The Apple Insider Podcast with Dan and Mikey Campbell

In this episode of the Apple Insider podcast, we discuss the state of competition in the tech industry, particularly when it comes to Apple's position as a market leader. Daniel Aaron begins by noting that Apple is no longer afraid to be the smallest company in the room, having risen to the top through its innovative products and services.

"I think Apple's biggest competitive threat is incompetence," Daniel says. "If they screw up their lead, it's kind of Apple's lead to lose. As long as they can keep executing, I think they're going to do really well because I don't think they really face any significant outside threats." This sentiment is echoed by Mikey Campbell, who notes that Apple's dominance in the market means that it doesn't have to worry about being challenged.

"We're not seeing a lot of competition out there," Mikey says. "Apple has a stranglehold on the market, and it's hard to identify a strong competitor. That's what makes it so interesting to watch how they navigate this landscape." Dan agrees, saying that Apple's biggest challenge is staying ahead of its own momentum.

"Apple doesn't have to worry about being challenged because they're not," Dan says. "They're already on top, and the number of companies that can really even compete with Apple are few and far between. It'll be interesting to see how well Apple keeps its pace going and whether or not it's able to maintain its lead in the market."

HomeKit: A Key Area of Growth for Apple

One area where Apple is seeing significant growth and innovation is in the field of home automation, particularly with the introduction of HomeKit. Mikey Campbell notes that he is personally excited about the potential of HomeKit to revolutionize the way people interact with their homes.

"For me, HomeKit is not just for how people think it's just for iOS devices," Mikey says. "I think it's going to actually help the whole home automation field, not just with Siri, but with geo-fencing features and how everything works together under one ecosystem." Daniel agrees, saying that he is also excited about the potential of HomeKit.

"I like Homekit when it works," Daniel says. "The one thing that I can think of where Siri doesn't quite handle the way I want it to is that late at night I need to change the temperature on the thermostat and currently I open an application to do that if I have to start speaking late at night that's not a good situation for other people that are sleeping."

But Daniel notes that this is just one minor complaint, as HomeKit has the potential to revolutionize the way people interact with their homes. "We're in this phase of home automation where everything is a glorified remote control," he says. "It's on/off, it's dim, it's set a scene for me, it's set this for me, it's that for me. But what if we could make it smarter? What if we could do something smart based on something else that I'm doing?" Mikey agrees, saying that he wants to see more intelligent and automated solutions.

"I don't want remote controls, I want smart things to happen for me," Mikey says. "We're not there yet, but I want to get there." This sentiment is echoed by Dan, who notes that the potential of HomeKit to revolutionize home automation is vast.

Parting Thoughts from Daniel and Mikey

As we wrap up this episode of the Apple Insider podcast, both Daniel Aaron and Mikey Campbell offer some final thoughts on their favorite topics. Mikey notes that he would love to see more CarPlay integration into cars, as well as a music service from Apple.

"I want more Carplay, I want more people having the experience that I enjoy with it," Mikey says. "I think it's brilliant." Daniel also offers some parting thoughts on HomeKit, noting that while there is still work to be done, he is excited about the potential of the technology to revolutionize home automation.

And finally, both hosts wish their listeners well and encourage them to leave positive feedback on iTunes.

About the Hosts

* Victor Marks is the host of the Apple Insider podcast. You can find him at Vmarks on Twitter.

* Daniel Aaron is a writer for Apple Insider and tweets at @DanielAaron.

* Mikey Campbell is also a writer for Apple Insider and tweets at @MikeyCampbell81.

"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast this is the Apple Insider podcast recording on Thursday June 25th I have with me today Dan hello from California welcome and Mikey from Honolulu Aloha Mahalo so I'm your host Victor this is the Apple Insider podcast and we've got some news for you one of the things that happened earlier this week was a rumor about an iPhone without any home button at all the idea was that touch ID would be built into the display Dan can you tell me what your thoughts are on this um it's one of those things that sounds like it could be far out in the future the the concern I have about it I mean the obvious benefit is that you can put a bigger screen on a smaller device if you don't have this margin to support a home button but also the home button has been a very characteristic to um element of iOS devices especially the iPhone and changing it from a button to touch ID it's it's a very physical thing and and you know you can you can operate the phone without looking at it so if if you integrate that in the screen it'd be really cool to have basically the touch Touch ID is a sensor that's scanning your finger it's a like a almost like a camera like a low resolution camera like a scanner so we we've seen some patent applications that involve basically taking that technology and embedding it into the screen so that you could re um handle both touches and hard presses with Force touch and even being able to scan your fingerprint through the screen and possibly scan multiple fingers it would be more secure things like that it would be a pretty significant change in the form factor of of the phone and it would change how use it and it also affects things like accessibility how do you use something if you're blind um so there are some issues to work out but you know it's a kind of a cool idea I don't think it's anywhere in the in the next year or so it would have to be a pretty significant jump but we'll see what what happens so Mikey yes no home button smart or stupid um well I think it is a definite leap I think could be very smart um I think a platform that would be ripe for this kind of Innovation would be iPad um the home button seems kind of lost there now especially when you think about how it's well rumored to be getting quite quite a bit larger having that one um stationary button on one side of the uh display kind of makes things a bit difficult uh but it's going to take a lot a long time like d said to kind of remap our brains into thinking um outside of the home button box as it were do you want this feature um well to me the uh the home button it I mean it it's not integrated with the screen at all I mean it's below the screen so it's really not a big issue for me um in fact I I oftentimes rest my thumb on it naturally holding the phone so um uh I would want it if it means that the display would be a true edgo Edge uh edgo Edge panel which would be really nice I mean that that is another benefit that could come out of this okay I'm going to tell you what I think I think it is highly possible that it's going to be stupid I think it's I think it could be awesome for iPads where you're right and a lot of things are gesture based but I I just think that there's something very good about having a home button and there are people out there who don't use Touch ID because they're concerned and paranoid about their security right they only have 10 fingers someone can compel them to put their thumb down um there are a lot of reasons why people don't want to use Touch ID and I'm concerned about accessibility like Dan was saying uh reachability and what do you do if you are site impaired and can't locate where your home button is um I don't know I mean the the accessibility features right now are I I don't know if you watch the um the session on accessibility at WWDC or Dan I don't even know did you go to that there were a couple things you're talking about like voiceover you there yeah so I I watched part of that um session which was you know I mean pretty pretty astounding stuff as far as what developers have been have been up to in that area that you know know people really don't um get to see or you know need to need to see or access it all uh but I I don't know that that having not having a home button will affect the accessibility of say an iPhone on any you know significant level it is kind of interesting it's kind of a a throwback to the whole conversation that wasn't too long ago when the iPhone first came out people were saying that a phone with a big touchcreen and no physical keyboard was just not going to work and Google was showing how you could pull a keyboard out the side of it and Blackberry had their keyboard and it was like this is the thing people care about this keyboard and you had all these pendants saying that you know physical keys were where it's at you just could not remove them and people were you know it was obvious if you're typing on a piece of glass it's sort of not um doesn't have that Clickety feel of typing on a keyboard that we were all used to and now everybody does every you have nowhere to locate where your fingers are and of course that problem has been solved yeah I mean we just look at it and you even people with vision problems or or other physical problems with moving their fingers or whatever it's possible to control it with your voice or some other other um mechanism or with voice over and there's a lot of these things that seem seem really obviously wrong until we get to the point where it's possible and so it this could be a thing where you know the home button feels very common for apple and in fact other makers were getting rid of this a lot of Android phones had sort of soft keys on the bottom and they became part of the screen and then you know they were experimenting with a lot of things Google originally had that track ball thing uh all those things are gone and if you look at Samsung which you know closely follows Apple they have a home button that's a little slightly different shape but it's in the same place and it does the same thing and um and other things that have tried to compete against that you know LG has the button on the back that they were trying to have take off uh they didn't really fly yeah when it comes to reachability as a feature we talked about this a little bit last time you you currently double tap on the home button and how is a a screen going to differentiate between double tap for part of a game or something and double tap on the screen for reachability uh I'd assume they'd have to incorporate a new gesture perhaps with Force touch I mean I don't know the the um the roll out could be you know first Force touch get people used to that then then a year or two later um Implement a nonh home button iPad and then after that a couple years maybe bring it to iPhone or so you know you know how they apple is great on iterating uh between their platforms so um all right so Mikey you're optimistic about this uh as far as it's going to become a reality or that is a good idea even just you like the I like the idea yeah all right Dan you optimistic or not um I I'm taking a waitand see approach I don't know what's going to happen but I I right now I like the home button where it's at and it's very natural and although if you have a huge phone like the 6 Plus um a lot of times I pick it up and I'm I have it the other way around and because the screen flips around you have to find out why is this not working oh I have it upside down I have to turn it around on my hand and put my finger on the button so if you had that b basically working in software the whole screen was able to do your fingerprint then it would give you more flexibility just to use it sort of without thinking so cautiously optimistic great I'm I'm gonna hold up the bottom and go with negative I will be the skeptic on this one I I think it's cool to see what they're going to do I just like my home button all right all right let's talk about homekit uh I recently got the Lutron cassetta Wireless starter kit and Dan you were in San Francisco and met with Joe data who we had on the podcast a few weeks back all about Inson so tell me about your experience with inston so far so I just recently I have I've been sitting on the stuff for a couple days um busy with some other things I just plugged it in and within 10 minutes I had two switches in the bulb the whole kit set up on an app it's very simple um very easy to use you just plug it in and for each each um little thing you plug in every there's an onoff module a dimmer an LED bulb each one has a number on it you just plug it into the app you say New Device here's the number sets it up in your network you can Define rooms really quickly you add your devices to a room and I was really impressed the app looks really great uh it just worked immediately I didn't run into any real problems um I haven't tested it for a long period of time yet so I have some testing yet to do but um it in general when I've when I've seen home automation stuff before it seems that there's a lot of kind of frustration that I think is a barrier to people adopting it and when you see just sort of the presentation of how all the things homekit can do it can be sort of overwhelming and you're thinking how much programming do I want to do to just make my house you know the lights come on but one of the things that we talked about when when they were showing me sort of how how some of the stuff works what you can do with it is it's sort of addictive once you start saying it up um you want to set up more things and you think oh wow you know here's here's this lamp that's hard to get to the switch and I'm tired of plugging this in uh wouldn't it be great if I had just another button on my app here and of course with homekit uh all these different companies that are selling their own proprietary systems can talk to homekit and it's controllable by Siri so you can just say hey Siri turn turn on the kitchen lights or set the set the room to the scene you know I'm coming home from work whatever and it has the lights dialed up to the 60% and this light goes off and you know the temperature goes down and the garage door locks or whatever um it it has some really cool potential for being really easy to use to the point where people are actually going to use it have you I agree have you go ahead M I'm sorry have you tried any of the Geo fencing features or did you not get a chance to do that yet um some of the geofencing stuff you can do requires like a proximity switch there's more conditional stuff that's coming in iOS 9 where you can say if if it's after 6 o00 and I've um walked into the motion sensor then sett all these lights do this so you can do more if then kind of things um yeah so I'm looking at see I also had the opportunity to play with this I had the Lutron kit and so I'm looking at geofencing in Lutron app and I have a home location and I have uh and and it makes me Mark exactly where the circle is on the radius map of where my home location is and then I have things that I can do arriving home and they're only after Sunset toggle on off and activate a seam when when I arrive home and and similarly when I leave home I have notify me if lights are on when I leave home and activate a scene when I leave home and those work well well we should talk about what working well means with my experience so far does it work period uh uh those things seem to work so the kit that I got is is two dimmer switches two remote controls for those dimmer switches so can have physical remotes that are about the same size as an Apple TV remote uh and also can control from the app uh it has the bridge and I can control via Siri and so I plugged two nightstand lamps into each of the dimmers and I set one in a room and set the other not in that same room so that I had the ability to see when I was turning a room on or off and I was able to do the Geo fencing but all of this required so much work to get working that really I just want to stab myself and and to to tell you about that right I took it out of the box I plugged in the dimmer to lights I plugged in the bridge and the app found the bridge and then wanted to update the firmware on the bridge which is always a fantastic welcoming experience to a product right and then the app wouldn't connect to the bridge so now I thought oh great the firmware has killed the thing no no it eventually got there but I had difficulty connecting to the bridge where it would say oh we can't find it so you log out and you retry and you type your password again and you log in and in about 20 minutes of that trying to connect the bridge and then I had difficulty connecting to the app where it would throw up a page saying web page not found error in the middle of the app after I'd connected to the bridge and it's always disconcerting when you're using an app and you know they're going to use a web view but you don't want to see the web view right you want it feel like you're in the app experience and they throw up this web page not found ER just brutal so then then I started to add rooms to Siri and I I had my two lights set up I had them both working so I went ahead and went into the app and tried to add a room through their Siri integration panel and you click on the plus and you name a room so I named it bedroom because that's what it is and it tells you that room's already existing it does where I didn't create that room where did that room come from so won't let me add that room so I ended up naming a room upstairs so that I had had something that's more of a name you give to a Zone anyway but it was the only way I could fake it into letting me have a room and just guys so home animation has always been kind of hard right would you agree with that Dan yeah it's it's every maker is us doing their own thing uh I think with inston they've been around longer and it's been a thing where I think we talked about this before where you know this is something where some guy would come out to your house and wire something up it's kind of like home theater right the guy with the white van rolls out and does it for you kind of thing yeah and a lot of these tools and a lot of these products were kind of oriented towards a technical person setting it up and then being sort of easy to work afterward and sort of being sort of sort of where what I think what what Apple's trying to do with homekit is take all these desperate different kind of products and make them work under an umbrella of strong licensing and with both homekit and carplay and a lot of these initiatives apple is branching out they're they're taking their ecosystem umbrella and not only dealing with their own stuff that they control but they're extending to other partners and it's kind it's more similar to what Google's facing with Android and trying to work with all these different partners and kind of hurting cats and and in know trying to get different players to work together and these companies are not really always on the same part as Apple I mean none of them are and so you start dealing with problems that you don't think of because there's actually a lot of complication under under the hood right I want to stop you right there just so we can finish off the homekit part of this conversation and we'll segue but what I want to say is is so your experience with Inson positive so far yes I really like their app it's really well done and this the stuff seems to be really easy to set up and get running perfect Lutron uh obviously my experience wasn't quite there the Siri part of it was was okay once I'd gotten the room part set up but and the demo worked beautifully I could demonstrate this all day long and it looks like I'm a genius but the setup was difficult so I think they're still a little closer to the white van guy rolling around setting this stuff up than than it being every person who ought to have home automation going on so carplay you just mentioned carplay and and we've had a couple of good announcements with carplay recently things like um oh GM putting carplay across their line in 2016 and the first car getting it is the Corvette Stingray and then it's going to follow on with Cadillac and Buick and and the Chevrolet Spark and Malibu and things like those um so you were saying that Apple is is really reaching out into this kind of space that Google's been confronting these problems in that the idea of of putting their software in other people's products yeah I mean Android by definition is sort of a generic software for everyone to kind of take in different directions and that sounded like such a good idea until we started what actually happens when that occurs and it's just been a mess year after year after year of anytime I mean even if even people who love Android talk about companies that are doing their own thing the motor Moto blur and the you know Samsung's what do they got it um touch excitement or whatever you know they layer of proprietary stuff on top of Android where they're make yeah TouchWiz which is a terrible name um yeah they should have gone with such excitement yeah would be much better than touch poo you know um when you have all these different companies trying to experiment they're they're adding new complications to the thing and so at this point Google is now backtracking and saying hey wait we're we're you know they're basically trying to do an iOS thing where they're saying we want to control the the look we're going to create this material design everything's going to look the same everything's going to be the same and they're still on the marketing cycle of saying Android is for people who are all different and don't want the same thing and someone's like well which one is it but but with apple with both carplay and home playay and some of the other stuff that they're doing uh they're working with different makers and trying to get them playing to the same level that Apple does internally it's much easier for Apple because they don't make as many different types of products and they have much more control over the hardware and software and can blend it together and so things like Siri and being able to have watch apps and have everything sort of kind of flow together on a few different types of Hardware so you're controlling these other products through them um is a new approach to something that's been around for a long time I mean remember like the second like Android 2 one of their big thing that year which I think was around 2009 was home automation never took off the Android at home thing and that was that was 2011 because I was at that IO that year I thought it was before honeycomb maybe it was the same year as honeycomb but yeah it was just kind of you know was like this this idea that sounded really good but didn't take off it was it was Ice Cream Sandwich here I think and the the idea of uh home automation in general is very old I remember way back in the day um oh God late 80s there was this idea of it probably even earlier than that it's probably mid 80s when Apple came out with the Apple talk it was like this cheap way to network things together networking was kind of a new idea at the time you know in a home you're right that used the uh the same Apple cable You' use for your keyboard you could connect your Macs together yeah was basically you're you're connecting things with a sort of Daisy chained um serial cable but there was a I think it was sort of a parody it was I think it in Mac world at the time where they were writing the story about how Apple was going to connect your kitchen and have all these appliances that would plug together and it was called kitchen talk or some kind of joke like that and that's kind of what we're getting to now is where you can have all these smart appliances and smart devices and sensors and you know things environment sensors your security system you can have all these things going on in your home and have a system that controls it so that it's not just as inordinately complex difficult to manage thing where it sort of fits in a framework where everything works and a company like Inson can make an app that controls not only its own products but you can also have other homekit products in there and Siri can you know you can give a command a Siri and you can have devices from different manufacturers that it just works with and that's that's an impressive accomplishment so some of the problems that we're seeing remember that hom kid is really only a year old mhm and car play is also you know Apple had really aggressive targets of how fast they wanted to get into cars and the automotive industry isn't like the tech industry it doesn't move that quickly 10 years is a fast moving setup for the automotive industry yeah so I mean when did carplay was first launched I mean they first started talking about I think it was the end of 2012 or I think that was iOS and the cars when they first brought up the idea of doing this and then 2013 they were talking about how they're going to get it into cars in 2014 mile a year so it's a little bit little behind what they would like to have done but it's still impressive how quickly they're moving yeah in 2011 I had an airport express that I uh had hacked to run off of USB instead of the AC power and I named that router carplay and I put it in my car and connected it to an ox cable and I had AirPlay in the car and I rapidly understood at one point that Apple was going to move into the car and they weren't going to do it like that they were going to do it a lot better the truth is I'm a I'm a fan of carplay you know I have the Pioneer I've had the Alpine and now the Kenwood announcement has just come out so there's another aftermarket option for people and I I really strongly believe that having these kind of systems in the car is a good thing yeah I'm wishing my car had it I have because what car do you have I have a 2011 BMW and it has pretty good navigation that I I paid a lot of money for um but there's no no integration between the so if I put an address in the car it's like a totally different way to do it doesn't sync to your phone or anything like that um doesn't work with the Ser or anything like that of course and so uh it's such a totally different experience when I put a location in my car and I said you know you can just pull up the phone and say hey so you're give me directions to the nearest you know whatever and not only does it just start working on the phone but it will also on my watch it will start giving me tap tap directions um so you don't even have to looking be looking at the phone like here's the turn coming up tap tap oh that means right turn so and and for a lot of our listeners who have cars and you know some people in San Francisco clearly don't because it doesn't make sense to own a car in San Francisco but the thing is when you're trying to upgrade radios right you can have an older car and upgrading the radio is very easy when you have a newer car like your BMW there's so much integrated into it that it it it may be impossible or if it is possible you have to make tradeoff decisions right there are people that have climate controls integrated into the front face of the dashboard where the radio goes there's uh there's there's onboard car dashboard display stuff that goes on there um you know when I when I changed out the radio in my Cadillac I gave up the ability to have the seat memories because the seat memories were stored in in the system that connected to that radio I think so I was able to put in carplay but I had to trade make that trade-off yeah so I mean it's evolving and I think one of the things with carplay if I if I remember this correctly in iOS 9 not only does it get Wi-Fi support which will require new hardware I think but also um the ability to for car makers to expose more of their uh proprietary stuff climate control things like that within the carplay interface so it see how this kind of plays out right so what's happening in in iOS 9 carplay is that you get a car app on the carplay display that's right in line with the maps messages phone and so forth and when you tap on that that allows car manufacturers to tie into the the existing car telematics the windows the climate control and other things like that um for aftermarket like I'm currently doing that's not even an issue it would be kind of cool there there's like I know BMW has a lot of apps and the kinds of things you can do if your car is enabled with apps and you can um you know some car makers let you um remotely start it bring it up to temperature whatever uh one of the things they they showed one of the complications on for Apple watch was a little indicator showing when your Volkswagen was charged up your electric car so it it not only shows you what the charges on your car but also you can use the new feature in watch OS 2 where you turn turn The the digital crown and it shows you in the future see you could basically calculate it instantly in real time how long it's going to take for the car to charge up we'll say oh it's going to be charged up at 8:00 by 7:30 I'm going to have enough battery to drive to La whatever I thought that was pretty cool yeah so one of the things that we don't currently have in carplay is a beats music service I I fully expect that to change when beats launches for real and let's talk a little bit about Beats one Dan so beats one is part of old music it's sort of like their free tier but instead of having this idea of let's allow people to stream music and then throw in ads which is kind of the model almost of iTunes M um iTunes radio it was sort of like kind of a Pandora um thing where you can't just play anything you want but you you get sort of a playlist and you can skip through a few things that's what Google just showed off um that's what Pandora is doing and Spotify is a little better version of that where you can actually pick any songs you want but it's ad supported and doesn't really contribute that much money um beats is kind of an interesting sort of Middle Ground where Apple's saying we're going to make a radio station that's free you can listen to and it's going to be a taste maker it's going to have real talent behind it people who really live and breathe radio it's not just um sort of a algorithm playing top hits um it's sort of a throwback to Real Radio where people tuned in to listen to real people talking about what's actually happening in the music industry and new talent and kind of providing a foundation for things so it's kind of interesting on a number of levels um the the other thing that they're adding into it is a lot of celebrities are going to be on it because Apple's really taking this next step in trying to save music I mean remember back in the day it was Napster and you know everybody was just kind of stealing music and apple kind of stepped up and said okay here's a Marketplace toell music and it was sort of a give and take thing where on one hand they made it so you you couldn't you weren't forced to buy an album you weren't forced to buy two good songs and 10 fillers you could buy whatever songs you wanted to and the music industry kind of pushed back against that because that was their whole model of we wanted to sell albums but once they realized selling albums is not going to happen anymore we need to sell actual products that people want to buy because the alternative is just people going to steal it once that happened then there was just kind of new wave of you know basically the next napor all these streaming products that are saying oh here's an alternative to buying music is being able to basically use Napster for free with ads or you can pay a little bit of money for it the problem is there's not enough people paying for it for that to be a sustainable thing for the music industry so Spotify has what is it something like 40 to 60 million users but only about a quarter of those are actually paying subscribers so combined in their their limited ad Revenue with the amount that people are actually paying the $10 a month or something uh works out to being very little person song play um and unless you have a critical mass of people that are paying for it unless you have something like 100 million users that's just not enough money so Apple's really trying to do this with scale so Apple music is I think they're telling uh radio labels or you know labels that they want to achieve 100 million subscribers because at that level you can actually stream things that it Mak sense to for artists to stream their music they're getting enough money from millions of people to where it makes up for the fact that they're no longer selling albums so right so having as a a gateway to that having a radio station that pulls people in and says here's new stuff that's happening and gives people a reason to either buy music or buy a subscription so that they can explore music on their own it's kind of an interesting idea and the fact that you're not just pulling in talent but you're having the music industry promote this is a service of this is a a functional model for paying for music it's not just you're going to listen you're going to be forced to listen to ads you're not going to be able to skip um it's more carrot and less restriction cool so one of the stories that came out that Mikey wrote about this week was about royalty rates Mikey y take it away um yeah so I mean royalty rates have been a hot button topic or recently became a uh kind of a firestorm this week with um Tay Tay Taylor Swift uh posting to her blog that you know she was shocked and disappointed at um that Apple would not be or apple was considering not paying artists and Publishers and labels for uh the right to stream the songs during a free 90day trial period for uh new Apple music users um Apple quickly reversed that and said they would be paying and the question then became how much would they be paying during this free trial period and it came out uh this week that they'll be paying um 210 of one cent per play so it's uh it's already comparable to those uh like um services like Spotify and um I believe uh Pandora that or yeah they're they're free tiers I think it's um that's what they pay or U supposedly pay so I mean it's a good it's a win for uh for Indie labels especially um who you know don't have these huge revenue streams from uh iTunes and they they don't have that much exposure so I mean they quickly uh signed up right after um this news broke or probably before you know um but it also broke around the same time that these Indie labels like um under the umbrella of beggar's group and Merlin signed on to Apple music streaming so it's it's really kind of a win for Apple in um in the sense that they get this kind of free publicity that they're not the uh the big uh the big monster that you know the uh recording industry has kind of made them out to be with with iTunes but um yeah I don't know what what you guys think about it as far as the uh 0.2 cents per play I don't think it's the recording industry that's that's made Apple out to be bad as much as the media that has has never cared about how much streaming rates were before until Apple got involved and then it becomes kind of Click bake news and scrutinized very coincidental huh yeah suddenly that everyone's interested in actually how much artists are getting paid and really um one of the things I I wrote when the first thing happened um when Taylor Swift was talking about how artists should get paid for things um one of the issues that looked like it was affecting Apple's negotiation because apple has a lot of money and really these streaming rates are not that high it's not that big of a deal for Apple to drop it's really like a few million um the amount that Spotify pays what Apple's paying for this first 90 days trial what they would be paying is very little so it's not like apple was not trying to spend money um I think one of the issues is antitrust if apple is basically saying here's we're paying for three months of service that's something that other companies that are struggling to have any Revenue at all like Spotify and Pandora can say wait you're you're dumping your product into the market um which is kind of unfair uh at the same time because we know the FTC is scrutinizing Apple's deals with streaming companies and how much they're paying and how much they're offering to pay so I think that played into it I think a bigger thing though in talking with music exec and seeing some of the the comments people have been posting is that Apple really needs the industry to promote this so they can't just push it out as a service remember the whole thing with ping and some of that I mean part of that was that they were partnering with Facebook and then Facebook pulled the carpet underneath them but part of it was it was sort of Unfinished and they did have some high-profile support from you know stars like Lady Gaga whoever who were on this this site but um there was a lot of resistance to throwing all their putting all their support behind Apple there was kind of a fear that Apple would be the big Monopoly and um not so one of the things was you know there were the music labels were giving DRM music to Amazon free or first and not allowing Apple to have not not not allowing Apple to sell DRM free music through iTunes so they were trying to kind of create competition for apple and I think since then we've seen so little real competition developing that the music industry is realizing wait if we don't if we don't get behind something and make it real we're going to get nothing but ad streaming Revenue which is very little and people stealing music and that's even worse so I think apple is really trying to build Partnerships with these companies and to do that leverage of saying hey if you if we give people a three-month membership that will get them hooked on this product and they'll love it and they'll like the you know connect features and being able to have connect with artists and things like that and they'll want to pay for it they'll want to support artists and so I think Apple's effort to have this three free period was partly antitrust where they're saying labels have to help us do this and partly was sort of Leverage to say hey we're going to pay you bigger rates in the future than anybody else is we're going to give you more customers than anybody else is so contribute and and um provide you know support us sign on for this free period so that customers will actually get a chance to use it and like it and and sign up um and the controversy surrounding that you know with swift allowed Apple to kind of say hey okay we're going to we're going to pay rates comparable to free rates or the ad rates that other companies pay so I think they found a middle ground so it wasn't so much you know Taylor Swift winning against this huge company that was opposed to it I think it was trying to figure out how do we find this middle ground and the way that it was discovered I mean the way that it kept Apple music has been the top of the tech news for the last three or four days in the week before it launches is has totally outweighed any payments that Apple could make so it's kind of a win for everybody you make the sound also reasonable you can also take kind of a conspiracy theory thing like it was all planned I I don't I don't think anybody is was genius enough to figure that out I I mean it's but it it certainly starts to sound sketchy because of how it how it worked out so fluidly but it does kind of feel like and uh let's see Swift Taylor Swift posts to a Tumblr somewhere and Eddie Q responds on Twitter I am twirling my mustache at the moment and uh and every media every newspaper every every television station gets on and starts talking about Apple music for a week and putting it headline news no no publicity is bad publicity the truth is I got what I want out of the story you know what I wanted I I wanted to use all the pictures in my photo library of Eddie Q doing karaoke and I got to and it was glorious I didn't really need to see any of those pictures again what did you those are fantastic I put together a photo album that I clipped out of the Keynote so we we talked about this earlier um what was your impression of the whole music part of the keynote it was kind of like developer keynote and all of a sudden it's like one more thing and it was a bunch of music people on stage and a lot of people have been very critical and saying this is really sloppy and you know these music people weren't prepared and so here here's what I think about this we are used to seeing an Apple keynote be rehearsed within an inch of its life right the the old Legend was that when was a jobs keynote that everyone would practice in an auditorium for days ahead of the keynote that jobs had a spiral bound notebook with his notes for exactly what was going to happen when and what his key points were for speaking and that that this none of this went wrong ever and even when some minor glitch happened that they Riff on it but basically this thing was rehearsed to the point of of perfection and Eddie Q's presentation didn't have that same re first feel it felt like there were slowdowns and high points and glitches with the right music coming up and some of that was excusable the same way you'd excuse a digital camera not working for jobs in New York in 2001 but some of this felt like it was just off the cuff and and in some ways like Eddie Q was speaking about his love for music his personal love for music and it didn't resonate yeah I'm kind of silly dancing and stuff I I think like you say I mean Apple had had such a very tight presentation style and expected that of other people so when anybody would mess up or anything that was kind of like what was the what was the anony toys like the radio controlled cars that they had W it was last year the uh the artificial eny Drive artificial intelligence driven remote control cars yeah it was kind of a cool idea but that it it sort of flopped as a presentation it wasn't didn't come off perfect um and that was kind of people talked about that like oh this is a big deal if you go to any other company whether it's Microsoft or Google or Samsung their present are terrible HTC well the the skits that Samsung runs my God just terrible I mean just ton deaf and sloppy and boring HP will like come out with a 100 different products that nobody cares about and rattle on for hours I remember remember what the last HP the the last HP keynote that I cared about was the web OS one where they showed us we were going to get tablets and laptops running web OS and it was going to be an ecosystem yeah and before that Palm sorry Mikey did you did you stifle a laugh there no of course not I mean like rest in peace and that was supposed to be like the great thing that was all these Apple developers that left apple and you know joined Palm to create this new thing and there a lot there's a lot of excitement behind it and even though it had a lot of the same DNA it just didn't really function well you know where all those guys ended up right the Palm guys yeah well they started at HP and bled to where they're all at Google they're all working on Android what happened I know some of web people that are working on Android but so so what happened is that there were a number of people working on HP webos and Pa webos that were H1B Visa holders and you pretty much when you get awarded those for your employees you need to start the process of renewing them right away just because the the gears of government grind slowly and the Palm people in charge of that whiffed they did not start renewing and they didn't start looking at until the Visas were coming to expire and had to be renewed and it was at that point that HP was was beginning to fall apart and Google said we know how to solve this problem and so they picked up all of the H1B employees that were working on webos and brought them to Android well some of the top talented at web OS at Palm went to Apple guy that created the notification system and some of the more valuable things so um yeah it's kind of interesting to see how things flow around but just in general I mean presentations by tech companies are usually awful and you know even title that was the music industry a bunch of artists that you think you know these are people that their business is beating on stage in front of people and it was it's embarrassing to watch and so it's not too crazy that you know when Drake got got on stage and he's just kind of talking sort of extemporaneously it felt like um I think it was kind of strange that everyone freaked out think there there's something about when whenever beats gets mentioned everyone just freaks out about how it was such a terrible idea that Apple bought them and how their Hardware is so terrible and it has weights in it I I want to stop and say when you say everyone you mean like people in this insular Tech Circle right yes cuz cuz not everyone really cares right no I don't I don't I don't think the majority of people care I think people in the tech industry that are writing the headlines and trying to create what people think and unsuccessfully I think because they've been telling us for a long time that we had to buy Samsung and had to buy Android and had to buy Windows and they haven't really you know these are the same people that were telling people not to buy iPods they're not they're certainly not very influential but they talk as if they are and if if what they have to say is really important yeah so you you alluded to this one of the stories was the idea that beats headphones were not a good value because they were putting weights in them to make them feel heavier and therefore feel like quality yeah it's very fashionable to talk about how crappy beats are and I mean to be to be fair it's not I mean that's just one of the problems with Beats headphones um they are overpriced and uh well let's let's not go down that do they guarantee audio quality that their reputation seems to indicate well it's a question right and and yes you can say no they aren't audio file grade for my viewer pure virgin ears that can tell with gold connectors and gold cables fine but um there there are certainly a reasonable pair of headphones yes they're they're middling headphones that are there there may be better value for money out there but they're a fine pair of product to buy right uh I think a lot of that money is going to the wrong place or at least it you know it was I mean it's all about the design but I mean there's nothing wrong with that if you want if you look at any products that kids like though whether it's Nike shoes or you know any kind of clothing it's not about how great it is or how cost effect it is per ounce of product it's about is this something you know a lot of it is marketing and the reason why Apple bought beats was not to like get their technology and how to make headphones because Apple could already made good products oh yeah it was about tapping into this music SA indust that you know if you look at La and you look at Silicon Valley they're very different they work on they're good at very different things and the things that Apple's good at and the things that Pixar is good at are not they're very different than the things that are people are creating value in in the la music industry and that's what beats was F you know that's that's their roots and so for Apple to be Savvy enough to make an acquisition in a different direction I think was pretty incredible because it's not Tim Cook is not somebody who builds you know music stuff that Taps into the 14 to 20y Old Market where beats has a very strong presence I've talked to a lot of younger people and their impression of Beats is extremely different from these people who are in their 30s and 40s and talking about how beats is not a good value and all this stuff it doesn't really matter if if your target audience likes a product and they're wanting to buy it that's value so I think the criticism was well yeah but I I don't know I on that point I think it also goes I mean apple is also very marketing Savvy they they also buil reputation but it's in a different direction but it's it kind of is a Counterpoint to what what beats is doing I mean beats is it's for lack of a better word it's it's about the hype and they're a marketing machine and they unlike Apple it it doesn't have the um product cache to back up what they're what they're saying I think is what um most of the detractors are that that's their point Mikey the tech whisperer no I I'm just saying I think that's what that that's what people are the pundits are you know they're they're kind of poo pooing beats on on those merits it's yeah beats is is also a much smaller company that you know the're what you're saying is they are basically a marketing company that contracted out their production and stuff to they're not anywhere in the category of Apple of course in terms of being able to design and build products but I that's not what Apple was buying what I'm saying is Apple was buying the marketing Savvy and the um the people who know how to connect with these artists that if you watch any videos any popular videos they have Beats Pills and they have Beats headphones and that's how that's why kids are buying this stuff is because it's it's connected and people know you know they know that it's part of the culture that they're representing their age group or whatever so I mean yes Apple wasn't buying high quality um headphone design Apple can do that Apple can fix that problem I think what they're buying into is real Market Savvy and and that's the kind of thing that you do acquisition for is to get into somewhere where you don't know how to do it yourself yep now when it comes to the the idea that they were putting extra weight into the product to make it feel better first of all you you noted this when we talked before that the uh the hinge was made of metal and that's not exactly extra right that's not they're they're not throwing in extra lead weights to make it heavy that's just we made this part out of metal because it's better right and what I wanted to add to that is that there are number of products out there not made by Apple where where people do know that heavier feels substantial and there are totally legitimate reasons to put weight into a product that otherwise would be light and feel cheap you know the there are USB hubs that fall off desks right I had a a portable mixer that had two or three channels on it and a mixer just needs a PCB board there's there's nothing to it and you open it up and sure enough there are pieces of lead glued to the bottom of the inside of the case to keep it from falling off your desk so this kind of criticism against Apple and Beats is is really sort of a non-starter for me because this is something that many many products do and it's not a a Bad Thing necessarily yeah it's part of product design yeah you have a desired result and the desired result is does not fall off desk what are you going to do I mean the most interesting part to me is that that those conversations keep happening and that people are just constantly talking about how terrible beats is and you know there's a lot of terrible products out there that they could be talking about but the fact that they're constantly talking about Beats tells you something about what the motivation is it's not that they're trying to warn everybody that this is a terrible product is that they're just trying to constantly create the sort of propagandist noise about how terrible everything apple is and everything that's connected to Apple and everything they buy and um that's based in fear because they realize apple is a pretty powerful force right now they have lots of money and before they had money they were beating everybody strategically now that they have money it's looking pretty you know a couple years ago you could say Samsung was a strong competitor Apple at this point Samsung is copying apple egregiously and they're still not you know they don't they lost that perceived Edge that they had and there's nobody else in Android that's making money and even these you know like U Jami and these companies that oh they're going to come storming out of China and take over the world no they're not a threat either so what is Apple's competitor is it Microsoft what is Google going to you know come up with a strategy and do something besides copy Apple stuff a couple years later well said so Dan parting thought to the end of the podcast my parting thought is if you look at iOS 9 and a number of technologies that Apple released or iterated upon built upon some more at WWDC they're entering a new phase of kind of confidence and that they're not afraid of showing off what they're working on this whole idea that wwc is restricted to everybody but developers is gone everybody can talk about this stuff because I think Apple doesn't have that fear that they're the smallest company in the room and they're fighting to you know get on top anymore they are on top and the number of companies that can really even compete with apple are it's hard to really identify a strong competitor and it'll be interesting to see how well Apple keeps its Pace going going and whether or not um I I think really Apple's biggest competitive threat is incompetence if it if it screws up its lead it's kind of Apple's Le um it's Apple's lead to lose so as long as they can keep executing I think they're going to do really well because I don't think they really face any significant outside threats but that's the biggest problem is if you don't have threats what keeps you going and so far we've seen Apple's kind of driving itself so I hope that continues brilliant Mikey your parting thought for the week um parting thought parting thought is uh on homekit is just the from the experiences that you two were describing I I it's an interesting area that I'm personally um looking into right now and I'm very excited to see what is going to happen in the future and uh for me I think homekit um not only is just for how people think is just for iOS devices I think it's going to actually um help the whole home automation uh field not just with Siri but um I'm really interested in the uh Geo fencing features and how everything um can work together under one ecosystem and hopefully Apple will be able to uh bring that together under one umbrella um that you know it's been so hard for other manufacturers to do up to this point and um you know I think I think they might succeed with this so it's exciting times thank you carplay and homekit those are my parting thoughts I love carplay I want more of it I want more people having the experience that I enjoy with it I think it's brilliant with homekit I like homekit when it works I I like the Siri control uh the one thing that I can think of where Siri doesn't quite handle way I want it to is that late at night I need to change the temperature on the thermostat and currently I open an application to do that if I have to start speaking late at night that's not a good situation for other people that are sleeping but bigger than that because that's a minor complaint is that right now we're in this phase of home automation and we've been in it since home automation began where everything is a glorified remote control it's onoff it's dim it's set a scene for me it's set this for me it's that for me the Geo fencing is interesting because now we're talking about doing something smart based on something else that I'm doing we saw the beginnings of this with Nest learning thermostat where it sort of learns my behavior by proximity and learns my habits for what I want the temperatures to feel like at what times of day and I want for everything else to get that smart and smarter so it's not just am am I coming home am I leaving home but it's when I come home what kinds of things do I like to have happen generally and can those things happen without me setting up a scene for them and initiating a scene I don't want remote controls I want smart things to happen for me and we're not there yet but I want to get there amen amen so let's wind it up this has been the Apple Insider podcast with Dan calling in from San Francisco yeah that was good where can we find you on the internet Dan I am I write for a website called Apple Insider and yeah it's good you should read it but um the other the other thing that I do is I I post stuff on Twitter at Daniel Aon and I'm also on Instagram same thing Daniel Aaron everywhere e r an so that's my stuff that's your stuff Mikey where can people find you on the interwebs uh same place Daniel Aaron oh no wait no uh at Mikey Campbell 81 on the Twitter machine and um I'm also working for this small website called Apple Insider although I haven't seen Daniel there so maybe we'll cross path one day I just did a story on the uh the new Apple store in San Francisco that's going up the big glass box I saw doors that open up awesome is it uh I saw that it's pretty my uh my friend works like across the street from that and he uh he's been giving me the updates on it I kind of want to visit just to see the grander well I'm your host Victor marks I'm at V marks on Twitter and this has been the Apple Insider podcast if Mikey launches a music service or Daniel puts lead in products we'll tell you all about it next week please leave positive RS on iTunes all rightyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast this is the Apple Insider podcast recording on Thursday June 25th I have with me today Dan hello from California welcome and Mikey from Honolulu Aloha Mahalo so I'm your host Victor this is the Apple Insider podcast and we've got some news for you one of the things that happened earlier this week was a rumor about an iPhone without any home button at all the idea was that touch ID would be built into the display Dan can you tell me what your thoughts are on this um it's one of those things that sounds like it could be far out in the future the the concern I have about it I mean the obvious benefit is that you can put a bigger screen on a smaller device if you don't have this margin to support a home button but also the home button has been a very characteristic to um element of iOS devices especially the iPhone and changing it from a button to touch ID it's it's a very physical thing and and you know you can you can operate the phone without looking at it so if if you integrate that in the screen it'd be really cool to have basically the touch Touch ID is a sensor that's scanning your finger it's a like a almost like a camera like a low resolution camera like a scanner so we we've seen some patent applications that involve basically taking that technology and embedding it into the screen so that you could re um handle both touches and hard presses with Force touch and even being able to scan your fingerprint through the screen and possibly scan multiple fingers it would be more secure things like that it would be a pretty significant change in the form factor of of the phone and it would change how use it and it also affects things like accessibility how do you use something if you're blind um so there are some issues to work out but you know it's a kind of a cool idea I don't think it's anywhere in the in the next year or so it would have to be a pretty significant jump but we'll see what what happens so Mikey yes no home button smart or stupid um well I think it is a definite leap I think could be very smart um I think a platform that would be ripe for this kind of Innovation would be iPad um the home button seems kind of lost there now especially when you think about how it's well rumored to be getting quite quite a bit larger having that one um stationary button on one side of the uh display kind of makes things a bit difficult uh but it's going to take a lot a long time like d said to kind of remap our brains into thinking um outside of the home button box as it were do you want this feature um well to me the uh the home button it I mean it it's not integrated with the screen at all I mean it's below the screen so it's really not a big issue for me um in fact I I oftentimes rest my thumb on it naturally holding the phone so um uh I would want it if it means that the display would be a true edgo Edge uh edgo Edge panel which would be really nice I mean that that is another benefit that could come out of this okay I'm going to tell you what I think I think it is highly possible that it's going to be stupid I think it's I think it could be awesome for iPads where you're right and a lot of things are gesture based but I I just think that there's something very good about having a home button and there are people out there who don't use Touch ID because they're concerned and paranoid about their security right they only have 10 fingers someone can compel them to put their thumb down um there are a lot of reasons why people don't want to use Touch ID and I'm concerned about accessibility like Dan was saying uh reachability and what do you do if you are site impaired and can't locate where your home button is um I don't know I mean the the accessibility features right now are I I don't know if you watch the um the session on accessibility at WWDC or Dan I don't even know did you go to that there were a couple things you're talking about like voiceover you there yeah so I I watched part of that um session which was you know I mean pretty pretty astounding stuff as far as what developers have been have been up to in that area that you know know people really don't um get to see or you know need to need to see or access it all uh but I I don't know that that having not having a home button will affect the accessibility of say an iPhone on any you know significant level it is kind of interesting it's kind of a a throwback to the whole conversation that wasn't too long ago when the iPhone first came out people were saying that a phone with a big touchcreen and no physical keyboard was just not going to work and Google was showing how you could pull a keyboard out the side of it and Blackberry had their keyboard and it was like this is the thing people care about this keyboard and you had all these pendants saying that you know physical keys were where it's at you just could not remove them and people were you know it was obvious if you're typing on a piece of glass it's sort of not um doesn't have that Clickety feel of typing on a keyboard that we were all used to and now everybody does every you have nowhere to locate where your fingers are and of course that problem has been solved yeah I mean we just look at it and you even people with vision problems or or other physical problems with moving their fingers or whatever it's possible to control it with your voice or some other other um mechanism or with voice over and there's a lot of these things that seem seem really obviously wrong until we get to the point where it's possible and so it this could be a thing where you know the home button feels very common for apple and in fact other makers were getting rid of this a lot of Android phones had sort of soft keys on the bottom and they became part of the screen and then you know they were experimenting with a lot of things Google originally had that track ball thing uh all those things are gone and if you look at Samsung which you know closely follows Apple they have a home button that's a little slightly different shape but it's in the same place and it does the same thing and um and other things that have tried to compete against that you know LG has the button on the back that they were trying to have take off uh they didn't really fly yeah when it comes to reachability as a feature we talked about this a little bit last time you you currently double tap on the home button and how is a a screen going to differentiate between double tap for part of a game or something and double tap on the screen for reachability uh I'd assume they'd have to incorporate a new gesture perhaps with Force touch I mean I don't know the the um the roll out could be you know first Force touch get people used to that then then a year or two later um Implement a nonh home button iPad and then after that a couple years maybe bring it to iPhone or so you know you know how they apple is great on iterating uh between their platforms so um all right so Mikey you're optimistic about this uh as far as it's going to become a reality or that is a good idea even just you like the I like the idea yeah all right Dan you optimistic or not um I I'm taking a waitand see approach I don't know what's going to happen but I I right now I like the home button where it's at and it's very natural and although if you have a huge phone like the 6 Plus um a lot of times I pick it up and I'm I have it the other way around and because the screen flips around you have to find out why is this not working oh I have it upside down I have to turn it around on my hand and put my finger on the button so if you had that b basically working in software the whole screen was able to do your fingerprint then it would give you more flexibility just to use it sort of without thinking so cautiously optimistic great I'm I'm gonna hold up the bottom and go with negative I will be the skeptic on this one I I think it's cool to see what they're going to do I just like my home button all right all right let's talk about homekit uh I recently got the Lutron cassetta Wireless starter kit and Dan you were in San Francisco and met with Joe data who we had on the podcast a few weeks back all about Inson so tell me about your experience with inston so far so I just recently I have I've been sitting on the stuff for a couple days um busy with some other things I just plugged it in and within 10 minutes I had two switches in the bulb the whole kit set up on an app it's very simple um very easy to use you just plug it in and for each each um little thing you plug in every there's an onoff module a dimmer an LED bulb each one has a number on it you just plug it into the app you say New Device here's the number sets it up in your network you can Define rooms really quickly you add your devices to a room and I was really impressed the app looks really great uh it just worked immediately I didn't run into any real problems um I haven't tested it for a long period of time yet so I have some testing yet to do but um it in general when I've when I've seen home automation stuff before it seems that there's a lot of kind of frustration that I think is a barrier to people adopting it and when you see just sort of the presentation of how all the things homekit can do it can be sort of overwhelming and you're thinking how much programming do I want to do to just make my house you know the lights come on but one of the things that we talked about when when they were showing me sort of how how some of the stuff works what you can do with it is it's sort of addictive once you start saying it up um you want to set up more things and you think oh wow you know here's here's this lamp that's hard to get to the switch and I'm tired of plugging this in uh wouldn't it be great if I had just another button on my app here and of course with homekit uh all these different companies that are selling their own proprietary systems can talk to homekit and it's controllable by Siri so you can just say hey Siri turn turn on the kitchen lights or set the set the room to the scene you know I'm coming home from work whatever and it has the lights dialed up to the 60% and this light goes off and you know the temperature goes down and the garage door locks or whatever um it it has some really cool potential for being really easy to use to the point where people are actually going to use it have you I agree have you go ahead M I'm sorry have you tried any of the Geo fencing features or did you not get a chance to do that yet um some of the geofencing stuff you can do requires like a proximity switch there's more conditional stuff that's coming in iOS 9 where you can say if if it's after 6 o00 and I've um walked into the motion sensor then sett all these lights do this so you can do more if then kind of things um yeah so I'm looking at see I also had the opportunity to play with this I had the Lutron kit and so I'm looking at geofencing in Lutron app and I have a home location and I have uh and and it makes me Mark exactly where the circle is on the radius map of where my home location is and then I have things that I can do arriving home and they're only after Sunset toggle on off and activate a seam when when I arrive home and and similarly when I leave home I have notify me if lights are on when I leave home and activate a scene when I leave home and those work well well we should talk about what working well means with my experience so far does it work period uh uh those things seem to work so the kit that I got is is two dimmer switches two remote controls for those dimmer switches so can have physical remotes that are about the same size as an Apple TV remote uh and also can control from the app uh it has the bridge and I can control via Siri and so I plugged two nightstand lamps into each of the dimmers and I set one in a room and set the other not in that same room so that I had the ability to see when I was turning a room on or off and I was able to do the Geo fencing but all of this required so much work to get working that really I just want to stab myself and and to to tell you about that right I took it out of the box I plugged in the dimmer to lights I plugged in the bridge and the app found the bridge and then wanted to update the firmware on the bridge which is always a fantastic welcoming experience to a product right and then the app wouldn't connect to the bridge so now I thought oh great the firmware has killed the thing no no it eventually got there but I had difficulty connecting to the bridge where it would say oh we can't find it so you log out and you retry and you type your password again and you log in and in about 20 minutes of that trying to connect the bridge and then I had difficulty connecting to the app where it would throw up a page saying web page not found error in the middle of the app after I'd connected to the bridge and it's always disconcerting when you're using an app and you know they're going to use a web view but you don't want to see the web view right you want it feel like you're in the app experience and they throw up this web page not found ER just brutal so then then I started to add rooms to Siri and I I had my two lights set up I had them both working so I went ahead and went into the app and tried to add a room through their Siri integration panel and you click on the plus and you name a room so I named it bedroom because that's what it is and it tells you that room's already existing it does where I didn't create that room where did that room come from so won't let me add that room so I ended up naming a room upstairs so that I had had something that's more of a name you give to a Zone anyway but it was the only way I could fake it into letting me have a room and just guys so home animation has always been kind of hard right would you agree with that Dan yeah it's it's every maker is us doing their own thing uh I think with inston they've been around longer and it's been a thing where I think we talked about this before where you know this is something where some guy would come out to your house and wire something up it's kind of like home theater right the guy with the white van rolls out and does it for you kind of thing yeah and a lot of these tools and a lot of these products were kind of oriented towards a technical person setting it up and then being sort of easy to work afterward and sort of being sort of sort of where what I think what what Apple's trying to do with homekit is take all these desperate different kind of products and make them work under an umbrella of strong licensing and with both homekit and carplay and a lot of these initiatives apple is branching out they're they're taking their ecosystem umbrella and not only dealing with their own stuff that they control but they're extending to other partners and it's kind it's more similar to what Google's facing with Android and trying to work with all these different partners and kind of hurting cats and and in know trying to get different players to work together and these companies are not really always on the same part as Apple I mean none of them are and so you start dealing with problems that you don't think of because there's actually a lot of complication under under the hood right I want to stop you right there just so we can finish off the homekit part of this conversation and we'll segue but what I want to say is is so your experience with Inson positive so far yes I really like their app it's really well done and this the stuff seems to be really easy to set up and get running perfect Lutron uh obviously my experience wasn't quite there the Siri part of it was was okay once I'd gotten the room part set up but and the demo worked beautifully I could demonstrate this all day long and it looks like I'm a genius but the setup was difficult so I think they're still a little closer to the white van guy rolling around setting this stuff up than than it being every person who ought to have home automation going on so carplay you just mentioned carplay and and we've had a couple of good announcements with carplay recently things like um oh GM putting carplay across their line in 2016 and the first car getting it is the Corvette Stingray and then it's going to follow on with Cadillac and Buick and and the Chevrolet Spark and Malibu and things like those um so you were saying that Apple is is really reaching out into this kind of space that Google's been confronting these problems in that the idea of of putting their software in other people's products yeah I mean Android by definition is sort of a generic software for everyone to kind of take in different directions and that sounded like such a good idea until we started what actually happens when that occurs and it's just been a mess year after year after year of anytime I mean even if even people who love Android talk about companies that are doing their own thing the motor Moto blur and the you know Samsung's what do they got it um touch excitement or whatever you know they layer of proprietary stuff on top of Android where they're make yeah TouchWiz which is a terrible name um yeah they should have gone with such excitement yeah would be much better than touch poo you know um when you have all these different companies trying to experiment they're they're adding new complications to the thing and so at this point Google is now backtracking and saying hey wait we're we're you know they're basically trying to do an iOS thing where they're saying we want to control the the look we're going to create this material design everything's going to look the same everything's going to be the same and they're still on the marketing cycle of saying Android is for people who are all different and don't want the same thing and someone's like well which one is it but but with apple with both carplay and home playay and some of the other stuff that they're doing uh they're working with different makers and trying to get them playing to the same level that Apple does internally it's much easier for Apple because they don't make as many different types of products and they have much more control over the hardware and software and can blend it together and so things like Siri and being able to have watch apps and have everything sort of kind of flow together on a few different types of Hardware so you're controlling these other products through them um is a new approach to something that's been around for a long time I mean remember like the second like Android 2 one of their big thing that year which I think was around 2009 was home automation never took off the Android at home thing and that was that was 2011 because I was at that IO that year I thought it was before honeycomb maybe it was the same year as honeycomb but yeah it was just kind of you know was like this this idea that sounded really good but didn't take off it was it was Ice Cream Sandwich here I think and the the idea of uh home automation in general is very old I remember way back in the day um oh God late 80s there was this idea of it probably even earlier than that it's probably mid 80s when Apple came out with the Apple talk it was like this cheap way to network things together networking was kind of a new idea at the time you know in a home you're right that used the uh the same Apple cable You' use for your keyboard you could connect your Macs together yeah was basically you're you're connecting things with a sort of Daisy chained um serial cable but there was a I think it was sort of a parody it was I think it in Mac world at the time where they were writing the story about how Apple was going to connect your kitchen and have all these appliances that would plug together and it was called kitchen talk or some kind of joke like that and that's kind of what we're getting to now is where you can have all these smart appliances and smart devices and sensors and you know things environment sensors your security system you can have all these things going on in your home and have a system that controls it so that it's not just as inordinately complex difficult to manage thing where it sort of fits in a framework where everything works and a company like Inson can make an app that controls not only its own products but you can also have other homekit products in there and Siri can you know you can give a command a Siri and you can have devices from different manufacturers that it just works with and that's that's an impressive accomplishment so some of the problems that we're seeing remember that hom kid is really only a year old mhm and car play is also you know Apple had really aggressive targets of how fast they wanted to get into cars and the automotive industry isn't like the tech industry it doesn't move that quickly 10 years is a fast moving setup for the automotive industry yeah so I mean when did carplay was first launched I mean they first started talking about I think it was the end of 2012 or I think that was iOS and the cars when they first brought up the idea of doing this and then 2013 they were talking about how they're going to get it into cars in 2014 mile a year so it's a little bit little behind what they would like to have done but it's still impressive how quickly they're moving yeah in 2011 I had an airport express that I uh had hacked to run off of USB instead of the AC power and I named that router carplay and I put it in my car and connected it to an ox cable and I had AirPlay in the car and I rapidly understood at one point that Apple was going to move into the car and they weren't going to do it like that they were going to do it a lot better the truth is I'm a I'm a fan of carplay you know I have the Pioneer I've had the Alpine and now the Kenwood announcement has just come out so there's another aftermarket option for people and I I really strongly believe that having these kind of systems in the car is a good thing yeah I'm wishing my car had it I have because what car do you have I have a 2011 BMW and it has pretty good navigation that I I paid a lot of money for um but there's no no integration between the so if I put an address in the car it's like a totally different way to do it doesn't sync to your phone or anything like that um doesn't work with the Ser or anything like that of course and so uh it's such a totally different experience when I put a location in my car and I said you know you can just pull up the phone and say hey so you're give me directions to the nearest you know whatever and not only does it just start working on the phone but it will also on my watch it will start giving me tap tap directions um so you don't even have to looking be looking at the phone like here's the turn coming up tap tap oh that means right turn so and and for a lot of our listeners who have cars and you know some people in San Francisco clearly don't because it doesn't make sense to own a car in San Francisco but the thing is when you're trying to upgrade radios right you can have an older car and upgrading the radio is very easy when you have a newer car like your BMW there's so much integrated into it that it it it may be impossible or if it is possible you have to make tradeoff decisions right there are people that have climate controls integrated into the front face of the dashboard where the radio goes there's uh there's there's onboard car dashboard display stuff that goes on there um you know when I when I changed out the radio in my Cadillac I gave up the ability to have the seat memories because the seat memories were stored in in the system that connected to that radio I think so I was able to put in carplay but I had to trade make that trade-off yeah so I mean it's evolving and I think one of the things with carplay if I if I remember this correctly in iOS 9 not only does it get Wi-Fi support which will require new hardware I think but also um the ability to for car makers to expose more of their uh proprietary stuff climate control things like that within the carplay interface so it see how this kind of plays out right so what's happening in in iOS 9 carplay is that you get a car app on the carplay display that's right in line with the maps messages phone and so forth and when you tap on that that allows car manufacturers to tie into the the existing car telematics the windows the climate control and other things like that um for aftermarket like I'm currently doing that's not even an issue it would be kind of cool there there's like I know BMW has a lot of apps and the kinds of things you can do if your car is enabled with apps and you can um you know some car makers let you um remotely start it bring it up to temperature whatever uh one of the things they they showed one of the complications on for Apple watch was a little indicator showing when your Volkswagen was charged up your electric car so it it not only shows you what the charges on your car but also you can use the new feature in watch OS 2 where you turn turn The the digital crown and it shows you in the future see you could basically calculate it instantly in real time how long it's going to take for the car to charge up we'll say oh it's going to be charged up at 8:00 by 7:30 I'm going to have enough battery to drive to La whatever I thought that was pretty cool yeah so one of the things that we don't currently have in carplay is a beats music service I I fully expect that to change when beats launches for real and let's talk a little bit about Beats one Dan so beats one is part of old music it's sort of like their free tier but instead of having this idea of let's allow people to stream music and then throw in ads which is kind of the model almost of iTunes M um iTunes radio it was sort of like kind of a Pandora um thing where you can't just play anything you want but you you get sort of a playlist and you can skip through a few things that's what Google just showed off um that's what Pandora is doing and Spotify is a little better version of that where you can actually pick any songs you want but it's ad supported and doesn't really contribute that much money um beats is kind of an interesting sort of Middle Ground where Apple's saying we're going to make a radio station that's free you can listen to and it's going to be a taste maker it's going to have real talent behind it people who really live and breathe radio it's not just um sort of a algorithm playing top hits um it's sort of a throwback to Real Radio where people tuned in to listen to real people talking about what's actually happening in the music industry and new talent and kind of providing a foundation for things so it's kind of interesting on a number of levels um the the other thing that they're adding into it is a lot of celebrities are going to be on it because Apple's really taking this next step in trying to save music I mean remember back in the day it was Napster and you know everybody was just kind of stealing music and apple kind of stepped up and said okay here's a Marketplace toell music and it was sort of a give and take thing where on one hand they made it so you you couldn't you weren't forced to buy an album you weren't forced to buy two good songs and 10 fillers you could buy whatever songs you wanted to and the music industry kind of pushed back against that because that was their whole model of we wanted to sell albums but once they realized selling albums is not going to happen anymore we need to sell actual products that people want to buy because the alternative is just people going to steal it once that happened then there was just kind of new wave of you know basically the next napor all these streaming products that are saying oh here's an alternative to buying music is being able to basically use Napster for free with ads or you can pay a little bit of money for it the problem is there's not enough people paying for it for that to be a sustainable thing for the music industry so Spotify has what is it something like 40 to 60 million users but only about a quarter of those are actually paying subscribers so combined in their their limited ad Revenue with the amount that people are actually paying the $10 a month or something uh works out to being very little person song play um and unless you have a critical mass of people that are paying for it unless you have something like 100 million users that's just not enough money so Apple's really trying to do this with scale so Apple music is I think they're telling uh radio labels or you know labels that they want to achieve 100 million subscribers because at that level you can actually stream things that it Mak sense to for artists to stream their music they're getting enough money from millions of people to where it makes up for the fact that they're no longer selling albums so right so having as a a gateway to that having a radio station that pulls people in and says here's new stuff that's happening and gives people a reason to either buy music or buy a subscription so that they can explore music on their own it's kind of an interesting idea and the fact that you're not just pulling in talent but you're having the music industry promote this is a service of this is a a functional model for paying for music it's not just you're going to listen you're going to be forced to listen to ads you're not going to be able to skip um it's more carrot and less restriction cool so one of the stories that came out that Mikey wrote about this week was about royalty rates Mikey y take it away um yeah so I mean royalty rates have been a hot button topic or recently became a uh kind of a firestorm this week with um Tay Tay Taylor Swift uh posting to her blog that you know she was shocked and disappointed at um that Apple would not be or apple was considering not paying artists and Publishers and labels for uh the right to stream the songs during a free 90day trial period for uh new Apple music users um Apple quickly reversed that and said they would be paying and the question then became how much would they be paying during this free trial period and it came out uh this week that they'll be paying um 210 of one cent per play so it's uh it's already comparable to those uh like um services like Spotify and um I believe uh Pandora that or yeah they're they're free tiers I think it's um that's what they pay or U supposedly pay so I mean it's a good it's a win for uh for Indie labels especially um who you know don't have these huge revenue streams from uh iTunes and they they don't have that much exposure so I mean they quickly uh signed up right after um this news broke or probably before you know um but it also broke around the same time that these Indie labels like um under the umbrella of beggar's group and Merlin signed on to Apple music streaming so it's it's really kind of a win for Apple in um in the sense that they get this kind of free publicity that they're not the uh the big uh the big monster that you know the uh recording industry has kind of made them out to be with with iTunes but um yeah I don't know what what you guys think about it as far as the uh 0.2 cents per play I don't think it's the recording industry that's that's made Apple out to be bad as much as the media that has has never cared about how much streaming rates were before until Apple got involved and then it becomes kind of Click bake news and scrutinized very coincidental huh yeah suddenly that everyone's interested in actually how much artists are getting paid and really um one of the things I I wrote when the first thing happened um when Taylor Swift was talking about how artists should get paid for things um one of the issues that looked like it was affecting Apple's negotiation because apple has a lot of money and really these streaming rates are not that high it's not that big of a deal for Apple to drop it's really like a few million um the amount that Spotify pays what Apple's paying for this first 90 days trial what they would be paying is very little so it's not like apple was not trying to spend money um I think one of the issues is antitrust if apple is basically saying here's we're paying for three months of service that's something that other companies that are struggling to have any Revenue at all like Spotify and Pandora can say wait you're you're dumping your product into the market um which is kind of unfair uh at the same time because we know the FTC is scrutinizing Apple's deals with streaming companies and how much they're paying and how much they're offering to pay so I think that played into it I think a bigger thing though in talking with music exec and seeing some of the the comments people have been posting is that Apple really needs the industry to promote this so they can't just push it out as a service remember the whole thing with ping and some of that I mean part of that was that they were partnering with Facebook and then Facebook pulled the carpet underneath them but part of it was it was sort of Unfinished and they did have some high-profile support from you know stars like Lady Gaga whoever who were on this this site but um there was a lot of resistance to throwing all their putting all their support behind Apple there was kind of a fear that Apple would be the big Monopoly and um not so one of the things was you know there were the music labels were giving DRM music to Amazon free or first and not allowing Apple to have not not not allowing Apple to sell DRM free music through iTunes so they were trying to kind of create competition for apple and I think since then we've seen so little real competition developing that the music industry is realizing wait if we don't if we don't get behind something and make it real we're going to get nothing but ad streaming Revenue which is very little and people stealing music and that's even worse so I think apple is really trying to build Partnerships with these companies and to do that leverage of saying hey if you if we give people a three-month membership that will get them hooked on this product and they'll love it and they'll like the you know connect features and being able to have connect with artists and things like that and they'll want to pay for it they'll want to support artists and so I think Apple's effort to have this three free period was partly antitrust where they're saying labels have to help us do this and partly was sort of Leverage to say hey we're going to pay you bigger rates in the future than anybody else is we're going to give you more customers than anybody else is so contribute and and um provide you know support us sign on for this free period so that customers will actually get a chance to use it and like it and and sign up um and the controversy surrounding that you know with swift allowed Apple to kind of say hey okay we're going to we're going to pay rates comparable to free rates or the ad rates that other companies pay so I think they found a middle ground so it wasn't so much you know Taylor Swift winning against this huge company that was opposed to it I think it was trying to figure out how do we find this middle ground and the way that it was discovered I mean the way that it kept Apple music has been the top of the tech news for the last three or four days in the week before it launches is has totally outweighed any payments that Apple could make so it's kind of a win for everybody you make the sound also reasonable you can also take kind of a conspiracy theory thing like it was all planned I I don't I don't think anybody is was genius enough to figure that out I I mean it's but it it certainly starts to sound sketchy because of how it how it worked out so fluidly but it does kind of feel like and uh let's see Swift Taylor Swift posts to a Tumblr somewhere and Eddie Q responds on Twitter I am twirling my mustache at the moment and uh and every media every newspaper every every television station gets on and starts talking about Apple music for a week and putting it headline news no no publicity is bad publicity the truth is I got what I want out of the story you know what I wanted I I wanted to use all the pictures in my photo library of Eddie Q doing karaoke and I got to and it was glorious I didn't really need to see any of those pictures again what did you those are fantastic I put together a photo album that I clipped out of the Keynote so we we talked about this earlier um what was your impression of the whole music part of the keynote it was kind of like developer keynote and all of a sudden it's like one more thing and it was a bunch of music people on stage and a lot of people have been very critical and saying this is really sloppy and you know these music people weren't prepared and so here here's what I think about this we are used to seeing an Apple keynote be rehearsed within an inch of its life right the the old Legend was that when was a jobs keynote that everyone would practice in an auditorium for days ahead of the keynote that jobs had a spiral bound notebook with his notes for exactly what was going to happen when and what his key points were for speaking and that that this none of this went wrong ever and even when some minor glitch happened that they Riff on it but basically this thing was rehearsed to the point of of perfection and Eddie Q's presentation didn't have that same re first feel it felt like there were slowdowns and high points and glitches with the right music coming up and some of that was excusable the same way you'd excuse a digital camera not working for jobs in New York in 2001 but some of this felt like it was just off the cuff and and in some ways like Eddie Q was speaking about his love for music his personal love for music and it didn't resonate yeah I'm kind of silly dancing and stuff I I think like you say I mean Apple had had such a very tight presentation style and expected that of other people so when anybody would mess up or anything that was kind of like what was the what was the anony toys like the radio controlled cars that they had W it was last year the uh the artificial eny Drive artificial intelligence driven remote control cars yeah it was kind of a cool idea but that it it sort of flopped as a presentation it wasn't didn't come off perfect um and that was kind of people talked about that like oh this is a big deal if you go to any other company whether it's Microsoft or Google or Samsung their present are terrible HTC well the the skits that Samsung runs my God just terrible I mean just ton deaf and sloppy and boring HP will like come out with a 100 different products that nobody cares about and rattle on for hours I remember remember what the last HP the the last HP keynote that I cared about was the web OS one where they showed us we were going to get tablets and laptops running web OS and it was going to be an ecosystem yeah and before that Palm sorry Mikey did you did you stifle a laugh there no of course not I mean like rest in peace and that was supposed to be like the great thing that was all these Apple developers that left apple and you know joined Palm to create this new thing and there a lot there's a lot of excitement behind it and even though it had a lot of the same DNA it just didn't really function well you know where all those guys ended up right the Palm guys yeah well they started at HP and bled to where they're all at Google they're all working on Android what happened I know some of web people that are working on Android but so so what happened is that there were a number of people working on HP webos and Pa webos that were H1B Visa holders and you pretty much when you get awarded those for your employees you need to start the process of renewing them right away just because the the gears of government grind slowly and the Palm people in charge of that whiffed they did not start renewing and they didn't start looking at until the Visas were coming to expire and had to be renewed and it was at that point that HP was was beginning to fall apart and Google said we know how to solve this problem and so they picked up all of the H1B employees that were working on webos and brought them to Android well some of the top talented at web OS at Palm went to Apple guy that created the notification system and some of the more valuable things so um yeah it's kind of interesting to see how things flow around but just in general I mean presentations by tech companies are usually awful and you know even title that was the music industry a bunch of artists that you think you know these are people that their business is beating on stage in front of people and it was it's embarrassing to watch and so it's not too crazy that you know when Drake got got on stage and he's just kind of talking sort of extemporaneously it felt like um I think it was kind of strange that everyone freaked out think there there's something about when whenever beats gets mentioned everyone just freaks out about how it was such a terrible idea that Apple bought them and how their Hardware is so terrible and it has weights in it I I want to stop and say when you say everyone you mean like people in this insular Tech Circle right yes cuz cuz not everyone really cares right no I don't I don't I don't think the majority of people care I think people in the tech industry that are writing the headlines and trying to create what people think and unsuccessfully I think because they've been telling us for a long time that we had to buy Samsung and had to buy Android and had to buy Windows and they haven't really you know these are the same people that were telling people not to buy iPods they're not they're certainly not very influential but they talk as if they are and if if what they have to say is really important yeah so you you alluded to this one of the stories was the idea that beats headphones were not a good value because they were putting weights in them to make them feel heavier and therefore feel like quality yeah it's very fashionable to talk about how crappy beats are and I mean to be to be fair it's not I mean that's just one of the problems with Beats headphones um they are overpriced and uh well let's let's not go down that do they guarantee audio quality that their reputation seems to indicate well it's a question right and and yes you can say no they aren't audio file grade for my viewer pure virgin ears that can tell with gold connectors and gold cables fine but um there there are certainly a reasonable pair of headphones yes they're they're middling headphones that are there there may be better value for money out there but they're a fine pair of product to buy right uh I think a lot of that money is going to the wrong place or at least it you know it was I mean it's all about the design but I mean there's nothing wrong with that if you want if you look at any products that kids like though whether it's Nike shoes or you know any kind of clothing it's not about how great it is or how cost effect it is per ounce of product it's about is this something you know a lot of it is marketing and the reason why Apple bought beats was not to like get their technology and how to make headphones because Apple could already made good products oh yeah it was about tapping into this music SA indust that you know if you look at La and you look at Silicon Valley they're very different they work on they're good at very different things and the things that Apple's good at and the things that Pixar is good at are not they're very different than the things that are people are creating value in in the la music industry and that's what beats was F you know that's that's their roots and so for Apple to be Savvy enough to make an acquisition in a different direction I think was pretty incredible because it's not Tim Cook is not somebody who builds you know music stuff that Taps into the 14 to 20y Old Market where beats has a very strong presence I've talked to a lot of younger people and their impression of Beats is extremely different from these people who are in their 30s and 40s and talking about how beats is not a good value and all this stuff it doesn't really matter if if your target audience likes a product and they're wanting to buy it that's value so I think the criticism was well yeah but I I don't know I on that point I think it also goes I mean apple is also very marketing Savvy they they also buil reputation but it's in a different direction but it's it kind of is a Counterpoint to what what beats is doing I mean beats is it's for lack of a better word it's it's about the hype and they're a marketing machine and they unlike Apple it it doesn't have the um product cache to back up what they're what they're saying I think is what um most of the detractors are that that's their point Mikey the tech whisperer no I I'm just saying I think that's what that that's what people are the pundits are you know they're they're kind of poo pooing beats on on those merits it's yeah beats is is also a much smaller company that you know the're what you're saying is they are basically a marketing company that contracted out their production and stuff to they're not anywhere in the category of Apple of course in terms of being able to design and build products but I that's not what Apple was buying what I'm saying is Apple was buying the marketing Savvy and the um the people who know how to connect with these artists that if you watch any videos any popular videos they have Beats Pills and they have Beats headphones and that's how that's why kids are buying this stuff is because it's it's connected and people know you know they know that it's part of the culture that they're representing their age group or whatever so I mean yes Apple wasn't buying high quality um headphone design Apple can do that Apple can fix that problem I think what they're buying into is real Market Savvy and and that's the kind of thing that you do acquisition for is to get into somewhere where you don't know how to do it yourself yep now when it comes to the the idea that they were putting extra weight into the product to make it feel better first of all you you noted this when we talked before that the uh the hinge was made of metal and that's not exactly extra right that's not they're they're not throwing in extra lead weights to make it heavy that's just we made this part out of metal because it's better right and what I wanted to add to that is that there are number of products out there not made by Apple where where people do know that heavier feels substantial and there are totally legitimate reasons to put weight into a product that otherwise would be light and feel cheap you know the there are USB hubs that fall off desks right I had a a portable mixer that had two or three channels on it and a mixer just needs a PCB board there's there's nothing to it and you open it up and sure enough there are pieces of lead glued to the bottom of the inside of the case to keep it from falling off your desk so this kind of criticism against Apple and Beats is is really sort of a non-starter for me because this is something that many many products do and it's not a a Bad Thing necessarily yeah it's part of product design yeah you have a desired result and the desired result is does not fall off desk what are you going to do I mean the most interesting part to me is that that those conversations keep happening and that people are just constantly talking about how terrible beats is and you know there's a lot of terrible products out there that they could be talking about but the fact that they're constantly talking about Beats tells you something about what the motivation is it's not that they're trying to warn everybody that this is a terrible product is that they're just trying to constantly create the sort of propagandist noise about how terrible everything apple is and everything that's connected to Apple and everything they buy and um that's based in fear because they realize apple is a pretty powerful force right now they have lots of money and before they had money they were beating everybody strategically now that they have money it's looking pretty you know a couple years ago you could say Samsung was a strong competitor Apple at this point Samsung is copying apple egregiously and they're still not you know they don't they lost that perceived Edge that they had and there's nobody else in Android that's making money and even these you know like U Jami and these companies that oh they're going to come storming out of China and take over the world no they're not a threat either so what is Apple's competitor is it Microsoft what is Google going to you know come up with a strategy and do something besides copy Apple stuff a couple years later well said so Dan parting thought to the end of the podcast my parting thought is if you look at iOS 9 and a number of technologies that Apple released or iterated upon built upon some more at WWDC they're entering a new phase of kind of confidence and that they're not afraid of showing off what they're working on this whole idea that wwc is restricted to everybody but developers is gone everybody can talk about this stuff because I think Apple doesn't have that fear that they're the smallest company in the room and they're fighting to you know get on top anymore they are on top and the number of companies that can really even compete with apple are it's hard to really identify a strong competitor and it'll be interesting to see how well Apple keeps its Pace going going and whether or not um I I think really Apple's biggest competitive threat is incompetence if it if it screws up its lead it's kind of Apple's Le um it's Apple's lead to lose so as long as they can keep executing I think they're going to do really well because I don't think they really face any significant outside threats but that's the biggest problem is if you don't have threats what keeps you going and so far we've seen Apple's kind of driving itself so I hope that continues brilliant Mikey your parting thought for the week um parting thought parting thought is uh on homekit is just the from the experiences that you two were describing I I it's an interesting area that I'm personally um looking into right now and I'm very excited to see what is going to happen in the future and uh for me I think homekit um not only is just for how people think is just for iOS devices I think it's going to actually um help the whole home automation uh field not just with Siri but um I'm really interested in the uh Geo fencing features and how everything um can work together under one ecosystem and hopefully Apple will be able to uh bring that together under one umbrella um that you know it's been so hard for other manufacturers to do up to this point and um you know I think I think they might succeed with this so it's exciting times thank you carplay and homekit those are my parting thoughts I love carplay I want more of it I want more people having the experience that I enjoy with it I think it's brilliant with homekit I like homekit when it works I I like the Siri control uh the one thing that I can think of where Siri doesn't quite handle way I want it to is that late at night I need to change the temperature on the thermostat and currently I open an application to do that if I have to start speaking late at night that's not a good situation for other people that are sleeping but bigger than that because that's a minor complaint is that right now we're in this phase of home automation and we've been in it since home automation began where everything is a glorified remote control it's onoff it's dim it's set a scene for me it's set this for me it's that for me the Geo fencing is interesting because now we're talking about doing something smart based on something else that I'm doing we saw the beginnings of this with Nest learning thermostat where it sort of learns my behavior by proximity and learns my habits for what I want the temperatures to feel like at what times of day and I want for everything else to get that smart and smarter so it's not just am am I coming home am I leaving home but it's when I come home what kinds of things do I like to have happen generally and can those things happen without me setting up a scene for them and initiating a scene I don't want remote controls I want smart things to happen for me and we're not there yet but I want to get there amen amen so let's wind it up this has been the Apple Insider podcast with Dan calling in from San Francisco yeah that was good where can we find you on the internet Dan I am I write for a website called Apple Insider and yeah it's good you should read it but um the other the other thing that I do is I I post stuff on Twitter at Daniel Aon and I'm also on Instagram same thing Daniel Aaron everywhere e r an so that's my stuff that's your stuff Mikey where can people find you on the interwebs uh same place Daniel Aaron oh no wait no uh at Mikey Campbell 81 on the Twitter machine and um I'm also working for this small website called Apple Insider although I haven't seen Daniel there so maybe we'll cross path one day I just did a story on the uh the new Apple store in San Francisco that's going up the big glass box I saw doors that open up awesome is it uh I saw that it's pretty my uh my friend works like across the street from that and he uh he's been giving me the updates on it I kind of want to visit just to see the grander well I'm your host Victor marks I'm at V marks on Twitter and this has been the Apple Insider podcast if Mikey launches a music service or Daniel puts lead in products we'll tell you all about it next week please leave positive RS on iTunes all rightyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast this is the Apple Insider podcast recording on Thursday June 25th I have with me today Dan hello from California welcome and Mikey from Honolulu Aloha Mahalo so I'm your host Victor this is the Apple Insider podcast and we've got some news for you one of the things that happened earlier this week was a rumor about an iPhone without any home button at all the idea was that touch ID would be built into the display Dan can you tell me what your thoughts are on this um it's one of those things that sounds like it could be far out in the future the the concern I have about it I mean the obvious benefit is that you can put a bigger screen on a smaller device if you don't have this margin to support a home button but also the home button has been a very characteristic to um element of iOS devices especially the iPhone and changing it from a button to touch ID it's it's a very physical thing and and you know you can you can operate the phone without looking at it so if if you integrate that in the screen it'd be really cool to have basically the touch Touch ID is a sensor that's scanning your finger it's a like a almost like a camera like a low resolution camera like a scanner so we we've seen some patent applications that involve basically taking that technology and embedding it into the screen so that you could re um handle both touches and hard presses with Force touch and even being able to scan your fingerprint through the screen and possibly scan multiple fingers it would be more secure things like that it would be a pretty significant change in the form factor of of the phone and it would change how use it and it also affects things like accessibility how do you use something if you're blind um so there are some issues to work out but you know it's a kind of a cool idea I don't think it's anywhere in the in the next year or so it would have to be a pretty significant jump but we'll see what what happens so Mikey yes no home button smart or stupid um well I think it is a definite leap I think could be very smart um I think a platform that would be ripe for this kind of Innovation would be iPad um the home button seems kind of lost there now especially when you think about how it's well rumored to be getting quite quite a bit larger having that one um stationary button on one side of the uh display kind of makes things a bit difficult uh but it's going to take a lot a long time like d said to kind of remap our brains into thinking um outside of the home button box as it were do you want this feature um well to me the uh the home button it I mean it it's not integrated with the screen at all I mean it's below the screen so it's really not a big issue for me um in fact I I oftentimes rest my thumb on it naturally holding the phone so um uh I would want it if it means that the display would be a true edgo Edge uh edgo Edge panel which would be really nice I mean that that is another benefit that could come out of this okay I'm going to tell you what I think I think it is highly possible that it's going to be stupid I think it's I think it could be awesome for iPads where you're right and a lot of things are gesture based but I I just think that there's something very good about having a home button and there are people out there who don't use Touch ID because they're concerned and paranoid about their security right they only have 10 fingers someone can compel them to put their thumb down um there are a lot of reasons why people don't want to use Touch ID and I'm concerned about accessibility like Dan was saying uh reachability and what do you do if you are site impaired and can't locate where your home button is um I don't know I mean the the accessibility features right now are I I don't know if you watch the um the session on accessibility at WWDC or Dan I don't even know did you go to that there were a couple things you're talking about like voiceover you there yeah so I I watched part of that um session which was you know I mean pretty pretty astounding stuff as far as what developers have been have been up to in that area that you know know people really don't um get to see or you know need to need to see or access it all uh but I I don't know that that having not having a home button will affect the accessibility of say an iPhone on any you know significant level it is kind of interesting it's kind of a a throwback to the whole conversation that wasn't too long ago when the iPhone first came out people were saying that a phone with a big touchcreen and no physical keyboard was just not going to work and Google was showing how you could pull a keyboard out the side of it and Blackberry had their keyboard and it was like this is the thing people care about this keyboard and you had all these pendants saying that you know physical keys were where it's at you just could not remove them and people were you know it was obvious if you're typing on a piece of glass it's sort of not um doesn't have that Clickety feel of typing on a keyboard that we were all used to and now everybody does every you have nowhere to locate where your fingers are and of course that problem has been solved yeah I mean we just look at it and you even people with vision problems or or other physical problems with moving their fingers or whatever it's possible to control it with your voice or some other other um mechanism or with voice over and there's a lot of these things that seem seem really obviously wrong until we get to the point where it's possible and so it this could be a thing where you know the home button feels very common for apple and in fact other makers were getting rid of this a lot of Android phones had sort of soft keys on the bottom and they became part of the screen and then you know they were experimenting with a lot of things Google originally had that track ball thing uh all those things are gone and if you look at Samsung which you know closely follows Apple they have a home button that's a little slightly different shape but it's in the same place and it does the same thing and um and other things that have tried to compete against that you know LG has the button on the back that they were trying to have take off uh they didn't really fly yeah when it comes to reachability as a feature we talked about this a little bit last time you you currently double tap on the home button and how is a a screen going to differentiate between double tap for part of a game or something and double tap on the screen for reachability uh I'd assume they'd have to incorporate a new gesture perhaps with Force touch I mean I don't know the the um the roll out could be you know first Force touch get people used to that then then a year or two later um Implement a nonh home button iPad and then after that a couple years maybe bring it to iPhone or so you know you know how they apple is great on iterating uh between their platforms so um all right so Mikey you're optimistic about this uh as far as it's going to become a reality or that is a good idea even just you like the I like the idea yeah all right Dan you optimistic or not um I I'm taking a waitand see approach I don't know what's going to happen but I I right now I like the home button where it's at and it's very natural and although if you have a huge phone like the 6 Plus um a lot of times I pick it up and I'm I have it the other way around and because the screen flips around you have to find out why is this not working oh I have it upside down I have to turn it around on my hand and put my finger on the button so if you had that b basically working in software the whole screen was able to do your fingerprint then it would give you more flexibility just to use it sort of without thinking so cautiously optimistic great I'm I'm gonna hold up the bottom and go with negative I will be the skeptic on this one I I think it's cool to see what they're going to do I just like my home button all right all right let's talk about homekit uh I recently got the Lutron cassetta Wireless starter kit and Dan you were in San Francisco and met with Joe data who we had on the podcast a few weeks back all about Inson so tell me about your experience with inston so far so I just recently I have I've been sitting on the stuff for a couple days um busy with some other things I just plugged it in and within 10 minutes I had two switches in the bulb the whole kit set up on an app it's very simple um very easy to use you just plug it in and for each each um little thing you plug in every there's an onoff module a dimmer an LED bulb each one has a number on it you just plug it into the app you say New Device here's the number sets it up in your network you can Define rooms really quickly you add your devices to a room and I was really impressed the app looks really great uh it just worked immediately I didn't run into any real problems um I haven't tested it for a long period of time yet so I have some testing yet to do but um it in general when I've when I've seen home automation stuff before it seems that there's a lot of kind of frustration that I think is a barrier to people adopting it and when you see just sort of the presentation of how all the things homekit can do it can be sort of overwhelming and you're thinking how much programming do I want to do to just make my house you know the lights come on but one of the things that we talked about when when they were showing me sort of how how some of the stuff works what you can do with it is it's sort of addictive once you start saying it up um you want to set up more things and you think oh wow you know here's here's this lamp that's hard to get to the switch and I'm tired of plugging this in uh wouldn't it be great if I had just another button on my app here and of course with homekit uh all these different companies that are selling their own proprietary systems can talk to homekit and it's controllable by Siri so you can just say hey Siri turn turn on the kitchen lights or set the set the room to the scene you know I'm coming home from work whatever and it has the lights dialed up to the 60% and this light goes off and you know the temperature goes down and the garage door locks or whatever um it it has some really cool potential for being really easy to use to the point where people are actually going to use it have you I agree have you go ahead M I'm sorry have you tried any of the Geo fencing features or did you not get a chance to do that yet um some of the geofencing stuff you can do requires like a proximity switch there's more conditional stuff that's coming in iOS 9 where you can say if if it's after 6 o00 and I've um walked into the motion sensor then sett all these lights do this so you can do more if then kind of things um yeah so I'm looking at see I also had the opportunity to play with this I had the Lutron kit and so I'm looking at geofencing in Lutron app and I have a home location and I have uh and and it makes me Mark exactly where the circle is on the radius map of where my home location is and then I have things that I can do arriving home and they're only after Sunset toggle on off and activate a seam when when I arrive home and and similarly when I leave home I have notify me if lights are on when I leave home and activate a scene when I leave home and those work well well we should talk about what working well means with my experience so far does it work period uh uh those things seem to work so the kit that I got is is two dimmer switches two remote controls for those dimmer switches so can have physical remotes that are about the same size as an Apple TV remote uh and also can control from the app uh it has the bridge and I can control via Siri and so I plugged two nightstand lamps into each of the dimmers and I set one in a room and set the other not in that same room so that I had the ability to see when I was turning a room on or off and I was able to do the Geo fencing but all of this required so much work to get working that really I just want to stab myself and and to to tell you about that right I took it out of the box I plugged in the dimmer to lights I plugged in the bridge and the app found the bridge and then wanted to update the firmware on the bridge which is always a fantastic welcoming experience to a product right and then the app wouldn't connect to the bridge so now I thought oh great the firmware has killed the thing no no it eventually got there but I had difficulty connecting to the bridge where it would say oh we can't find it so you log out and you retry and you type your password again and you log in and in about 20 minutes of that trying to connect the bridge and then I had difficulty connecting to the app where it would throw up a page saying web page not found error in the middle of the app after I'd connected to the bridge and it's always disconcerting when you're using an app and you know they're going to use a web view but you don't want to see the web view right you want it feel like you're in the app experience and they throw up this web page not found ER just brutal so then then I started to add rooms to Siri and I I had my two lights set up I had them both working so I went ahead and went into the app and tried to add a room through their Siri integration panel and you click on the plus and you name a room so I named it bedroom because that's what it is and it tells you that room's already existing it does where I didn't create that room where did that room come from so won't let me add that room so I ended up naming a room upstairs so that I had had something that's more of a name you give to a Zone anyway but it was the only way I could fake it into letting me have a room and just guys so home animation has always been kind of hard right would you agree with that Dan yeah it's it's every maker is us doing their own thing uh I think with inston they've been around longer and it's been a thing where I think we talked about this before where you know this is something where some guy would come out to your house and wire something up it's kind of like home theater right the guy with the white van rolls out and does it for you kind of thing yeah and a lot of these tools and a lot of these products were kind of oriented towards a technical person setting it up and then being sort of easy to work afterward and sort of being sort of sort of where what I think what what Apple's trying to do with homekit is take all these desperate different kind of products and make them work under an umbrella of strong licensing and with both homekit and carplay and a lot of these initiatives apple is branching out they're they're taking their ecosystem umbrella and not only dealing with their own stuff that they control but they're extending to other partners and it's kind it's more similar to what Google's facing with Android and trying to work with all these different partners and kind of hurting cats and and in know trying to get different players to work together and these companies are not really always on the same part as Apple I mean none of them are and so you start dealing with problems that you don't think of because there's actually a lot of complication under under the hood right I want to stop you right there just so we can finish off the homekit part of this conversation and we'll segue but what I want to say is is so your experience with Inson positive so far yes I really like their app it's really well done and this the stuff seems to be really easy to set up and get running perfect Lutron uh obviously my experience wasn't quite there the Siri part of it was was okay once I'd gotten the room part set up but and the demo worked beautifully I could demonstrate this all day long and it looks like I'm a genius but the setup was difficult so I think they're still a little closer to the white van guy rolling around setting this stuff up than than it being every person who ought to have home automation going on so carplay you just mentioned carplay and and we've had a couple of good announcements with carplay recently things like um oh GM putting carplay across their line in 2016 and the first car getting it is the Corvette Stingray and then it's going to follow on with Cadillac and Buick and and the Chevrolet Spark and Malibu and things like those um so you were saying that Apple is is really reaching out into this kind of space that Google's been confronting these problems in that the idea of of putting their software in other people's products yeah I mean Android by definition is sort of a generic software for everyone to kind of take in different directions and that sounded like such a good idea until we started what actually happens when that occurs and it's just been a mess year after year after year of anytime I mean even if even people who love Android talk about companies that are doing their own thing the motor Moto blur and the you know Samsung's what do they got it um touch excitement or whatever you know they layer of proprietary stuff on top of Android where they're make yeah TouchWiz which is a terrible name um yeah they should have gone with such excitement yeah would be much better than touch poo you know um when you have all these different companies trying to experiment they're they're adding new complications to the thing and so at this point Google is now backtracking and saying hey wait we're we're you know they're basically trying to do an iOS thing where they're saying we want to control the the look we're going to create this material design everything's going to look the same everything's going to be the same and they're still on the marketing cycle of saying Android is for people who are all different and don't want the same thing and someone's like well which one is it but but with apple with both carplay and home playay and some of the other stuff that they're doing uh they're working with different makers and trying to get them playing to the same level that Apple does internally it's much easier for Apple because they don't make as many different types of products and they have much more control over the hardware and software and can blend it together and so things like Siri and being able to have watch apps and have everything sort of kind of flow together on a few different types of Hardware so you're controlling these other products through them um is a new approach to something that's been around for a long time I mean remember like the second like Android 2 one of their big thing that year which I think was around 2009 was home automation never took off the Android at home thing and that was that was 2011 because I was at that IO that year I thought it was before honeycomb maybe it was the same year as honeycomb but yeah it was just kind of you know was like this this idea that sounded really good but didn't take off it was it was Ice Cream Sandwich here I think and the the idea of uh home automation in general is very old I remember way back in the day um oh God late 80s there was this idea of it probably even earlier than that it's probably mid 80s when Apple came out with the Apple talk it was like this cheap way to network things together networking was kind of a new idea at the time you know in a home you're right that used the uh the same Apple cable You' use for your keyboard you could connect your Macs together yeah was basically you're you're connecting things with a sort of Daisy chained um serial cable but there was a I think it was sort of a parody it was I think it in Mac world at the time where they were writing the story about how Apple was going to connect your kitchen and have all these appliances that would plug together and it was called kitchen talk or some kind of joke like that and that's kind of what we're getting to now is where you can have all these smart appliances and smart devices and sensors and you know things environment sensors your security system you can have all these things going on in your home and have a system that controls it so that it's not just as inordinately complex difficult to manage thing where it sort of fits in a framework where everything works and a company like Inson can make an app that controls not only its own products but you can also have other homekit products in there and Siri can you know you can give a command a Siri and you can have devices from different manufacturers that it just works with and that's that's an impressive accomplishment so some of the problems that we're seeing remember that hom kid is really only a year old mhm and car play is also you know Apple had really aggressive targets of how fast they wanted to get into cars and the automotive industry isn't like the tech industry it doesn't move that quickly 10 years is a fast moving setup for the automotive industry yeah so I mean when did carplay was first launched I mean they first started talking about I think it was the end of 2012 or I think that was iOS and the cars when they first brought up the idea of doing this and then 2013 they were talking about how they're going to get it into cars in 2014 mile a year so it's a little bit little behind what they would like to have done but it's still impressive how quickly they're moving yeah in 2011 I had an airport express that I uh had hacked to run off of USB instead of the AC power and I named that router carplay and I put it in my car and connected it to an ox cable and I had AirPlay in the car and I rapidly understood at one point that Apple was going to move into the car and they weren't going to do it like that they were going to do it a lot better the truth is I'm a I'm a fan of carplay you know I have the Pioneer I've had the Alpine and now the Kenwood announcement has just come out so there's another aftermarket option for people and I I really strongly believe that having these kind of systems in the car is a good thing yeah I'm wishing my car had it I have because what car do you have I have a 2011 BMW and it has pretty good navigation that I I paid a lot of money for um but there's no no integration between the so if I put an address in the car it's like a totally different way to do it doesn't sync to your phone or anything like that um doesn't work with the Ser or anything like that of course and so uh it's such a totally different experience when I put a location in my car and I said you know you can just pull up the phone and say hey so you're give me directions to the nearest you know whatever and not only does it just start working on the phone but it will also on my watch it will start giving me tap tap directions um so you don't even have to looking be looking at the phone like here's the turn coming up tap tap oh that means right turn so and and for a lot of our listeners who have cars and you know some people in San Francisco clearly don't because it doesn't make sense to own a car in San Francisco but the thing is when you're trying to upgrade radios right you can have an older car and upgrading the radio is very easy when you have a newer car like your BMW there's so much integrated into it that it it it may be impossible or if it is possible you have to make tradeoff decisions right there are people that have climate controls integrated into the front face of the dashboard where the radio goes there's uh there's there's onboard car dashboard display stuff that goes on there um you know when I when I changed out the radio in my Cadillac I gave up the ability to have the seat memories because the seat memories were stored in in the system that connected to that radio I think so I was able to put in carplay but I had to trade make that trade-off yeah so I mean it's evolving and I think one of the things with carplay if I if I remember this correctly in iOS 9 not only does it get Wi-Fi support which will require new hardware I think but also um the ability to for car makers to expose more of their uh proprietary stuff climate control things like that within the carplay interface so it see how this kind of plays out right so what's happening in in iOS 9 carplay is that you get a car app on the carplay display that's right in line with the maps messages phone and so forth and when you tap on that that allows car manufacturers to tie into the the existing car telematics the windows the climate control and other things like that um for aftermarket like I'm currently doing that's not even an issue it would be kind of cool there there's like I know BMW has a lot of apps and the kinds of things you can do if your car is enabled with apps and you can um you know some car makers let you um remotely start it bring it up to temperature whatever uh one of the things they they showed one of the complications on for Apple watch was a little indicator showing when your Volkswagen was charged up your electric car so it it not only shows you what the charges on your car but also you can use the new feature in watch OS 2 where you turn turn The the digital crown and it shows you in the future see you could basically calculate it instantly in real time how long it's going to take for the car to charge up we'll say oh it's going to be charged up at 8:00 by 7:30 I'm going to have enough battery to drive to La whatever I thought that was pretty cool yeah so one of the things that we don't currently have in carplay is a beats music service I I fully expect that to change when beats launches for real and let's talk a little bit about Beats one Dan so beats one is part of old music it's sort of like their free tier but instead of having this idea of let's allow people to stream music and then throw in ads which is kind of the model almost of iTunes M um iTunes radio it was sort of like kind of a Pandora um thing where you can't just play anything you want but you you get sort of a playlist and you can skip through a few things that's what Google just showed off um that's what Pandora is doing and Spotify is a little better version of that where you can actually pick any songs you want but it's ad supported and doesn't really contribute that much money um beats is kind of an interesting sort of Middle Ground where Apple's saying we're going to make a radio station that's free you can listen to and it's going to be a taste maker it's going to have real talent behind it people who really live and breathe radio it's not just um sort of a algorithm playing top hits um it's sort of a throwback to Real Radio where people tuned in to listen to real people talking about what's actually happening in the music industry and new talent and kind of providing a foundation for things so it's kind of interesting on a number of levels um the the other thing that they're adding into it is a lot of celebrities are going to be on it because Apple's really taking this next step in trying to save music I mean remember back in the day it was Napster and you know everybody was just kind of stealing music and apple kind of stepped up and said okay here's a Marketplace toell music and it was sort of a give and take thing where on one hand they made it so you you couldn't you weren't forced to buy an album you weren't forced to buy two good songs and 10 fillers you could buy whatever songs you wanted to and the music industry kind of pushed back against that because that was their whole model of we wanted to sell albums but once they realized selling albums is not going to happen anymore we need to sell actual products that people want to buy because the alternative is just people going to steal it once that happened then there was just kind of new wave of you know basically the next napor all these streaming products that are saying oh here's an alternative to buying music is being able to basically use Napster for free with ads or you can pay a little bit of money for it the problem is there's not enough people paying for it for that to be a sustainable thing for the music industry so Spotify has what is it something like 40 to 60 million users but only about a quarter of those are actually paying subscribers so combined in their their limited ad Revenue with the amount that people are actually paying the $10 a month or something uh works out to being very little person song play um and unless you have a critical mass of people that are paying for it unless you have something like 100 million users that's just not enough money so Apple's really trying to do this with scale so Apple music is I think they're telling uh radio labels or you know labels that they want to achieve 100 million subscribers because at that level you can actually stream things that it Mak sense to for artists to stream their music they're getting enough money from millions of people to where it makes up for the fact that they're no longer selling albums so right so having as a a gateway to that having a radio station that pulls people in and says here's new stuff that's happening and gives people a reason to either buy music or buy a subscription so that they can explore music on their own it's kind of an interesting idea and the fact that you're not just pulling in talent but you're having the music industry promote this is a service of this is a a functional model for paying for music it's not just you're going to listen you're going to be forced to listen to ads you're not going to be able to skip um it's more carrot and less restriction cool so one of the stories that came out that Mikey wrote about this week was about royalty rates Mikey y take it away um yeah so I mean royalty rates have been a hot button topic or recently became a uh kind of a firestorm this week with um Tay Tay Taylor Swift uh posting to her blog that you know she was shocked and disappointed at um that Apple would not be or apple was considering not paying artists and Publishers and labels for uh the right to stream the songs during a free 90day trial period for uh new Apple music users um Apple quickly reversed that and said they would be paying and the question then became how much would they be paying during this free trial period and it came out uh this week that they'll be paying um 210 of one cent per play so it's uh it's already comparable to those uh like um services like Spotify and um I believe uh Pandora that or yeah they're they're free tiers I think it's um that's what they pay or U supposedly pay so I mean it's a good it's a win for uh for Indie labels especially um who you know don't have these huge revenue streams from uh iTunes and they they don't have that much exposure so I mean they quickly uh signed up right after um this news broke or probably before you know um but it also broke around the same time that these Indie labels like um under the umbrella of beggar's group and Merlin signed on to Apple music streaming so it's it's really kind of a win for Apple in um in the sense that they get this kind of free publicity that they're not the uh the big uh the big monster that you know the uh recording industry has kind of made them out to be with with iTunes but um yeah I don't know what what you guys think about it as far as the uh 0.2 cents per play I don't think it's the recording industry that's that's made Apple out to be bad as much as the media that has has never cared about how much streaming rates were before until Apple got involved and then it becomes kind of Click bake news and scrutinized very coincidental huh yeah suddenly that everyone's interested in actually how much artists are getting paid and really um one of the things I I wrote when the first thing happened um when Taylor Swift was talking about how artists should get paid for things um one of the issues that looked like it was affecting Apple's negotiation because apple has a lot of money and really these streaming rates are not that high it's not that big of a deal for Apple to drop it's really like a few million um the amount that Spotify pays what Apple's paying for this first 90 days trial what they would be paying is very little so it's not like apple was not trying to spend money um I think one of the issues is antitrust if apple is basically saying here's we're paying for three months of service that's something that other companies that are struggling to have any Revenue at all like Spotify and Pandora can say wait you're you're dumping your product into the market um which is kind of unfair uh at the same time because we know the FTC is scrutinizing Apple's deals with streaming companies and how much they're paying and how much they're offering to pay so I think that played into it I think a bigger thing though in talking with music exec and seeing some of the the comments people have been posting is that Apple really needs the industry to promote this so they can't just push it out as a service remember the whole thing with ping and some of that I mean part of that was that they were partnering with Facebook and then Facebook pulled the carpet underneath them but part of it was it was sort of Unfinished and they did have some high-profile support from you know stars like Lady Gaga whoever who were on this this site but um there was a lot of resistance to throwing all their putting all their support behind Apple there was kind of a fear that Apple would be the big Monopoly and um not so one of the things was you know there were the music labels were giving DRM music to Amazon free or first and not allowing Apple to have not not not allowing Apple to sell DRM free music through iTunes so they were trying to kind of create competition for apple and I think since then we've seen so little real competition developing that the music industry is realizing wait if we don't if we don't get behind something and make it real we're going to get nothing but ad streaming Revenue which is very little and people stealing music and that's even worse so I think apple is really trying to build Partnerships with these companies and to do that leverage of saying hey if you if we give people a three-month membership that will get them hooked on this product and they'll love it and they'll like the you know connect features and being able to have connect with artists and things like that and they'll want to pay for it they'll want to support artists and so I think Apple's effort to have this three free period was partly antitrust where they're saying labels have to help us do this and partly was sort of Leverage to say hey we're going to pay you bigger rates in the future than anybody else is we're going to give you more customers than anybody else is so contribute and and um provide you know support us sign on for this free period so that customers will actually get a chance to use it and like it and and sign up um and the controversy surrounding that you know with swift allowed Apple to kind of say hey okay we're going to we're going to pay rates comparable to free rates or the ad rates that other companies pay so I think they found a middle ground so it wasn't so much you know Taylor Swift winning against this huge company that was opposed to it I think it was trying to figure out how do we find this middle ground and the way that it was discovered I mean the way that it kept Apple music has been the top of the tech news for the last three or four days in the week before it launches is has totally outweighed any payments that Apple could make so it's kind of a win for everybody you make the sound also reasonable you can also take kind of a conspiracy theory thing like it was all planned I I don't I don't think anybody is was genius enough to figure that out I I mean it's but it it certainly starts to sound sketchy because of how it how it worked out so fluidly but it does kind of feel like and uh let's see Swift Taylor Swift posts to a Tumblr somewhere and Eddie Q responds on Twitter I am twirling my mustache at the moment and uh and every media every newspaper every every television station gets on and starts talking about Apple music for a week and putting it headline news no no publicity is bad publicity the truth is I got what I want out of the story you know what I wanted I I wanted to use all the pictures in my photo library of Eddie Q doing karaoke and I got to and it was glorious I didn't really need to see any of those pictures again what did you those are fantastic I put together a photo album that I clipped out of the Keynote so we we talked about this earlier um what was your impression of the whole music part of the keynote it was kind of like developer keynote and all of a sudden it's like one more thing and it was a bunch of music people on stage and a lot of people have been very critical and saying this is really sloppy and you know these music people weren't prepared and so here here's what I think about this we are used to seeing an Apple keynote be rehearsed within an inch of its life right the the old Legend was that when was a jobs keynote that everyone would practice in an auditorium for days ahead of the keynote that jobs had a spiral bound notebook with his notes for exactly what was going to happen when and what his key points were for speaking and that that this none of this went wrong ever and even when some minor glitch happened that they Riff on it but basically this thing was rehearsed to the point of of perfection and Eddie Q's presentation didn't have that same re first feel it felt like there were slowdowns and high points and glitches with the right music coming up and some of that was excusable the same way you'd excuse a digital camera not working for jobs in New York in 2001 but some of this felt like it was just off the cuff and and in some ways like Eddie Q was speaking about his love for music his personal love for music and it didn't resonate yeah I'm kind of silly dancing and stuff I I think like you say I mean Apple had had such a very tight presentation style and expected that of other people so when anybody would mess up or anything that was kind of like what was the what was the anony toys like the radio controlled cars that they had W it was last year the uh the artificial eny Drive artificial intelligence driven remote control cars yeah it was kind of a cool idea but that it it sort of flopped as a presentation it wasn't didn't come off perfect um and that was kind of people talked about that like oh this is a big deal if you go to any other company whether it's Microsoft or Google or Samsung their present are terrible HTC well the the skits that Samsung runs my God just terrible I mean just ton deaf and sloppy and boring HP will like come out with a 100 different products that nobody cares about and rattle on for hours I remember remember what the last HP the the last HP keynote that I cared about was the web OS one where they showed us we were going to get tablets and laptops running web OS and it was going to be an ecosystem yeah and before that Palm sorry Mikey did you did you stifle a laugh there no of course not I mean like rest in peace and that was supposed to be like the great thing that was all these Apple developers that left apple and you know joined Palm to create this new thing and there a lot there's a lot of excitement behind it and even though it had a lot of the same DNA it just didn't really function well you know where all those guys ended up right the Palm guys yeah well they started at HP and bled to where they're all at Google they're all working on Android what happened I know some of web people that are working on Android but so so what happened is that there were a number of people working on HP webos and Pa webos that were H1B Visa holders and you pretty much when you get awarded those for your employees you need to start the process of renewing them right away just because the the gears of government grind slowly and the Palm people in charge of that whiffed they did not start renewing and they didn't start looking at until the Visas were coming to expire and had to be renewed and it was at that point that HP was was beginning to fall apart and Google said we know how to solve this problem and so they picked up all of the H1B employees that were working on webos and brought them to Android well some of the top talented at web OS at Palm went to Apple guy that created the notification system and some of the more valuable things so um yeah it's kind of interesting to see how things flow around but just in general I mean presentations by tech companies are usually awful and you know even title that was the music industry a bunch of artists that you think you know these are people that their business is beating on stage in front of people and it was it's embarrassing to watch and so it's not too crazy that you know when Drake got got on stage and he's just kind of talking sort of extemporaneously it felt like um I think it was kind of strange that everyone freaked out think there there's something about when whenever beats gets mentioned everyone just freaks out about how it was such a terrible idea that Apple bought them and how their Hardware is so terrible and it has weights in it I I want to stop and say when you say everyone you mean like people in this insular Tech Circle right yes cuz cuz not everyone really cares right no I don't I don't I don't think the majority of people care I think people in the tech industry that are writing the headlines and trying to create what people think and unsuccessfully I think because they've been telling us for a long time that we had to buy Samsung and had to buy Android and had to buy Windows and they haven't really you know these are the same people that were telling people not to buy iPods they're not they're certainly not very influential but they talk as if they are and if if what they have to say is really important yeah so you you alluded to this one of the stories was the idea that beats headphones were not a good value because they were putting weights in them to make them feel heavier and therefore feel like quality yeah it's very fashionable to talk about how crappy beats are and I mean to be to be fair it's not I mean that's just one of the problems with Beats headphones um they are overpriced and uh well let's let's not go down that do they guarantee audio quality that their reputation seems to indicate well it's a question right and and yes you can say no they aren't audio file grade for my viewer pure virgin ears that can tell with gold connectors and gold cables fine but um there there are certainly a reasonable pair of headphones yes they're they're middling headphones that are there there may be better value for money out there but they're a fine pair of product to buy right uh I think a lot of that money is going to the wrong place or at least it you know it was I mean it's all about the design but I mean there's nothing wrong with that if you want if you look at any products that kids like though whether it's Nike shoes or you know any kind of clothing it's not about how great it is or how cost effect it is per ounce of product it's about is this something you know a lot of it is marketing and the reason why Apple bought beats was not to like get their technology and how to make headphones because Apple could already made good products oh yeah it was about tapping into this music SA indust that you know if you look at La and you look at Silicon Valley they're very different they work on they're good at very different things and the things that Apple's good at and the things that Pixar is good at are not they're very different than the things that are people are creating value in in the la music industry and that's what beats was F you know that's that's their roots and so for Apple to be Savvy enough to make an acquisition in a different direction I think was pretty incredible because it's not Tim Cook is not somebody who builds you know music stuff that Taps into the 14 to 20y Old Market where beats has a very strong presence I've talked to a lot of younger people and their impression of Beats is extremely different from these people who are in their 30s and 40s and talking about how beats is not a good value and all this stuff it doesn't really matter if if your target audience likes a product and they're wanting to buy it that's value so I think the criticism was well yeah but I I don't know I on that point I think it also goes I mean apple is also very marketing Savvy they they also buil reputation but it's in a different direction but it's it kind of is a Counterpoint to what what beats is doing I mean beats is it's for lack of a better word it's it's about the hype and they're a marketing machine and they unlike Apple it it doesn't have the um product cache to back up what they're what they're saying I think is what um most of the detractors are that that's their point Mikey the tech whisperer no I I'm just saying I think that's what that that's what people are the pundits are you know they're they're kind of poo pooing beats on on those merits it's yeah beats is is also a much smaller company that you know the're what you're saying is they are basically a marketing company that contracted out their production and stuff to they're not anywhere in the category of Apple of course in terms of being able to design and build products but I that's not what Apple was buying what I'm saying is Apple was buying the marketing Savvy and the um the people who know how to connect with these artists that if you watch any videos any popular videos they have Beats Pills and they have Beats headphones and that's how that's why kids are buying this stuff is because it's it's connected and people know you know they know that it's part of the culture that they're representing their age group or whatever so I mean yes Apple wasn't buying high quality um headphone design Apple can do that Apple can fix that problem I think what they're buying into is real Market Savvy and and that's the kind of thing that you do acquisition for is to get into somewhere where you don't know how to do it yourself yep now when it comes to the the idea that they were putting extra weight into the product to make it feel better first of all you you noted this when we talked before that the uh the hinge was made of metal and that's not exactly extra right that's not they're they're not throwing in extra lead weights to make it heavy that's just we made this part out of metal because it's better right and what I wanted to add to that is that there are number of products out there not made by Apple where where people do know that heavier feels substantial and there are totally legitimate reasons to put weight into a product that otherwise would be light and feel cheap you know the there are USB hubs that fall off desks right I had a a portable mixer that had two or three channels on it and a mixer just needs a PCB board there's there's nothing to it and you open it up and sure enough there are pieces of lead glued to the bottom of the inside of the case to keep it from falling off your desk so this kind of criticism against Apple and Beats is is really sort of a non-starter for me because this is something that many many products do and it's not a a Bad Thing necessarily yeah it's part of product design yeah you have a desired result and the desired result is does not fall off desk what are you going to do I mean the most interesting part to me is that that those conversations keep happening and that people are just constantly talking about how terrible beats is and you know there's a lot of terrible products out there that they could be talking about but the fact that they're constantly talking about Beats tells you something about what the motivation is it's not that they're trying to warn everybody that this is a terrible product is that they're just trying to constantly create the sort of propagandist noise about how terrible everything apple is and everything that's connected to Apple and everything they buy and um that's based in fear because they realize apple is a pretty powerful force right now they have lots of money and before they had money they were beating everybody strategically now that they have money it's looking pretty you know a couple years ago you could say Samsung was a strong competitor Apple at this point Samsung is copying apple egregiously and they're still not you know they don't they lost that perceived Edge that they had and there's nobody else in Android that's making money and even these you know like U Jami and these companies that oh they're going to come storming out of China and take over the world no they're not a threat either so what is Apple's competitor is it Microsoft what is Google going to you know come up with a strategy and do something besides copy Apple stuff a couple years later well said so Dan parting thought to the end of the podcast my parting thought is if you look at iOS 9 and a number of technologies that Apple released or iterated upon built upon some more at WWDC they're entering a new phase of kind of confidence and that they're not afraid of showing off what they're working on this whole idea that wwc is restricted to everybody but developers is gone everybody can talk about this stuff because I think Apple doesn't have that fear that they're the smallest company in the room and they're fighting to you know get on top anymore they are on top and the number of companies that can really even compete with apple are it's hard to really identify a strong competitor and it'll be interesting to see how well Apple keeps its Pace going going and whether or not um I I think really Apple's biggest competitive threat is incompetence if it if it screws up its lead it's kind of Apple's Le um it's Apple's lead to lose so as long as they can keep executing I think they're going to do really well because I don't think they really face any significant outside threats but that's the biggest problem is if you don't have threats what keeps you going and so far we've seen Apple's kind of driving itself so I hope that continues brilliant Mikey your parting thought for the week um parting thought parting thought is uh on homekit is just the from the experiences that you two were describing I I it's an interesting area that I'm personally um looking into right now and I'm very excited to see what is going to happen in the future and uh for me I think homekit um not only is just for how people think is just for iOS devices I think it's going to actually um help the whole home automation uh field not just with Siri but um I'm really interested in the uh Geo fencing features and how everything um can work together under one ecosystem and hopefully Apple will be able to uh bring that together under one umbrella um that you know it's been so hard for other manufacturers to do up to this point and um you know I think I think they might succeed with this so it's exciting times thank you carplay and homekit those are my parting thoughts I love carplay I want more of it I want more people having the experience that I enjoy with it I think it's brilliant with homekit I like homekit when it works I I like the Siri control uh the one thing that I can think of where Siri doesn't quite handle way I want it to is that late at night I need to change the temperature on the thermostat and currently I open an application to do that if I have to start speaking late at night that's not a good situation for other people that are sleeping but bigger than that because that's a minor complaint is that right now we're in this phase of home automation and we've been in it since home automation began where everything is a glorified remote control it's onoff it's dim it's set a scene for me it's set this for me it's that for me the Geo fencing is interesting because now we're talking about doing something smart based on something else that I'm doing we saw the beginnings of this with Nest learning thermostat where it sort of learns my behavior by proximity and learns my habits for what I want the temperatures to feel like at what times of day and I want for everything else to get that smart and smarter so it's not just am am I coming home am I leaving home but it's when I come home what kinds of things do I like to have happen generally and can those things happen without me setting up a scene for them and initiating a scene I don't want remote controls I want smart things to happen for me and we're not there yet but I want to get there amen amen so let's wind it up this has been the Apple Insider podcast with Dan calling in from San Francisco yeah that was good where can we find you on the internet Dan I am I write for a website called Apple Insider and yeah it's good you should read it but um the other the other thing that I do is I I post stuff on Twitter at Daniel Aon and I'm also on Instagram same thing Daniel Aaron everywhere e r an so that's my stuff that's your stuff Mikey where can people find you on the interwebs uh same place Daniel Aaron oh no wait no uh at Mikey Campbell 81 on the Twitter machine and um I'm also working for this small website called Apple Insider although I haven't seen Daniel there so maybe we'll cross path one day I just did a story on the uh the new Apple store in San Francisco that's going up the big glass box I saw doors that open up awesome is it uh I saw that it's pretty my uh my friend works like across the street from that and he uh he's been giving me the updates on it I kind of want to visit just to see the grander well I'm your host Victor marks I'm at V marks on Twitter and this has been the Apple Insider podcast if Mikey launches a music service or Daniel puts lead in products we'll tell you all about it next week please leave positive RS on iTunes all right\n"