something really nice about charging when you're in the car because well you're already in the car you're not going anywhere you may as well charge but having carplay start when you get close and turn the car on is brilliant because there are a couple of times you get in the car you you're going on a short trip you forget to to plug take the phone out of the pocket plug it into the dash the whole thing it's just better you can get a wireless charger too you you could get a wireless charger too and be completely wireless but you know keeping the phone in the pocket and having carplay start is very good it's still insane to me that this new iPhone you're going to spend you know $1,500 or whatever on it if you get the large one ships with this this this dinky little charger 1amp charger and like it's insane to me because wireless charging now they made it more efficient on the new one it's not actually a faster charger they just made it so it's more efficient or whatever so it it it does it at a faster rate but it charges up to like 7.5 amps or Watts or whatever I'm I'm not an electrician but uh that's so much faster than the a built-in charger yes absolutely it is and you can get these wireless chargers for like $5 on Amazon and it's like apple can't ship it with something that sh that charges a little faster I swear if these new iPads that are expected to come out in October if they don't ship with a fast charged 29 watt adapter for like an 800 plus dollar tablet that's going to be one of the stupidest things you are going to go to war over this aren't you it's it drives me nuts like it's it's such a stupid thing to be cheap on like someone was telling me the other day that like the difference between like you know you have a sticker that peels off cleanly versus a sticker that like tears as soon as you try to take it off something like when it's on a new product like you buy something cheap from China or whatever and it's got like a sticker on it apparently the difference in price between those is like one penny per like 8,000 sheets or something it's like it's so just nickel and diming to the smallest of the scents and it's it's so frustrating to see a company like apple that will charge you an arm and a leg for their new phone and people will happily pay it and they can't just make the charger a little bit more capable so here's the other problem right which is that the fastest charging that they can do uses that USBC connector and the USBC connector is on all of their laptops yeah but it is not on all of the cigarette lighted adapters or cars or or other kinds of chargers you might have around well so the rumor that came out a few weeks ago was that the iPad itself was going to have a USBC port on it mink quo said that I don't believe I think he's got it wrong I think what happens is it ships with the USBC to lightning cable in the box with a 29 adap so you can charge the thing at full speed that's a lot more sensible than what he was proposing I yeah the switch to USBC would make no sense to me because it's not like Apple's been pushing plugging in accessories into your iPad if anything they want everything to be Wireless yeah or the failed SMART connector yeah I mean it's and I say failed only because there have been precious few accessories for it yeah I I still use my SMART connector doc to charge it uh and I like uh my my Apple Smart Keyboard uh but yeah I've been very disappointed I think that uh there should be a lot more uses for the SMART connector and I think you know Apple kind of blew it do you want to hear why I think they still ship the 1 amp charger with the fantastically expensive iPhone let's hear it I think there are two reasons reason one packaging size the oneapp charger is small the onea charger fits in the iPhone box nicely going to a larger charger means redesigning the packaging to accommodate that and giving up space in the box that they can otherwise keep small you know the worst thing in the world is to have to ship air because you're you're paying for the size of the box and and shipping an empty box stinks the using the smaller adapter means they can then use a shallower box they they don't have to dedicate that space to a larger charger and the cable and still fit the earbuds in can you say larger charger again larger charger I didn't stumble over that at all I was I was pretty happy about that so the and and there are some difficulties because obviously there are Chargers around the world that are larger like the UK charger for example which has the the very large blades that come out of it or the um the e new charger that has wider spaced pins that go into the wall outlet so they they do have to accommodate different sized larger chargers for worldwide use there you go again um but they like the small cube because it does fit there's another reason this is my other speculation which is that slow charging the phone is better longterm for its battery life now I I fully expect to get email telling me that I'm wrong but here's what we know and and that is two things age a battery one of them is leaving it charged in for extended periods of time right if you charge overnight your battery is is potentially going to age faster than if you charge it up to about 70% and then stop charging it and the reason is what happens is when you charge to 100% it the the the charge controller says okay I'm full and stops charging and then it bleeds down over a little bit of time because you know you get to 99% or 98% because it's still running this the radios it's still receiving data things like that and then it says wait I'm 99% I can be charged again and so it turns on and so you just constantly cycle between 99 and 100 99 and 100 turning it on and off which is not healthy for the battery yeah I think it's like I I think it's like the Max Capacity it'll fluctuate between 100% of real capacity and 94% of real capacity but it shows you 100% all the time so if you could somehow get access to that raw data you could take your phone off the charger at the right time and get another 6% out of your battery but of course Apple's not going to disclose that information because then it would drive people insane right and I actually have a uh a charger made by a third party that has Bluetooth low energy in it and pairs with the phone and then uses that to monitor charge status and charge cycling so that it prevents that kind of thing and it worked great except that you have to keep their app frontmost in order for it to to stay keep the connection alive with the charger to do that you know what I was saying about being exhausted by uh uh the shortcuts I'm already exhausted by you describing this yes just I know I just want I just want the phone to last all day I don't care what magic has to go on behind the scenes to make it work I know but remember the Huawei Nexus 6p and their battery debacle yeah okay so the Huawei Nexus 6p used USBC charging fast charging and and that phone charges ridiculously fast you know you get a full char in under 2 hours but the batteries aged badly because of that right so this is the tradeoff you can have your nice 7 and2 watt 7 half amp charging with your your wireless chargers but the added heat and added cycling and added fast charge has a negative impact on your battery yeah now if you're changing phones every year because you're on the upgrade plan don't care right fresh battery at the end of year anyway right and it's cheap to get the battery repl now anyhow so even if you to keep your phone another year it's like well you might as well I I don't think that cost is going to stay the same I think the reduced cost for getting your battery changed was a one-time concession to deal with the battery debacle yes I agree and and that that price is going back up to the $80 that it was previously I think they already announced that it's going up the end of the year so yeah let me see I'm going to check the health on my iPhone 10 battery right now we'll see where we're at battery health maximum capacity is at 94 %. so we we're it came out what October of last year so 11 months okay so or no it was November it was early November the phone came out so Le less than that less than 11 months and I've lost 6% of its capacity over the summer I had my iPhone 6 and at the beginning of the summer it said 94% battery health and when was the last time you had the battery replaced in that phone two years ago and then at the end of Apple Care basically when my Apple Care initially ran out on it I I went ahead and changed the battery at that time I don't like my phone battery to get below like 50% that gives me anxiety so when I'm at work my phone sits on a wireless charger all day see that's not healthy for it what you ought to do is is run it down to about 20% and then charge it back up to about 70% well I'm not a healthy person Victor so tell me about it you at least have an Apple Watch you close your rings I don't even do that you know I had a uh like a 45 day streak going on my move goal uh which probably some people are scoffing and saying oh I'm at 600 days or whatever but it was good for me so lay off me and I went to a a wedding in Calgary and I walked all around downtown and then I was dancing and all that and somehow that day of all days was the day that broke my streak and I didn't close the move goal and I was like really really like what happened here how did this happen I feel like you know and then there are some days where I'm just sitting around on my fat butt all day doing nothing and probably just like waving my hand around while I'm on the phone or something like that and then it registers a bunch of activity and I look down and it's like and it's like my my move goal is like three4 of the way closed and it's like oh like and I've done nothing all day so I mean obviously it's just a game it's not like it's an actual representation of my health and uh you know it's it h it's limited based on being on my wrist and not knowing what the rest of my body is doing but at the same time like it's hard to place too too much stock in these rings when when that's the way they operate yeah actor graphy which is the the idea of charting and and logging the movement is really imprecise it is of course but it's it's but it's something it motivates like there are a number of times especially when I had that awesome streak going where I was like I'm going to go out for a walk just so I can close out this ring you know because you know it's it's good to have that little thing that motivates you if you game a it motivates you I think that's great yeah just don't place too much faith in it or think that you know these people who have like with the Fitbit craze where it was like 10,000 steps per day and like oh yeah 10,000 steps was a madeup number you know where 10,000 steps came from where's that 10,000 steps came because in the 1960s in a cereal in Japan they placed a Cheesy pedometer and in in Japanese they called it the 10,000 step meter that's where this comes from and it's a completely fictional number it just comes from the the toy in the Cal box basically you know I I've I've met people over the years where they say oh you know I lost 50 lbs by parking my car at the back of the parking lot when I go to the grocery store and then I just and and I just lost all this weight and it's like how little were you moving before really like that that walking from the back of the parking lot to the front is like what made you lose all that weight like gez man you know like I'm out running miles and stuff and all that and it's like you know you struggle to lose weight and then some people it's like man how how inactive were you and I think for people like that the watch is probably great right like stand up close your rings do whatever um you know if if that's the little motivation they need that they're moving so little um then it's probably a huge huge uh gain for public health just for those folks alone absolutely of course I I represent that side of completely sedentary people I get all my Fitness in in January at CES walking the show floor your ancestors or your your future Generations will be the folks in Wall-E and the in the chairs oh precisely actually my kids are far more active than I am oh that's good they they are competitive swimmers they you know I just ended up finished building a bicycle for one of them they they a serious 4 watch Victory you got to get out there CL those Rings 10,000 steps do it I totally do I'm right now I'm in search of replacing my iPhone 6 that's what I'm in search of because priories it was well it was 94% at the of the summer and by the end of the summer it was 70% and dying at 30% battery life and it was just Dro it it was like it just one day dropped off a cliff it was fine one day and sad the next I'm just waiting for the day that I can get some sort of a camera on my watch and I don't have to bring my phone with me just that's my that's my perfect watch there that's when I'll buy that's when I'll buy the stainless steel model but you remember that there were people that were building a camera into the band that we saw at CES yeah I don't know that it ever shipped I don't know that it ever did but it was it was certainly I I run and go to the gym without my uh phone um so I have my YMCA card on my watch uh through the wallet app and then I'll go to the grocery store a lot of times after I get out of the gym and Trader Joe's takes Apple pay and so I just don't have my phone on me and I use any list uh which has a great native watch app and I use that to check off items on the grocery list it's awesome I love it I would love to go an afternoon and evening without having my phone on me the one thing that I miss is it'll be like oh that's I'll be out running and like that's a nice Sunset and want to take a photo of it or or look at this thing you know or whatever there's always like random things that you want to take photos of and send to people and I can't do it when I just have my watch and it's the one thing that I miss can you add items to any list using Siri yes you can and I am hoping I haven't looked yet but I'm hoping that there's some Siri shortcut integration that will make it even easier I'm saying that that could be very cool one of the Reon re that I that I went with it is because it has a native watch app and it works really well so um and you can share you know with uh other people and have a shared list and all that it's it's a great app very happy with it awesome so we've got two app recommendations for people this week we've got pedometer Plus+ and we've got any list yes and if you get a chance to try and use series shortcuts please go ahead and message me on Twitter yes send me all of your good shortcuts so that I can just install them and reap the benefits of your hard work and you can go ahead and send that to Victor appleinsider.com and we'll make sure that Neil gets it because Neil needs all that hard work yes he needs all the help he can get well this is the end of never perfectly good episode we we've been on here for about an hour or so may maybe we need to go ahead and wrap this up cool I'm I'm Victor I'm at V marks on Twitter and uh the notorious Neil Hughes is this is Neil on Twitter yes so what's what's the deal are we going to have you back again Neil what's going on yeah yeah uh would love to come back let me know when when you want me well there there is no conspiracy here I'm not being punished we are keeping Neil down we are oppressing Neil it's because you're so fit yes yeah exactly all right well we will be back next week with more Apple Insider go ahead and write positive reviews on iTunes and tell us what's going on with your new Apple watch plans your new iPhone plans and we will be back with more next week nyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to this episode of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor and joining me is the wonderful William G wait a minute actually it's the notorious Neil Hughes Victor how's it going where have you been I I've been on sabatical no no I've been working I feel like we lost you there for a while I'm never too far promise well I I know that's a big reassurance to all our listeners because we really miss you thank you thank you now I I really appreciate everybody who's always tweeting at me and and staying in touch and asking for my opinions on things and stuff uh you can always reach out to me on Twitter and find me there and I will respond at some point tell everyone your Twitter name uh this is Neil NE cool now in the last time since we spoke there have been all kinds of new things happening including new devices I know so what are you getting I am getting uh an iPhone 10s because as you know I don't like jumbo phones um and I am getting a Apple Watch series 4 44 mm which is is for practical purposes about the same size as the 42mm but you get a lot more screen area for the money right yeah well you can use the same bands at least which is nice unfortunately because Apple so Apple used to do this thing where because they were trying to be like high-end watch you could just order with basically whatever band you wanted and that was you know awesome but they have since gone away from that and you're limited to a very limited number of bands so I was looking at uh the Nike model this year but the problem is the Nike model ships two weeks later and it wouldn't arrive until Friday like October 6th or whatever it is and I'm going to be out of town that weekend and I didn't know exactly where I was going to be because I was going to be in transit that day so I couldn't pick a place and I couldn't sign for it so I ended up just going with the um uh the I think they call it the sport loop it's the velcro one which I already own it was like the choice was between two bands that I already own it was either the regular sport or the the the loop the sport Loop band or whatever and I was like oh jeez because then reason I was going to get the Nike One is because it has the the Nike Loop band but it's a reflective at night when you run at night and I run at night a lot but I really don't need it that badly and it was like it was one of those things I was like well I could wait like 3 weeks plus to get this watch because God knows when it'll get delivered or I could just get the one on day one and I was like I'll just get the one on day one right which one of these two bad options is more frustrating waiting around for something or getting what I already have right exactly so I figure I'm going to probably just sell this old watch to Apple because they were going to give me like cuz I have the series 3 the quote unquote old watch it's so ancient uh I'm just going to give it to Apple because they give you like 250 bucks for it which isn't bad I fig I'll probably get the same if I were to list it on you know eBay or whatever was that the cellular model or something yeah it's a cellular model so um so yeah I figure I'll just send them because I'm guessing that they require a band with it so I'll just um and what I was doing in years past was I was actually just going on Amazon and buying a cheap knockoff band and then sending that to whoever was buying my my uh watch but now it's like well I guess I already have this velcro one so I'll just get a new velcro one and replace it and that's a good idea with velcro anyway because over time so velcro is a hook and loop system and over time the Loops in the soft side tear and and no longer stick well so replacing the velcro over time is good anyway yeah exactly I I just wish that they still had the option of uh bands like where you could choose and pick and choose and get new ones and stuff um because it was nice it was like oh you know I don't have this band and then it was an opportunity every year to get a new band it was almost an incentive to buy because like well if I'm going to pay $40 for the band anyhow factor that into the price right um and then you get a new one to add to your collection now did this same kind delay drive your iPhone 10s versus 10r decision no this is going to sound sad but the reason that I'm getting the 10s more than anything um aside from the fact that I'm going to be doing the review for Apple Insider is something happened with I have an iPhone 10 and something happened where um it cracked underneath the leather case on the back so you can't tell if the phone is cracked but it really really bothers me because I've never in my life in 10 years of owning an iPhone have never ever cracked an iPhone ever the front the back none of it never cracked one and then one day and I have no idea when it cracked or how but it the corner up by the camera has like kind of a little tiny shatter and then that turned into a large crack that went all across the back case and so this is one of those things that really ticked me off and I was like how did this happen I don't even remember dropping the phone I don't know what what happened um and so I looked into getting the back replaced it turns out that if you don't have Apple Care the back of the phone is like 10 times more expensive than the front of the phone it's like $500 to get this back glass replaced so so it just bothers me it doesn't change the functionality or the usability of the phone in any way and then I looked to trade it into Apple to see like oh you know if I get the 10s how much will you pay me for it if the back weren't cracked um they would give me like $550 for this phone or something like that the fact that the back is cracked means they give me Zer for this phone and they're just like yeah you can recycle it and it's like the phone still works fine so basically long story short I came to the realization that I need to get Apple Care and I need to get on the annual iPhone upgrade plan it is now I said I would hold off on Apple Care until I cracked a phone I have cracked a phone it is now time for me to get on the Apple care plan it is now time for me to get a phone that is not cracked um and I don't like giant phones so the 10r was out uh 6.1 in was just too much um so I will stick with the size that I currently have um and I'm getting the 10s yeah so I have two theories one is that the reason that it is so much more expensive to replace the back glass is the way they assemble these things MH you know if if they put the frame and then they put the glass in from the the front of the frame and then Pile in the logic board and the battery and all the other bits that means to replace it requires disassembling the whole entire phone right which is is nuts Bonkers and too much of a cost and so that's why they say it's worthless and I have another theory I have another crazy Theory and this is this is people don't take my advice don't do this at home but you know I I think about how when you have a cracked windshield on your car if you catch it early then you can fill it with a little bit of epoxy and they have a suction cup kind of thing to force the glue into the crack so that it heals it and cures it nicely and that prevents the crack from growing but if you leave it then you know you hit a bump and the crack splits the whole windshield just like you know you hit a small bump and you never notice it with a letter case on and you split the whole back of your phone yeah so I yeah I'm I'm I'm angry at myself the that uh the first phone that I managed to crack was the one that cost about $1,300 but uh here we are so let me console you you are not irresponsible the the the uh the iPhone upgrading plan is one of those things too where it's like well if you're going to get the phone every year then having this automated system where you pay the same amount um and you trade in your old phone and you don't have to worry about that stuff um and then you just continue extending the the two-year plan it just kind of makes sense if you're going to get Apple care if you're not going to get apple care then it's not worth it but that was why I just bought the phones outright in years past CU it was like well I'm not going to get Apple Care I've never cracked a phone I don't need to and now it's like well maybe I do need to get apple care I I have always purchased Apple Care for the phones and the reason is for for cracks like that for weird things that happen to cameras I've I've had spots develop on the inside of the lens of the camera in years past I've had back when home buttons were physical home buttons I had and then they had the little square symbol on them the rounded rectangle symbol on them I've had home buttons that had the bizarre failure where they started rotating and instead of looking like a square it looked like a diamond and and so all of these things minor or not although spots on the camera was kind of major since the camera is a major function of the phone having Apple Care meant that you didn't have to worry about it you didn't have to Blink about it and that you know after about a year and and nine months go and change the battery and have a fresh battery for the next year so that you might use the phone if you're not upgrading right away yeah I would always try to get my battery replaced every year and then I found they used to just go okay and look at the phone they go yeah we'll swap the battery and then in recent years they've gotten a little more difficult about it which obviously led to the whole battery gate slash the de now now now we can check the health of our battery or whatever so what happened was like it got increasingly comical so a couple years ago I had like the iPhone 6 or the 6s I don't remember which one it was but it was one that had the random shutdown problem and I brought it in and they were like no your battery is healthy and I said no it's not it's definitely randomly shutting down and uh and so they finally you know it all came came out and then I went back in and then they replaced it so then a year later I had an SE and it was dropping from like it would get to like 50 or 40% and then drop to like 5% and I was like well this is crazy so I brought into the store and they said oh no your battery health is fine we won't swap it out and this was probably like a month before the iPhone 10 came out and then they said what we can do is we can open it up and see if there's like some sort of issue with it or something like that and and then if we replace the battery you know we'll charge you x amount of money or whatever I said okay so apparently they went back and had the machine open up with the sheen messed up and it ripped one of the ribbon cables so they ended up just giving me a uh they ended up just giving me a refurbished phone for free uh so it worked out but it was like it was one of those things where I was like I really shouldn't have to haggle this much when you guys have had a number of battery issues that are proven that are out there like I'm not making this up uh and you know I ended up getting an iPhone 10 like a month later anyhow but um yeah at this point it's like I don't want to do all that haggling regarding batteries and and arguing with them about stuff not working it's just easier to get a new phone every year yeah and I have yet to go for the upgrade plan I think about it but it's it's something that I'm not there on yet I I used to change my phone every year or every other year and I somehow got into keeping the iPhone 6 for four years I mean these phones are great there's you don't need to upgraded every year you know it's it's just I'm just an insane person so well I'm right there with you in spirit but iOS 12 has really done right by me yeah it's a great update uh you know iOS 12 on iPhone 6 and 6s and 6 Plus and 6s plus has has really proved itself I think that you know one one of the anecdotes is that when people were at WWDC they saw Apple Engineers wandering around using iPhone 6 and by having the engineers use the old Hardware they really tuned iOS 12 properly for it yeah I I I think it runs great um I've been very happy with it I I'm super excited about the shortcuts app I've been a long time um workflow user uh however um it's one of those things where like if if it was like 15 years ago I I would be all about shortcuts and sitting down and learning it I just don't have the time now so I opened it up and it was like man this is cool wow this is really intimidating uh I don't know I don't know how I can like make this work like I've done like some custom Siri commands and stuff like that which is cool and a lot of the apps have integration so now I can make it so that the default weather comes from carrot instead of uh Apple weather app just by customizing commands and stuff but like you know when I was a kid I had uh an old Windows PC with like 4 megab of ram rting Windows 3.1 like a compact pararo or something and it would I would make a boot disc and so I would bypass Windows and boot straight into dos so I could play like Doom or hexen or whatever and not use the ram that was required to get into Windows and then get out because the system would just not give back the memory so that kind of stuff was fun for me at a time when I was a kid but now it's like uh I just want it to work you know like I just don't want to like mess around with it so I I want to be more excited about uh the the shortcuts app in terms of being passionate about learning to use it U but I think I'm more excited just in terms of hey you build something and then I'll install it from like the gallery in the app yeah and I'm I'm concerned about that too I feel like this is awesome for for people who are going to dig into it but the people who are going to dig into it are are maybe relatively small compared to the vast majority of iPhone users the you know it's great that it makes the homepod more useful for example right but in some ways it feels like kicking the can down the road here you program as opposed to we're going to help you make Siri smarter yeah I mean I'm a big time homekit user um I am a fan of using Siri for complex multi-step tasks to simplify them so everything about it's right up my alley I just it was one of those things where like my wife uh just started school and she was like I just want to have a one day a week do not disturb like I don't want to have Monday through Friday or or seven days a week or whatever I want to just have every Monday when I'm in class my iPad automatically goes into to do not disturb and I was like hm I wonder if I can do this through uh the shortcuts app and then I went in and spent about 15 minutes trying to figure it out and then I spent another 10 minutes searching Google and Twitter to see if anybody had done it and then I had no answers and then I gave up so you like I couldn't figure it out and if I spent half hour on it and couldn't figure it out the average user probably won't be able to either and maybe it's not possible I don't know but I I want to I want to love it I want to learn it I want to embrace it I just don't have the time it it feels like one of those things like automator automator on Mac is very cool automator on Mac is very nice and no one uses it automator is even easier though because you can at least have it do um you know with mouse presses and stuff like that true and and also they give you a wide catalog that you can choose from with the options already kind of there yeah yeah you can you can be dumb and use automator and get it to work but um if you're dumb like I am and and try to use shortcuts um you know these it's a little more complicated it would be nicer if they had something similar automator where it was like you know close the window and open a new app and then tap this and it'll learn that and go okay we know how to get directly to that function of that app that that would be mind blowing that would probably be really good right I I don't know if it's possible but well it depends on how much they have in ter of os hooks that they can identify what what's being tapped on yeah and and uh you know with a lot of these apps already have some level of Siri integration anyhow the the deeper um dive into Siri that happened a few years ago so and and this is the thing like everything Apple does lays the groundwork for what comes later I was trying to explain to somebody the other day they were saying well the AR on the iPhone I don't really think it's that impressive it's like well you have to think about what this is laying the groundwork for like apple could literally launch a headset tomorrow and all all the groundwork that they've laid in iOS 12 means that they would have more AR apps on the on their platform than anybody else you look at all these other devices that are out there you know the magic leap which apparently is hugely disappointing uh Microsoft Hollow lens these are such limited markets but by leveraging a platform that Millions upon Millions upon millions of people are using and thousands upon thousands of developers are eager to use they are creating the groundwork for AR apps that are now going to be able to be on a future headset or whatever so it's the same thing with Siri and and and workflow and Now shortcuts all that integration that they've done now Builds on it so all the hooks that Siri has had into Apps before can now automatically be just click a button and Bam now you're working with shortcuts so they've laid a lot of the groundwork and they've done a nice job and I expect that really good things are going to come from shortcuts it's just going to have to be somebody else building it yeah now I I wanted to to talk about a little bit I mean we know that one of the big things that happens with the iPhone Ione 10 and 10s rather or the camera camera is kind of a huge deal right yeah so in the past there have been people that shot movies on iPhone 5 and then shot movies on iPhone 7 and we actually had a uh a movie that was in theaters that was shot on iPhone 7 and there have been a few yeah um the most recent one being the Soderberg movie unane yeah and it looks like director John Chu who uh directed crazy Rich agents shot a short film entirely on iPhone XS Max he had Early Access prior to the launch on Friday and he shot this project in partnership with wired called somewhere and it was uh sort of a glimpse into the workout routine of a a b boy star named Luigi Rosado who rehearses his dance moves in solitude on a garage and so they didn't use any special Hardware or any post-processing software they just started capturing this uh these dance moves and you know did it even they didn't even use gimbals or dollies they just kind of handheld the phone and used built-in stabilization and it came out pretty awesome yeah I mean this guy is is the new hot thing in Hollywood right crazy changes was on top of the box office for like five or six weeks or something it's made a ton of money so uh good get for Apple um very timely uh and you know talented dude uh who is clearly showing off what you can do with the really cool camera in your pocket you know it it used to be that if you wanted to make a movie there was this Camp of people that would tell you you had to go to film school and do all the right things and learn how to raise money and rent equipment and all that stuff and there was this other Camp of people that said basically go get whatever camera you possibly can put your hands on it and just start shooting something go ahead and write a script and go for it right right and you know that's how Kevin Smith kind of started that's how there there are people who have made liveaction versions of Toy Story or there there was a guy who he and his friends when they were k kids spent years recreating Indiana Jones oh yeah you know and Raiders of the Lost Arc they they reot Raiders of Lost Arc and they started out doing it on uh on VHS and there's a documentary about that yeah called Raiders and it's pretty good right and so the the ability to have a super good camera in a phone that's widely available should enable a lot more creativity right it should enable people to become filmmakers whenever they want to and the tools get out of the way and it's it's just down to your own Talent your own acting your own writing right I I went and saw a really terrible movie in theaters last week called uh I think it was it was either ninja zombie or zombie ninja I don't know which order it was in but it was actually shot in like 1992 in Chicago on 8 millimeter and uh it was recently discovered by the American film genre archive and they put it out on Blu-ray and they had like a big release in theaters and I went and saw it with like a packed house and it was about as terrible as you would expect but what was funny about it was you could see that there were like some basic understanding of basic film making chops and editing and like editing around the low budget and stuff and so yeah to your point like these guys clearly were not professional filmmakers and made a really cheesy terrible movie but they understood some of the basics of it and that and you got to start somewhere it it's said that the actual movie making happens in the edit room yeah you know obviously sure you have to have actors obviously sure you have to have a script of some kind but the script can change wildly in edit well that's why if you have a director like Michael um who uh you know is known for his many Cuts you just shoot a lot and then if you have a director who's really really bad at action um you'll be watching and it's cut too much because they don't know how to shoot a fight and you don't know who's punching who yeah I've seen that it's really disorienting yeah I'm I'm trying to think of a movie that I saw recently that that had a really bad fight scene the only one I can think of is uh uh the the uh James Bond uh Daniel Craig not Skyfall but the one that came after it uh Quantum of soless or whatever yeah oh God that was like whoever I don't know who directed that movie but the fight scenes were just so bad like you didn't know who was punching who what was going on it was like this is terrible it was such a step down from Skyfall the first five minutes of of Quantum of Solace were incredible right the the shots where they were filming in Mexico and the Day of the Dead yeah yeah know that was cool that was fantastic that was an entirely different director than the director for the rest of the movie I have it backwards though Quantum soless came before Skyfall okay so do I have skyall was the Roger deacons one he's he's the um cinematographer he was also on uh Blade Runner 2049 he does really gorgeous stuff uh so Skyfall was kind of a return to form for them but uh I think Quant of the soless was the one that came before and it was terrible did you like flade Runner 2049 I did yeah I I watched it once and the first watch didn't do a lot for me and I think what I need to do is go back and watch it again again because I'm sure there's a lot more there that I missed the first time it's a little slow I'm a big fan of Blade Runner um I thought the film was gorgeous uh like I said Roger deacons does a really great job um and I really liked the the pacing I liked a lot of the concepts of it it took some of the stuff from the first movie and kind of built on it but also turned some stuff on its ear which I liked it was his own thing um I thought it was a really great movie yeah it was we're talking about the wrong film I'm not talking about Quant of a soless I was talking about Spectre the James Bond Spectre movie Spectre oh that was the one after Skyfall I think right yeah yeah I didn't even see that one I heard it was terrible the reviews were not good well so watch the first five minutes okay because the first five minutes were great the the the opening Quant of sess was the one where they were like taking over the water supply or something I don't know we're going down the rabbit hole who who can tell but definitely definitely watch the the uh The Day of the Dead scene that opens Spectre because that was well done the rest of the movie was kind of terrible but that was great got it thinking about things that are that are related to Apple now tell me about your Apple watch you updated your Series 3 Apple watch to watch OS 5 yeah I've been running the beta for a few months now um it's good uh I'm you know it's not it's not a major update I've never used the walkie-talkie app yet um because I didn't know anybody else that was on watch OS 5 so I mean I guess I'll try that at some point um presumably when I'm reviewing the series for this weekend I'll give it a shot I like that you can custom the um uh control center where you swipe it from the bottom you put the stuff that you want up top um yeah I mean other than that I'm I'm struggling to think of what is really new in this update I guess there's support for shortcuts which I haven't set up yet there's support for shortcuts there's the uh the breathe faces there are the other complications kind of things and and one of the things that that they're supposed to be doing with watch OS 5 is the ability for apps to have complications appear on the watch face from those apps so this is supposed to bring developers back to writing watch apps yeah I mean i' I've been pretty set with my complications for a while um um so I didn't I didn't change any of my complications when I got into watch OS 5 I am curious to try out the new complications with the larger watch face though yeah the the it seems a little busy for me it's a little too colorful a little too busy I'm going to have to mess around with it I I like them a little more simple I think one of the things they're trying to do is they they piled everything into that face and turned it all on so that you could see what the options were and that was sort of what they showed us during the keynote where all of a sudden they have contacts in the center of the watch face so that you can tap and directly communicate with your contacts that way you know it's not that these are tasteful decisions are necessarily the right thing to do for everyone but by turning all of them on you start people thinking about okay I've been wearing the watch what should I change yeah I mean I think complications are one of the best features of the watch if not the best feature so I'm super happy that they're embracing them in a big way uh but for my personal use I will probably be toning it down a little on the series 4 yeah pedometer Plus+ is one of the applications that has really tried to take advantage of the things that watchos allows so I would I would tell you as you're doing your series 4 uh review go ahead and install that application and see what it does with the watch faces cuz I'm kind of curious to see how they've taken advantage of it yeah cool I'll have to check that out I my main ones that I use are um carrot weather which is a really great watch app um and then uh Nike Plus run Club well yeah cuz that's obviously the the first party partner well it's it's still a third party app um because it competes with Apple's own workouts app but they have like guided runs and stuff like that that I like if you're doing like U interval training and stuff like that yeah but I think of it as a tightener partnership just because they have the the Nike Plus version that ships with that app basically right yeah yeah exactly it it is still it still has the plague that that besets a lot of uh third party apps on the watch though where it is not as reliable as apples apps it's a little buggy um and I think that you know there's a apple gets access to apis that third party developers don't and that's been hurting the Apple watch since launch and hopefully that continues to change I know with watch OS 5 now um apps can kind of store their own audio and stuff like that so we don't have the problems that were previously coming up with OverWatch and all that the third party podcast app um but yeah they still like last night for example I went for a run and I had to tap like four or five times on the start button it's a giant button that takes up the entire screen uh but it just was not registering to start my run so I wonder if there's a forthcoming update for the Nike Plus app before the series 4 Nike Edition launches in 2 weeks um that that solves those issues I certainly hope so now one of the things that we we ran a story on this week was about the Apple watch or a similar device being required for all John Hancock life insurance policies and this this is something that John Hancock's been sort of leaning towards for a while you know they they were running Facebook ads last year saying sign up for a policy and earn a free Apple watch right where basically what they do is is based on your activity per month they will give you the the credit towards the watch like they'll ship you a watch and then based on your activity you um you either owe them money or don't based on how much you do if you're inactive then obviously you need to pay for it but if you are using it interactive then they they go ahead and credit you that and and so currently they are pivoting towards this interactive life insurance where every policy holder with them is going to have to track their Fitness and you know you save up to 15% in annual premium saving you uh you earn the Apple watch for as little as $25 by being very very active and they're throwing in other things along with that you know shopping entertainment rewards and and uh a subscription to headspace which is a meditation app that works really well and it's it's intriguing to me that they're they're pushing this so hard I mean it saves them money so that's why they do it they're an insurance company it does and and obviously they don't want to pay out on a claim but you know you could yeah I'm I'm a big fan of the Apple watch and and its health benefits um less so a fan of giving tracking capabilities to companies that don't really need know more information about us um you know no offense no offense to insurance companies they got to make money like everybody else does just like apple Insider does uh but I you know it's it's one of those things where it's like do they really need to know all that information yeah but you know it certainly beats the traditional life insurance model of sending you to a doctor to get a physical kind of thing sure yeah totally and and some people may be totally comfortable with that I would not be inclined to uh unwillingly have that data just shared with an insurance company you know you think about what Apple's doing with the EKG reader on the watch series 4 and I was talking with somebody about this the other day in terms of data privacy what's interesting is it outputs that data as a PDF that you can then share with your doctor um and presumably this is all stored you know on device and secure and gives users that are registering that data uh the ability to choose who it's shared with and who it's not you know sharing a PDF is not something that you're going to accidentally do uh but once it gets into the hand of your doctor or whoever else then then it's kind of a free frall then then if there's a data breach at uh at your hospital um then then your EKG or whatever uh Your Health Data might end up on the internet that that's where the the threat is with this stuff um having your your health information logged on your phone is not as big of a risk I don't think well and this is something that Apple's been sort of working on in the past too was the you know currently they have some 50 or 70 organizations that they synchronize health records with and so I have two local hospitals that I have records at that um you whose doctors I see from time to time and those appear in my Apple health application which is super handy it is really nice because uh you know if you if you go to another doctor for whatever reason and you need to be you know they ask so are you generally healthy you know what what was your last whatever rating like and I was able to pull up and say well you know on this date it said that my blood pressure was this right and and that was convenient that was kind of nice um one of the things that I think we've we've heard some movement towards is Apple's been talking about working with medical facilities on creating what an electronic health record should be you know epic's been doing this kind of thing for years but epic uses it as a tool for lockin get as many institutions signed up on Epic as possible and then keep those formats proprietary where Apple is is thinking about what privacy means that's not just obscurity by proprietary formats and what data sharing could be like it's it's somewh it's it's an area where the market needs somebody to take the initiative and Apple's focus on privacy and the fact that it doesn't profit from user data makes it the ideal candidate to do this it has devices in everybody's pockets and on their wrists it's already leading the charge and tracking Health Data and they don't want to collect your health data they just want to help you get healthy and sell you a watch obviously yeah so um yeah I mean I think that if anybody's the candidate to do it it's apple and and I'm happy to see that they are taking that initiative and that it's important to them they aren't the only ones doing it though Microsoft Google and Amazon are working in a Consortium to try and also fix IAL records yeah no they are and I don't know if I would trust Google with my health data so or Amazon yeah you've always been a little Lear of Amazon MH it's it's interesting I guess I can understand that because they're very much in the business of selling stuff yes and knowing more about you yeah in order to sell you more stuff right so what John Hancock's doing because again we ran a story about John Hancock is their offer is you order an Apple Watch series 3 with GPS by electronically signing at checkout a uh a retail installment agreement with their group for the retail price of the watch and then after an initial payment of $25 plus tax they do outof pocket payments over the next two years based on the number of workouts completed and and so basically the the way to get the watch for the $25 plus tax is that you agreed to this two-year program and you work out like mad you just get as fit as you've ever been you you do all the workouts you possibly can and they they don't make the monthly installment out of pocket payments because you've done those workouts completed but if you slip if you fall if you if you uh if you backslide in your fitness program then they just take the money it's it's intriguing to me that they um as much as the watch changes from year to year and and there are improvements every year that you're sticking with a watch for 2 years that's probably normal for most users who aren't Neil Hughes you know what do you think about that if you are a gadget hobbyist like yourself like I said I I I you'd never sign up for this program anyway no it's not for me no I don't I don't want to trust anybody with my sensitive data that I don't have to I I completely understand that and that's one of the appeals of Apple is they don't want my data and is stored on Vice and and they're happy to keep it that way absolutely the right hire can make a huge impact on your business and that's why it's so important to find the right person but where do you find that individual you you could try posting on job boards but can you be really sure the right person sees your job instead find the person who will help grow your business with LinkedIn as the world's largest Professional Network people go to LinkedIn every day to grow professionally and discover job opportunities and 70% of the US Workforce is already there LinkedIn jobs matches people to your role based on more of who they really are their skills their interests and even how open they are to new opportunities this way your job gets seen by more of the right people most LinkedIn members haven't recently visited the top job boards but nine out of 10 members are open to New Opportunities so you can really only reach them on LinkedIn and that's why a new hire is made every 10 seconds using LinkedIn and businesses rate LinkedIn 40% higher than job boards at delivering quality candidates hurry to linkedin.com appleinsider and get $50 off your first job post that's linkedin.com appleinsider to get $50 off your first job post post linkedin.com apppp Insider terms and conditions apply so Neil do you do you damn it what was I G to say Neil yes one of the things that we saw on the keynote that I know a lot of people were were excited about was the notion that you can use Google Maps and uh and ways in carplay yeah I mean this is a huge boost for carplay obviously Apple Maps for uh all of the hype that Apple tried when they launched it a few years ago has just not been able to catch up to Google uh in terms of data um say what you will about you know the traffic data and all that kind of stuff but the actual raw data of street level businesses all that kind of stuff they Apple just can't compete with Google on that front and so this is uh a bit of a concession on Apple's part to allow uh competing map Services both owned by Google um into its carplay platform which which in the end boosts carplay and makes it a better platform and I think that there was something of a handshake deal here too because around the same time this week um Apple also uh added support for Android auto to Apple music so I feel like there was probably a behind the- scenes deal where Apple's like we'd like to get on Android auto Google's like we'd like to get on carplay they both realized that it makes platforms better so they just said okay let's do it interestingly I I have Google Maps installed on my phone I use it especially when I travel and I plugged into carplay and tapped on an address in the Gmail application and it opened Google Maps on carplay The Voice services are not using Siri The Voice services for Google Maps in carplay run through Google's own voice Services which was really interesting for me because it's it's very much basically like almost using the Android auto version of the app yeah it's interesting it was it was really similar uh the only carplay is part about it that I could find was when you tap on the the settings gear icon in carplay on the the dashboard it gives you very large icons for things like avoid highways avoid tolls kind of stuff like that but it was it was in pretty much every respect really user friendly that's cool I I I don't use any of these platform forms I have a 12-year-old Prius that I only have because it's paid off and I live in Brooklyn and don't need a car so all good reasons yes so I would you know it's one of those things where if I had a car I'd probably you know a car where I could do the install and drove it every day then I would probably do the custom you know get one of those Pioneer put in carplay or whatever but just it's not happening well I have uh so one of the people that works at Pioneer drives a 12-year-old Prius and of course because she works at pioneer they they were able to do the install pretty easily how do they do that I mean you have the whole built-in GPS system that I think it runs on a DVD that's hidden under the driver's side seat I I saw her dashboard and it was the old Prius dashboard just like yours but they had managed to put the uh the Pioneer double D screen in it interesting yeah it's it's uh I'm sure it was probably a little more expensive than doing it on something like my uh my wife's Honda for example right yeah yeah I mean there's a there's a whole giant screen there and all that and it's not small they were able to do it interesting and you know I I asked her about it at CES a year ago and she said yeah she loves it that that having carplay and and having the PRS is a really good combination for her I am still stuck on my petrol power vehicles but um I tell you one of the um one of the things that that I love about uh uh not having a headphone jack on the phone is using it in the car because I have a car adapter that uh just takes lightning in to a USB charging thing and then it has a small 3.5 mm out on the cigarette adapter and that's where it plugs in so all I have is one lightning cable coming out of my center console in the Prius and I plug in that one cable and I can do audio so it's doing the audio over lightning or is it using that that head audio over lightning and then the cigarette adapter itself is converting from lightning to 3.5 mm oh okay yeah so there's a 3.5 mm out on the cigarette adapter got it okay neat that's that's an interesting little charger that you got there yeah exactly it's awesome so just one cable super simple um you know for all the H and cry about the headphone jack it's like this is way better yeah well so I've been using carplay for the past couple of years and in both my wife and my car and using the lightning cable obviously for audio and charging and I'm getting ready to install the Pioneer Wireless carplay unit I've had I've had the Alpine Wireless carplay unit back in January and we're getting ready to do the uh the Pioneer version of it which is the second aftermarket unit available with wireless carplay there's a lot to be said for it now obviously there's something really nice about charging when you're in the car because well you're already in the car you're not going anywhere you may as well charge but having carplay start when you get close and turn the car on is brilliant because there are a couple of times you get in the car you you're going on a short trip you forget to to plug take the phone out of the pocket plug it into the dash the whole thing it's just better you can get a wireless charger too you you could get a wireless charger too and be completely wireless but you know keeping the phone in the pocket and having carplay start is very good it's still insane to me that this new iPhone you're going to spend you know $1,500 or whatever on it if you get the large one ships with this this this dinky little charger 1amp charger and like it's insane to me because wireless charging now they made it more efficient on the new one it's not actually a faster charger they just made it so it's more efficient or whatever so it it it does it at a faster rate but it charges up to like 7.5 amps or Watts or whatever I'm I'm not an electrician but uh that's so much faster than the a built-in charger yes absolutely it is and you can get these wireless chargers for like $5 on Amazon and it's like apple can't ship it with something that sh that charges a little faster I swear if these new iPads that are expected to come out in October if they don't ship with a fast charged 29 watt adapter for like an 800 plus dollar tablet that's going to be one of the stupidest things you are going to go to war over this aren't you it's it drives me nuts like it's it's such a stupid thing to be cheap on like someone was telling me the other day that like the difference between like you know you have a sticker that peels off cleanly versus a sticker that like tears as soon as you try to take it off something like when it's on a new product like you buy something cheap from China or whatever and it's got like a sticker on it apparently the difference in price between those is like one penny per like 8,000 sheets or something it's like it's so just nickel and diming to the smallest of the scents and it's it's so frustrating to see a company like apple that will charge you an arm and a leg for their new phone and people will happily pay it and they can't just make the charger a little bit more capable so here's the other problem right which is that the fastest charging that they can do uses that USBC connector and the USBC connector is on all of their laptops yeah but it is not on all of the cigarette lighted adapters or cars or or other kinds of chargers you might have around well so the rumor that came out a few weeks ago was that the iPad itself was going to have a USBC port on it mink quo said that I don't believe I think he's got it wrong I think what happens is it ships with the USBC to lightning cable in the box with a 29 adap so you can charge the thing at full speed that's a lot more sensible than what he was proposing I yeah the switch to USBC would make no sense to me because it's not like Apple's been pushing plugging in accessories into your iPad if anything they want everything to be Wireless yeah or the failed SMART connector yeah I mean it's and I say failed only because there have been precious few accessories for it yeah I I still use my SMART connector doc to charge it uh and I like uh my my Apple Smart Keyboard uh but yeah I've been very disappointed I think that uh there should be a lot more uses for the SMART connector and I think you know Apple kind of blew it do you want to hear why I think they still ship the 1 amp charger with the fantastically expensive iPhone let's hear it I think there are two reasons reason one packaging size the oneapp charger is small the onea charger fits in the iPhone box nicely going to a larger charger means redesigning the packaging to accommodate that and giving up space in the box that they can otherwise keep small you know the worst thing in the world is to have to ship air because you're you're paying for the size of the box and and shipping an empty box stinks the using the smaller adapter means they can then use a shallower box they they don't have to dedicate that space to a larger charger and the cable and still fit the earbuds in can you say larger charger again larger charger I didn't stumble over that at all I was I was pretty happy about that so the and and there are some difficulties because obviously there are Chargers around the world that are larger like the UK charger for example which has the the very large blades that come out of it or the um the e new charger that has wider spaced pins that go into the wall outlet so they they do have to accommodate different sized larger chargers for worldwide use there you go again um but they like the small cube because it does fit there's another reason this is my other speculation which is that slow charging the phone is better longterm for its battery life now I I fully expect to get email telling me that I'm wrong but here's what we know and and that is two things age a battery one of them is leaving it charged in for extended periods of time right if you charge overnight your battery is is potentially going to age faster than if you charge it up to about 70% and then stop charging it and the reason is what happens is when you charge to 100% it the the the charge controller says okay I'm full and stops charging and then it bleeds down over a little bit of time because you know you get to 99% or 98% because it's still running this the radios it's still receiving data things like that and then it says wait I'm 99% I can be charged again and so it turns on and so you just constantly cycle between 99 and 100 99 and 100 turning it on and off which is not healthy for the battery yeah I think it's like I I think it's like the Max Capacity it'll fluctuate between 100% of real capacity and 94% of real capacity but it shows you 100% all the time so if you could somehow get access to that raw data you could take your phone off the charger at the right time and get another 6% out of your battery but of course Apple's not going to disclose that information because then it would drive people insane right and I actually have a uh a charger made by a third party that has Bluetooth low energy in it and pairs with the phone and then uses that to monitor charge status and charge cycling so that it prevents that kind of thing and it worked great except that you have to keep their app frontmost in order for it to to stay keep the connection alive with the charger to do that you know what I was saying about being exhausted by uh uh the shortcuts I'm already exhausted by you describing this yes just I know I just want I just want the phone to last all day I don't care what magic has to go on behind the scenes to make it work I know but remember the Huawei Nexus 6p and their battery debacle yeah okay so the Huawei Nexus 6p used USBC charging fast charging and and that phone charges ridiculously fast you know you get a full char in under 2 hours but the batteries aged badly because of that right so this is the tradeoff you can have your nice 7 and2 watt 7 half amp charging with your your wireless chargers but the added heat and added cycling and added fast charge has a negative impact on your battery yeah now if you're changing phones every year because you're on the upgrade plan don't care right fresh battery at the end of year anyway right and it's cheap to get the battery repl now anyhow so even if you to keep your phone another year it's like well you might as well I I don't think that cost is going to stay the same I think the reduced cost for getting your battery changed was a one-time concession to deal with the battery debacle yes I agree and and that that price is going back up to the $80 that it was previously I think they already announced that it's going up the end of the year so yeah let me see I'm going to check the health on my iPhone 10 battery right now we'll see where we're at battery health maximum capacity is at 94 %. so we we're it came out what October of last year so 11 months okay so or no it was November it was early November the phone came out so Le less than that less than 11 months and I've lost 6% of its capacity over the summer I had my iPhone 6 and at the beginning of the summer it said 94% battery health and when was the last time you had the battery replaced in that phone two years ago and then at the end of Apple Care basically when my Apple Care initially ran out on it I I went ahead and changed the battery at that time I don't like my phone battery to get below like 50% that gives me anxiety so when I'm at work my phone sits on a wireless charger all day see that's not healthy for it what you ought to do is is run it down to about 20% and then charge it back up to about 70% well I'm not a healthy person Victor so tell me about it you at least have an Apple Watch you close your rings I don't even do that you know I had a uh like a 45 day streak going on my move goal uh which probably some people are scoffing and saying oh I'm at 600 days or whatever but it was good for me so lay off me and I went to a a wedding in Calgary and I walked all around downtown and then I was dancing and all that and somehow that day of all days was the day that broke my streak and I didn't close the move goal and I was like really really like what happened here how did this happen I feel like you know and then there are some days where I'm just sitting around on my fat butt all day doing nothing and probably just like waving my hand around while I'm on the phone or something like that and then it registers a bunch of activity and I look down and it's like and it's like my my move goal is like three4 of the way closed and it's like oh like and I've done nothing all day so I mean obviously it's just a game it's not like it's an actual representation of my health and uh you know it's it h it's limited based on being on my wrist and not knowing what the rest of my body is doing but at the same time like it's hard to place too too much stock in these rings when when that's the way they operate yeah actor graphy which is the the idea of charting and and logging the movement is really imprecise it is of course but it's it's but it's something it motivates like there are a number of times especially when I had that awesome streak going where I was like I'm going to go out for a walk just so I can close out this ring you know because you know it's it's good to have that little thing that motivates you if you game a it motivates you I think that's great yeah just don't place too much faith in it or think that you know these people who have like with the Fitbit craze where it was like 10,000 steps per day and like oh yeah 10,000 steps was a madeup number you know where 10,000 steps came from where's that 10,000 steps came because in the 1960s in a cereal in Japan they placed a Cheesy pedometer and in in Japanese they called it the 10,000 step meter that's where this comes from and it's a completely fictional number it just comes from the the toy in the Cal box basically you know I I've I've met people over the years where they say oh you know I lost 50 lbs by parking my car at the back of the parking lot when I go to the grocery store and then I just and and I just lost all this weight and it's like how little were you moving before really like that that walking from the back of the parking lot to the front is like what made you lose all that weight like gez man you know like I'm out running miles and stuff and all that and it's like you know you struggle to lose weight and then some people it's like man how how inactive were you and I think for people like that the watch is probably great right like stand up close your rings do whatever um you know if if that's the little motivation they need that they're moving so little um then it's probably a huge huge uh gain for public health just for those folks alone absolutely of course I I represent that side of completely sedentary people I get all my Fitness in in January at CES walking the show floor your ancestors or your your future Generations will be the folks in Wall-E and the in the chairs oh precisely actually my kids are far more active than I am oh that's good they they are competitive swimmers they you know I just ended up finished building a bicycle for one of them they they a serious 4 watch Victory you got to get out there CL those Rings 10,000 steps do it I totally do I'm right now I'm in search of replacing my iPhone 6 that's what I'm in search of because priories it was well it was 94% at the of the summer and by the end of the summer it was 70% and dying at 30% battery life and it was just Dro it it was like it just one day dropped off a cliff it was fine one day and sad the next I'm just waiting for the day that I can get some sort of a camera on my watch and I don't have to bring my phone with me just that's my that's my perfect watch there that's when I'll buy that's when I'll buy the stainless steel model but you remember that there were people that were building a camera into the band that we saw at CES yeah I don't know that it ever shipped I don't know that it ever did but it was it was certainly I I run and go to the gym without my uh phone um so I have my YMCA card on my watch uh through the wallet app and then I'll go to the grocery store a lot of times after I get out of the gym and Trader Joe's takes Apple pay and so I just don't have my phone on me and I use any list uh which has a great native watch app and I use that to check off items on the grocery list it's awesome I love it I would love to go an afternoon and evening without having my phone on me the one thing that I miss is it'll be like oh that's I'll be out running and like that's a nice Sunset and want to take a photo of it or or look at this thing you know or whatever there's always like random things that you want to take photos of and send to people and I can't do it when I just have my watch and it's the one thing that I miss can you add items to any list using Siri yes you can and I am hoping I haven't looked yet but I'm hoping that there's some Siri shortcut integration that will make it even easier I'm saying that that could be very cool one of the Reon re that I that I went with it is because it has a native watch app and it works really well so um and you can share you know with uh other people and have a shared list and all that it's it's a great app very happy with it awesome so we've got two app recommendations for people this week we've got pedometer Plus+ and we've got any list yes and if you get a chance to try and use series shortcuts please go ahead and message me on Twitter yes send me all of your good shortcuts so that I can just install them and reap the benefits of your hard work and you can go ahead and send that to Victor appleinsider.com and we'll make sure that Neil gets it because Neil needs all that hard work yes he needs all the help he can get well this is the end of never perfectly good episode we we've been on here for about an hour or so may maybe we need to go ahead and wrap this up cool I'm I'm Victor I'm at V marks on Twitter and uh the notorious Neil Hughes is this is Neil on Twitter yes so what's what's the deal are we going to have you back again Neil what's going on yeah yeah uh would love to come back let me know when when you want me well there there is no conspiracy here I'm not being punished we are keeping Neil down we are oppressing Neil it's because you're so fit yes yeah exactly all right well we will be back next week with more Apple Insider go ahead and write positive reviews on iTunes and tell us what's going on with your new Apple watch plans your new iPhone plans and we will be back with more next week n\n"