The Lightning Conundrum: Why Apple's iPhone Transition Has Been a Disaster

As we continue to see the world move towards wireless charging and faster data transfer speeds, it's hard not to feel a sense of nostalgia for the good old days of analog technology. Remember when you could just plug in your headphones and enjoy some sweet, sweet audio? Yeah, those days are long gone, and Apple has taken the 3.5mm headphone jack as a casualty of its shift to wireless charging.

So, what's an accessory maker to do? The problem is that Apple didn't exactly make it easy for them. I mean, when did they start licensing Lightning connectors? Two months after the phone came out! That's like dropping a new iPhone without even having a plan in place for accessories. And don't even get me started on the shortages of Lightning connectors themselves. It was like a game of musical chairs, with Apple doling out licenses very restrictively to different companies.

Logitech is one company that has managed to snag a license, but it's not like they're making a fortune off it just yet. In fact, if you look around, SMART connector accessories are few and far between. It's like Apple hasn't even bothered to make sure there's a decent alternative to the 3.5mm headphone jack available for its latest iPhones.

And then there's the issue of charging. Let's face it, folks: wireless charging is still not as convenient as plugging in your phone with a charger and listening to some tunes on your favorite headphones. But hey, at least Apple has made sure that our new iPhone can charge faster than ever before. Or so we're told.

The Problem with SMART Connector

So, what's the deal with SMART connector? Is it going to be the answer to all our prayers when it comes to charging and listening? I'm not convinced yet. I mean, have you seen the number of accessories available for this thing? It's like a ghost town out there! And don't even get me started on the lack of transparency from Apple itself.

But hey, if anyone knows more about SMART connector than me, they're not telling. Logitech is one company that has managed to snag a license, but I'm still waiting for some actual news on what this thing does and how it works. Is it going to be faster than Lightning? Will it be cheaper? Who knows?

One Thing That Doesn't Bother Me

You know who doesn't care about the 3.5mm headphone jack or SMART connector? Me! I've got a Lightning to HDMI adapter that I use for Apple TV, and I'm not exactly thrilled about it. But hey, at least I can still enjoy my favorite shows on the big screen.

And if anyone needs me, I'll be over here with my trusty adapter, listening to music on my headphones while Apple figures out this whole wireless charging thing.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to episode 66 of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor marks and with me is Neil Hughes and we're here and we're going to talk all about all things Apple earnings iPad iPhone Mac and more welcome Neil hey Victor uh I'm excited this week I have a lot to get off my chest so let's get to it begin well I I we should probably start talking about earnings um Apple had their first decline in earnings in 13 years first ever year-over-year decrease in iPhone sales um I mean you know in terms of the finances it certainly wasn't a bad quarter they shipped uh 51.2 million iPhones 50.6 billion in Revenue um uh net income was 10.5 billion uh I mean pretty big numbers and pretty good performance but nevertheless a disappointment because it's the first time in 13 years that Apple has seen a decline okay so clearly apple is doomed well here's the funny thing so um I made the mistake this week um and I I love our listeners and I love our commenters but we have some very passionate people out there who uh certainly uh are very defensive when it comes to Apple and I respect that um but for myself as a person who covers the news I have to cover it in objective and realistic way and so if you're joeo and you don't follow Apple that closely and maybe you own a few shares of apple or something like that and the stock drops you know 10% after earnings you come to Apple Insider to find out why the stock has dropped and so I wrote a headline saying that uh uh it was a disappointing March quarter because it was a disappointing March quarter it matter that it was going to be right they signaled this it was right within Apple's guidance it doesn't mean that Apple's doomed or that I'm you know trying to drive that I am part of a grand conspiracy to drive the stock down but the truth is all of Apple's three major product categories iPhone iPad and Mac all saw year-over-year sales declines period that's just the reality of it and for a company that's grown for 13 years to have their first decline in 13 years is going to be seen as a disappointment it it doesn't matter it you could you know you can uh win the Super Bowl with your team every year and the one year if they don't win it it's a disappointment because that's what you get used to and I I went into the comments and tried to defend how we covered this um and some people just don't take to that because you know the the iPhone 6 was a super cycle and the 6s could never possibly live up to those expectations etc etc it's not that I even disagree with that stuff it's just the reality of this was a disappointing quarter for apple and I realize that you're an Apple fan and you're really excited and passionate about the company and you really want to Champion them and you know reiterate to the world they're doing well because they are but you know don't don't come at me I'm not the bad guy here you know like blame blame Wall Street blame expectations blame Apple for being so successful for 13 years but at the end of the day it was a disappointing quarter and that that's okay uh if you want to look at the extreme other side of the spectrum so on one side you have the Apple Fans who are don't want anything bad said about their company and and that's fine but then on the other side I got an email from a uh uh European newspaper a a reporter there who wanted a comment from me for a story um and he he actually asked me is this the beginning of the end for apple and I'm just like uh well you know over $200 billion in cash sitting around uh gross margins are still at like 39% on selling Hardware they sold 50 million phones uh they sold 10 million tablets they sold 4 million Macs uh God knows how many watches they sold or way to go out of business isn't it right $6 billion earned this last quarter on software and services that they provide I mean are you kidding me you know uh a company like Microsoft would kill a man to sell 50 million phones in a year let alone in one quarter you know they had their disappointing long decline didn't they right it's just you know and so I responded to this reporter and I said apple is not only this not only is this not the the beginning of the end but apple is not going anywhere in my lifetime or yours like this is the biggest company on the planet they continue to sell astronomical amounts of products and they will continue to sell astronomical amounts of products now maybe the growth won't continue maybe there's some quote unquote tough times ahead but if tough times is making 10 billion dollar a quarter you're doing okay there there would have to be a series of very significant very large very bad bets for Apple to go bad for Apple to fail and then they have so much cash in the bank I mean you know they would have to burn through all of that it would it would be a long series of really really apocalyptically stupid events to take place to kill Apple at this point I mean let's be real the reason that this is a disappointment not just on Wall Street um because obviously Wall Street wants growth and that's all their interested in and that's their Looney land over there we've talked about that a lot um that was disappointing for wall stre but from a consumer perspective there's at least an idea that um you know uh 3D touch on the iPhone isn't really that interesting or that useful and okay I mean I can't really disagree with that I gladly switch to an iPhone SE and a Bandon 3D touch and I don't use it uh because I don't have it anymore and I don't care so if that's a defining feature of the iPhone 6s and apple and developers haven't really found an interesting way to use it yeah okay um iCloud remains uh a trouble spot for Apple uh the iPad um is still not iOS does not really offer the kind of uh power user features that that really needs to make it a potential laptop replacement the Apple watch while there's a lot I like about the Apple watch the apps on it are incredibly slow so you know there are other companies putting this in perspective there are other companies that would kill to have apple Services business they would love to have I'm not preaching Doom and Gloom for Apple here in any way I'm just saying that there are a lot of areas where Apple could improve and it is possible and even likely that some of the reasons that you're seeing um declines this quarter are yes there wasn't a a new hardware design the iPhone which gets consumers excited yes there's seasonal Trends yes there's market trends yes people are hanging on their smartphones longer but I think that there's also um a feeling amongst a lot of people uh and when I say that I mean like really casual people that don't follow this stuff as closely as we do uh that that apple is not um uh innovating at the pace that they expect and a lot of that I think is unfair because it's a perception versus a reality um you know not every product that Apple puts out or every update that Apple puts out is some sort of a revolutionary thing but at the same time there's some things that are just such no-brainers that you're like why haven't they done it yet like Siri on the Mac it's like why why haven't we you know why why are why isn't that there that doesn't make any sense to me um some integration of Touch ID on the Mac would be great as well um uh you know these are the kind of things that are eventually coming but they feel like they could have done it last year you know so of course there's there's room for Apple to grow in areas where they should grow and hopefully they you know start to address some of those things in the coming months and years uh as we go go into WWDC as new Macbook Pros come out that kind of stuff um that doesn't mean that Apple is is in trouble or that things are going poorly for them but there's a lot of opportunities for them to innovate and I think that there is a growing expectation not only on Wall Street but amongst consumers that um Apple needs to start taking advantage of that and and kind of going in those directions where it's almost logical for them to go there right it's it's inevitable yeah you know I I continue to be impressed with with Apple's performance in all these areas you know I'm looking at it and I see yes okay the numbers are down year on year right but in in terms of setting our expectations they're they're meeting everything they set right right they know why this is a decline and they know what they're going to do about it they are very astute business people over there they projected accordingly um they said that iPhone sales were going to decline they did they projected with a accurate range uh what their revenue was going to be for the quarter they know what they're doing they can see the trends coming um and and they they're very smart they they know what they're doing right now they got to reckon with things like the iPad sales drop but you know they're they're doing that because they just introduced guess what new iPads yeah and and uh you know with the iPad that's a uh a spot for me that um sometimes it feels like apple is um singularly focused is the way I would put it like when iOS 7 came out and it was a complete redesign it was all about making it work on the iPhone and iOS 7 the iPad was just a blown up version of iOS 7 on the iPhone uh it really did not feel like they took that opportunity to optimize for iPad and they didn't even do it with iOS 8 it took really until iOS 9 came out that Apple said oh remember the iPad we should start paying a little more attention to what we do for that on the software side which is where you start to see features like split view picture and picture all that kind of iPad specific iOS features taking advantage of the screen real estate but I mean you had a really dark period there from iOS 7 to ios9 where for two generations of iOS nothing was really done specifically to justify the larger screen of the iPad in terms of the operating system and it just wait wait wait iOS 7 was all about getting the whole design right and getting everyone else on board right right iOS 8 was about making it work because there were some inconsistencies in iOS 7 that totally didn't make sense and iOS 8 addressed those right iOS 9 is exactly where they should have started fixing the features and making the iPad had really shine right I I agree it just shouldn't have taken two years it feels like sometimes apple is like singularly focused you know IDE that they should do things faster but at the same time we cry when they do things faster and stuff gets broken well I mean I can't disagree with that but do you remember it's buggy it doesn't work well yeah because they're going too fast do do you remember a few years ago where uh Apple had delay um I don't remember what release of osant was but it was some release of it they had to delay it until the fall because they literally took people off of the the OS 10 team to finish up iOS in time to get it out because that became the priority you are going back to 10.6 10.7 days Steve was still alive and he made the announcement in the summer that it was going to be delayed because they'd moved people around for it and I mean even then you know Apple obviously wasn't nearly as big as they are now considering how much they've grown just in the last couple years but even then they were a large company with a lot of money and it's it's just amazing to me I mean I guess that's just how they operate I don't know but it's amazing to me they can't just hire people and get them up to speed you know well but that's the problem is is you cannot you actually make things take longer when you put more people on it because those people have to get up to speed you simply here's here's the math okay and I'm going to repeat this and I'm quoting uh I'm blanking on who I'm quoting uh Fred I'm blanking on Fred's last name but but you cannot produce a child in one month by putting nine women on the job it just you cannot speed some things up by putting more people on it I agree and for that specific um situation obviously that's Brooks it's Fred Brooks that said that I'm sorry and obviously that's a bad example because you know that was a time crunch kind of thing but I'm talking about over the longer term from iOS 7 to iOS 9 the fact that it took us so long to get pretty basic iPad features like split screen and and picture and picture um it it shows that I think Apple at least internally gets focused on one thing that they need to do that gets all their attention and then it's kind of on to the next thing well yeah but they also try and make improvements and those improvements don't always go well you know we can you remember the connectivity issues within OS 10 10.11 mhm where there wi-fi bugs where they tried to replace um oh God I'm blanking on the name of the process uh begins with an M let's see if I can find it activity monitor really quickly um the the process that that discovers things that are around it jeez discoverability at any rate there was this uh process that had been working fine for years and they replaced it with a whole new one it was a they did a new Bluetooth stack at some point that ruined everything yeah well it was it was a part of that kind of thing part mdns responder okay mdns responder which handles bonjour and uh those kind of services and they replaced this at at beginning of 10.11 mhm and it blew out everything and Kevin Marx who used to work at Apple then worked at Google couple other places noticed that if you replaced the new service with the old mdns responder magically everything started working again and it took Apple a couple of releases to roll back and and give in instead of trying to fix the new one I uh still have a problem that has existed since iOS 7 came out with copy and paste and I've Googled to see if there's a fix and whatever and it seems like most people don't have this problem anymore it must just be the fact that I have not had a phone start from scratch I'm always restoring from iCloud and stuff and I guess at some point I'll just have to bite the bullet and do it but I would say probably 50% of the time when I copy something it actually copies it and it's really annoying because I'll be in one app like you know I want to copy a photo or something in Safari and then I'll jump over to messages hit paste and it'll paste something completely different than what I was expecting and then half the time you're already your thumb's already on the send button and you're sending something you didn't intend to send to somebody uh that happens to me all the time and I don't know what it is about it it's been there since iOS 7 and it must be like a legacy thing from reloading from iCloud for me or something but one of these days like I said I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and just do a fresh install on my phone without restoring from iCloud and just kind of manually restore everything because I don't know what it is but I've been through multiple phones it was on an iPhone 6 iPhone 6s now on an iPhone SE and I still have the problem yeah have you ever tried any of those thirdparty clipboard apps I downloaded one called uh I can't remember the name of it and it didn't really work for me uh there's one that I tried and I had a hard time getting along with it also I think it's it's one of these difficult kind of things where it's a beautiful thing when it works well for that person but if you're just trying to get into it and figure out how do I save stuff to this and and how do I use it right um I'm going to see if I can figure out which one I had I had it as an extension as well and it's a share sheet kind of thing right where you you'd share to it and it would save like a multiple clipboard so you could have multiple different clippings in it and I just could never figure it out well let's let's just uh say here that before this turns into just a complain Fest about new new topic here go on no apple is not Apple's not doomed Apple's fine uh they had a disappointing quarter sorry if you don't like to hear that um they will continue to innovate and bring out new products how successful those products are we will see but it's not like iPhone sales are going to fall off a cliff anytime soon it's still a great product people still like it there's still a demand for it um and the same can be said for Max and and and iPads and all that you know things like the Apple watch we'll see where they go as they evolve as they go um still a lot of room for improvement on all the products but especially new ones like the Apple watch and and things like that well speaking of new products tell me about this MacBook because you reviewed the 12-in MacBook now last week Shane and I talked about it and we talked about it in terms of it being a good Mac and fine for what you needed to do you actually had your hands on with it yeah um so I reviewed the MacBook last year um and I reviewed this series MacBook as well and it's basically the same machine um a little faster a little better battery life um but other than that if you didn't like last year's machine you're not going to like this year's machine if you were in love with last year's machine you're going to be in love with this year's machine it's not going to change anybody's mind um take last year's computer make it a little bit faster processor is like 15 to 20% faster uh the the internal storage is faster so it'll be a little snappier but at the end of the day it's still a $1,300 computer that can't be used for a lot of highend pro tasks for the same price you get a MacBook Pro for that's a lot more capable so I think it's a very I think it applies to a niche market of people that really want an ultra portable super thin brilliantly designed Mac and they basically just want to use it to check email browse the web and do edit some photos and stuff like that so so wait if if you're interested in a super light portable machine that can act as your primary computer mhm and you don't mind spending $1,300 on it why wouldn't you get an iPad Pro uh well as someone who loves my iPad Pro 12.9 in um I still cannot do things like work on it just I mean am I wrong to to ask that question here you've just laid out the MacBook is you're not wrong and I would argue that a lot of people that the MacBook uh would appeal to might should consider getting an iPad if you're primarily looking to browse the web and check email um some people you know just prefer the ability to have a bunch of windows open use a cursor have a traditional Computing experience a dedicated keyboard that sort of stuff um and for those people the the MacBook would be a good computer what what Apple really should have done this year honestly is cut the price by 150 bucks it would have I gave I gave this MacBook uh the same score I gave it last year 3.5 so it's not that it's a bad Mac it's that it's a bad Mac for Value it's it's value for money is what you're complaining about here yeah I mean I you know when I'm reviewing this kind of stuff I have to weigh it for everybody is this a Mac for me no absolutely not I have absolutely no use for this Mac but I can't review it in that context because this isn't about me this is about advising our readers and people that are curious about which Mac to buy which one's right for them when you look at Apple's product lineup you can get a MacBook Air which doesn't have a retina display uh for under $1,000 and it's a competent machine and it is and yes it lacks a right display and it's not as thin as the new Macbook and all that stuff but it it's a good machine um you can get a Macbook Pro 13 in for the same price as this 12-in MacBook bigger screen yeah it's thicker but it's got a way more capable uh processor in it um it's it's the MacBook the 12-in MacBook is kind of caught in the middle right now very much like the first MacBook Air was ahead of its time trailblazing brilliant design forward you don't waste any time going back to 2007 do you well I mean that's but look back at that computer right if you bought that computer in 2007 you were buying into the future of computing but you were doing it too three years ahead of the curve it wasn't until about 2010 when Apple redesigned the MacBook Air and really made it a capable relevant machine that sales started to take off and we should remember that that original Air cost 2,000 bucks exactly they lowered the price out in the second generation design of the MacBook Air um and they made it a much better machine and it was even thinner at that point and it continues to be a part of Apple's lineup because it was that influential and that great of a product and there's a huge Market of people out there that wish that Apple would take that design and put a retina display in it but they won't because that product that product's going away and the 12 in is now the vision of the future yeah for me personally um the the the single port doesn't bother me I don't care about the single USBC Port um the port I use more than anything on my MacBook Pro actually is the SD card slot and I know that that's going to die whenever they redesign the MacBook Pro I understand that I've C you are unique in that one I I use it all the time that's how that's the easiest way for me to transfer photos I don't want to dig out a cable or anything like that to transfer from my Sony camera I just want to plug it in see you're also one of those people who's using a standalone camera I am yes I am unique but I shoot photos for a living as part of this job so therefore I have to take photos with a nice camera and transfer them my Mac edit them put them in the review that sort of stuff so for me that's a feature that I know is going to be gone eventually because and probably pretty soon because Apple likes to get rid of Legacy ports and I understand that um other ports I don't really mind um I'm ready to go Whole Hog on USBC uh I could totally uh dig that if the next MacBook Pro doesn't have any full-size USB ports and I need adapters and stuff I'm cool with that if it gets me a thinner design I'm cool with the MacBook having one port on it I don't like that it has one port for charging and sinking I wish that Apple would bring back mag safe and have one mag safe for charging and one USB C port for everything else yeah so third parties have already addressed that problem for you you know that right I know because Griffin makes a uh a magsafe like and they don't call it mag safe obious does it do data as well or is it just power it's a that's a very good question I believe it's power I'm not positive so then you have to unplug this thing to plug in when you want and it's just like so use one of the many hubs that are available for this thing well yeah I don't really care about that people want a second port on here but if Apple just put a MAG safe on there well if they just put two USBC ports they could do that as well but the problem with that is this thing is so freaking light that and the USBC cable plugs in so snugly that if you make the lightest tug on this cable you're going to send your laptop flying and you just threw $1,300 at the window you know uh mag safe has saved my laptop more times than I can count um from people tripping over it or whatever you know I I realiz apple is kind of positioning this as almost more iPad than MacBook it's like you know you don't you you maybe you know don't want to keep this plugged in all the time is kind of their philosophy I get it but I think if they just put a you know mag safe3 uh easily detachable on there redesign it make it nice and thin and then put the USBC Port next to it that would address 75% of the concerns out there that people have about this computer yeah so Griffin calls theirs break safe and break safe is a breakaway power cord for your MacBook or Chromebook and then if you want to plug anything into your MacBook you have to unplug this adapter that which by the way sticks out of the beautiful chassis on your MacBook and then plug in the cable it's it's a nightmare just put a MAG safe on there and we'd be done well there you have it things Apple needs to do now comparing this to the iPad Pro uh there there have been some benchmarks and it looks like in multicore score multi-core scores overall the MacBook totally beats it it walks all over the iPad Pros in single core scores the iPad Pro is is better when it comes to metal the iPad Pro 12.9 in is better um in in JavaScript and Jetstream JavaScript ring it's uh the MacBook beats the others so but but they're still fairly close I mean these aren't big ratings that are different except when it comes to metal and the iPad Pro totally outshines everything else yeah I mean the iPad Pro is uh incredible piece of Hardware uh very capable brilliantly designed um I think the software is what holds it back the the MacBook uh is an incredible piece of Hardware I think the software is great I really love OS 10 um I think that it's price and the compromises are probably too much for most users and so going back to what I was saying before when I write a review I have to write it for somebody who's looking to buy a Mac and if you're looking to buy a Mac if you're okay with the compromise that this product makes and you're okay with the price you will be extremely happy with this laptop it is incredibly designed um it fanless thin beautiful uh some people don't like the keyboard because it's less travel on the keys doesn't bother me at all some people don't like the fact there's one port doesn't really bother me at all um uh I know some people really hate the fact that the the FaceTime camera on it is still only 480p because the screen is so thin that's all they can fit in there I don't really care um none of those things really bother me but when I just look at it from a you know 40,000 ft perspective like looking at the landscape I wonder who it's for that that's my main concern with the MacBook is where is this Market of uh people that want to spend 13 plus100 on a laptop and have all these compromises when they spend that much money certainly there is a market out there but uh when I write these reviews I I like to imagine that you know it's a friend of mine or a family member and they come to me and they say what do you think of this computer uh what what do you think would work for me for 90% of the people that ask me that question the MacBook is not for them they don't want to spend that much money and they don't want to have these compromises okay so single word buy or not buy if you're okay with the compromises buy cool if you're okay with the price byy I I think it's a great machine but you know I can't give everything uh a five out of five because it's a great machine I mean there's there's a lot come on it's from Apple you're you're conspiring to H Apple oh I know anytime anytime I write something with people listeners please please email Neil tell him it's time to take the veil off the conspiracy it's an impressive machine and in two three years it is going to be incredible when the uh Hardware catches up in terms of performance and apple kind of tweaks the design a little bit I think um it's going to be Apple's bestselling Mac but very much like the first MacBook Air it's going to take a little time okay I want to take a moment and talk to you about I cracked so NE Neil have you ever cracked a screen on your iPhone I thankfully have not uh my wife cracked the no in the last year she has cracked both an iPhone 6s and an Apple Watch so it's been an expensive year and an Apple Watch geez how do you do that she uh dropped it onto a tile floor and it landed just perfectly and shattered the screen and it cost like $2 $250 to replace it it was not Che basically the cost of a fresh watch yeah was it a sport model mhm yeah so the cost of a freshwat y so so there's this iPhone repair company called icked and they're perfect for people just like wife because what they do is you go online and and they immediately send out a professional iPhone repair technician they're they're not going to fix your watch but they'll Sue it for iPhones and other devices and so they send out this Tech to the location of you're choosing and and they do it wherever whenever and they mean wherever so they arrive in less than an hour and we'll fix it they'll do it at a coffee shop they'll do it wherever you want to meet um and it generally takes about less than 30 minutes for them to fix your phone they have 5,000 of these Techs in 600 cities across the United States and they do fast quality work and they stand behind it every repair they make comes with a lifetime warranty so if you find yourself with a broken iPhone go to ia.com for the best most convenient and reliable phone repair they come to you it's kind of hard to beat that isn't it yeah I mean Apple charges a lot of money for their repairs and especially if you have an older phone um and don't want to spend that kind of money to get it repaired these these repair services a lot of times do a really great job and uh it's a good way to save money definitely so I know you're a giant fan of the SMART connector yes you love that connector I do you can't wait for there to be more accessories and devices for that connector since the iPad Pro launched last November I have been and we've talked about many times on the podcast here a huge proponent of the SMART connector because I can see the potential of having a quickly attachable and removable accessory that can do whatever accessory makers can imagine that they want it to do so so tell me about your dream accessory what do you wish was made well in a perfect world I would have an iPad just like it is now that works like it does now and then I could dock it with a device that would allow me to connect whatever I chose to it um a US B Hub with a bunch of accessories I can have a a a podcasting setup for example dock it got a microphone that's already connected to the dock a keyboard that's already connected to the dock all I have to do is rest my iPad on there and it becomes the computer I need at that moment I think that's really the future of the iPad um and these Ultra portable form factors is and especially with a screen that can you know where where the entire interface is the screen it can become whatever you need in that moment and you can see little inklings of that now with the SMART connector and the ability to quickly attach a keyboard and just start typing and get going and and then and also with Apple's pushing the camera connection kit as a USB kit that does other things like they talked about podcast mics exactly you can actually take the uh USB connector kit it has a uh uh uh lightning input on it you can plug in and get power while you're using a USB accessory or you could even plug in a powered USB hub and connect multiple USB access to your iPad a lot of people don't realize this the iPad is way more powerful and a way more capable computer than a lot of people realize this isn't just a kids toy but it remains held back uh by a number of things most notably iOS is just not there in terms of competing with the Mac for you know uh power user Computing that kind of stuff yeah so if you could mash the camera connection kit into a SMART connector dock that would be sort of on its way for you I can Envision a lot of things that you could do with these SMART connector doc uh accessories that would be fantastic so we're getting a we're getting a a glimpse of that uh this week um Logitech uh announced a new product uh called the loga base um and they sent us a review unit to sample before the announcement came out so I've been using it for the last week and it's not without its shortcomings but um and we'll have a full review up in in the next few days for this product we did a first look um when it was announced on Tuesday and I love it it charges your iPad Pro whether the 9.7 in model the 12.9 in model it charges it through the SMART connector and literally all you got to do is rest your iPad on the magnetic connector and it starts to juice up your ipad you don't have to line up a lightning connector and it allows it to do it in landscape mode so if you have it docked you can use it you know more like you would a laptop and the base is nice and heavy and sturdy so when you pick it up it doesn't it's not like any other iPad Dock where the lightning connector is so snug that you have to hold the base down to pull it off and line it up and all that nope just rest it on there the magnets align it starts to charge bam nice I I love it um and it's I I think it's the beginning of what's to come the problem is we don't really know what the technical limitations of the SMART connector are can it do simultaneous uh Power and data probably but this product doesn't so uh the logic base on the back of it has a female lightning connector port and uh you plug in a lightning cable and then plug that into the wall and you then that's what it does I tried doing other things like plugging in the aformentioned USB adapter to see if I could do simultaneous data and power doesn't work um I don't know if that's a limitation of the SMART connector Hardware capabilities or if iOS just doesn't want to play nice yet and maybe a software update could fix that praying it's the ladder but imagine again I talked about a podcasting station before right just because we're doing a podcast that's a great example right imagine if I had a place in my home where I had a dock where I charged my iPad but I also had uh USB ports on that dock with a microphone and other things that I need plugged in and all I would need to do is rest my iPad on there open up an app and Bam I'm ready to podcast nice yeah I mean that would be great um we're not there yet but I'm hoping that we get there soon you know I can Envision all kinds of great stuff with this uh one of the um uh products that I would really like to see is a a mobile keyboard dock that has its own battery in it so imagine um if you had a nice uh base that was you know the size uh and equal weight uh or proportionally I guess of the iPad Pro um that could turn into a Macbook style uh fold out um uh you know clam shell design uh much like we we've talked a lot about the uh what's the keyboard that I like the um uh they make it for they make it for the iPads but it doesn't use uh SMART connector it's Bluetooth the uh it has the hinge on it looks like a Macbook what's that one called oh you you like the bridge keyboards yes correct Bridge with a Y um yes it turns basically your your iPad into kind of a Macbook kind of feel where you can CU it's got these hinges you can angle the screen however you want just like a Macbook uh fullsize keyboard it's nice and uh yeah it it it doubles the thickness of your iPad and makes it heavier but because that heavy base on the keyboard you can use it on your lap without it you know toppling over or whatever um so great design but I could imagine accessory like that with its own battery in there that would then when you dock your iPad into it recharge your iPad so imagine you get what 10 to 12 hours out of your iPad imagine having a keyboard accessory with its own battery in it that uses the data and power capabilities of the SMART connector that would then essentially double the battery life of your iPad give you 20 hours up time you know you could use it for 2 days without having to plug it in to to get work done and stuff like that wow I I think that's kind of where the potential of SMART connector is and so we wrote about that a little bit this week um because prior to this loga uh base coming out we didn't actually know for sure that the SMART connector could be used to recharge devices we had no idea and so there were some iPhone 7 leaks that showed a SMART connector port on the back of an iPhone 7 chassis supposedly and our staff were looking at these leaks and we're like what the heck like why would you cuz all we knew really was that SMART connector be used for keyboard and the leaks have it on the back of the iPhone just above where the lightning Port is and it's like I mean what are they going to do like a BlackBerry style slide out keyboard like yeah and also it's a crazy place to put it when the uh the iPads one is on its Edge right so now we've got access that work with iPads and accessories that work with the phone rumored phone right and so it didn't make any sense but then this week Logitech announces this product you can recharge and then it's like the pieces are starting to fall into place so I'm starting to think that these iPhone 7 leaks that we're seeing with the SMART connector on the back are legitimate I think I think they're real and I think the reason uh for that is Apple is apparently going to get rid of the headphone jack that's what these leaks show and that's what all the rumors are saying you got to be able to plug in a headphone to the Lightning Jack if you're not going to use Bluetooth and if you're plugged in to the headphone jack and you are listening to music you can't charge your phone without some sort of adapter or splitter unless you had a dock or battery case that powered it through the SMART connector so right or or you know the every uh headphone adapter was one like the digital AV connector that also has a female lightning port on it mhm which costly anybody who's used like a mphi for example knows that they have to do this thing where cuz it's got to connect through the lightning port at the bottom it has to have like a chin at the bottom you just got to have the space there to have the circuitry to connect to lightning it's got to slide in imagine that you didn't have to do that anymore and imagine Apple since now they make this weird battery case with a hump on the back and it integrates with iOS and plays nice and automatically charges it without buttons imagine Apple made a new battery case for an iPhone 7 that just snapped on magnetically to the back of your phone no Chin no Chin maybe not even a hump on the back who knows um and you could really make a ultra thin easy to snap on and off and use battery to extend the battery life of your phone wow so I think that's where this is heading I don't know I don't have any inside info on this but if you if you look at the pieces coming together you know the new iPad Pro the 9.7 model has has the SMART connector as well Apple's doubling down on this they have a history of introducing technology in one product and bringing it to another for example Force touch on the watch and the Mac now 3D touch on the iPhone uh they like to have Synergy and bring these things together we have leaks showing a SMART connector port on the back of the iPhone 7 supposedly believing that where there's smoke there's fire I think yeah I think so and so it makes too much sense at this point and then when you start to think about the potential if you're looking at it as not a data transfer uh uh Port but a charging port uh now you could sell all kinds of docs where again that problem I was talking about before lining up your iPad with the with the lightning connector yeah imagine you don't have to do that with your phone anymore either now you just have a dock where you put it in there the connector automatically lines up magnetically with whatever's on the dock and it charges cool so I I think I think that's where this is all heading that's my guess um if you're going to see it on iPhone this year that's how they'll uh calm some of the concern over the uh uh ditching of the headphone jack it'll be well you can plug into lightning and you can charge at the same time which obviously with just one lightning port and without a SMART connector you couldn't do that without some sort of adapter weird dongle City I I don't know that there's going to be a whole lot of people upset about the actual loss of the headphone Port I mean oh there will be well There Will Be Blood just because people want to have something to be upset about but Bluetooth is known Bluetooth is out there you'll get Bluetooth headphones you'll get the the cheap adapter off of Amazon that converts your headphones to Bluetooth it it's not like a difficult proposition no no I mean if if you've already got a pair of headphones you love and your phone has no adapter that that works with that you're going to buy and carry a Bluetooth adapter for your headphones I don't there's a simple small one about the size of a 50 Cent you know two qu stuck together I'm not doing that no way I've got 4 I've got $450 headphones here and if they don't make a lightning adapter for these headphones There Will Be Blood I guarant that yes no no freaking way that I can't use these with my with my iPhone that that would be absolutely insane right so if there's a lightning adapter you're going to have it yeah I mean I'll buy the lightning adapter I I don't I'm I'm not really that worried about ditching the headphone jack I actually looked uh at my headphone collection the other day because I'm a little I'm a little ridiculous when it comes to headphones I'll admit I I have to have wait I just want to preface this by laying out exactly who you are you're the person that if it doesn't fit in one suitcase if you can't fit every single belonging you own into one carry-on suitcase roller board suitcase you will throw it out you will dispose of it in some way you'll send it to my house for God's sakes y you know even if I'm not expecting a package here comes something from New York because Neil wants to get it out of his house and you have a headphone collection I do um I actually just bought uh some noise cancelling Bluetooth headphones from Phillips a few weeks ago for a flight because um I was I been bringing these uh master and dynamic headphones with me on flights and while I love them um they're little big aren't they yeah a little big and uh also they've got this like great like stainless steel you know uh and I they're just getting tossed around in a bag and getting scratched up and it's like these are my atome um working headphones I need something a little cheaper that I can just toss in a bag so you know I looked at uh Bluetooth noise cancelling and there weren't a lot of great options out there Phillips has a new pair that just came out in like January they were like 90 bucks on Amazon they work great um recharge through USBC um fold up real nice and small and they're cheap enough that if they last me a year or two for 90 bucks I'll be happy so that's the latest addition to my headphone collection but yeah I mean ditching the headphone jack doesn't really bother me that much I'm not really that concerned about it well do do you go for runs are you are you into exercise I am yes and uh use my Apple watch when I go run and do you listen to music when you go run I do yes I use um Bluetooth headphones okay have you tried out Mara I have not okay Mara is a hands-free running assistant that uses voice recognition and the microphone in your earbuds to help optimize your runs so have you heard about this no this is the first I've heard I'm Googling it right now okay so she's handsfree and you talk to her using your earbuds and she uses voice commands you tell her what kind of run you'd like to do you ask questions about your speed your pace location duration or even the weather and you can have her play albums and playlists from your music library just by prompting her with your voice uh and and weirdly she can also speak first she can unprompted tell you how you're doing and compare your past runs and records and she'll warn you about changes in the weather so if you're out running and it's about to downpour she'll she'll go ahead and she'll tell you about that and you can track your progress using her too so you can see all your past runs and how you compared and she recognizes when you've had accomplishments and the new thing about her is is besides just working with your iPhone she's also now compatible with Amazon Alexa enabled devices like Echo Dot and tap so you can ask Alexa for updates like hey Alexa how ask Mara how far I ran last Thursday or ask Mara what's my average time for a 5 km run so you should visit mara. that's m.ai and download your free virtual running assistant to your iPhone or Amazon Alexa device today yeah I'm looking at their listing on the App Store it's really cool um they integrate with apple Health um which is great um and yeah you can talk to it it understands conversational English and uh uh integrates with maps and weather and all kinds of stuff so pretty cool you should totally try that out yeah I'm going to try it out it's like a it's like a Siri for running kind of yeah I I will be interested to know how that actually works out for you yeah yeah I'll have to check it out I use my uh Plantronics uh Bluetooth headphones when I run that I love I've recommended them before to people on Twitter who asked me my favorite running headphones some someday you're just going to have to catalog the headphone collection for us uh they're great super light headphones that wrap around my ear um so they don't fall out and they have an integrated microphone so they'll work great with something like Mara yeah now Apple isn't the only one going through this business of removing the headphone jack no uh I mean it's inevitable the headphone jack is going to die it's just going to be a long and painful and and slow death much like the USB port won't die you know apple is going uh full full bore on USBC but uh there's still full sizee USB ports on the iPhone charger they ship on their MacBook Pro on the MacBook Air and it's going to take some time for that to change even USBC is still a USB port right the the headphone Port is an analog Port that only does basically two things right it's it's headphone out and mic in on some special headphone Jacks Square would disagree with you but yes uh good point good point Square have this beautiful hack where their old Square reader can use the headphone port for data however I want to point out that their new Square Reader that does EMV and Apple pay mhm doesn't use the headphone jack right they went to Bluetooth they know this is coming the headphone Port is a single-purpose thing and we're in a world where we want ports that do many things like USB so yeah so Intel wants USBC to uh they've proposed adding a audio spec to it so that you could plug in headphones over USBC honestly this is just I mean it's inevitable it's going to happen and I'm somewhat happy about it but it's going to be a nightmare of a transition especially now you're going to be dealing with phones that have head use headphones over USBC iPhones that do headphones over lightning do you have the r adapter do you have the right cable it's like oh jeez well at least with USBC and lightning there are only two ports to reckon with you know with uh okay well right now with a headphone Port there's only one port to record with fair point I want to remember you did earlier in the podcast you recalled back to 2007 when you were talking about uh Mac and delays in software and things like that I'm going to go back there now because one of the first Android phones was an HTC phone and the HTC and I think it was the hero um had a USB mini connector and no headphone jack and to use headphones with the HTC Hero you plugged in a USB mini to headphone adapter we're going back to that world remember the first iPhone had the recessed headphone jack yes and you couldn't plug in most headphones without an adapter there were special made for iPhone headphones just so that you'd know that woulded or people started selling adapters with them and uh we since we mentioned Mofi cases before with the chin same thing there if you have a chin on the bottom of it then you can't plug in your headphones without an adapter I I have a ton of the belcon adapters that allowed you to plug in regular phones into the iPhone yep it's uh not anything really new but here here's an interesting point if apple is going to get it get rid of the headphone jack but they still have it on the MacBook they're not ready to get rid of it on the 12-in MacBook at what point do we get a MacBook with a female lightning port on it um if intel pushes headphone out through USBC then you just don't so you're telling me that I'm going to buy a pair of Apple beats wired headphones and they're going to have to ship in the box if I want to use it with my Mac a swappable cable or an adapter to plug into either USBC on my Mac or lightning on my iPhone that does not sound like an apple decision to me okay putting a female lightning port on a Mac is also a bad decision or or a bad compromise right because you're going to end up with a double-ended lightning cable you're going to end up with people plugging in lightning Chargers into that lightning port and it won't charge their MacBook it's it's uh an awkward series of compromises I mean couldn't you say the same thing about mini display port and Thunderbolt um mini display port and Thunderbolt how is the same connector uh same connector and it gained features over time right but if you have a legacy mini display port on your Mac and you try to plug in a thunderbolt accessory it doesn't work even though the cable fits uh oh okay so you're telling that they shouldn't reuse the connector because they gained more features no I mean you were saying that people are be confused because they're going to try to plug in a lightning cable if you plug in a lightning charger if you plug in your iPad Pro charger into the side of a Macbook a rumored MacBook with a uh and I say rumored because you're starting this rumor okay but if if you plug in your iPad Pro charger to the side of a rumored MacBook with a lightning port on it what's going to happen what do you think should happen there probably nothing is that a dumb expectation to plug in a charger to a port that fits and presume that it should charge is it a dumb expectation to plug in a thunderbolt accessory to a port that fits and assume it should work uh it's not a dumb expectation except that the older one doesn't have that feature right it's not a thunderbolt port on your laptop you're plugging into it's a mini display port Apple continued to sell Apple continued to sell for years the Thunderbolt display alongside the cinema display because you could you no you could not use a you could not use a thunderbolt display with a legacy Mac you could not use a thunderbolt display as a mini display board display you had to have a new Mac to use the Thunderbolt display and so if you didn't have a Mac with uh a thunderbolt Port it did not work with the Thunderbolt display wow so your problem that you're talking about has already been done it happened before I know because I was sent a thunderbolt display that did not work with my MacBook Air which did not have a thunderbolt Port it had a mini display port the people that bought Apple monitors were smaller in number than the people that have lightning Chargers would you agree of course yeah okay so so that problem that you experienced was a problem that was experienced by a smaller number of people I agree it's a problem but if they release what you're talking about it's going to be a widespread problem I just can't see them selling headphones that have to come with adapter since they are now in the headphone business with Beats that need an adapter to work across Apple product lines I cannot see it happening it would be insane to me that you would have headphones solely for iPhone use and headphones solely for Mac use without an adapter that seems crazy to me and and it seems pretty unapp like where we talk about things just working or we used to anyway exactly I think I think that they have to put a lightning port and you know what if it charges over that then so be it I mean right now um I have a USBC to lightning cable and a 29 wat Apple adapter that charges my 12.9in iPad Pro much faster at USB 3p speeds so theoretically uh it would take you you know uh an ET no real reason they couldn't wire it up to be the charger it might take you an eternity you know unless they wanted to make like a a 100 watt uh uh well I if you're your charger that you're using is the MacBook Air charger or the the MacBook 12 12in MacBook charger I I bought the 12in MacBook charger so then that should work to charge the 12 MacBook just as well over lightning as it would over USBC hypothetically does not work that fast over SMART connector however the log do but we don't know what's going on in that in in the in the chain of SMART connector using the Logitech stuff we don't know where the Slowdown is is it the port is it logitech's internal business it too many variables and apple doesn't like to tell the technical specifications of what it sells so we may never find out until they open up SMART connector a little more but it does even if you're using the standard 12w connector Logitech says it takes uh 1 to two hours longer to charge over SMART connector than it does direct through lighting yeah and and that's because either SMART connector can't handle it or Logitech isn't doing it but somewhere in the middle somewhere we don't is being dissipated as heat right now I mean the 29 wat charger for the 12-in MacBook um that would not be enough to charge a MacBook Pro um you have much higher right 60 watt 85 watt kind of so they would need to sell a completely different uh USBC to lightning brick uh to make a Mac that would charge over lightning which seems unlikely that they would want to do that because they're already charging through USBC um but still I just I don't know what the answer is here and that's why I put it out there because headphones that connect to your Mac over USBC and then connect to your iPhone over lightning it's just like H jeez it's it's a weird Road mapap and you're right I imagine somewhere their Engineers just throwing their hands up and saying screw it ship everything and Apple's been doubling down on on Lightning you know you look at uh all these devices now uh you know the dock that they sell for the Apple watch plugs in through lightning um the uh Siri remote for the Apple TV charges through lightning the uh lightning connector on the back of the apple pencil now this uh loga bay dock has a lightning port on the back uh you have controllers for the Apple TV that charge through lightning Port so I mean run down the list apple is really embracing lightning as a charging method um and it's weird to me that the pencil has a Mayo lightning port on the back end of it and they really need to have like some sort of eraser function on the back I would I would have put it wouldn't wouldn't it be normal that say if you're charging an accessory that you put the female lightning port on the back of the pencil and plug in the same charger you use for the iPad what they really should have done is put a SMART connector on the side of the pencil and had it draw power from the iPad over that and magnetically attached to the side of it so you could actually have your pencil being held in a way that isn't liable to snap off intriguing and I would imagine that a future apple pencil is going to do that it'll just have Smart Connor port on the side it I have this uh magnetic thing I'm using with my apple pencil right now that sticks it to the side or to the front of the iPad yeah you have a sleeve for your pencil a case for your pencil it it I mean it's it it works it's cheap it's functional and frankly it's a much better way to Stow your apple pencil than to uh just leave it laying around you want to use it and then put it down for a second especially if you're walking around with your iPad or or sitting on a couch or something like that um it's an easy way to just put your pencil down and have easy access to it you got to think that charging through the SMART connector is a really smart way for them to do it in the future um with a Next Generation model so what what what do you believe is really going to happen here are we giving up headphone Port is that actually happening I didn't believe it was going to happen but now these schematics are out and now that we know what we know about SMART connector and it shows the lack of a headphone port on there and Intel's Direction too you think just cross the board I mean I think no I I I think that the the death of the headphone was inevitable I think that that was always going to happen the headphone jack was going away that that Jack has been around for forever and it needs to go um that part of it is completely understandable to me what I didn't think was going to happen and I'll probably end up eating crow from my earlier predictions is I didn't think that Apple was going to just abandon the headphone jack this year I thought that there would be a transitionary period where they would start shipping the iPhone with lightning headphones and start flooding the market with lightning headphones and give them a year or two to get rid of the port so imagine that you bought an iPhone 7 this year and it came with lightning Earp pods instead of 3.5mm Jack earpods and then they started you know giving accessory makers the ability to sell adapters or sell headphones with lightning connectors on it but the iPhone would still have headone wait wait they told us two years ago two years ago you and I were on the phone after a wwc conference and we were talking about lightning enabled headphones and you were asking me if there was confirmation that they could actually do this and you know at the time we talked about it and said yes yes they could do lightning headphones then at CES not not this past January but the January before JBL and Phillips announced and Phillips even showed their lightning headphones right and and at this most recent January CES I came back with Philips lightning headphones I've got got some and there were a couple other companies that announced theirs there but there aren't a lot of them there aren't even beats lightning headphones you can get a Beats pill that charges over lightning I I wonder how tightly integrated beats actually is with apple I have I I expect that it's not that tight well I it's I think the mistake there is it's going to be the same thing that happen when they switch from 30 pin to lightning it takes some time for accessory makers to get these products out to Market if Apple had really pushed and had lightning headphones out in the Market it wouldn't be as big of a deal but there is going to be uh wailing and nashing of teeth when this happens because of the lack of lighning headphones out there which means a lot of people are going to need adapters that's just the reality amount of nashing of teeth is going to last for a very short period of time because people will make the adapters and then push them out I don't know some people still complain about lightning so you know there's those people need to take a drink and relax I agree with you but again we're talking about the larger uh space of consumers and not just the enthusiasts who don't mind you know embracing these changes who out there is still crying over the and pouring one out for 30 pin Tim Cook was on stepen coar last fall and coar asked him about it what 30 pin accessory has colar got that isn't working with the 30 pin adapter well video out for starters at any gym that you go to go to a gym with a treadmill and they have a nice 30 pin cable sticking out of it because every gym in America bought those and and they allowed you to plug in your iPod and play video on the screen in front of you so if you plug in the 30 pin adapter doesn't work with doesn't happen NOP can't do video over it doesn't work you got to have the 30 pin that you have to have the correct video lightning accessory you need the Lightning to HDMI adapter to do video out yeah MH M digital AV Adapter doesn't work with the 30 pin adapter so therefore all those treadmills you see at the gym are useless and unless you want to dig out your old iPod Classic or something or bring your own adapter you can't well I mean you have to have a you can't do that cuz then you have to doctor the treadmill and they kick you out of the gym and yeah there's there there is no way to do it if you have a modern iPhone you can't do it and this is still on people's minds like I said coar asked Tim Cook about it last fall so uh the average person is still upset about that switch and this is going to upset people for a long time and it's going to be very difficult for apple and I think if I were in charge over there clearly I'm not and I'm not as smart as the folks over there thankfully you're not thankfully I'm not but I would have done what I said do a transition start pushing lightning headphones ship it with lightning headphones get the adapters out there get the accessory makers to start making lightning headphones lower why that doesn't work right you can't do that successfully be unless you're prepared to subsidize the sales for all the units that don't sell then do it none of none of those headphones are ever going to sell as long as there's an analog Port out there because why would anyone spend the additional money to get the lightning ones when the analog ones are right there on the shelf and cheap yeah so you're going to end up with accessory makers that are going to take a huge bath on returns of product that doesn't move for your transition and what is the alternative a mountain of bad press is what they're going to get when they ship an iPhone without a 3.5 mm Jack and there are no headphones available for it other than whatever be annoyed and they'll issue bad reports and next thing you know we'll be talking about how this is all well it' be the same episode all over again if you remember the switch to lightning it took forever for lightning accessories to start to make it to Market to get docks to get the accessories out reason the reason it took forever for that to happen was because there were shortages on the lightning connectors themselves well they didn't even start licensing it until 2 months after the phone came out they launched the phone in September and then they didn't have a licensing Commission on it until noing was available immediately but the supply was so constrained they doled them out very very in restricted quotas to different companies they had a meeting where they detailed the specifications of lightning that November it was after the phone came out trust me it was it was not timed well and it takes time for the stuff to roll out I mean that's why when we look at SMART connector we don't even know who Apple's licensing it to if they're even licensing it to anybody cuz the only non lch they are to Logitech who they're working you know behind the scenes with but nobody else is making any SMART connector things and so if you're an accessory maker you're kind of like between a rock and a hard place here it's like well should I embrace SMART connector is it going to sell should I bother making anything will Apple even license it to me tough very tough I think I think it's going to be a publicity nightmare if the new iPhone doesn't have 3.5 millim Jack and there are no lightning headphones out there I think it's going to go very poorly for apple and uh hopefully uh I am wrong and they've planned this out much better than I uh think they have but you know it's all speculation at this point but I think the SMART connector charging goes a long way to at least addressing the charging and listening personally I I honestly I won't even care actually you know what I already have a lightning to headphone adapter now that I think of it yeah I do I totally didn't remember this but I do and here how I have it um both Belin and uh I'm blanking on the other company begins with a J uh are sold in Best Buy and a no it's not j-bird it's it's some some other thing I'll figure it out in a second but if no it's not a common name that you would think of okay okay um but what it is is a Lightning to HDMI oh God no no it's not oh damn I don't have it I'm thinking backwards it's an H I was thinking totally wrong I have an HDMI to uh to to VGA that has a headphone on it for doing Apple TV stuff I was thinking of the wrong adapter never mind scratch that that's a a is that re too um I don't have a 30 pin like that but all right never mind that I almost had I almost had okay to make up for for that if any of our listeners ever meets me in person and is still upset about the 30 rein the lightning transition I promise to buy them a drink I apologize for that all right this has been episode 66 of the Apple Insider podcast and if Neil eats crow over the headphone Port not going away we'll tell you all about it when it happens Neil where can people find you on the internet uh well you can read uh my news and reviews on Apple Insider including the 12-in MacBook review and we'll have one of the loga base coming up and if you want to yell at me the easiest way to do it is through Twitter I'm on Twitter at thisis Neil NE do you read your Twitter when people yell at you I do um and it happens uh more frequently than you might think uh I'm somehow not surprised at all there we go this is app Insider podcast number 66 in the can thanks again to ia.com for sponsoring today's episode think of ICT as Uber meets iPhone repair ICT Works around your schedule and travels to you to repair your broken iPhone on the spot in 30 minutes or less and your on demand repair is backed by lifetime warranty whether your repairs for iPhone or iPad iic crack.com technicians are fast and professional and they service business accounts too for a limited time listeners get a free tempered glass screen protector with your ond demand repair request your repair at i.com inssideryou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to episode 66 of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor marks and with me is Neil Hughes and we're here and we're going to talk all about all things Apple earnings iPad iPhone Mac and more welcome Neil hey Victor uh I'm excited this week I have a lot to get off my chest so let's get to it begin well I I we should probably start talking about earnings um Apple had their first decline in earnings in 13 years first ever year-over-year decrease in iPhone sales um I mean you know in terms of the finances it certainly wasn't a bad quarter they shipped uh 51.2 million iPhones 50.6 billion in Revenue um uh net income was 10.5 billion uh I mean pretty big numbers and pretty good performance but nevertheless a disappointment because it's the first time in 13 years that Apple has seen a decline okay so clearly apple is doomed well here's the funny thing so um I made the mistake this week um and I I love our listeners and I love our commenters but we have some very passionate people out there who uh certainly uh are very defensive when it comes to Apple and I respect that um but for myself as a person who covers the news I have to cover it in objective and realistic way and so if you're joeo and you don't follow Apple that closely and maybe you own a few shares of apple or something like that and the stock drops you know 10% after earnings you come to Apple Insider to find out why the stock has dropped and so I wrote a headline saying that uh uh it was a disappointing March quarter because it was a disappointing March quarter it matter that it was going to be right they signaled this it was right within Apple's guidance it doesn't mean that Apple's doomed or that I'm you know trying to drive that I am part of a grand conspiracy to drive the stock down but the truth is all of Apple's three major product categories iPhone iPad and Mac all saw year-over-year sales declines period that's just the reality of it and for a company that's grown for 13 years to have their first decline in 13 years is going to be seen as a disappointment it it doesn't matter it you could you know you can uh win the Super Bowl with your team every year and the one year if they don't win it it's a disappointment because that's what you get used to and I I went into the comments and tried to defend how we covered this um and some people just don't take to that because you know the the iPhone 6 was a super cycle and the 6s could never possibly live up to those expectations etc etc it's not that I even disagree with that stuff it's just the reality of this was a disappointing quarter for apple and I realize that you're an Apple fan and you're really excited and passionate about the company and you really want to Champion them and you know reiterate to the world they're doing well because they are but you know don't don't come at me I'm not the bad guy here you know like blame blame Wall Street blame expectations blame Apple for being so successful for 13 years but at the end of the day it was a disappointing quarter and that that's okay uh if you want to look at the extreme other side of the spectrum so on one side you have the Apple Fans who are don't want anything bad said about their company and and that's fine but then on the other side I got an email from a uh uh European newspaper a a reporter there who wanted a comment from me for a story um and he he actually asked me is this the beginning of the end for apple and I'm just like uh well you know over $200 billion in cash sitting around uh gross margins are still at like 39% on selling Hardware they sold 50 million phones uh they sold 10 million tablets they sold 4 million Macs uh God knows how many watches they sold or way to go out of business isn't it right $6 billion earned this last quarter on software and services that they provide I mean are you kidding me you know uh a company like Microsoft would kill a man to sell 50 million phones in a year let alone in one quarter you know they had their disappointing long decline didn't they right it's just you know and so I responded to this reporter and I said apple is not only this not only is this not the the beginning of the end but apple is not going anywhere in my lifetime or yours like this is the biggest company on the planet they continue to sell astronomical amounts of products and they will continue to sell astronomical amounts of products now maybe the growth won't continue maybe there's some quote unquote tough times ahead but if tough times is making 10 billion dollar a quarter you're doing okay there there would have to be a series of very significant very large very bad bets for Apple to go bad for Apple to fail and then they have so much cash in the bank I mean you know they would have to burn through all of that it would it would be a long series of really really apocalyptically stupid events to take place to kill Apple at this point I mean let's be real the reason that this is a disappointment not just on Wall Street um because obviously Wall Street wants growth and that's all their interested in and that's their Looney land over there we've talked about that a lot um that was disappointing for wall stre but from a consumer perspective there's at least an idea that um you know uh 3D touch on the iPhone isn't really that interesting or that useful and okay I mean I can't really disagree with that I gladly switch to an iPhone SE and a Bandon 3D touch and I don't use it uh because I don't have it anymore and I don't care so if that's a defining feature of the iPhone 6s and apple and developers haven't really found an interesting way to use it yeah okay um iCloud remains uh a trouble spot for Apple uh the iPad um is still not iOS does not really offer the kind of uh power user features that that really needs to make it a potential laptop replacement the Apple watch while there's a lot I like about the Apple watch the apps on it are incredibly slow so you know there are other companies putting this in perspective there are other companies that would kill to have apple Services business they would love to have I'm not preaching Doom and Gloom for Apple here in any way I'm just saying that there are a lot of areas where Apple could improve and it is possible and even likely that some of the reasons that you're seeing um declines this quarter are yes there wasn't a a new hardware design the iPhone which gets consumers excited yes there's seasonal Trends yes there's market trends yes people are hanging on their smartphones longer but I think that there's also um a feeling amongst a lot of people uh and when I say that I mean like really casual people that don't follow this stuff as closely as we do uh that that apple is not um uh innovating at the pace that they expect and a lot of that I think is unfair because it's a perception versus a reality um you know not every product that Apple puts out or every update that Apple puts out is some sort of a revolutionary thing but at the same time there's some things that are just such no-brainers that you're like why haven't they done it yet like Siri on the Mac it's like why why haven't we you know why why are why isn't that there that doesn't make any sense to me um some integration of Touch ID on the Mac would be great as well um uh you know these are the kind of things that are eventually coming but they feel like they could have done it last year you know so of course there's there's room for Apple to grow in areas where they should grow and hopefully they you know start to address some of those things in the coming months and years uh as we go go into WWDC as new Macbook Pros come out that kind of stuff um that doesn't mean that Apple is is in trouble or that things are going poorly for them but there's a lot of opportunities for them to innovate and I think that there is a growing expectation not only on Wall Street but amongst consumers that um Apple needs to start taking advantage of that and and kind of going in those directions where it's almost logical for them to go there right it's it's inevitable yeah you know I I continue to be impressed with with Apple's performance in all these areas you know I'm looking at it and I see yes okay the numbers are down year on year right but in in terms of setting our expectations they're they're meeting everything they set right right they know why this is a decline and they know what they're going to do about it they are very astute business people over there they projected accordingly um they said that iPhone sales were going to decline they did they projected with a accurate range uh what their revenue was going to be for the quarter they know what they're doing they can see the trends coming um and and they they're very smart they they know what they're doing right now they got to reckon with things like the iPad sales drop but you know they're they're doing that because they just introduced guess what new iPads yeah and and uh you know with the iPad that's a uh a spot for me that um sometimes it feels like apple is um singularly focused is the way I would put it like when iOS 7 came out and it was a complete redesign it was all about making it work on the iPhone and iOS 7 the iPad was just a blown up version of iOS 7 on the iPhone uh it really did not feel like they took that opportunity to optimize for iPad and they didn't even do it with iOS 8 it took really until iOS 9 came out that Apple said oh remember the iPad we should start paying a little more attention to what we do for that on the software side which is where you start to see features like split view picture and picture all that kind of iPad specific iOS features taking advantage of the screen real estate but I mean you had a really dark period there from iOS 7 to ios9 where for two generations of iOS nothing was really done specifically to justify the larger screen of the iPad in terms of the operating system and it just wait wait wait iOS 7 was all about getting the whole design right and getting everyone else on board right right iOS 8 was about making it work because there were some inconsistencies in iOS 7 that totally didn't make sense and iOS 8 addressed those right iOS 9 is exactly where they should have started fixing the features and making the iPad had really shine right I I agree it just shouldn't have taken two years it feels like sometimes apple is like singularly focused you know IDE that they should do things faster but at the same time we cry when they do things faster and stuff gets broken well I mean I can't disagree with that but do you remember it's buggy it doesn't work well yeah because they're going too fast do do you remember a few years ago where uh Apple had delay um I don't remember what release of osant was but it was some release of it they had to delay it until the fall because they literally took people off of the the OS 10 team to finish up iOS in time to get it out because that became the priority you are going back to 10.6 10.7 days Steve was still alive and he made the announcement in the summer that it was going to be delayed because they'd moved people around for it and I mean even then you know Apple obviously wasn't nearly as big as they are now considering how much they've grown just in the last couple years but even then they were a large company with a lot of money and it's it's just amazing to me I mean I guess that's just how they operate I don't know but it's amazing to me they can't just hire people and get them up to speed you know well but that's the problem is is you cannot you actually make things take longer when you put more people on it because those people have to get up to speed you simply here's here's the math okay and I'm going to repeat this and I'm quoting uh I'm blanking on who I'm quoting uh Fred I'm blanking on Fred's last name but but you cannot produce a child in one month by putting nine women on the job it just you cannot speed some things up by putting more people on it I agree and for that specific um situation obviously that's Brooks it's Fred Brooks that said that I'm sorry and obviously that's a bad example because you know that was a time crunch kind of thing but I'm talking about over the longer term from iOS 7 to iOS 9 the fact that it took us so long to get pretty basic iPad features like split screen and and picture and picture um it it shows that I think Apple at least internally gets focused on one thing that they need to do that gets all their attention and then it's kind of on to the next thing well yeah but they also try and make improvements and those improvements don't always go well you know we can you remember the connectivity issues within OS 10 10.11 mhm where there wi-fi bugs where they tried to replace um oh God I'm blanking on the name of the process uh begins with an M let's see if I can find it activity monitor really quickly um the the process that that discovers things that are around it jeez discoverability at any rate there was this uh process that had been working fine for years and they replaced it with a whole new one it was a they did a new Bluetooth stack at some point that ruined everything yeah well it was it was a part of that kind of thing part mdns responder okay mdns responder which handles bonjour and uh those kind of services and they replaced this at at beginning of 10.11 mhm and it blew out everything and Kevin Marx who used to work at Apple then worked at Google couple other places noticed that if you replaced the new service with the old mdns responder magically everything started working again and it took Apple a couple of releases to roll back and and give in instead of trying to fix the new one I uh still have a problem that has existed since iOS 7 came out with copy and paste and I've Googled to see if there's a fix and whatever and it seems like most people don't have this problem anymore it must just be the fact that I have not had a phone start from scratch I'm always restoring from iCloud and stuff and I guess at some point I'll just have to bite the bullet and do it but I would say probably 50% of the time when I copy something it actually copies it and it's really annoying because I'll be in one app like you know I want to copy a photo or something in Safari and then I'll jump over to messages hit paste and it'll paste something completely different than what I was expecting and then half the time you're already your thumb's already on the send button and you're sending something you didn't intend to send to somebody uh that happens to me all the time and I don't know what it is about it it's been there since iOS 7 and it must be like a legacy thing from reloading from iCloud for me or something but one of these days like I said I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and just do a fresh install on my phone without restoring from iCloud and just kind of manually restore everything because I don't know what it is but I've been through multiple phones it was on an iPhone 6 iPhone 6s now on an iPhone SE and I still have the problem yeah have you ever tried any of those thirdparty clipboard apps I downloaded one called uh I can't remember the name of it and it didn't really work for me uh there's one that I tried and I had a hard time getting along with it also I think it's it's one of these difficult kind of things where it's a beautiful thing when it works well for that person but if you're just trying to get into it and figure out how do I save stuff to this and and how do I use it right um I'm going to see if I can figure out which one I had I had it as an extension as well and it's a share sheet kind of thing right where you you'd share to it and it would save like a multiple clipboard so you could have multiple different clippings in it and I just could never figure it out well let's let's just uh say here that before this turns into just a complain Fest about new new topic here go on no apple is not Apple's not doomed Apple's fine uh they had a disappointing quarter sorry if you don't like to hear that um they will continue to innovate and bring out new products how successful those products are we will see but it's not like iPhone sales are going to fall off a cliff anytime soon it's still a great product people still like it there's still a demand for it um and the same can be said for Max and and and iPads and all that you know things like the Apple watch we'll see where they go as they evolve as they go um still a lot of room for improvement on all the products but especially new ones like the Apple watch and and things like that well speaking of new products tell me about this MacBook because you reviewed the 12-in MacBook now last week Shane and I talked about it and we talked about it in terms of it being a good Mac and fine for what you needed to do you actually had your hands on with it yeah um so I reviewed the MacBook last year um and I reviewed this series MacBook as well and it's basically the same machine um a little faster a little better battery life um but other than that if you didn't like last year's machine you're not going to like this year's machine if you were in love with last year's machine you're going to be in love with this year's machine it's not going to change anybody's mind um take last year's computer make it a little bit faster processor is like 15 to 20% faster uh the the internal storage is faster so it'll be a little snappier but at the end of the day it's still a $1,300 computer that can't be used for a lot of highend pro tasks for the same price you get a MacBook Pro for that's a lot more capable so I think it's a very I think it applies to a niche market of people that really want an ultra portable super thin brilliantly designed Mac and they basically just want to use it to check email browse the web and do edit some photos and stuff like that so so wait if if you're interested in a super light portable machine that can act as your primary computer mhm and you don't mind spending $1,300 on it why wouldn't you get an iPad Pro uh well as someone who loves my iPad Pro 12.9 in um I still cannot do things like work on it just I mean am I wrong to to ask that question here you've just laid out the MacBook is you're not wrong and I would argue that a lot of people that the MacBook uh would appeal to might should consider getting an iPad if you're primarily looking to browse the web and check email um some people you know just prefer the ability to have a bunch of windows open use a cursor have a traditional Computing experience a dedicated keyboard that sort of stuff um and for those people the the MacBook would be a good computer what what Apple really should have done this year honestly is cut the price by 150 bucks it would have I gave I gave this MacBook uh the same score I gave it last year 3.5 so it's not that it's a bad Mac it's that it's a bad Mac for Value it's it's value for money is what you're complaining about here yeah I mean I you know when I'm reviewing this kind of stuff I have to weigh it for everybody is this a Mac for me no absolutely not I have absolutely no use for this Mac but I can't review it in that context because this isn't about me this is about advising our readers and people that are curious about which Mac to buy which one's right for them when you look at Apple's product lineup you can get a MacBook Air which doesn't have a retina display uh for under $1,000 and it's a competent machine and it is and yes it lacks a right display and it's not as thin as the new Macbook and all that stuff but it it's a good machine um you can get a Macbook Pro 13 in for the same price as this 12-in MacBook bigger screen yeah it's thicker but it's got a way more capable uh processor in it um it's it's the MacBook the 12-in MacBook is kind of caught in the middle right now very much like the first MacBook Air was ahead of its time trailblazing brilliant design forward you don't waste any time going back to 2007 do you well I mean that's but look back at that computer right if you bought that computer in 2007 you were buying into the future of computing but you were doing it too three years ahead of the curve it wasn't until about 2010 when Apple redesigned the MacBook Air and really made it a capable relevant machine that sales started to take off and we should remember that that original Air cost 2,000 bucks exactly they lowered the price out in the second generation design of the MacBook Air um and they made it a much better machine and it was even thinner at that point and it continues to be a part of Apple's lineup because it was that influential and that great of a product and there's a huge Market of people out there that wish that Apple would take that design and put a retina display in it but they won't because that product that product's going away and the 12 in is now the vision of the future yeah for me personally um the the the single port doesn't bother me I don't care about the single USBC Port um the port I use more than anything on my MacBook Pro actually is the SD card slot and I know that that's going to die whenever they redesign the MacBook Pro I understand that I've C you are unique in that one I I use it all the time that's how that's the easiest way for me to transfer photos I don't want to dig out a cable or anything like that to transfer from my Sony camera I just want to plug it in see you're also one of those people who's using a standalone camera I am yes I am unique but I shoot photos for a living as part of this job so therefore I have to take photos with a nice camera and transfer them my Mac edit them put them in the review that sort of stuff so for me that's a feature that I know is going to be gone eventually because and probably pretty soon because Apple likes to get rid of Legacy ports and I understand that um other ports I don't really mind um I'm ready to go Whole Hog on USBC uh I could totally uh dig that if the next MacBook Pro doesn't have any full-size USB ports and I need adapters and stuff I'm cool with that if it gets me a thinner design I'm cool with the MacBook having one port on it I don't like that it has one port for charging and sinking I wish that Apple would bring back mag safe and have one mag safe for charging and one USB C port for everything else yeah so third parties have already addressed that problem for you you know that right I know because Griffin makes a uh a magsafe like and they don't call it mag safe obious does it do data as well or is it just power it's a that's a very good question I believe it's power I'm not positive so then you have to unplug this thing to plug in when you want and it's just like so use one of the many hubs that are available for this thing well yeah I don't really care about that people want a second port on here but if Apple just put a MAG safe on there well if they just put two USBC ports they could do that as well but the problem with that is this thing is so freaking light that and the USBC cable plugs in so snugly that if you make the lightest tug on this cable you're going to send your laptop flying and you just threw $1,300 at the window you know uh mag safe has saved my laptop more times than I can count um from people tripping over it or whatever you know I I realiz apple is kind of positioning this as almost more iPad than MacBook it's like you know you don't you you maybe you know don't want to keep this plugged in all the time is kind of their philosophy I get it but I think if they just put a you know mag safe3 uh easily detachable on there redesign it make it nice and thin and then put the USBC Port next to it that would address 75% of the concerns out there that people have about this computer yeah so Griffin calls theirs break safe and break safe is a breakaway power cord for your MacBook or Chromebook and then if you want to plug anything into your MacBook you have to unplug this adapter that which by the way sticks out of the beautiful chassis on your MacBook and then plug in the cable it's it's a nightmare just put a MAG safe on there and we'd be done well there you have it things Apple needs to do now comparing this to the iPad Pro uh there there have been some benchmarks and it looks like in multicore score multi-core scores overall the MacBook totally beats it it walks all over the iPad Pros in single core scores the iPad Pro is is better when it comes to metal the iPad Pro 12.9 in is better um in in JavaScript and Jetstream JavaScript ring it's uh the MacBook beats the others so but but they're still fairly close I mean these aren't big ratings that are different except when it comes to metal and the iPad Pro totally outshines everything else yeah I mean the iPad Pro is uh incredible piece of Hardware uh very capable brilliantly designed um I think the software is what holds it back the the MacBook uh is an incredible piece of Hardware I think the software is great I really love OS 10 um I think that it's price and the compromises are probably too much for most users and so going back to what I was saying before when I write a review I have to write it for somebody who's looking to buy a Mac and if you're looking to buy a Mac if you're okay with the compromise that this product makes and you're okay with the price you will be extremely happy with this laptop it is incredibly designed um it fanless thin beautiful uh some people don't like the keyboard because it's less travel on the keys doesn't bother me at all some people don't like the fact there's one port doesn't really bother me at all um uh I know some people really hate the fact that the the FaceTime camera on it is still only 480p because the screen is so thin that's all they can fit in there I don't really care um none of those things really bother me but when I just look at it from a you know 40,000 ft perspective like looking at the landscape I wonder who it's for that that's my main concern with the MacBook is where is this Market of uh people that want to spend 13 plus100 on a laptop and have all these compromises when they spend that much money certainly there is a market out there but uh when I write these reviews I I like to imagine that you know it's a friend of mine or a family member and they come to me and they say what do you think of this computer uh what what do you think would work for me for 90% of the people that ask me that question the MacBook is not for them they don't want to spend that much money and they don't want to have these compromises okay so single word buy or not buy if you're okay with the compromises buy cool if you're okay with the price byy I I think it's a great machine but you know I can't give everything uh a five out of five because it's a great machine I mean there's there's a lot come on it's from Apple you're you're conspiring to H Apple oh I know anytime anytime I write something with people listeners please please email Neil tell him it's time to take the veil off the conspiracy it's an impressive machine and in two three years it is going to be incredible when the uh Hardware catches up in terms of performance and apple kind of tweaks the design a little bit I think um it's going to be Apple's bestselling Mac but very much like the first MacBook Air it's going to take a little time okay I want to take a moment and talk to you about I cracked so NE Neil have you ever cracked a screen on your iPhone I thankfully have not uh my wife cracked the no in the last year she has cracked both an iPhone 6s and an Apple Watch so it's been an expensive year and an Apple Watch geez how do you do that she uh dropped it onto a tile floor and it landed just perfectly and shattered the screen and it cost like $2 $250 to replace it it was not Che basically the cost of a fresh watch yeah was it a sport model mhm yeah so the cost of a freshwat y so so there's this iPhone repair company called icked and they're perfect for people just like wife because what they do is you go online and and they immediately send out a professional iPhone repair technician they're they're not going to fix your watch but they'll Sue it for iPhones and other devices and so they send out this Tech to the location of you're choosing and and they do it wherever whenever and they mean wherever so they arrive in less than an hour and we'll fix it they'll do it at a coffee shop they'll do it wherever you want to meet um and it generally takes about less than 30 minutes for them to fix your phone they have 5,000 of these Techs in 600 cities across the United States and they do fast quality work and they stand behind it every repair they make comes with a lifetime warranty so if you find yourself with a broken iPhone go to ia.com for the best most convenient and reliable phone repair they come to you it's kind of hard to beat that isn't it yeah I mean Apple charges a lot of money for their repairs and especially if you have an older phone um and don't want to spend that kind of money to get it repaired these these repair services a lot of times do a really great job and uh it's a good way to save money definitely so I know you're a giant fan of the SMART connector yes you love that connector I do you can't wait for there to be more accessories and devices for that connector since the iPad Pro launched last November I have been and we've talked about many times on the podcast here a huge proponent of the SMART connector because I can see the potential of having a quickly attachable and removable accessory that can do whatever accessory makers can imagine that they want it to do so so tell me about your dream accessory what do you wish was made well in a perfect world I would have an iPad just like it is now that works like it does now and then I could dock it with a device that would allow me to connect whatever I chose to it um a US B Hub with a bunch of accessories I can have a a a podcasting setup for example dock it got a microphone that's already connected to the dock a keyboard that's already connected to the dock all I have to do is rest my iPad on there and it becomes the computer I need at that moment I think that's really the future of the iPad um and these Ultra portable form factors is and especially with a screen that can you know where where the entire interface is the screen it can become whatever you need in that moment and you can see little inklings of that now with the SMART connector and the ability to quickly attach a keyboard and just start typing and get going and and then and also with Apple's pushing the camera connection kit as a USB kit that does other things like they talked about podcast mics exactly you can actually take the uh USB connector kit it has a uh uh uh lightning input on it you can plug in and get power while you're using a USB accessory or you could even plug in a powered USB hub and connect multiple USB access to your iPad a lot of people don't realize this the iPad is way more powerful and a way more capable computer than a lot of people realize this isn't just a kids toy but it remains held back uh by a number of things most notably iOS is just not there in terms of competing with the Mac for you know uh power user Computing that kind of stuff yeah so if you could mash the camera connection kit into a SMART connector dock that would be sort of on its way for you I can Envision a lot of things that you could do with these SMART connector doc uh accessories that would be fantastic so we're getting a we're getting a a glimpse of that uh this week um Logitech uh announced a new product uh called the loga base um and they sent us a review unit to sample before the announcement came out so I've been using it for the last week and it's not without its shortcomings but um and we'll have a full review up in in the next few days for this product we did a first look um when it was announced on Tuesday and I love it it charges your iPad Pro whether the 9.7 in model the 12.9 in model it charges it through the SMART connector and literally all you got to do is rest your iPad on the magnetic connector and it starts to juice up your ipad you don't have to line up a lightning connector and it allows it to do it in landscape mode so if you have it docked you can use it you know more like you would a laptop and the base is nice and heavy and sturdy so when you pick it up it doesn't it's not like any other iPad Dock where the lightning connector is so snug that you have to hold the base down to pull it off and line it up and all that nope just rest it on there the magnets align it starts to charge bam nice I I love it um and it's I I think it's the beginning of what's to come the problem is we don't really know what the technical limitations of the SMART connector are can it do simultaneous uh Power and data probably but this product doesn't so uh the logic base on the back of it has a female lightning connector port and uh you plug in a lightning cable and then plug that into the wall and you then that's what it does I tried doing other things like plugging in the aformentioned USB adapter to see if I could do simultaneous data and power doesn't work um I don't know if that's a limitation of the SMART connector Hardware capabilities or if iOS just doesn't want to play nice yet and maybe a software update could fix that praying it's the ladder but imagine again I talked about a podcasting station before right just because we're doing a podcast that's a great example right imagine if I had a place in my home where I had a dock where I charged my iPad but I also had uh USB ports on that dock with a microphone and other things that I need plugged in and all I would need to do is rest my iPad on there open up an app and Bam I'm ready to podcast nice yeah I mean that would be great um we're not there yet but I'm hoping that we get there soon you know I can Envision all kinds of great stuff with this uh one of the um uh products that I would really like to see is a a mobile keyboard dock that has its own battery in it so imagine um if you had a nice uh base that was you know the size uh and equal weight uh or proportionally I guess of the iPad Pro um that could turn into a Macbook style uh fold out um uh you know clam shell design uh much like we we've talked a lot about the uh what's the keyboard that I like the um uh they make it for they make it for the iPads but it doesn't use uh SMART connector it's Bluetooth the uh it has the hinge on it looks like a Macbook what's that one called oh you you like the bridge keyboards yes correct Bridge with a Y um yes it turns basically your your iPad into kind of a Macbook kind of feel where you can CU it's got these hinges you can angle the screen however you want just like a Macbook uh fullsize keyboard it's nice and uh yeah it it it doubles the thickness of your iPad and makes it heavier but because that heavy base on the keyboard you can use it on your lap without it you know toppling over or whatever um so great design but I could imagine accessory like that with its own battery in there that would then when you dock your iPad into it recharge your iPad so imagine you get what 10 to 12 hours out of your iPad imagine having a keyboard accessory with its own battery in it that uses the data and power capabilities of the SMART connector that would then essentially double the battery life of your iPad give you 20 hours up time you know you could use it for 2 days without having to plug it in to to get work done and stuff like that wow I I think that's kind of where the potential of SMART connector is and so we wrote about that a little bit this week um because prior to this loga uh base coming out we didn't actually know for sure that the SMART connector could be used to recharge devices we had no idea and so there were some iPhone 7 leaks that showed a SMART connector port on the back of an iPhone 7 chassis supposedly and our staff were looking at these leaks and we're like what the heck like why would you cuz all we knew really was that SMART connector be used for keyboard and the leaks have it on the back of the iPhone just above where the lightning Port is and it's like I mean what are they going to do like a BlackBerry style slide out keyboard like yeah and also it's a crazy place to put it when the uh the iPads one is on its Edge right so now we've got access that work with iPads and accessories that work with the phone rumored phone right and so it didn't make any sense but then this week Logitech announces this product you can recharge and then it's like the pieces are starting to fall into place so I'm starting to think that these iPhone 7 leaks that we're seeing with the SMART connector on the back are legitimate I think I think they're real and I think the reason uh for that is Apple is apparently going to get rid of the headphone jack that's what these leaks show and that's what all the rumors are saying you got to be able to plug in a headphone to the Lightning Jack if you're not going to use Bluetooth and if you're plugged in to the headphone jack and you are listening to music you can't charge your phone without some sort of adapter or splitter unless you had a dock or battery case that powered it through the SMART connector so right or or you know the every uh headphone adapter was one like the digital AV connector that also has a female lightning port on it mhm which costly anybody who's used like a mphi for example knows that they have to do this thing where cuz it's got to connect through the lightning port at the bottom it has to have like a chin at the bottom you just got to have the space there to have the circuitry to connect to lightning it's got to slide in imagine that you didn't have to do that anymore and imagine Apple since now they make this weird battery case with a hump on the back and it integrates with iOS and plays nice and automatically charges it without buttons imagine Apple made a new battery case for an iPhone 7 that just snapped on magnetically to the back of your phone no Chin no Chin maybe not even a hump on the back who knows um and you could really make a ultra thin easy to snap on and off and use battery to extend the battery life of your phone wow so I think that's where this is heading I don't know I don't have any inside info on this but if you if you look at the pieces coming together you know the new iPad Pro the 9.7 model has has the SMART connector as well Apple's doubling down on this they have a history of introducing technology in one product and bringing it to another for example Force touch on the watch and the Mac now 3D touch on the iPhone uh they like to have Synergy and bring these things together we have leaks showing a SMART connector port on the back of the iPhone 7 supposedly believing that where there's smoke there's fire I think yeah I think so and so it makes too much sense at this point and then when you start to think about the potential if you're looking at it as not a data transfer uh uh Port but a charging port uh now you could sell all kinds of docs where again that problem I was talking about before lining up your iPad with the with the lightning connector yeah imagine you don't have to do that with your phone anymore either now you just have a dock where you put it in there the connector automatically lines up magnetically with whatever's on the dock and it charges cool so I I think I think that's where this is all heading that's my guess um if you're going to see it on iPhone this year that's how they'll uh calm some of the concern over the uh uh ditching of the headphone jack it'll be well you can plug into lightning and you can charge at the same time which obviously with just one lightning port and without a SMART connector you couldn't do that without some sort of adapter weird dongle City I I don't know that there's going to be a whole lot of people upset about the actual loss of the headphone Port I mean oh there will be well There Will Be Blood just because people want to have something to be upset about but Bluetooth is known Bluetooth is out there you'll get Bluetooth headphones you'll get the the cheap adapter off of Amazon that converts your headphones to Bluetooth it it's not like a difficult proposition no no I mean if if you've already got a pair of headphones you love and your phone has no adapter that that works with that you're going to buy and carry a Bluetooth adapter for your headphones I don't there's a simple small one about the size of a 50 Cent you know two qu stuck together I'm not doing that no way I've got 4 I've got $450 headphones here and if they don't make a lightning adapter for these headphones There Will Be Blood I guarant that yes no no freaking way that I can't use these with my with my iPhone that that would be absolutely insane right so if there's a lightning adapter you're going to have it yeah I mean I'll buy the lightning adapter I I don't I'm I'm not really that worried about ditching the headphone jack I actually looked uh at my headphone collection the other day because I'm a little I'm a little ridiculous when it comes to headphones I'll admit I I have to have wait I just want to preface this by laying out exactly who you are you're the person that if it doesn't fit in one suitcase if you can't fit every single belonging you own into one carry-on suitcase roller board suitcase you will throw it out you will dispose of it in some way you'll send it to my house for God's sakes y you know even if I'm not expecting a package here comes something from New York because Neil wants to get it out of his house and you have a headphone collection I do um I actually just bought uh some noise cancelling Bluetooth headphones from Phillips a few weeks ago for a flight because um I was I been bringing these uh master and dynamic headphones with me on flights and while I love them um they're little big aren't they yeah a little big and uh also they've got this like great like stainless steel you know uh and I they're just getting tossed around in a bag and getting scratched up and it's like these are my atome um working headphones I need something a little cheaper that I can just toss in a bag so you know I looked at uh Bluetooth noise cancelling and there weren't a lot of great options out there Phillips has a new pair that just came out in like January they were like 90 bucks on Amazon they work great um recharge through USBC um fold up real nice and small and they're cheap enough that if they last me a year or two for 90 bucks I'll be happy so that's the latest addition to my headphone collection but yeah I mean ditching the headphone jack doesn't really bother me that much I'm not really that concerned about it well do do you go for runs are you are you into exercise I am yes and uh use my Apple watch when I go run and do you listen to music when you go run I do yes I use um Bluetooth headphones okay have you tried out Mara I have not okay Mara is a hands-free running assistant that uses voice recognition and the microphone in your earbuds to help optimize your runs so have you heard about this no this is the first I've heard I'm Googling it right now okay so she's handsfree and you talk to her using your earbuds and she uses voice commands you tell her what kind of run you'd like to do you ask questions about your speed your pace location duration or even the weather and you can have her play albums and playlists from your music library just by prompting her with your voice uh and and weirdly she can also speak first she can unprompted tell you how you're doing and compare your past runs and records and she'll warn you about changes in the weather so if you're out running and it's about to downpour she'll she'll go ahead and she'll tell you about that and you can track your progress using her too so you can see all your past runs and how you compared and she recognizes when you've had accomplishments and the new thing about her is is besides just working with your iPhone she's also now compatible with Amazon Alexa enabled devices like Echo Dot and tap so you can ask Alexa for updates like hey Alexa how ask Mara how far I ran last Thursday or ask Mara what's my average time for a 5 km run so you should visit mara. that's m.ai and download your free virtual running assistant to your iPhone or Amazon Alexa device today yeah I'm looking at their listing on the App Store it's really cool um they integrate with apple Health um which is great um and yeah you can talk to it it understands conversational English and uh uh integrates with maps and weather and all kinds of stuff so pretty cool you should totally try that out yeah I'm going to try it out it's like a it's like a Siri for running kind of yeah I I will be interested to know how that actually works out for you yeah yeah I'll have to check it out I use my uh Plantronics uh Bluetooth headphones when I run that I love I've recommended them before to people on Twitter who asked me my favorite running headphones some someday you're just going to have to catalog the headphone collection for us uh they're great super light headphones that wrap around my ear um so they don't fall out and they have an integrated microphone so they'll work great with something like Mara yeah now Apple isn't the only one going through this business of removing the headphone jack no uh I mean it's inevitable the headphone jack is going to die it's just going to be a long and painful and and slow death much like the USB port won't die you know apple is going uh full full bore on USBC but uh there's still full sizee USB ports on the iPhone charger they ship on their MacBook Pro on the MacBook Air and it's going to take some time for that to change even USBC is still a USB port right the the headphone Port is an analog Port that only does basically two things right it's it's headphone out and mic in on some special headphone Jacks Square would disagree with you but yes uh good point good point Square have this beautiful hack where their old Square reader can use the headphone port for data however I want to point out that their new Square Reader that does EMV and Apple pay mhm doesn't use the headphone jack right they went to Bluetooth they know this is coming the headphone Port is a single-purpose thing and we're in a world where we want ports that do many things like USB so yeah so Intel wants USBC to uh they've proposed adding a audio spec to it so that you could plug in headphones over USBC honestly this is just I mean it's inevitable it's going to happen and I'm somewhat happy about it but it's going to be a nightmare of a transition especially now you're going to be dealing with phones that have head use headphones over USBC iPhones that do headphones over lightning do you have the r adapter do you have the right cable it's like oh jeez well at least with USBC and lightning there are only two ports to reckon with you know with uh okay well right now with a headphone Port there's only one port to record with fair point I want to remember you did earlier in the podcast you recalled back to 2007 when you were talking about uh Mac and delays in software and things like that I'm going to go back there now because one of the first Android phones was an HTC phone and the HTC and I think it was the hero um had a USB mini connector and no headphone jack and to use headphones with the HTC Hero you plugged in a USB mini to headphone adapter we're going back to that world remember the first iPhone had the recessed headphone jack yes and you couldn't plug in most headphones without an adapter there were special made for iPhone headphones just so that you'd know that woulded or people started selling adapters with them and uh we since we mentioned Mofi cases before with the chin same thing there if you have a chin on the bottom of it then you can't plug in your headphones without an adapter I I have a ton of the belcon adapters that allowed you to plug in regular phones into the iPhone yep it's uh not anything really new but here here's an interesting point if apple is going to get it get rid of the headphone jack but they still have it on the MacBook they're not ready to get rid of it on the 12-in MacBook at what point do we get a MacBook with a female lightning port on it um if intel pushes headphone out through USBC then you just don't so you're telling me that I'm going to buy a pair of Apple beats wired headphones and they're going to have to ship in the box if I want to use it with my Mac a swappable cable or an adapter to plug into either USBC on my Mac or lightning on my iPhone that does not sound like an apple decision to me okay putting a female lightning port on a Mac is also a bad decision or or a bad compromise right because you're going to end up with a double-ended lightning cable you're going to end up with people plugging in lightning Chargers into that lightning port and it won't charge their MacBook it's it's uh an awkward series of compromises I mean couldn't you say the same thing about mini display port and Thunderbolt um mini display port and Thunderbolt how is the same connector uh same connector and it gained features over time right but if you have a legacy mini display port on your Mac and you try to plug in a thunderbolt accessory it doesn't work even though the cable fits uh oh okay so you're telling that they shouldn't reuse the connector because they gained more features no I mean you were saying that people are be confused because they're going to try to plug in a lightning cable if you plug in a lightning charger if you plug in your iPad Pro charger into the side of a Macbook a rumored MacBook with a uh and I say rumored because you're starting this rumor okay but if if you plug in your iPad Pro charger to the side of a rumored MacBook with a lightning port on it what's going to happen what do you think should happen there probably nothing is that a dumb expectation to plug in a charger to a port that fits and presume that it should charge is it a dumb expectation to plug in a thunderbolt accessory to a port that fits and assume it should work uh it's not a dumb expectation except that the older one doesn't have that feature right it's not a thunderbolt port on your laptop you're plugging into it's a mini display port Apple continued to sell Apple continued to sell for years the Thunderbolt display alongside the cinema display because you could you no you could not use a you could not use a thunderbolt display with a legacy Mac you could not use a thunderbolt display as a mini display board display you had to have a new Mac to use the Thunderbolt display and so if you didn't have a Mac with uh a thunderbolt Port it did not work with the Thunderbolt display wow so your problem that you're talking about has already been done it happened before I know because I was sent a thunderbolt display that did not work with my MacBook Air which did not have a thunderbolt Port it had a mini display port the people that bought Apple monitors were smaller in number than the people that have lightning Chargers would you agree of course yeah okay so so that problem that you experienced was a problem that was experienced by a smaller number of people I agree it's a problem but if they release what you're talking about it's going to be a widespread problem I just can't see them selling headphones that have to come with adapter since they are now in the headphone business with Beats that need an adapter to work across Apple product lines I cannot see it happening it would be insane to me that you would have headphones solely for iPhone use and headphones solely for Mac use without an adapter that seems crazy to me and and it seems pretty unapp like where we talk about things just working or we used to anyway exactly I think I think that they have to put a lightning port and you know what if it charges over that then so be it I mean right now um I have a USBC to lightning cable and a 29 wat Apple adapter that charges my 12.9in iPad Pro much faster at USB 3p speeds so theoretically uh it would take you you know uh an ET no real reason they couldn't wire it up to be the charger it might take you an eternity you know unless they wanted to make like a a 100 watt uh uh well I if you're your charger that you're using is the MacBook Air charger or the the MacBook 12 12in MacBook charger I I bought the 12in MacBook charger so then that should work to charge the 12 MacBook just as well over lightning as it would over USBC hypothetically does not work that fast over SMART connector however the log do but we don't know what's going on in that in in the in the chain of SMART connector using the Logitech stuff we don't know where the Slowdown is is it the port is it logitech's internal business it too many variables and apple doesn't like to tell the technical specifications of what it sells so we may never find out until they open up SMART connector a little more but it does even if you're using the standard 12w connector Logitech says it takes uh 1 to two hours longer to charge over SMART connector than it does direct through lighting yeah and and that's because either SMART connector can't handle it or Logitech isn't doing it but somewhere in the middle somewhere we don't is being dissipated as heat right now I mean the 29 wat charger for the 12-in MacBook um that would not be enough to charge a MacBook Pro um you have much higher right 60 watt 85 watt kind of so they would need to sell a completely different uh USBC to lightning brick uh to make a Mac that would charge over lightning which seems unlikely that they would want to do that because they're already charging through USBC um but still I just I don't know what the answer is here and that's why I put it out there because headphones that connect to your Mac over USBC and then connect to your iPhone over lightning it's just like H jeez it's it's a weird Road mapap and you're right I imagine somewhere their Engineers just throwing their hands up and saying screw it ship everything and Apple's been doubling down on on Lightning you know you look at uh all these devices now uh you know the dock that they sell for the Apple watch plugs in through lightning um the uh Siri remote for the Apple TV charges through lightning the uh lightning connector on the back of the apple pencil now this uh loga bay dock has a lightning port on the back uh you have controllers for the Apple TV that charge through lightning Port so I mean run down the list apple is really embracing lightning as a charging method um and it's weird to me that the pencil has a Mayo lightning port on the back end of it and they really need to have like some sort of eraser function on the back I would I would have put it wouldn't wouldn't it be normal that say if you're charging an accessory that you put the female lightning port on the back of the pencil and plug in the same charger you use for the iPad what they really should have done is put a SMART connector on the side of the pencil and had it draw power from the iPad over that and magnetically attached to the side of it so you could actually have your pencil being held in a way that isn't liable to snap off intriguing and I would imagine that a future apple pencil is going to do that it'll just have Smart Connor port on the side it I have this uh magnetic thing I'm using with my apple pencil right now that sticks it to the side or to the front of the iPad yeah you have a sleeve for your pencil a case for your pencil it it I mean it's it it works it's cheap it's functional and frankly it's a much better way to Stow your apple pencil than to uh just leave it laying around you want to use it and then put it down for a second especially if you're walking around with your iPad or or sitting on a couch or something like that um it's an easy way to just put your pencil down and have easy access to it you got to think that charging through the SMART connector is a really smart way for them to do it in the future um with a Next Generation model so what what what do you believe is really going to happen here are we giving up headphone Port is that actually happening I didn't believe it was going to happen but now these schematics are out and now that we know what we know about SMART connector and it shows the lack of a headphone port on there and Intel's Direction too you think just cross the board I mean I think no I I I think that the the death of the headphone was inevitable I think that that was always going to happen the headphone jack was going away that that Jack has been around for forever and it needs to go um that part of it is completely understandable to me what I didn't think was going to happen and I'll probably end up eating crow from my earlier predictions is I didn't think that Apple was going to just abandon the headphone jack this year I thought that there would be a transitionary period where they would start shipping the iPhone with lightning headphones and start flooding the market with lightning headphones and give them a year or two to get rid of the port so imagine that you bought an iPhone 7 this year and it came with lightning Earp pods instead of 3.5mm Jack earpods and then they started you know giving accessory makers the ability to sell adapters or sell headphones with lightning connectors on it but the iPhone would still have headone wait wait they told us two years ago two years ago you and I were on the phone after a wwc conference and we were talking about lightning enabled headphones and you were asking me if there was confirmation that they could actually do this and you know at the time we talked about it and said yes yes they could do lightning headphones then at CES not not this past January but the January before JBL and Phillips announced and Phillips even showed their lightning headphones right and and at this most recent January CES I came back with Philips lightning headphones I've got got some and there were a couple other companies that announced theirs there but there aren't a lot of them there aren't even beats lightning headphones you can get a Beats pill that charges over lightning I I wonder how tightly integrated beats actually is with apple I have I I expect that it's not that tight well I it's I think the mistake there is it's going to be the same thing that happen when they switch from 30 pin to lightning it takes some time for accessory makers to get these products out to Market if Apple had really pushed and had lightning headphones out in the Market it wouldn't be as big of a deal but there is going to be uh wailing and nashing of teeth when this happens because of the lack of lighning headphones out there which means a lot of people are going to need adapters that's just the reality amount of nashing of teeth is going to last for a very short period of time because people will make the adapters and then push them out I don't know some people still complain about lightning so you know there's those people need to take a drink and relax I agree with you but again we're talking about the larger uh space of consumers and not just the enthusiasts who don't mind you know embracing these changes who out there is still crying over the and pouring one out for 30 pin Tim Cook was on stepen coar last fall and coar asked him about it what 30 pin accessory has colar got that isn't working with the 30 pin adapter well video out for starters at any gym that you go to go to a gym with a treadmill and they have a nice 30 pin cable sticking out of it because every gym in America bought those and and they allowed you to plug in your iPod and play video on the screen in front of you so if you plug in the 30 pin adapter doesn't work with doesn't happen NOP can't do video over it doesn't work you got to have the 30 pin that you have to have the correct video lightning accessory you need the Lightning to HDMI adapter to do video out yeah MH M digital AV Adapter doesn't work with the 30 pin adapter so therefore all those treadmills you see at the gym are useless and unless you want to dig out your old iPod Classic or something or bring your own adapter you can't well I mean you have to have a you can't do that cuz then you have to doctor the treadmill and they kick you out of the gym and yeah there's there there is no way to do it if you have a modern iPhone you can't do it and this is still on people's minds like I said coar asked Tim Cook about it last fall so uh the average person is still upset about that switch and this is going to upset people for a long time and it's going to be very difficult for apple and I think if I were in charge over there clearly I'm not and I'm not as smart as the folks over there thankfully you're not thankfully I'm not but I would have done what I said do a transition start pushing lightning headphones ship it with lightning headphones get the adapters out there get the accessory makers to start making lightning headphones lower why that doesn't work right you can't do that successfully be unless you're prepared to subsidize the sales for all the units that don't sell then do it none of none of those headphones are ever going to sell as long as there's an analog Port out there because why would anyone spend the additional money to get the lightning ones when the analog ones are right there on the shelf and cheap yeah so you're going to end up with accessory makers that are going to take a huge bath on returns of product that doesn't move for your transition and what is the alternative a mountain of bad press is what they're going to get when they ship an iPhone without a 3.5 mm Jack and there are no headphones available for it other than whatever be annoyed and they'll issue bad reports and next thing you know we'll be talking about how this is all well it' be the same episode all over again if you remember the switch to lightning it took forever for lightning accessories to start to make it to Market to get docks to get the accessories out reason the reason it took forever for that to happen was because there were shortages on the lightning connectors themselves well they didn't even start licensing it until 2 months after the phone came out they launched the phone in September and then they didn't have a licensing Commission on it until noing was available immediately but the supply was so constrained they doled them out very very in restricted quotas to different companies they had a meeting where they detailed the specifications of lightning that November it was after the phone came out trust me it was it was not timed well and it takes time for the stuff to roll out I mean that's why when we look at SMART connector we don't even know who Apple's licensing it to if they're even licensing it to anybody cuz the only non lch they are to Logitech who they're working you know behind the scenes with but nobody else is making any SMART connector things and so if you're an accessory maker you're kind of like between a rock and a hard place here it's like well should I embrace SMART connector is it going to sell should I bother making anything will Apple even license it to me tough very tough I think I think it's going to be a publicity nightmare if the new iPhone doesn't have 3.5 millim Jack and there are no lightning headphones out there I think it's going to go very poorly for apple and uh hopefully uh I am wrong and they've planned this out much better than I uh think they have but you know it's all speculation at this point but I think the SMART connector charging goes a long way to at least addressing the charging and listening personally I I honestly I won't even care actually you know what I already have a lightning to headphone adapter now that I think of it yeah I do I totally didn't remember this but I do and here how I have it um both Belin and uh I'm blanking on the other company begins with a J uh are sold in Best Buy and a no it's not j-bird it's it's some some other thing I'll figure it out in a second but if no it's not a common name that you would think of okay okay um but what it is is a Lightning to HDMI oh God no no it's not oh damn I don't have it I'm thinking backwards it's an H I was thinking totally wrong I have an HDMI to uh to to VGA that has a headphone on it for doing Apple TV stuff I was thinking of the wrong adapter never mind scratch that that's a a is that re too um I don't have a 30 pin like that but all right never mind that I almost had I almost had okay to make up for for that if any of our listeners ever meets me in person and is still upset about the 30 rein the lightning transition I promise to buy them a drink I apologize for that all right this has been episode 66 of the Apple Insider podcast and if Neil eats crow over the headphone Port not going away we'll tell you all about it when it happens Neil where can people find you on the internet uh well you can read uh my news and reviews on Apple Insider including the 12-in MacBook review and we'll have one of the loga base coming up and if you want to yell at me the easiest way to do it is through Twitter I'm on Twitter at thisis Neil NE do you read your Twitter when people yell at you I do um and it happens uh more frequently than you might think uh I'm somehow not surprised at all there we go this is app Insider podcast number 66 in the can thanks again to ia.com for sponsoring today's episode think of ICT as Uber meets iPhone repair ICT Works around your schedule and travels to you to repair your broken iPhone on the spot in 30 minutes or less and your on demand repair is backed by lifetime warranty whether your repairs for iPhone or iPad iic crack.com technicians are fast and professional and they service business accounts too for a limited time listeners get a free tempered glass screen protector with your ond demand repair request your repair at i.com inssideryou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to episode 66 of the Apple Insider podcast I'm Victor marks and with me is Neil Hughes and we're here and we're going to talk all about all things Apple earnings iPad iPhone Mac and more welcome Neil hey Victor uh I'm excited this week I have a lot to get off my chest so let's get to it begin well I I we should probably start talking about earnings um Apple had their first decline in earnings in 13 years first ever year-over-year decrease in iPhone sales um I mean you know in terms of the finances it certainly wasn't a bad quarter they shipped uh 51.2 million iPhones 50.6 billion in Revenue um uh net income was 10.5 billion uh I mean pretty big numbers and pretty good performance but nevertheless a disappointment because it's the first time in 13 years that Apple has seen a decline okay so clearly apple is doomed well here's the funny thing so um I made the mistake this week um and I I love our listeners and I love our commenters but we have some very passionate people out there who uh certainly uh are very defensive when it comes to Apple and I respect that um but for myself as a person who covers the news I have to cover it in objective and realistic way and so if you're joeo and you don't follow Apple that closely and maybe you own a few shares of apple or something like that and the stock drops you know 10% after earnings you come to Apple Insider to find out why the stock has dropped and so I wrote a headline saying that uh uh it was a disappointing March quarter because it was a disappointing March quarter it matter that it was going to be right they signaled this it was right within Apple's guidance it doesn't mean that Apple's doomed or that I'm you know trying to drive that I am part of a grand conspiracy to drive the stock down but the truth is all of Apple's three major product categories iPhone iPad and Mac all saw year-over-year sales declines period that's just the reality of it and for a company that's grown for 13 years to have their first decline in 13 years is going to be seen as a disappointment it it doesn't matter it you could you know you can uh win the Super Bowl with your team every year and the one year if they don't win it it's a disappointment because that's what you get used to and I I went into the comments and tried to defend how we covered this um and some people just don't take to that because you know the the iPhone 6 was a super cycle and the 6s could never possibly live up to those expectations etc etc it's not that I even disagree with that stuff it's just the reality of this was a disappointing quarter for apple and I realize that you're an Apple fan and you're really excited and passionate about the company and you really want to Champion them and you know reiterate to the world they're doing well because they are but you know don't don't come at me I'm not the bad guy here you know like blame blame Wall Street blame expectations blame Apple for being so successful for 13 years but at the end of the day it was a disappointing quarter and that that's okay uh if you want to look at the extreme other side of the spectrum so on one side you have the Apple Fans who are don't want anything bad said about their company and and that's fine but then on the other side I got an email from a uh uh European newspaper a a reporter there who wanted a comment from me for a story um and he he actually asked me is this the beginning of the end for apple and I'm just like uh well you know over $200 billion in cash sitting around uh gross margins are still at like 39% on selling Hardware they sold 50 million phones uh they sold 10 million tablets they sold 4 million Macs uh God knows how many watches they sold or way to go out of business isn't it right $6 billion earned this last quarter on software and services that they provide I mean are you kidding me you know uh a company like Microsoft would kill a man to sell 50 million phones in a year let alone in one quarter you know they had their disappointing long decline didn't they right it's just you know and so I responded to this reporter and I said apple is not only this not only is this not the the beginning of the end but apple is not going anywhere in my lifetime or yours like this is the biggest company on the planet they continue to sell astronomical amounts of products and they will continue to sell astronomical amounts of products now maybe the growth won't continue maybe there's some quote unquote tough times ahead but if tough times is making 10 billion dollar a quarter you're doing okay there there would have to be a series of very significant very large very bad bets for Apple to go bad for Apple to fail and then they have so much cash in the bank I mean you know they would have to burn through all of that it would it would be a long series of really really apocalyptically stupid events to take place to kill Apple at this point I mean let's be real the reason that this is a disappointment not just on Wall Street um because obviously Wall Street wants growth and that's all their interested in and that's their Looney land over there we've talked about that a lot um that was disappointing for wall stre but from a consumer perspective there's at least an idea that um you know uh 3D touch on the iPhone isn't really that interesting or that useful and okay I mean I can't really disagree with that I gladly switch to an iPhone SE and a Bandon 3D touch and I don't use it uh because I don't have it anymore and I don't care so if that's a defining feature of the iPhone 6s and apple and developers haven't really found an interesting way to use it yeah okay um iCloud remains uh a trouble spot for Apple uh the iPad um is still not iOS does not really offer the kind of uh power user features that that really needs to make it a potential laptop replacement the Apple watch while there's a lot I like about the Apple watch the apps on it are incredibly slow so you know there are other companies putting this in perspective there are other companies that would kill to have apple Services business they would love to have I'm not preaching Doom and Gloom for Apple here in any way I'm just saying that there are a lot of areas where Apple could improve and it is possible and even likely that some of the reasons that you're seeing um declines this quarter are yes there wasn't a a new hardware design the iPhone which gets consumers excited yes there's seasonal Trends yes there's market trends yes people are hanging on their smartphones longer but I think that there's also um a feeling amongst a lot of people uh and when I say that I mean like really casual people that don't follow this stuff as closely as we do uh that that apple is not um uh innovating at the pace that they expect and a lot of that I think is unfair because it's a perception versus a reality um you know not every product that Apple puts out or every update that Apple puts out is some sort of a revolutionary thing but at the same time there's some things that are just such no-brainers that you're like why haven't they done it yet like Siri on the Mac it's like why why haven't we you know why why are why isn't that there that doesn't make any sense to me um some integration of Touch ID on the Mac would be great as well um uh you know these are the kind of things that are eventually coming but they feel like they could have done it last year you know so of course there's there's room for Apple to grow in areas where they should grow and hopefully they you know start to address some of those things in the coming months and years uh as we go go into WWDC as new Macbook Pros come out that kind of stuff um that doesn't mean that Apple is is in trouble or that things are going poorly for them but there's a lot of opportunities for them to innovate and I think that there is a growing expectation not only on Wall Street but amongst consumers that um Apple needs to start taking advantage of that and and kind of going in those directions where it's almost logical for them to go there right it's it's inevitable yeah you know I I continue to be impressed with with Apple's performance in all these areas you know I'm looking at it and I see yes okay the numbers are down year on year right but in in terms of setting our expectations they're they're meeting everything they set right right they know why this is a decline and they know what they're going to do about it they are very astute business people over there they projected accordingly um they said that iPhone sales were going to decline they did they projected with a accurate range uh what their revenue was going to be for the quarter they know what they're doing they can see the trends coming um and and they they're very smart they they know what they're doing right now they got to reckon with things like the iPad sales drop but you know they're they're doing that because they just introduced guess what new iPads yeah and and uh you know with the iPad that's a uh a spot for me that um sometimes it feels like apple is um singularly focused is the way I would put it like when iOS 7 came out and it was a complete redesign it was all about making it work on the iPhone and iOS 7 the iPad was just a blown up version of iOS 7 on the iPhone uh it really did not feel like they took that opportunity to optimize for iPad and they didn't even do it with iOS 8 it took really until iOS 9 came out that Apple said oh remember the iPad we should start paying a little more attention to what we do for that on the software side which is where you start to see features like split view picture and picture all that kind of iPad specific iOS features taking advantage of the screen real estate but I mean you had a really dark period there from iOS 7 to ios9 where for two generations of iOS nothing was really done specifically to justify the larger screen of the iPad in terms of the operating system and it just wait wait wait iOS 7 was all about getting the whole design right and getting everyone else on board right right iOS 8 was about making it work because there were some inconsistencies in iOS 7 that totally didn't make sense and iOS 8 addressed those right iOS 9 is exactly where they should have started fixing the features and making the iPad had really shine right I I agree it just shouldn't have taken two years it feels like sometimes apple is like singularly focused you know IDE that they should do things faster but at the same time we cry when they do things faster and stuff gets broken well I mean I can't disagree with that but do you remember it's buggy it doesn't work well yeah because they're going too fast do do you remember a few years ago where uh Apple had delay um I don't remember what release of osant was but it was some release of it they had to delay it until the fall because they literally took people off of the the OS 10 team to finish up iOS in time to get it out because that became the priority you are going back to 10.6 10.7 days Steve was still alive and he made the announcement in the summer that it was going to be delayed because they'd moved people around for it and I mean even then you know Apple obviously wasn't nearly as big as they are now considering how much they've grown just in the last couple years but even then they were a large company with a lot of money and it's it's just amazing to me I mean I guess that's just how they operate I don't know but it's amazing to me they can't just hire people and get them up to speed you know well but that's the problem is is you cannot you actually make things take longer when you put more people on it because those people have to get up to speed you simply here's here's the math okay and I'm going to repeat this and I'm quoting uh I'm blanking on who I'm quoting uh Fred I'm blanking on Fred's last name but but you cannot produce a child in one month by putting nine women on the job it just you cannot speed some things up by putting more people on it I agree and for that specific um situation obviously that's Brooks it's Fred Brooks that said that I'm sorry and obviously that's a bad example because you know that was a time crunch kind of thing but I'm talking about over the longer term from iOS 7 to iOS 9 the fact that it took us so long to get pretty basic iPad features like split screen and and picture and picture um it it shows that I think Apple at least internally gets focused on one thing that they need to do that gets all their attention and then it's kind of on to the next thing well yeah but they also try and make improvements and those improvements don't always go well you know we can you remember the connectivity issues within OS 10 10.11 mhm where there wi-fi bugs where they tried to replace um oh God I'm blanking on the name of the process uh begins with an M let's see if I can find it activity monitor really quickly um the the process that that discovers things that are around it jeez discoverability at any rate there was this uh process that had been working fine for years and they replaced it with a whole new one it was a they did a new Bluetooth stack at some point that ruined everything yeah well it was it was a part of that kind of thing part mdns responder okay mdns responder which handles bonjour and uh those kind of services and they replaced this at at beginning of 10.11 mhm and it blew out everything and Kevin Marx who used to work at Apple then worked at Google couple other places noticed that if you replaced the new service with the old mdns responder magically everything started working again and it took Apple a couple of releases to roll back and and give in instead of trying to fix the new one I uh still have a problem that has existed since iOS 7 came out with copy and paste and I've Googled to see if there's a fix and whatever and it seems like most people don't have this problem anymore it must just be the fact that I have not had a phone start from scratch I'm always restoring from iCloud and stuff and I guess at some point I'll just have to bite the bullet and do it but I would say probably 50% of the time when I copy something it actually copies it and it's really annoying because I'll be in one app like you know I want to copy a photo or something in Safari and then I'll jump over to messages hit paste and it'll paste something completely different than what I was expecting and then half the time you're already your thumb's already on the send button and you're sending something you didn't intend to send to somebody uh that happens to me all the time and I don't know what it is about it it's been there since iOS 7 and it must be like a legacy thing from reloading from iCloud for me or something but one of these days like I said I'm just going to have to bite the bullet and just do a fresh install on my phone without restoring from iCloud and just kind of manually restore everything because I don't know what it is but I've been through multiple phones it was on an iPhone 6 iPhone 6s now on an iPhone SE and I still have the problem yeah have you ever tried any of those thirdparty clipboard apps I downloaded one called uh I can't remember the name of it and it didn't really work for me uh there's one that I tried and I had a hard time getting along with it also I think it's it's one of these difficult kind of things where it's a beautiful thing when it works well for that person but if you're just trying to get into it and figure out how do I save stuff to this and and how do I use it right um I'm going to see if I can figure out which one I had I had it as an extension as well and it's a share sheet kind of thing right where you you'd share to it and it would save like a multiple clipboard so you could have multiple different clippings in it and I just could never figure it out well let's let's just uh say here that before this turns into just a complain Fest about new new topic here go on no apple is not Apple's not doomed Apple's fine uh they had a disappointing quarter sorry if you don't like to hear that um they will continue to innovate and bring out new products how successful those products are we will see but it's not like iPhone sales are going to fall off a cliff anytime soon it's still a great product people still like it there's still a demand for it um and the same can be said for Max and and and iPads and all that you know things like the Apple watch we'll see where they go as they evolve as they go um still a lot of room for improvement on all the products but especially new ones like the Apple watch and and things like that well speaking of new products tell me about this MacBook because you reviewed the 12-in MacBook now last week Shane and I talked about it and we talked about it in terms of it being a good Mac and fine for what you needed to do you actually had your hands on with it yeah um so I reviewed the MacBook last year um and I reviewed this series MacBook as well and it's basically the same machine um a little faster a little better battery life um but other than that if you didn't like last year's machine you're not going to like this year's machine if you were in love with last year's machine you're going to be in love with this year's machine it's not going to change anybody's mind um take last year's computer make it a little bit faster processor is like 15 to 20% faster uh the the internal storage is faster so it'll be a little snappier but at the end of the day it's still a $1,300 computer that can't be used for a lot of highend pro tasks for the same price you get a MacBook Pro for that's a lot more capable so I think it's a very I think it applies to a niche market of people that really want an ultra portable super thin brilliantly designed Mac and they basically just want to use it to check email browse the web and do edit some photos and stuff like that so so wait if if you're interested in a super light portable machine that can act as your primary computer mhm and you don't mind spending $1,300 on it why wouldn't you get an iPad Pro uh well as someone who loves my iPad Pro 12.9 in um I still cannot do things like work on it just I mean am I wrong to to ask that question here you've just laid out the MacBook is you're not wrong and I would argue that a lot of people that the MacBook uh would appeal to might should consider getting an iPad if you're primarily looking to browse the web and check email um some people you know just prefer the ability to have a bunch of windows open use a cursor have a traditional Computing experience a dedicated keyboard that sort of stuff um and for those people the the MacBook would be a good computer what what Apple really should have done this year honestly is cut the price by 150 bucks it would have I gave I gave this MacBook uh the same score I gave it last year 3.5 so it's not that it's a bad Mac it's that it's a bad Mac for Value it's it's value for money is what you're complaining about here yeah I mean I you know when I'm reviewing this kind of stuff I have to weigh it for everybody is this a Mac for me no absolutely not I have absolutely no use for this Mac but I can't review it in that context because this isn't about me this is about advising our readers and people that are curious about which Mac to buy which one's right for them when you look at Apple's product lineup you can get a MacBook Air which doesn't have a retina display uh for under $1,000 and it's a competent machine and it is and yes it lacks a right display and it's not as thin as the new Macbook and all that stuff but it it's a good machine um you can get a Macbook Pro 13 in for the same price as this 12-in MacBook bigger screen yeah it's thicker but it's got a way more capable uh processor in it um it's it's the MacBook the 12-in MacBook is kind of caught in the middle right now very much like the first MacBook Air was ahead of its time trailblazing brilliant design forward you don't waste any time going back to 2007 do you well I mean that's but look back at that computer right if you bought that computer in 2007 you were buying into the future of computing but you were doing it too three years ahead of the curve it wasn't until about 2010 when Apple redesigned the MacBook Air and really made it a capable relevant machine that sales started to take off and we should remember that that original Air cost 2,000 bucks exactly they lowered the price out in the second generation design of the MacBook Air um and they made it a much better machine and it was even thinner at that point and it continues to be a part of Apple's lineup because it was that influential and that great of a product and there's a huge Market of people out there that wish that Apple would take that design and put a retina display in it but they won't because that product that product's going away and the 12 in is now the vision of the future yeah for me personally um the the the single port doesn't bother me I don't care about the single USBC Port um the port I use more than anything on my MacBook Pro actually is the SD card slot and I know that that's going to die whenever they redesign the MacBook Pro I understand that I've C you are unique in that one I I use it all the time that's how that's the easiest way for me to transfer photos I don't want to dig out a cable or anything like that to transfer from my Sony camera I just want to plug it in see you're also one of those people who's using a standalone camera I am yes I am unique but I shoot photos for a living as part of this job so therefore I have to take photos with a nice camera and transfer them my Mac edit them put them in the review that sort of stuff so for me that's a feature that I know is going to be gone eventually because and probably pretty soon because Apple likes to get rid of Legacy ports and I understand that um other ports I don't really mind um I'm ready to go Whole Hog on USBC uh I could totally uh dig that if the next MacBook Pro doesn't have any full-size USB ports and I need adapters and stuff I'm cool with that if it gets me a thinner design I'm cool with the MacBook having one port on it I don't like that it has one port for charging and sinking I wish that Apple would bring back mag safe and have one mag safe for charging and one USB C port for everything else yeah so third parties have already addressed that problem for you you know that right I know because Griffin makes a uh a magsafe like and they don't call it mag safe obious does it do data as well or is it just power it's a that's a very good question I believe it's power I'm not positive so then you have to unplug this thing to plug in when you want and it's just like so use one of the many hubs that are available for this thing well yeah I don't really care about that people want a second port on here but if Apple just put a MAG safe on there well if they just put two USBC ports they could do that as well but the problem with that is this thing is so freaking light that and the USBC cable plugs in so snugly that if you make the lightest tug on this cable you're going to send your laptop flying and you just threw $1,300 at the window you know uh mag safe has saved my laptop more times than I can count um from people tripping over it or whatever you know I I realiz apple is kind of positioning this as almost more iPad than MacBook it's like you know you don't you you maybe you know don't want to keep this plugged in all the time is kind of their philosophy I get it but I think if they just put a you know mag safe3 uh easily detachable on there redesign it make it nice and thin and then put the USBC Port next to it that would address 75% of the concerns out there that people have about this computer yeah so Griffin calls theirs break safe and break safe is a breakaway power cord for your MacBook or Chromebook and then if you want to plug anything into your MacBook you have to unplug this adapter that which by the way sticks out of the beautiful chassis on your MacBook and then plug in the cable it's it's a nightmare just put a MAG safe on there and we'd be done well there you have it things Apple needs to do now comparing this to the iPad Pro uh there there have been some benchmarks and it looks like in multicore score multi-core scores overall the MacBook totally beats it it walks all over the iPad Pros in single core scores the iPad Pro is is better when it comes to metal the iPad Pro 12.9 in is better um in in JavaScript and Jetstream JavaScript ring it's uh the MacBook beats the others so but but they're still fairly close I mean these aren't big ratings that are different except when it comes to metal and the iPad Pro totally outshines everything else yeah I mean the iPad Pro is uh incredible piece of Hardware uh very capable brilliantly designed um I think the software is what holds it back the the MacBook uh is an incredible piece of Hardware I think the software is great I really love OS 10 um I think that it's price and the compromises are probably too much for most users and so going back to what I was saying before when I write a review I have to write it for somebody who's looking to buy a Mac and if you're looking to buy a Mac if you're okay with the compromise that this product makes and you're okay with the price you will be extremely happy with this laptop it is incredibly designed um it fanless thin beautiful uh some people don't like the keyboard because it's less travel on the keys doesn't bother me at all some people don't like the fact there's one port doesn't really bother me at all um uh I know some people really hate the fact that the the FaceTime camera on it is still only 480p because the screen is so thin that's all they can fit in there I don't really care um none of those things really bother me but when I just look at it from a you know 40,000 ft perspective like looking at the landscape I wonder who it's for that that's my main concern with the MacBook is where is this Market of uh people that want to spend 13 plus100 on a laptop and have all these compromises when they spend that much money certainly there is a market out there but uh when I write these reviews I I like to imagine that you know it's a friend of mine or a family member and they come to me and they say what do you think of this computer uh what what do you think would work for me for 90% of the people that ask me that question the MacBook is not for them they don't want to spend that much money and they don't want to have these compromises okay so single word buy or not buy if you're okay with the compromises buy cool if you're okay with the price byy I I think it's a great machine but you know I can't give everything uh a five out of five because it's a great machine I mean there's there's a lot come on it's from Apple you're you're conspiring to H Apple oh I know anytime anytime I write something with people listeners please please email Neil tell him it's time to take the veil off the conspiracy it's an impressive machine and in two three years it is going to be incredible when the uh Hardware catches up in terms of performance and apple kind of tweaks the design a little bit I think um it's going to be Apple's bestselling Mac but very much like the first MacBook Air it's going to take a little time okay I want to take a moment and talk to you about I cracked so NE Neil have you ever cracked a screen on your iPhone I thankfully have not uh my wife cracked the no in the last year she has cracked both an iPhone 6s and an Apple Watch so it's been an expensive year and an Apple Watch geez how do you do that she uh dropped it onto a tile floor and it landed just perfectly and shattered the screen and it cost like $2 $250 to replace it it was not Che basically the cost of a fresh watch yeah was it a sport model mhm yeah so the cost of a freshwat y so so there's this iPhone repair company called icked and they're perfect for people just like wife because what they do is you go online and and they immediately send out a professional iPhone repair technician they're they're not going to fix your watch but they'll Sue it for iPhones and other devices and so they send out this Tech to the location of you're choosing and and they do it wherever whenever and they mean wherever so they arrive in less than an hour and we'll fix it they'll do it at a coffee shop they'll do it wherever you want to meet um and it generally takes about less than 30 minutes for them to fix your phone they have 5,000 of these Techs in 600 cities across the United States and they do fast quality work and they stand behind it every repair they make comes with a lifetime warranty so if you find yourself with a broken iPhone go to ia.com for the best most convenient and reliable phone repair they come to you it's kind of hard to beat that isn't it yeah I mean Apple charges a lot of money for their repairs and especially if you have an older phone um and don't want to spend that kind of money to get it repaired these these repair services a lot of times do a really great job and uh it's a good way to save money definitely so I know you're a giant fan of the SMART connector yes you love that connector I do you can't wait for there to be more accessories and devices for that connector since the iPad Pro launched last November I have been and we've talked about many times on the podcast here a huge proponent of the SMART connector because I can see the potential of having a quickly attachable and removable accessory that can do whatever accessory makers can imagine that they want it to do so so tell me about your dream accessory what do you wish was made well in a perfect world I would have an iPad just like it is now that works like it does now and then I could dock it with a device that would allow me to connect whatever I chose to it um a US B Hub with a bunch of accessories I can have a a a podcasting setup for example dock it got a microphone that's already connected to the dock a keyboard that's already connected to the dock all I have to do is rest my iPad on there and it becomes the computer I need at that moment I think that's really the future of the iPad um and these Ultra portable form factors is and especially with a screen that can you know where where the entire interface is the screen it can become whatever you need in that moment and you can see little inklings of that now with the SMART connector and the ability to quickly attach a keyboard and just start typing and get going and and then and also with Apple's pushing the camera connection kit as a USB kit that does other things like they talked about podcast mics exactly you can actually take the uh USB connector kit it has a uh uh uh lightning input on it you can plug in and get power while you're using a USB accessory or you could even plug in a powered USB hub and connect multiple USB access to your iPad a lot of people don't realize this the iPad is way more powerful and a way more capable computer than a lot of people realize this isn't just a kids toy but it remains held back uh by a number of things most notably iOS is just not there in terms of competing with the Mac for you know uh power user Computing that kind of stuff yeah so if you could mash the camera connection kit into a SMART connector dock that would be sort of on its way for you I can Envision a lot of things that you could do with these SMART connector doc uh accessories that would be fantastic so we're getting a we're getting a a glimpse of that uh this week um Logitech uh announced a new product uh called the loga base um and they sent us a review unit to sample before the announcement came out so I've been using it for the last week and it's not without its shortcomings but um and we'll have a full review up in in the next few days for this product we did a first look um when it was announced on Tuesday and I love it it charges your iPad Pro whether the 9.7 in model the 12.9 in model it charges it through the SMART connector and literally all you got to do is rest your iPad on the magnetic connector and it starts to juice up your ipad you don't have to line up a lightning connector and it allows it to do it in landscape mode so if you have it docked you can use it you know more like you would a laptop and the base is nice and heavy and sturdy so when you pick it up it doesn't it's not like any other iPad Dock where the lightning connector is so snug that you have to hold the base down to pull it off and line it up and all that nope just rest it on there the magnets align it starts to charge bam nice I I love it um and it's I I think it's the beginning of what's to come the problem is we don't really know what the technical limitations of the SMART connector are can it do simultaneous uh Power and data probably but this product doesn't so uh the logic base on the back of it has a female lightning connector port and uh you plug in a lightning cable and then plug that into the wall and you then that's what it does I tried doing other things like plugging in the aformentioned USB adapter to see if I could do simultaneous data and power doesn't work um I don't know if that's a limitation of the SMART connector Hardware capabilities or if iOS just doesn't want to play nice yet and maybe a software update could fix that praying it's the ladder but imagine again I talked about a podcasting station before right just because we're doing a podcast that's a great example right imagine if I had a place in my home where I had a dock where I charged my iPad but I also had uh USB ports on that dock with a microphone and other things that I need plugged in and all I would need to do is rest my iPad on there open up an app and Bam I'm ready to podcast nice yeah I mean that would be great um we're not there yet but I'm hoping that we get there soon you know I can Envision all kinds of great stuff with this uh one of the um uh products that I would really like to see is a a mobile keyboard dock that has its own battery in it so imagine um if you had a nice uh base that was you know the size uh and equal weight uh or proportionally I guess of the iPad Pro um that could turn into a Macbook style uh fold out um uh you know clam shell design uh much like we we've talked a lot about the uh what's the keyboard that I like the um uh they make it for they make it for the iPads but it doesn't use uh SMART connector it's Bluetooth the uh it has the hinge on it looks like a Macbook what's that one called oh you you like the bridge keyboards yes correct Bridge with a Y um yes it turns basically your your iPad into kind of a Macbook kind of feel where you can CU it's got these hinges you can angle the screen however you want just like a Macbook uh fullsize keyboard it's nice and uh yeah it it it doubles the thickness of your iPad and makes it heavier but because that heavy base on the keyboard you can use it on your lap without it you know toppling over or whatever um so great design but I could imagine accessory like that with its own battery in there that would then when you dock your iPad into it recharge your iPad so imagine you get what 10 to 12 hours out of your iPad imagine having a keyboard accessory with its own battery in it that uses the data and power capabilities of the SMART connector that would then essentially double the battery life of your iPad give you 20 hours up time you know you could use it for 2 days without having to plug it in to to get work done and stuff like that wow I I think that's kind of where the potential of SMART connector is and so we wrote about that a little bit this week um because prior to this loga uh base coming out we didn't actually know for sure that the SMART connector could be used to recharge devices we had no idea and so there were some iPhone 7 leaks that showed a SMART connector port on the back of an iPhone 7 chassis supposedly and our staff were looking at these leaks and we're like what the heck like why would you cuz all we knew really was that SMART connector be used for keyboard and the leaks have it on the back of the iPhone just above where the lightning Port is and it's like I mean what are they going to do like a BlackBerry style slide out keyboard like yeah and also it's a crazy place to put it when the uh the iPads one is on its Edge right so now we've got access that work with iPads and accessories that work with the phone rumored phone right and so it didn't make any sense but then this week Logitech announces this product you can recharge and then it's like the pieces are starting to fall into place so I'm starting to think that these iPhone 7 leaks that we're seeing with the SMART connector on the back are legitimate I think I think they're real and I think the reason uh for that is Apple is apparently going to get rid of the headphone jack that's what these leaks show and that's what all the rumors are saying you got to be able to plug in a headphone to the Lightning Jack if you're not going to use Bluetooth and if you're plugged in to the headphone jack and you are listening to music you can't charge your phone without some sort of adapter or splitter unless you had a dock or battery case that powered it through the SMART connector so right or or you know the every uh headphone adapter was one like the digital AV connector that also has a female lightning port on it mhm which costly anybody who's used like a mphi for example knows that they have to do this thing where cuz it's got to connect through the lightning port at the bottom it has to have like a chin at the bottom you just got to have the space there to have the circuitry to connect to lightning it's got to slide in imagine that you didn't have to do that anymore and imagine Apple since now they make this weird battery case with a hump on the back and it integrates with iOS and plays nice and automatically charges it without buttons imagine Apple made a new battery case for an iPhone 7 that just snapped on magnetically to the back of your phone no Chin no Chin maybe not even a hump on the back who knows um and you could really make a ultra thin easy to snap on and off and use battery to extend the battery life of your phone wow so I think that's where this is heading I don't know I don't have any inside info on this but if you if you look at the pieces coming together you know the new iPad Pro the 9.7 model has has the SMART connector as well Apple's doubling down on this they have a history of introducing technology in one product and bringing it to another for example Force touch on the watch and the Mac now 3D touch on the iPhone uh they like to have Synergy and bring these things together we have leaks showing a SMART connector port on the back of the iPhone 7 supposedly believing that where there's smoke there's fire I think yeah I think so and so it makes too much sense at this point and then when you start to think about the potential if you're looking at it as not a data transfer uh uh Port but a charging port uh now you could sell all kinds of docs where again that problem I was talking about before lining up your iPad with the with the lightning connector yeah imagine you don't have to do that with your phone anymore either now you just have a dock where you put it in there the connector automatically lines up magnetically with whatever's on the dock and it charges cool so I I think I think that's where this is all heading that's my guess um if you're going to see it on iPhone this year that's how they'll uh calm some of the concern over the uh uh ditching of the headphone jack it'll be well you can plug into lightning and you can charge at the same time which obviously with just one lightning port and without a SMART connector you couldn't do that without some sort of adapter weird dongle City I I don't know that there's going to be a whole lot of people upset about the actual loss of the headphone Port I mean oh there will be well There Will Be Blood just because people want to have something to be upset about but Bluetooth is known Bluetooth is out there you'll get Bluetooth headphones you'll get the the cheap adapter off of Amazon that converts your headphones to Bluetooth it it's not like a difficult proposition no no I mean if if you've already got a pair of headphones you love and your phone has no adapter that that works with that you're going to buy and carry a Bluetooth adapter for your headphones I don't there's a simple small one about the size of a 50 Cent you know two qu stuck together I'm not doing that no way I've got 4 I've got $450 headphones here and if they don't make a lightning adapter for these headphones There Will Be Blood I guarant that yes no no freaking way that I can't use these with my with my iPhone that that would be absolutely insane right so if there's a lightning adapter you're going to have it yeah I mean I'll buy the lightning adapter I I don't I'm I'm not really that worried about ditching the headphone jack I actually looked uh at my headphone collection the other day because I'm a little I'm a little ridiculous when it comes to headphones I'll admit I I have to have wait I just want to preface this by laying out exactly who you are you're the person that if it doesn't fit in one suitcase if you can't fit every single belonging you own into one carry-on suitcase roller board suitcase you will throw it out you will dispose of it in some way you'll send it to my house for God's sakes y you know even if I'm not expecting a package here comes something from New York because Neil wants to get it out of his house and you have a headphone collection I do um I actually just bought uh some noise cancelling Bluetooth headphones from Phillips a few weeks ago for a flight because um I was I been bringing these uh master and dynamic headphones with me on flights and while I love them um they're little big aren't they yeah a little big and uh also they've got this like great like stainless steel you know uh and I they're just getting tossed around in a bag and getting scratched up and it's like these are my atome um working headphones I need something a little cheaper that I can just toss in a bag so you know I looked at uh Bluetooth noise cancelling and there weren't a lot of great options out there Phillips has a new pair that just came out in like January they were like 90 bucks on Amazon they work great um recharge through USBC um fold up real nice and small and they're cheap enough that if they last me a year or two for 90 bucks I'll be happy so that's the latest addition to my headphone collection but yeah I mean ditching the headphone jack doesn't really bother me that much I'm not really that concerned about it well do do you go for runs are you are you into exercise I am yes and uh use my Apple watch when I go run and do you listen to music when you go run I do yes I use um Bluetooth headphones okay have you tried out Mara I have not okay Mara is a hands-free running assistant that uses voice recognition and the microphone in your earbuds to help optimize your runs so have you heard about this no this is the first I've heard I'm Googling it right now okay so she's handsfree and you talk to her using your earbuds and she uses voice commands you tell her what kind of run you'd like to do you ask questions about your speed your pace location duration or even the weather and you can have her play albums and playlists from your music library just by prompting her with your voice uh and and weirdly she can also speak first she can unprompted tell you how you're doing and compare your past runs and records and she'll warn you about changes in the weather so if you're out running and it's about to downpour she'll she'll go ahead and she'll tell you about that and you can track your progress using her too so you can see all your past runs and how you compared and she recognizes when you've had accomplishments and the new thing about her is is besides just working with your iPhone she's also now compatible with Amazon Alexa enabled devices like Echo Dot and tap so you can ask Alexa for updates like hey Alexa how ask Mara how far I ran last Thursday or ask Mara what's my average time for a 5 km run so you should visit mara. that's m.ai and download your free virtual running assistant to your iPhone or Amazon Alexa device today yeah I'm looking at their listing on the App Store it's really cool um they integrate with apple Health um which is great um and yeah you can talk to it it understands conversational English and uh uh integrates with maps and weather and all kinds of stuff so pretty cool you should totally try that out yeah I'm going to try it out it's like a it's like a Siri for running kind of yeah I I will be interested to know how that actually works out for you yeah yeah I'll have to check it out I use my uh Plantronics uh Bluetooth headphones when I run that I love I've recommended them before to people on Twitter who asked me my favorite running headphones some someday you're just going to have to catalog the headphone collection for us uh they're great super light headphones that wrap around my ear um so they don't fall out and they have an integrated microphone so they'll work great with something like Mara yeah now Apple isn't the only one going through this business of removing the headphone jack no uh I mean it's inevitable the headphone jack is going to die it's just going to be a long and painful and and slow death much like the USB port won't die you know apple is going uh full full bore on USBC but uh there's still full sizee USB ports on the iPhone charger they ship on their MacBook Pro on the MacBook Air and it's going to take some time for that to change even USBC is still a USB port right the the headphone Port is an analog Port that only does basically two things right it's it's headphone out and mic in on some special headphone Jacks Square would disagree with you but yes uh good point good point Square have this beautiful hack where their old Square reader can use the headphone port for data however I want to point out that their new Square Reader that does EMV and Apple pay mhm doesn't use the headphone jack right they went to Bluetooth they know this is coming the headphone Port is a single-purpose thing and we're in a world where we want ports that do many things like USB so yeah so Intel wants USBC to uh they've proposed adding a audio spec to it so that you could plug in headphones over USBC honestly this is just I mean it's inevitable it's going to happen and I'm somewhat happy about it but it's going to be a nightmare of a transition especially now you're going to be dealing with phones that have head use headphones over USBC iPhones that do headphones over lightning do you have the r adapter do you have the right cable it's like oh jeez well at least with USBC and lightning there are only two ports to reckon with you know with uh okay well right now with a headphone Port there's only one port to record with fair point I want to remember you did earlier in the podcast you recalled back to 2007 when you were talking about uh Mac and delays in software and things like that I'm going to go back there now because one of the first Android phones was an HTC phone and the HTC and I think it was the hero um had a USB mini connector and no headphone jack and to use headphones with the HTC Hero you plugged in a USB mini to headphone adapter we're going back to that world remember the first iPhone had the recessed headphone jack yes and you couldn't plug in most headphones without an adapter there were special made for iPhone headphones just so that you'd know that woulded or people started selling adapters with them and uh we since we mentioned Mofi cases before with the chin same thing there if you have a chin on the bottom of it then you can't plug in your headphones without an adapter I I have a ton of the belcon adapters that allowed you to plug in regular phones into the iPhone yep it's uh not anything really new but here here's an interesting point if apple is going to get it get rid of the headphone jack but they still have it on the MacBook they're not ready to get rid of it on the 12-in MacBook at what point do we get a MacBook with a female lightning port on it um if intel pushes headphone out through USBC then you just don't so you're telling me that I'm going to buy a pair of Apple beats wired headphones and they're going to have to ship in the box if I want to use it with my Mac a swappable cable or an adapter to plug into either USBC on my Mac or lightning on my iPhone that does not sound like an apple decision to me okay putting a female lightning port on a Mac is also a bad decision or or a bad compromise right because you're going to end up with a double-ended lightning cable you're going to end up with people plugging in lightning Chargers into that lightning port and it won't charge their MacBook it's it's uh an awkward series of compromises I mean couldn't you say the same thing about mini display port and Thunderbolt um mini display port and Thunderbolt how is the same connector uh same connector and it gained features over time right but if you have a legacy mini display port on your Mac and you try to plug in a thunderbolt accessory it doesn't work even though the cable fits uh oh okay so you're telling that they shouldn't reuse the connector because they gained more features no I mean you were saying that people are be confused because they're going to try to plug in a lightning cable if you plug in a lightning charger if you plug in your iPad Pro charger into the side of a Macbook a rumored MacBook with a uh and I say rumored because you're starting this rumor okay but if if you plug in your iPad Pro charger to the side of a rumored MacBook with a lightning port on it what's going to happen what do you think should happen there probably nothing is that a dumb expectation to plug in a charger to a port that fits and presume that it should charge is it a dumb expectation to plug in a thunderbolt accessory to a port that fits and assume it should work uh it's not a dumb expectation except that the older one doesn't have that feature right it's not a thunderbolt port on your laptop you're plugging into it's a mini display port Apple continued to sell Apple continued to sell for years the Thunderbolt display alongside the cinema display because you could you no you could not use a you could not use a thunderbolt display with a legacy Mac you could not use a thunderbolt display as a mini display board display you had to have a new Mac to use the Thunderbolt display and so if you didn't have a Mac with uh a thunderbolt Port it did not work with the Thunderbolt display wow so your problem that you're talking about has already been done it happened before I know because I was sent a thunderbolt display that did not work with my MacBook Air which did not have a thunderbolt Port it had a mini display port the people that bought Apple monitors were smaller in number than the people that have lightning Chargers would you agree of course yeah okay so so that problem that you experienced was a problem that was experienced by a smaller number of people I agree it's a problem but if they release what you're talking about it's going to be a widespread problem I just can't see them selling headphones that have to come with adapter since they are now in the headphone business with Beats that need an adapter to work across Apple product lines I cannot see it happening it would be insane to me that you would have headphones solely for iPhone use and headphones solely for Mac use without an adapter that seems crazy to me and and it seems pretty unapp like where we talk about things just working or we used to anyway exactly I think I think that they have to put a lightning port and you know what if it charges over that then so be it I mean right now um I have a USBC to lightning cable and a 29 wat Apple adapter that charges my 12.9in iPad Pro much faster at USB 3p speeds so theoretically uh it would take you you know uh an ET no real reason they couldn't wire it up to be the charger it might take you an eternity you know unless they wanted to make like a a 100 watt uh uh well I if you're your charger that you're using is the MacBook Air charger or the the MacBook 12 12in MacBook charger I I bought the 12in MacBook charger so then that should work to charge the 12 MacBook just as well over lightning as it would over USBC hypothetically does not work that fast over SMART connector however the log do but we don't know what's going on in that in in the in the chain of SMART connector using the Logitech stuff we don't know where the Slowdown is is it the port is it logitech's internal business it too many variables and apple doesn't like to tell the technical specifications of what it sells so we may never find out until they open up SMART connector a little more but it does even if you're using the standard 12w connector Logitech says it takes uh 1 to two hours longer to charge over SMART connector than it does direct through lighting yeah and and that's because either SMART connector can't handle it or Logitech isn't doing it but somewhere in the middle somewhere we don't is being dissipated as heat right now I mean the 29 wat charger for the 12-in MacBook um that would not be enough to charge a MacBook Pro um you have much higher right 60 watt 85 watt kind of so they would need to sell a completely different uh USBC to lightning brick uh to make a Mac that would charge over lightning which seems unlikely that they would want to do that because they're already charging through USBC um but still I just I don't know what the answer is here and that's why I put it out there because headphones that connect to your Mac over USBC and then connect to your iPhone over lightning it's just like H jeez it's it's a weird Road mapap and you're right I imagine somewhere their Engineers just throwing their hands up and saying screw it ship everything and Apple's been doubling down on on Lightning you know you look at uh all these devices now uh you know the dock that they sell for the Apple watch plugs in through lightning um the uh Siri remote for the Apple TV charges through lightning the uh lightning connector on the back of the apple pencil now this uh loga bay dock has a lightning port on the back uh you have controllers for the Apple TV that charge through lightning Port so I mean run down the list apple is really embracing lightning as a charging method um and it's weird to me that the pencil has a Mayo lightning port on the back end of it and they really need to have like some sort of eraser function on the back I would I would have put it wouldn't wouldn't it be normal that say if you're charging an accessory that you put the female lightning port on the back of the pencil and plug in the same charger you use for the iPad what they really should have done is put a SMART connector on the side of the pencil and had it draw power from the iPad over that and magnetically attached to the side of it so you could actually have your pencil being held in a way that isn't liable to snap off intriguing and I would imagine that a future apple pencil is going to do that it'll just have Smart Connor port on the side it I have this uh magnetic thing I'm using with my apple pencil right now that sticks it to the side or to the front of the iPad yeah you have a sleeve for your pencil a case for your pencil it it I mean it's it it works it's cheap it's functional and frankly it's a much better way to Stow your apple pencil than to uh just leave it laying around you want to use it and then put it down for a second especially if you're walking around with your iPad or or sitting on a couch or something like that um it's an easy way to just put your pencil down and have easy access to it you got to think that charging through the SMART connector is a really smart way for them to do it in the future um with a Next Generation model so what what what do you believe is really going to happen here are we giving up headphone Port is that actually happening I didn't believe it was going to happen but now these schematics are out and now that we know what we know about SMART connector and it shows the lack of a headphone port on there and Intel's Direction too you think just cross the board I mean I think no I I I think that the the death of the headphone was inevitable I think that that was always going to happen the headphone jack was going away that that Jack has been around for forever and it needs to go um that part of it is completely understandable to me what I didn't think was going to happen and I'll probably end up eating crow from my earlier predictions is I didn't think that Apple was going to just abandon the headphone jack this year I thought that there would be a transitionary period where they would start shipping the iPhone with lightning headphones and start flooding the market with lightning headphones and give them a year or two to get rid of the port so imagine that you bought an iPhone 7 this year and it came with lightning Earp pods instead of 3.5mm Jack earpods and then they started you know giving accessory makers the ability to sell adapters or sell headphones with lightning connectors on it but the iPhone would still have headone wait wait they told us two years ago two years ago you and I were on the phone after a wwc conference and we were talking about lightning enabled headphones and you were asking me if there was confirmation that they could actually do this and you know at the time we talked about it and said yes yes they could do lightning headphones then at CES not not this past January but the January before JBL and Phillips announced and Phillips even showed their lightning headphones right and and at this most recent January CES I came back with Philips lightning headphones I've got got some and there were a couple other companies that announced theirs there but there aren't a lot of them there aren't even beats lightning headphones you can get a Beats pill that charges over lightning I I wonder how tightly integrated beats actually is with apple I have I I expect that it's not that tight well I it's I think the mistake there is it's going to be the same thing that happen when they switch from 30 pin to lightning it takes some time for accessory makers to get these products out to Market if Apple had really pushed and had lightning headphones out in the Market it wouldn't be as big of a deal but there is going to be uh wailing and nashing of teeth when this happens because of the lack of lighning headphones out there which means a lot of people are going to need adapters that's just the reality amount of nashing of teeth is going to last for a very short period of time because people will make the adapters and then push them out I don't know some people still complain about lightning so you know there's those people need to take a drink and relax I agree with you but again we're talking about the larger uh space of consumers and not just the enthusiasts who don't mind you know embracing these changes who out there is still crying over the and pouring one out for 30 pin Tim Cook was on stepen coar last fall and coar asked him about it what 30 pin accessory has colar got that isn't working with the 30 pin adapter well video out for starters at any gym that you go to go to a gym with a treadmill and they have a nice 30 pin cable sticking out of it because every gym in America bought those and and they allowed you to plug in your iPod and play video on the screen in front of you so if you plug in the 30 pin adapter doesn't work with doesn't happen NOP can't do video over it doesn't work you got to have the 30 pin that you have to have the correct video lightning accessory you need the Lightning to HDMI adapter to do video out yeah MH M digital AV Adapter doesn't work with the 30 pin adapter so therefore all those treadmills you see at the gym are useless and unless you want to dig out your old iPod Classic or something or bring your own adapter you can't well I mean you have to have a you can't do that cuz then you have to doctor the treadmill and they kick you out of the gym and yeah there's there there is no way to do it if you have a modern iPhone you can't do it and this is still on people's minds like I said coar asked Tim Cook about it last fall so uh the average person is still upset about that switch and this is going to upset people for a long time and it's going to be very difficult for apple and I think if I were in charge over there clearly I'm not and I'm not as smart as the folks over there thankfully you're not thankfully I'm not but I would have done what I said do a transition start pushing lightning headphones ship it with lightning headphones get the adapters out there get the accessory makers to start making lightning headphones lower why that doesn't work right you can't do that successfully be unless you're prepared to subsidize the sales for all the units that don't sell then do it none of none of those headphones are ever going to sell as long as there's an analog Port out there because why would anyone spend the additional money to get the lightning ones when the analog ones are right there on the shelf and cheap yeah so you're going to end up with accessory makers that are going to take a huge bath on returns of product that doesn't move for your transition and what is the alternative a mountain of bad press is what they're going to get when they ship an iPhone without a 3.5 mm Jack and there are no headphones available for it other than whatever be annoyed and they'll issue bad reports and next thing you know we'll be talking about how this is all well it' be the same episode all over again if you remember the switch to lightning it took forever for lightning accessories to start to make it to Market to get docks to get the accessories out reason the reason it took forever for that to happen was because there were shortages on the lightning connectors themselves well they didn't even start licensing it until 2 months after the phone came out they launched the phone in September and then they didn't have a licensing Commission on it until noing was available immediately but the supply was so constrained they doled them out very very in restricted quotas to different companies they had a meeting where they detailed the specifications of lightning that November it was after the phone came out trust me it was it was not timed well and it takes time for the stuff to roll out I mean that's why when we look at SMART connector we don't even know who Apple's licensing it to if they're even licensing it to anybody cuz the only non lch they are to Logitech who they're working you know behind the scenes with but nobody else is making any SMART connector things and so if you're an accessory maker you're kind of like between a rock and a hard place here it's like well should I embrace SMART connector is it going to sell should I bother making anything will Apple even license it to me tough very tough I think I think it's going to be a publicity nightmare if the new iPhone doesn't have 3.5 millim Jack and there are no lightning headphones out there I think it's going to go very poorly for apple and uh hopefully uh I am wrong and they've planned this out much better than I uh think they have but you know it's all speculation at this point but I think the SMART connector charging goes a long way to at least addressing the charging and listening personally I I honestly I won't even care actually you know what I already have a lightning to headphone adapter now that I think of it yeah I do I totally didn't remember this but I do and here how I have it um both Belin and uh I'm blanking on the other company begins with a J uh are sold in Best Buy and a no it's not j-bird it's it's some some other thing I'll figure it out in a second but if no it's not a common name that you would think of okay okay um but what it is is a Lightning to HDMI oh God no no it's not oh damn I don't have it I'm thinking backwards it's an H I was thinking totally wrong I have an HDMI to uh to to VGA that has a headphone on it for doing Apple TV stuff I was thinking of the wrong adapter never mind scratch that that's a a is that re too um I don't have a 30 pin like that but all right never mind that I almost had I almost had okay to make up for for that if any of our listeners ever meets me in person and is still upset about the 30 rein the lightning transition I promise to buy them a drink I apologize for that all right this has been episode 66 of the Apple Insider podcast and if Neil eats crow over the headphone Port not going away we'll tell you all about it when it happens Neil where can people find you on the internet uh well you can read uh my news and reviews on Apple Insider including the 12-in MacBook review and we'll have one of the loga base coming up and if you want to yell at me the easiest way to do it is through Twitter I'm on Twitter at thisis Neil NE do you read your Twitter when people yell at you I do um and it happens uh more frequently than you might think uh I'm somehow not surprised at all there we go this is app Insider podcast number 66 in the can thanks again to ia.com for sponsoring today's episode think of ICT as Uber meets iPhone repair ICT Works around your schedule and travels to you to repair your broken iPhone on the spot in 30 minutes or less and your on demand repair is backed by lifetime warranty whether your repairs for iPhone or iPad iic crack.com technicians are fast and professional and they service business accounts too for a limited time listeners get a free tempered glass screen protector with your ond demand repair request your repair at i.com inssider\n"