"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to episode 52 of our show where we discuss the latest news about Apple iPhone iPad mac Apple watch Apple TV and more we're recording on Thursday January 21st 2016 joining me today are Neil Hughes our managing editor hey how's it going also joining us is Shane Cole Holla At Your Boy Shane I know we were talking before we started recording and one of the topics you wanted to talk about was the Donald Trump Story the Donald Trump Story the Donald Trump story yes which you're have more specific than that well you referred to it as Donald Trump Jesus but the the story as I remember is that Donald Trump was speaking at one of his events one of his campaign stops in the United States and he made a comment about how he was going to cause Apple computer to start producing their quote damn computers unquote in the United States actually I believe it was their damn computers and things go ahead and correct us tell me exactly what he said I I don't know what he said I'm not going to look it up I choose to believe however that he just forgot what other things Apple makes like it's been so long since he interacted with any piece of consumer electronics that he just couldn't think of anything else he's like I know they make computers they make other stuff I'm sure so did you say they make fantastic products uh I don't know I I'll be honest with you I couldn't uh I couldn't force myself to read anything but those five words okay I'm going to read the quote and the quote is we have such amazing people in this country Smart Sharp energetic they're amazing Trump said we're going to get apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country instead of in other countries okay well godspeed later on he um he I don't know if it was at the same event or at a different event he said that he would do it by putting a 35% tariff on products manufactured outside the United States now I don't know if he means all products or just electronic products or just Apple's products uh but it's never that will never ever ever ever ever ever happen for a variety of reasons one I think I put this in the story The World Trade Organization would have a little hisy fit if we suddenly started enacting 35% protectionist tariffs they would have something to say about that I mean given that China's average tariff is only like 5% and they're famous I mean the the luxury tax in China now is I think 12% on clothing so if we went to 35% on electronics I think there'd be a little bit of a of a huff uh but yeah it's it's never going to happen it's an absurd campaign promise and it would cost billions and billions and billions of dollars and nobody could afford to buy iPhones anymore so there you go Bringing new meaning to Apple tax oh yes that would be the Android protectionist act because then you'd be able to afford Android products instead of iPhones is that the idea I I have no idea I have no idea what the end game is here I mean it's you know it's a lot of campaign Bluster to tell people what they want to hear it it it's like the fifth graders saying that they're if they get elected class president they're GNA make sure the soda is free you know like okay yeah I mean like it may get people interested and it may get you some votes but it doesn't change the reality of it I mean certainly more ambitious or uh less ambitious I should say promises have been made by presidents in the past that weren't able to be kept um you know I don't want to get too political here but you could look at something like the closing of Guantanamo Bay which is something that President Obama repeatedly promised to do and then once he got in office realized the logistics was doing something like that were a little difficult and so therefore it's still open to this day uh and here we are what seven years after he's been in office so nearing the end of his last term right so uh certainly a lot of presidential candidates make promises that they can't keep this is one of those that I would have to think would be pretty impossible to keep I mean technically speaking the president had has a limited power to impose protectionist tariffs that said I don't think this would ever happen I mean even if there were some scenario which he could he he could could impose a 35% tax on electronics manufactured overseas there's no way that he could possibly beat the tens of millions of dollars in pack money and lobbying cash that every consumer electronics manufacturer would suddenly shovel down congress's throat to repeal the Tariff Act of 19 22 which gives the president those Powers interestingly I mean I was thinking about this we know that when the iMac was first in production way back in 1998 that some of them were produced in California some of them still are go on so so some of the current flat panel iMacs are made in California assembled in California assembled yeah yeah the Freemont PL is still open it's reduced now but it's still open and the Mac Pro is in Texas I mean the so is the the uh a A8 Samsung's Fab for the A8 is in Austin I think but I believe the only top to bottom facility for manufacturing owned by Apple is in Ireland correct but even that's not top to bottom that's still just assembly is it oh okay yeah I mean they're they're not like fabbing Wafers there or anything right well yeah do but well they could make pcbs there though I don't think I think it's just populate them there I think it is larest assembly I think it is their largest manufacturing facility Apple owned is in Ireland yeah I think so well even the Mac Pro one is not Apple owned it's only Fremont andand I think the Mac Pro one is uh Flextronics I think uh Flextronics is now named just flex but isn't it a foxcon facility in Texas not a Flextronics or Flex it's not Fox it's either Flextronics or pegatron it's one of those two yeah I don't think Flex I don't think foxcon has do they have any Manufacturing in the US at foxcon I don't think they do I think they're brail do but not for Apple I don't think not for Apple so I mean I don't I don't the less interesting part of this story to me is Donald Trump I mean that's just campaign Bluster at that point I think any reasonable person can agree on that even people who support Donald Trump um but I think the more interesting part of this story is this kind of push uh and it's been going on for years by Apple itself to try to manufacture more in the United States uh Tim Cook himself has said that he would love to manufacture iPhones in the United States I don't think that's ever going to happen at least in our lifetimes but uh certainly an internal push for Apple to build stuff more in the United States could be a possibility without the need for any uh you know Apple taxes being imposed by the federal government or something like that right I mean what realistically do you think could be done to bring more manufacturing to the US well there is an economic incentive to bring manufacturing closer to the end consumer right um shoe companies now are actually at the Forefront of this Nike and Adidas are pushing really hard to that's why Adidas came out I don't know if you if you follow shoes at all but Adidas has these new 3D printed uh this new 3D printing process to make shoes and it's totally experimental and not right for prime time or anything but their idea is eventually that you make shoes at the retail store they're bought at which does a ton of things not the least of which is significantly cuts down on the complexity of your supply chain and removes the need to run a complicated uh Logistics operation well you don't have to worry about inventory any longer you got raw materials yeah so this this will happen eventually um anybody who has ever heard the 3D printing is the wave of the future thing that's why it's the wave of the future it's not for any other I mean there are some things you there are some things you can't make or you can't make reliably without being able to 3D print them that's a secondary Factor the real the real reason 3D printing is important to the future is this kind of thing it's bringing manufacturing as close as is humanly possible to the end consumer and now that's for us and by us I mean Americans that's a problem because our manufacturing economy is based around heavy industry right we make well not much anymore but we make steel yeah you know we make cars there's it's it's going to be tough times still make cars yeah it's G to be tough times for a while um but eventually eventually we'll get there well when you talk about shoes it makes me think you know obviously wearable devices have a lot in common with shoes in terms of custom style custom fit you know people need certain uh sizes and and widths and stuff on their shoes and stuff like that and you think about the complexity of uh bringing the Apple watch to the masses in terms of uh how many different colors do they offer now and different watch band combinations and sizes and all that kind of stuff I mean it took them a while to ramp up manufacturing of the Apple watch and it was in such limited capacity for those first couple months and when I say a while I mean like two months it was really a kind of a model Miracle of uh Logistics when you think about it but I mean think about all the possible combinations of Apple watch that are out there between the bands and the Styles and sizes um do you think that that's something that could be made a little simpler by uh uh if not manufacturing State side then at least doing something else State side what could they do there to to simplify it and make it cheaper for apple and better for the consumer so that's a little bit more of a complicated question because they the something like an Apple Watch or an iPhone is difficult to make in a a small scale process you know like making a shoe printing a shoe in a store is one thing but all of the the disperate components that go into an iPhone or Apple watch is a little bit harder what will happen eventually is that instead of having 350,000 people at a foxcon factory in Shenzhen you're going to have uh 10 guys looking over 150 robots at 10 different factories around the world right so if a iPhone the Mac Pro Factory in Texas that's that's kind of what's going on there as much of it is automated yeah you'll you'll have an iPhone sold in Germany will be made somewhere near Germany and an iPhone sold in China will be made somewhere near China and the same in the US and elsewhere that's where it's going okay maybe not for the electronics just the flow of sorry what about for the bands themselves just the bands yeah that kind of thing can be made bespoke yeah that's a really that's a really interesting idea there's a company here in Hong Kong called casify uh which I don't know if you've ever heard of them but they do they do custom iPhone cases and they also now do custom Apple watch bands you upload a photo and they print it uh they're like if You' ever heard Cafe Press like Cafe Press for watch bands and stuff and they print it and send it off to you and I could absolutely see something like that being in an Apple store you know the like we have in in PetSmart you have the little dog tag stations you know I can imagine in the future you go into like an Apple store and print your custom your custom watch band you buy the the watch itself and everything else is may be spoke we actually featured case toy in like a iPhone case Roundup a couple years ago for the holidays and I think some a representative from the company reached out to us because they said a lot of people were driven to them by our story or something like that and yeah I guess there's a lot of people that really want to get like an iPhone case with their dogs picture on her or something like that yeah there's um three is a big mobile operator in Europe and they also operate here and they are actually running a promo right now if you buy an iPhone 6 you get a voucher for case toy I thought that was a pretty interesting I mean it's not it's not just a side deal it's like their main promo at this moment yeah I guess there's a lot of demand for that kind of stuff it's interesting because normally when you're you're doing it as a carrier you you want to push a case that you've got in stock and take margin on are they taking margin on the voucher deal or they don't sell accessories as far as I'm aware um I mean they have tiny tiny accessory sections in their stores but I literally mean like one end cap it's interesting to me that you know Apple for many years uh has been leaving money on the table by not really playing into the customization of uh people's iPhones and and now with the watches they're obviously getting into it a little more but you think back to iPods and when they start doing them in different colors and stuff like that and then for the iPhone for so long they just didn't really offer a lot of variety they weren't even making cases and you know obviously now they make cases now they make a battery case they make all these custom Apple watch bands and styles and stuff like that that you can really personalize it and make it yours and I think that's been a a subtle but big time shift for the company and their focus um not only because it appeals to Consumers but it's a high margin business too you sell a $50 leather case and it probably costs them you know five bucks to make or something like that so uh they were offended by the idea of people putting terrible stuff on their product right theyed idea of some of these cases yeah it's good money for them as well but but just you know Johnny couldn't sleep at night because someone had put something horrible but colorful iMacs and iBooks and the iPods and stuff like that this isn't a new thing for Apple it's just interesting that they kind of for a few years there after the success of the iPhone kind of drifted away from it um you know you had a black iPhone then you then it took them forever to get the the the glass right on the iPhone 4 and the white iPhone came late and then finally they introduced the gold one one and now they have the rose gold but even still it's a limited number of colors compared to you know what you used to be able to get with an iPod or still can get with an iPod I wonder how so this is something I've been thinking about recently because this is the kind of thing I think about I wonder how if Johnny I has been wanting to do this kind of thing for a long time and always always always got shut down by Steve and the farther away from Steve that you get the more influence Johnny has and he gets to do stuff he's just always wanted to do but was never able to because he was overruled I I I would believe that yeah I mean you think about that first iMac again then that really you know was pretty out there in terms of the colors and and the look of it and everything like that and it was unique and it you could personalize it by buying your own color and the iPods yeah I I I could see that definitely being the case yeah because you for a long time the product marketing or I guess really as far as back as I know the product marketing department has run Apple product development right it's they make what they think they can sell um I mean they make stuff they want to make but they don't make things that they want to make and can't sell that's what I'm saying so I wonder if that if that ba uh balance of power is Shifting somewhat now um so the because Johnny I mean he seems to have Consolidated you know control of the company um for all intents and purposes so I wonder if he is if he with the reshuffling of the executive ranks I wonder if he is just now sort of the guy and Tim says you go do what you think is right you know I'll make I'll make the trains run on time and make sure we make tons of cash from the product side you do your thing don't leave out Phil Schiller in this equation well he just got he just got shuffled around he doesn't even I mean he's still VP uh wwm but he doesn't even uh their their head of internal C doesn't even report to him anymore right he has for years had that same kind of top tier influence he he and Donnie were both right there with Steve so well that's what I was saying he he had been the Arbiter of what they were going to build before because they would say we want to make this but can't we sell it and Phil would say yes or no but it seems now that that's shifting right it seems like Johnny has that I I think I want to wait for another product cycle to see what the results of that shift are I mean I hate to we all hate to do this because we hate when people throw it in our faces but could you what like Neil said look at all the options for the Apple watch could yeah could you have imagined this being in Steve Jobs's 2 by two Matrix uh no no this would not have made the 2 by two yeah I think he I think he only did the white iPhone because his wife wanted one but but you know Neil's not wrong either that it stems a little bit from that that having all the colors that we had for original iPod mini right because the iPod mini with all the different color skews wouldn't have necessarily fit in there either that's true yeah when you take into consideration the different uh capacities as well I mean there's always been a lot of configuration options that are broad for some products but well originally it was it was the 2x two Matrix and it was three options for each product in The Matrix and then when we got the iPod it sort of ballooned out from there and then you look at the iPad you can get it with or without LTE different colors yeah the iPad's a mess yeah they've they've really the product options have grown but it really hasn't gotten into ways to customize your product until Apple started to get into the accessories business I mean you have three four callers now for the iPhone um maybe they'll expand that in the future there's no really not really any rumors about that yet they tried to dabble in it with the iPhone 5c um the accessories business started with the iPhone 4 when we got the bumpers to solve antenna gate and that was there again under Steve right but it was pretty limited and now when you look at the options in terms of the different I mean you have how many colors of cases for the iPhones right and then you have Smart covers for the iPad and all the Apple watch bands and all that kind of stuff yeah and some of this I mean even just talking to to people that I used to talk to at Apple some of it was you you'd go and show them a case and their first question was does this case work with our cables does this case work on docking speaker products kind of thing mhm and you'd find a lot of the cases didn't work that they they conflicted with Docking products that they were too thick to to actually work or that they were too thick uh too tall for the connectors to make full contact on a docking product and you'd find that you couldn't get the Apple cables in or you'd get the regular charge cable in but you couldn't get one of the bigger ones that was like the uh the the VGA or HDMI cable to plug in and that's one of the things that they would reject when they were taking a product into their stores for the retail store was this case doesn't work with all the scenarios that we think our users need we're not going to take it remember when Apple used to charge you an extra hundred bucks to get a black MacBook yes totally who paid for that uh I know knew I knew three people who did yeah do you think that they would do that today no I can ask that's not hard to find out you John Scrivens and ask him if he buy another black MacBook do you mean if people would pay that or if Apple would charge that both I mean well I they wouldn't do it now I don't think because if you look at the a 12-in Macbook that comes in the same color as the iPad they don't charge anything extra for that so yeah I think people would absolutely people would if Apple had made the rose gold iPhone $100 more people absolutely would have paid it no question oh yes because but this is this is where like remember all those oh the only the the plus models are going to get uh Sapphire cover it's like who would pay for this because you can't see it like you you1 there because because when we're talking about Apple watch we have the aluminum body with mineral glass and then you move up to the steel with with sapphire but Neil NE Point yeah Neil's point stands that you can tell the difference between a sport watch and a uh a watch watch this is also on the aluminum watch and a watch watch and an addition watch but you can't tell the difference between uh Gorilla Glass and Sapphire whenever everything else is the same imagine that you were so excited about Sapphire and you're one of those jerks that had to tell everybody you had a sapphire phone the only way you could prove it is to take your keys out of your pocket and try to mangle your phone and go look it doesn't scratch I mean like you know I I can pick out 10 people who do that right well then you should reconsider your circle of friends but if if you look at if you look at you know the Apple watch yes the entry level model the sport has the ion X glass but it also has the cheaper aluminum which looks side by side very different from the stainless steel models I mean it's the entire package it's not just the glass for Apple to sell a model of phone with just the the glass different for an extra hundred bucks or whatever would be absolutely insane and it would be stupid and they would never ever do it now if Apple wanted to somehow defy the laws of physics and make a stainless steel iPhone that didn't weigh a ton then maybe they could do something like that or or you know some mythical uh uh what's that stuff liquid metal or something like that maybe but it would have to have a distinctly different visual appearance and some sort of added value for the consumer I don't think that Apple's in a position here in 2016 where they're just going to charge an extra hundred bucks for a color so on the subject of color can I make a confession sure I really like the rose gold iPhone do you I haveone I have a space gry one I know but I'm a man so there are many many men that bought the rose gold I know I've seen many of them anyway I really I thought it was be I thought it was going to be ridiculous but I've actually grown to really enjoy it the the space if it's ridiculous it's ridiculous in the best way the space gray iPhone is still too light they need to go darker like they did with the Apple watch it needs to go back to the iPhone 5 the black yeah that was really nice it just showed a lot of scratches and stuff more clearly so around theed which color you said you have the which one the space gray I have a space gray 6s space gray 6s and and you same I'm I'm still using the gold six I thought you had a 6S no I do not have a sixs okay no I'm I'm oh no that was the that was the MacBook a few weeks ago where you didn't realize that you had a uh Magic trackpad exactly or not a magic Trackpad a for Force touch trackpad yes that's right I went six months without realizing I the forest touch trackpad I am all uh space gray up and down if I could get a if I could get a space gray 15-inch MacBook Pro I'd buy a new one right now just to do that do you think that Apple would do like a gold MacBook Pro um that's a good question I I want to say no I could absolutely see a space gray MacBook Pro and I want to say no on the gold but you never know I would I I you know I like the gold 12in I would totally have the the gold in a larger size well so they've been doing this campaign recently where they show how everything matches all their collection their colle actually that's now I think about exactly what it is it's their collection right and my wife has been doing this for a while she had everything she has is silver with the white front she has a white uh smart cover on her iPad she has the MacBook Air is silver her iPad is silver her phone is silver and it all looks her Apple watch she wears the white uh white white sport band yeah with aluminum Apple watch and I'm not going to lie it looks killer like when when she's sitting like at a coffee shop or something which I I suppose is exactly the only time it would matter but it looks good I'm a little jealous well that's why they made the uh the the down Market Gold version so that you could match yeah I'm not gonna get the gold i' get the rose gold I would go rose gold probably I had a iPad Air 2 and I sold it when I got my iPad Pro or no I'm sorry I didn't sell it I gave it to my wife cuz she had an iPad Air and we sold her iPad Air uh she had a white iPad air with a blue Smart Cover um and it was a decision for a few days where she had to decide if she liked the Smart Cover the blue smart cover with the space gray uh iPad Air to or not uh she ended up sticking with the black one it wasn't a good match but yeah I mean these are important decisions like what matches well and even when you go into the Apple Store like if you want to try on a watch back when they first started doing the trons I asked them you know if I could try and mix and match uh you know a certain like a space black uh stainless steel with a certain band and they they wouldn't even do it in the store they wouldn't allow it because they let us do it when we went in for our addition appointment yeah but maybe it's because we were trying on the addition and they thought we were Rich you fooled them nice moving on I want to talk about things that Apple can't sell right we talked about all the things Apple can sell but we should talk about something that Apple can't sell and that is I ad is going away now you may not remember I ad I ad was this idea that Apple would create a platform that allowed people to put delightful pretty ads convenient ads ads that weren't terrible in their applications or or other things on their iOS and you know instead of getting these gross popovers and things like that you'd get something welld designed and apple was unable to challenge Google's mobile ad sales so what what are we losing out on here Neil what's what's actually happening with this uh I mean this will affect some developers that are very heavily invested in apple and probably Apple specific developers who are quick to embrace their kind of stuff I mean certainly there are a number of apps that do use I ads so this is going to be a change for that market but I mean in the grand scheme of things it doesn't really change very much I don't think uh I ads didn't really take on the way that apple wanted them to and uh the way that they predicted um it was an interesting concept but the reality of it just was that uh I don't know that Apple's heart was ever really in it either uh it didn't feel like something that they invested a lot in or focused a lot on uh and they certainly didn't talk about it much so I don't think this is a Scott forall project wasn't it uh I I don't know who was behind it Steve Jobs was still around when they unveiled it I believe I think he was of it was part of his thermonuclear war on Google and it just totally failed yeah they tried to do when it started out it was like a ridiculous Buy in like you had to buy a million dollars worth of ads in order to even get in so they only it's at launch they only had a handful of advertisers I think Nissan was one of the first ones and stuff like that and I guess I mean I guess it was kind of neat in a gwiz kind of way you tap on an ad and it worked like an app and it opened up and stuff like that but as time went on they you know they had to open up to more and people didn't want to put that much effort into the ads because that's just more cost in addition to the Buy in and so they just became kind of cheaper and weren't really that interesting they weren't really like apps anymore so in the beginning not only did you have to spend exorbitantly to get in but Apple did the creative you couldn't do your own creative you weren't allowed uh you could work with them obviously but a an IAD team made the ads yeah you know I mean it's it was one in a line of experiments to try to control the entire thing that just F let me ask my my understanding my recollection was that you didn't get the demographics of the people that looked at or tapped through or or waited on your ads and as an Advertiser that's one of the things you rely on to see that they're effective right so that also kind of led to the death of it didn't it yeah all every Apple has ever done in this case has been um uh a failure based on not I mean not a failure but it's it's not done as well as it could have because they refuse to share audience demos yeah there any number of app developers who are so pissed at the App Store can't won't even give them email addresses the the this is not going to affect most of our listeners what will affect most of our most of our listeners by the shutdown of I ad is the I ad Department also covered uh iTunes radio ads for uh uh content uh that you might stream Pandora like on iTunes radio that is no longer going to be ad supported and will only be under the um Apple music Banner which also means that people like myself who don't pay for Apple music but do pay for iTunes Match are going to lose that functionality as part of your $25 year uh subscription so I currently pay 25 bucks a year for iTunes Match and that gives me access to iTunes radio without ads and I can skip as much as I want uh once the changeover happens I'll no longer have access to iTunes radio and that's it I can only listen to beats one sucks to be you although that brings up a question who handles the Beats One ads good question I don't know I mean I'm sure that they'll still maintain some sort of internal advertising Department I I I I don't really enjoy most of what I hear on Beats one i' I've pretty much given up on it so um I I didn't use iTunes radio much either it's not much of a loss for me I know my wife used it a lot um and she's pretty disappointed I know my parents use it as well because they were subscribing to iTunes match it was just an easy way for them to get a Pandora likee service without having to hear ads um so I'm sure there are a lot of listeners out there who are in a similar position and and that's a unfortunate change I think I think they should have at least reconsidered it and kept it for iTunes Match subscribers yeah well the one way that I used IAD that I think I was on the Min minority side of was I used the IAD tools sometimes to mock up application ideas that I had because you mock up many people have done that yeah so it sucks that these tools are going to go away too well before that it was quartz composer was the hotness and then there was I producer for a while and now keynote is the the app of choice I used keynote from the very beginning for this stuff but you just put together a concept with it I mean there's no easy way to export that and turn in and start the basis for an app right code what you do with keynote when you're mocking up in prototyping is that you you link the buttons to other slides that have the resulting display and so you don't give any of the animations but you have I tapped on this oh and it shows you the slide that results and you export as a uh as a basically a hyperlink PDF well now you can actually do the whole thing you can do the same animations um there are teams at Apple that use keynote to do prototyping oh thank God and that's why they added a lot of because I was kopia for for like gosh I was using kopia since it came out in 2009 my suspicion is that the reason keyote has gotten so much love recently in that department it's because there are teams at Apple who do it and they were bugging the keynote team saying please make this happen for us well it's fast and it's awesome at doing it I once demonstrated an app that I mocked up at Apple and there are no other native prototyping apps that come close to the responsiveness of keynot I mean there are there are other ones pix 8 is really good now yeah but nothing else for a long time was around you could tell which things the employees that Apple internally use or don't use based on what gets attention when it's updated and that's why numbers sucks as bad as it does and that's why the remote app has been uh ignored for so many years and was not even a part of the Apple TV launch and the remote is literally maintained by one guy isn't it I know yeah and it was a built it's a built-in feature on the Apple watch and it didn't even work with the new Apple TV which is insane that's why uh Smart Cover unlock uh is no longer function with Touch ID like man you have been harping on that yeah that's well hey it's a it's a nice feature can we move to stuff that you harp about also like the uh the 4-inch iPhone well before we do that before we do that what do you have against numbers all of my friends who work uh in finance uh say that numbers is awful Exel no crap because they're in finance but for like Joe for me who only uses a spreadsheet when it's absolutely I don't care about you so no but I also only use a spreadsheet when it's absolutely necessary but what I do like to do and I end up having to use Google for this is forms right there used to be in numbers on iOS you could create a form and it would populate a spreadsheet with the results and that functionality went away and now I have to use Google Docs sheets in order to do forms that populate a spreadsheet that I can use the information out of later and I would really liked for numbers to have instead of killing the functionality off in iOS to have moved it over and made it also useful on OS 10 and in the the iCloud I didn't know that ever existed it totally existed and it was great but it was only and this was weird it was only in numbers on iPad you could not do the forms in numbers on iPhone interesting yeah I don't know instead of fixing this and making it everywhere they killed it if you're in if you're in finance and you need pivot tables yeah suck for you but I think for the the vast majority of people numbers is totally fun I it's much faster than excels who even the new Excel the new Excel is not terrible no the new office is great actually yeah um but the you know when I just need a quick and dirty spreadsheet I don't even bother opening so anyway moving on some more interesting things another thing that Neil likes to talk about smaller iPhones go on Neil well there was kind of a ridiculous video that came out today that made the rounds where it's really impossible to tell what the heck it is it's just some guy funneling what looks like an iPhone 6 or 6s uh and they claim it's an iPhone 6c a smaller one if the guy has large hands then it could just as easily be a 6S or a six but it basically looks identical to a iPhone 6 and 6s just smaller which so he scaled down an iPhone 6 in solid works and 3D printed a scaled down 4-in iPhone 6 and then spray painted at Gold is that what I'm saying no no I me it's I think it's just an iPhone 6 do with big hands probably probably just a regular phone um it's hard to say because the rumors have said like if you uh listen to what Ming quo has said um he thinks it's GNA look more like an iPhone 5S but he also says it's gonna have the uh 3D coverglass or whatever or whatever 2.5d coverglass where it's curved at the edges uh which is similar to the iPhone 6 and 6s so um there's a little bit of inconsistency about what the device is going to look like if you believe this video which uh Shane and I are very skeptical of but if you believe it then the new phone that's coming out in the 4 in size is basically just gonna be a small iPhone 6 um very skeptical is not negative enough to describe my feelings I I I don't know uh it would be interesting if they did that because then the whole lineup would look basically the same right you would have yeah the six the 6s the pluses and the smaller model would all be the same and just kind of scaled up or down um I don't know why why they would want to do that I think that they especially if they're looking to kind of juice sales at the halfway point before the seven comes out you think that they want to do something a little different maybe um to kind of incentivize the smaller form factor but uh we'll see you know I would personally I i' I'd like to see um you know something a little thicker and fit in a bigger battery and kind of make it the you know uh person who doesn't want to carry a tablet in their pocket you know out on the town for the day kind of phone but apparently I'm the only person on planet Earth who wants that so no in every every single iPhone thread there is somebody are you it might be you just in every one of them going I have multiple accounts and I going I wish they would make it thicker and had a bigger battery yeah I don't know I meane but when Apple concedes on that we get the humpback of iPhone 6 like this battery case is just like the ugliest thing I've ever seen I can't believe anybody would even buy one of these so have you have you tried one no it's so I tried one oh jeez and it actually no no no no no it looks ridiculous I would never actually use it in you know any scenario where I would be worried about being judged by my fellow human beings when when you're using a battery casage because you're at a show and you're not a conference and you're burning battery like there's no tomorrow that's that's when you pull out a battery case well in my case I have a little a really thin uh xiaomi um external battery that I keep in my bag but the battery C the done as it is it feels really good it doesn't like when you have a mopy case on it's just enormous yeah the same thickness all the way around I have the uh the newer mphi the smaller one and I really like it you have juice pack air uh I had the juice pack air before but this is a new a newer model I reviewed it I got I got to look up what it is hold on well he's looking that up uh anyway the with the design that they did for that when you're holding hand it doesn't feel like you have a giant battery case on it it just feels like you have a normal case on it so yeah the juice pack air um I've had for a couple years us with the iPhone 6 and I like it but it's definitely consider bigger it gives you like another 125% battery um and so Mofi sent me last fall the juice pack reserve for the iPhone 6 and 6s and it is considerably thinner uh but it only gives you an extra 60% battery so it makes a lot of concessions in terms of the battery life but it's thin enough uh and enough to get me through the day that it's become my preferred uh battery case so I recommend that one but honestly if Apple made a thicker smaller phone there are a lot of benefits to that uh including the fact that they could potentially fit in an even better camera right now you know as evidence by the protruding camera on the six and 6s they're limited by the laws of physics um if they were to make a thicker phone they could put in a better camera I you know I think that there would be a market for that and I don't think they would have to sacrifice their sense of style or make it that big that consumers would be turned off by it what was the the Nokia phone that had a optical zoom camera on the that was the 1020 was the name for it well so the 1020 was the Windows phone version there was uh one last gasp at actual like Symbian version of it before P view or something yeah pure something it had like an insane uh megapixel count something it was 40 something yeah think 41 megapixel yeah it was a Carl iiss lens on it too yep well and they did that for the Nokia 1020 as well yeah I mean that's a little extreme obviously um and that had a humpback on it too just to fit in that lens yep but you know if I mean if we started to think a little bit outside the box and apple wanted to make like a road warrior slash uh amateur photographer oriented smaller iPhone they could get away with a lot more by making it just slightly thicker or they could just make a digital camera yeah they'll never make a digital camera ever again again yeah they won't it's not g to happen quick cam it won't happen I mean just because the iPhone you know is is their bread and butter at that point but I think they they're never they're never going to make a three and a half inch photographer focused iPhone either no I don't but I don't that's what I'm saying I don't mean photographer Focus I think you could give it a number of advantages where you could make it appeal to a number of segments of the market make it appeal to people who like smaller form factor in their hand make it to people uh who like longer battery life uh people who want a better camera quality I think you could do something like that we'll call it the iPhone shut up finally Edition never happen it'll never happen now all right let's talk about this lifi story so recent versions of iOS the developer code beginning actually beginning with is 9.1 there's a cache file that makes a mention of lii capability so first of all what is lifi uh lifi is a marketing term for I guess it means light Fidelity it has no actual relation to wireless fidelity was always a stupid name also so well yeah uh but what it is basically is Wi-Fi via visible light so you have uh you have something like this in your house probably already if you have a television uh most TV remotes operate by IR infrared light that's why you can't uh point you have to point it generally in the vicinity of your TV for it if you block the end of the remote it will not work yeah exactly uh you can actually see it work if you uh hold it and points it at your iPhone camera while you have the camera open you can see it see it work I have had that work since iPhone 4 because they've been putting IR filters oh that's right they put filters on it now okay well never mind you can't do that so forget that little science experiment if you have an old digital camera yeah then yeah you can see anything without an IR felter on the front of it yeah but anyway so what happens is when you push say the power button it blinks a little infrared LED in the front of the remote control really really fast uh the nominal speed is I think 38 khz I could be wrong uh so 38,000 times a second and the TV sees these flashes of infrared light on its infrared receiver and decodes them into an electronic signal that means you know turn the volume up or turn the volume down on or off what have you and lii works on the same principle except it works with visible light so the uh say the Le if you have LED track lighting in your house it can be pulsed really rapidly uh so fast that you wouldn't be able to see it uh you wouldn't be able to tell it was being pulsed but it can be pulls so rapidly uh to or it can be pull rapidly enough to accomplish the same idea and because the speed of light is you know quite fast uh it would enable much faster communication there are problems uh like IR it needs line of site so you can only get a data connection literally while you can see the light uh but there are a lot of advantages so there you go so I don't think line of sight is an incredibly huge problem because when you're in a building which is where you're going to be if you're using lifi you're pretty much in range of a light bulb right you're you're not sitting in a closet that's got no lights you're sitting somewhere that's got lighting well that's true if you are somewhere with overhead lighting or ubiquitous overhead lighting but don't forget there are a lot of places that use indirect lighting I mean my apartment is a perfect example I don't I have overhead lights but they're never on I have indirect lighting everywhere so if you are someplace like that then it's not going to be helpful what's interesting to me is that this this can combine a couple of different things right because the first question is okay great you can pass data to a light bulb how do you get that data back to the the network in there to the outside world well you could use power line and use the power lines that connect the power to the bulb to transmit back to the router um and that would be reasonable you you could also do um like you know crazy things like Wi-Fi in the bulb and just have the bulb do that but what's what's interesting to me here is is you know this is this has impacts on things like Philips Hugh and some of the other smart light bulbs that we've been seeing so far where now you're going to have a bulb that's not just smart and controllable by the app but also does your data yeah there's a company in India that already has a proof of concept out and they're testing it in I want to say the Netherlands in a warehouse setting so I there's definitely some interesting some interesting options here it's going to need a lot more development and it's going to be a long way down the road uh but we've seen them ex them being Apple explore this before they have a patent I think from 2013 13 yeah yeah uh discussing ways of making camera sensors do double duty so you could set them in image mode to take a photo and the rest of the time they would be in data reception mode wild so it's it's in iOS and it remains to be seen if we'll actually see it as a a practical thing we can demonstrate I would rather they do wi or Wireless power at first but that's just me ESPN still in talks about an apple streaming still in talks with apple about a streaming service what do you like about this story Neil I mean if Apple's going to do it streaming service ESPN's kind of the big dog right you need you need to have live sports for your streaming service to be successful that's so I'm gonna stop you right there and tell you why you're wrong no not okay there was uh somebody did a survey two weeks ago I came out I think two weeks ago it may have been done a long time ago uh something like 55 or 56% of people surveyed said that they were a cable subscribers said that they would drop ESPN if it meant saving 8 a month on their cable the Assumption has always been that the reason people don't young especially young men under 50 don't cut the cord is because of the ESPN but apparently that's not actually the case ESPN has a much bigger mind share than an actual um audience market share I feel like ESPN's relevance varies depending on what sport you're watching too um yes very much so if you watch the NFL um certainly ESPN has Monday Night Football which is by far not even close the top rated program on all of cable it's it it beats most broadcast shows I mean Monday Night Football is huge but that only affects two teams a week so by and large an NFL viewer is going to be able to get their local market games over the air or you know however um through their local affiliate CBS uh or fox or NBC for the Sunday night game um now if you're into college basketball for example uh you're probably way more likely to be an ESPN viewer if you're into college football you're definitely more likely to be an ESPN viewer uh College Football H now ESPN has a strangle hold on that market they uh control uh pretty much all the SEC games except for the big matchup of the week of SEC football the biggest SEC weekly matchup remains exclusive to CBS but uh that will end soon probably um uh the uh Big 10 Network or no it's not the Big 10 Network somebody else also has ESPN running it ESPN runs the network Longhorn Network they run the ACC Lorn Network y and they will eventually run the Big 12 network if Texas gets their head out of their butt yep and ESPN also is the sole broadcaster of the college football playoff and uh college football National Championship now uh that's a really big deal if you're at all into college football now if you don't care about college football you probably don't give a crap about ESPN or college basketball or at the NBA a lot of NBA games are on ESPN but that's split between ESPN and TNT uh baseball's another one where TBS has a lot of Baseball ESPN has a lot of baseball so you may not but if you're if you're a baseball fan though you have an amazing option because MLB.TV is fantastic and they they just had they just went through a lawsuit over MLB.TV and I think for the next two years there won't be any local blackouts it's really a huge deal it's a Content land grab that's been going on for years and um ESPN continues to secure exclusive rights but then then there's some over-the-top services like MLB At Bat that make it less relevant um the NHL is exclusive to NBC um so you know you run down the list of of sports I I think ESPN recently has been making a push into NASCAR um they didn't really pay much attention to NASCAR for years and now they're getting into that um ESPN is also focusing on some more like entertainment focused uh uh content and and and um ESPN doing ESPN is doing professional wrestling now yes they do have a weekly uh segment on Sports Center covering professional wrestling so they're trying to broaden their base uh to appeal to more people but it's really kind of dependent on what sports you're interested in watching but I still think that if you're going to do a live streaming TV service uh the NFL is the most important thing but ESPN is uh probably just as important just in terms of uh the the the breath of content that they have exclusive access to including Monday Night Football yeah now so sling has ESPN or at least some portion of ESPN in it right the oo they have all of ESPN okay depending which package you have the base package I think just has ESPN and ESPN 2 but the sports package has all of them how are they doing uh they're about to pass two million subscribers I think the thing with sling is the inability to record content well the thing with sling is it kind of quality kind of sucks okay with an apple streaming service you're not gonna be able to record content either they have't nailed the streaming technology portion of it yet I mean here's how it works I watch sports live I pretty much uh DVR everything else and so I stick with cable because if I want to watch these programs uh and not pay $3 an episode on iTunes or some crap like that or wait 48 hours or a week or whatever for it to show up on Hulu you got to have cable and so for the convenience of it the ability to fast forward through ads and watch it more quickly pretty much any scripted television I watch DVR um sometimes the same night uh sometimes the next night sometimes they'll pile up and I just don't get around to them um I do have I pay for uh subscriptions to HBO uh now or go whichever one is cable free um and I also pay for the subscription to Showtime uh but those are separate from my cable provider and it's all on demand there is no live streaming component to it we don't have cable uh we have we also have HBO Go and Showtime I have sling which I only use to log in to watch ESPN on the Apple TV so I essentially pay $20 a month for ESPN and will continue to do so I have MLB.TV for baseball I don't watch the NFL live just because it's a pain in the ass I I do watch the Sunday night game because NBC streams those for free um but it's important remember rest is Netflix it's important to remember because there was a study that came out this week showing share of traffic and stuff like that the vast majority of streaming content providers out there are not showing live content they're it's all on demand they're they I mean YouTube does some live stuff but that's not really their bread and butter Netflix does Nothing Live Hulu does Nothing Live uh Apple you know will do an event live occasionally or something yeah twice a year yeah but they don't really do any live content so you're looking at sling um you know probably one of the bigger uh uh live providers is WWE network has a live Channel included with their um their subscription service so you can watch well yeah MLB but but that's a but that's a a game by game basis they don't have a linear channel is what I'm saying right that's true yeah so uh NHL does the same thing where you can subscribe and Direct TV obviously has an NFL uh streaming package as well but those are on game by game basis uh to have a linear Channel with constant content you can't get a subscription to the MLB Network you can't get a subscription to the NHL Network or the NFL Network without paying for cable those are exclusive to cable so to have a linear Channel like ESPN would be a huge deal for something like apple to help differentiate them from the other content providers out there and that's really was differentiating sling now I think sling shortcoming other than the apparent quality issues is the fact that you can't record anything yeah I don't know that's something feel it matters that's something I never considered before I wonder how widespread that is because there there's a lot of little things like that that you don't think about but actually make a big deal for a lot of people do you do you watch scripted television yes but not in any sort of timely manner okay but how do you watch it like let's say like Agent Carter premiered Tuesday night um I would buy an iTunes season pass okay see so it premiered Tuesday night my wife and I didn't get a chance to watch it we were watching something else a hockey game was on I think so we watched it last night it was a 2hour Premiere and we had it we had it tooed and or DVR and we could just fast forward through the commercials and watch it in an hour and a half or whatever it was but yeah I mean otherwise it on Hulu in a couple days otherwise I would have paid uh three bucks per hour on iTunes probably for us it was a two-parter to get it in standard deaf or whatever they charge I'd pay like six bucks when you start adding that up if you watch five or six shows it's actually cheaper to get cable and that's just to watch a handful of shows you know who does this really well I pay 11 bucks for Hulu ad free and I'll just watch whatever I want on that and cheer than cable and only from a network that supports Hulu uh and then also for the ones that support it in ad free because they're as I found some that run ads before or after the show uh who does this really well is the BBC actually yeah except for the geographical region problem I was gonna say you guys have absolutely no experience with this but the oh no no I have an i player account but I player is really I this is how I watched the Sherlock season premiere I think it was on player an hour after it was on TV in England really really well and the streaming is phenomenal I can stream well they finally got their heads out their butts around Flash in full HD from the I player app through please don't kick me off DBC through my VPN because I don't live in England I live in Hong Kong through my VPN through the iPad over AirPlay to my TV with no loss of quality it's extraordinary the BBC used to be about trying to spread the England to the rest of the world and and get their stuff out there and they've been really stupid about the geographical region blocking you know what's that mean for expats it's it's ridiculous well it it pains me to say this but I will commend uh cable companies on doing something right uh by and large on demand Services through cable providers are pretty good these days um so last night trying to catch up on TV again a Tuesday night episode of a new girl that my wife and I were trying to watch for some some reason the recording was messed up and I have a 5.1 system in the center channel didn't record properly on the live broadcast just went to the on demand and played it of course there's no fast forward option so you can't fast forward through the ads but I understand that and it was available less than 24 hours after the episode aired and I had zero problems watching it and high def started right away so um as much as I hate cable and love would would love to get rid of it they do a pretty good job with their on demand Services these days now that said there are some networks that don't participate I believe ABC and Time Warner continue to have a UT so you can't get any ABC content available on demand Through Time Warner and those contract disputes are just insane but that's why this is whole this whole thing to borrow a Steve Jobs phrase is a bag of hurt because you don't know what you're getting into I could switch to Hulu but what Network's goingon to comply and I gotta pay an extra couple bucks to get really adree as opposed to limited ads and do I have to wait 48 hours for it to show up on there it's just a pain in the butt yeah this is this exact thing is what has made me other than Sherlock and top gear which hilarious well not top but yeah exactly but other than stuff that was available on the BBC because it's such a pain-free experience this is exactly what stopped me from watching shows every week you know is my favorite show in the history of television and I still haven't seen the second half of the last season th this is exactly what has stopped Apple from getting into the business because Apple doesn't want to come into this half-baked Apple doesn't want to come in and not have ESPN and not have a deal with CBS to show their content on demand because no one's going to pay for that people you know you might get some early adopters to sign up for something like uh uh uh sling TV where they might you know be eager to embrace it or something like that but for the average person if they sign up for sling TV and they're like oh I can't DVR this or oh I can't get uh you know the Food Network or whatever you know I'm sure that Apple's done the research and they're saying that our Target demographic is this big you look at this initial success that they've had with apple music and they're not half baking this stuff I mean they're already uh out well outpacing Spotify as we talked about last week in terms of their growth and the number of people they've been able to bring in just because of their power and their clout if they're going to get into this business they're not looking to get two million subscribers like sling TV did they're looking to get tens of millions of subscribers they're looking to to accelerate the cable cutting process and so they're going to have to hit all of those points they're going to have to get ESPN they're going to have to get On Demand they're going to have to have you know cloud storage of stuff you want to record or however they do it it's all going to have to work and it's going to have to be affordable too and that's really tough yeah well without getting caught in a loop talking about TV I want to move on to garage band and apple updated Garage Band for iOS with a new interface that that makes it look like a hardware controller for a DJ with drum machines and things like that they also released a music Memos app so what what are these apps about what what's what's really going on here that they've updated them for us can I just say your transitions are flawless thank you sir or Segways I I suppose Segways so I actually haven't used new garage band for iOS but I will quickly talk about voice memos and then Neil can make us some stuff about Garage Band sure so uh sorry not voice MOS music memos is based on the idea of voice memos apparently what we hear is that a lot of musicians were using voice memos on the go and somehow news of this phenomenon got back to Apple and they said you know we can do this better so they made music memos which is voice memos for music and you can record it's it's like a mini it's sort of like a mini garage band uh but without the editing features you can record stuff you can uh tag your recordings manage your recordings but importantly it also includes some of the automatic backing track features from garage band so if you record say a a guitar uh a five minutes of guitar music memos will Analyze That for chord and Tempo and then put a drum track behind it for you so while you're out you can get a good idea of how your your song is going you know you can you can actually develop music uh on the go and then you can bring come back home and bring it directly into logic uh only Logic Pro 10 or the new garage band uh via iCloud so it's actually pretty if you are got person who likes to make music uh it's actually a pretty cool little deal and it's free yeah and it's free it looks pretty huge I mean just the idea of having a good memo app for capturing song ideas is a good thing and and voice memos was always not quite good enough because the recording quality was not uh not great they compressed the files pretty heavily because it was for voice we should note that they uh music memos records in Lawless yeah and and it's adding in the guitar tuner just killed off all of the guitar tuner apps although I I really do like polytune because polytune is seriously cool if you're a guitar player um polytune you can strum all six strings at the same time and it will pick out and show you which ones are sharp or flat at the same time you don't have to play note by note it's is really cool and the fast way to tune your guitar up but uh but still having a guitar tuner built into Apple's one is a big deal uh and as you say analyzing the the key signature and being able to tag for first chorus and things like that uh that's that's great this is really quite cool yeah I'm gonna be playing with this um and Neil tell me about garage band uh so the big changes in garage band are uh there's a whole new uh DJ controller section which would take on the likes of uh tractor and some of the other popular uh iPad DJ options out there I don't looks looks kind of like triggering Ableton Live a little bit with you know a Novation Launchpad for example and this is all in in apple and garage man style very simple so um simple to mess around with and uh for people that want to master it and do a little more technical stuff that's in there too but it does uh features that you would expect for like an amateur DJ like keeping beats in sync with the time and pitch and stuff like that so you can merge and and do cool stuff and make it sound like you're way more talented than you actually are um and they also have a new Drummer mode which uh gives you the option to create sick beats in uh different uh sounds Taylor I just heard your entire Soliloquy in Tay's voice I was I was hearing Taylor Swift but go on yeah I mean it's pretty cool um you know just drum machine go on there kind of mess around uh a little more advanced way to create stuff and uh play along with it um for a lot of people the more interesting features may actually be that uh GarageBand has also been updated to be designed for the retina display on the iPad Pro so there's more options on the screen um when you run it on your larger iPad it takes advantage of the screen real estate which is great um tired of just seeing apps just blown up to the 12.9 inch screen size you know to really take advantage of the iPad Pro you have to put more on the screen uh and do it in a way that makes sense unlike like when you open up the app store and there's just like a million apps to tap on there it's like this wasn't thought out very well um and then uh on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s plus uh Apple's also added support for 3D touch so uh if you're doing things like playing on the piano or whatever you can press harder or softer and it will gauge how hard you're pressing and uh uh emulate the instrument that you're playing accordingly so it looks like as I'm as I'm looking at Apple's copy on this they say to get started pick a template from popular genres like EDM house hip hop and more and then tap a cell in the template to turn on the loop so you're using Loops they've got already created and using that to to make your DJ music uh I you know I go back to things like loopy HD where you can record your own loops and then trigger them and if that was possible in this interface that would be really empowering because then you could Loop and then play live over the loops that you've created you know kind of Stack Up pieces to a song and build a live performance out of it yeah I mean messed around with Garage Band on iOS and and it's like uh iMovie one of those things that uh may not get as much attention as it deserves because it's actually quite powerful and and quite interesting and and quite capable um especially they have you know midi support for instruments and lightning connections and all kinds of cool stuff that you can do stuff can go through the headphone jack too to record through it or you can just use the mic so it's uh it's out of my wheelhouse I'm not I'm certainly not talented enough to use something like this or make something out of it but you play guitar don't you poorly uh but yeah anyway here's wonder wall I I think uh I I think that this is a good update and uh you know I think that it's it's a niche market but it's one that apple is wise to cater to and I updated my iPhone I I downloaded the iOS 9.2.1 update and installed it the other day um we were we covered that update we also covered the 10 11.3 update so what did we get out of these things not much it's basically some bug fixes and stuff the the big uh change for 9.2.1 is there was a bug with installing apps for uh uh Enterprise users so um if that affected you then you may be no longer affected after you update but other than that by the fact that this is a 0.1 update uh tells you all that you need to know about uh uh the fact that it's just basically security and and minor bug fixes yeah been hearing reports from people using iPhone 4S and 5 that It sped up their devices a little bit is there any there was a test that was done on uh YouTube where a guy compared um iPhone running an older iPhone like a 4S running 8.4.1 to 9.2.1 and they were pretty much comparable um in terms of speed uh iOS 9.2.1 did some stuff faster um 8.4.1 did some stuff slightly faster but uh from what I saw slightly comparable I guess people had complained with earlier builds of iOS 9 that their older iPhones specifically the iPhone 4S ran egregiously slow so if you've been holding off and updating may be a good time how El do you know when it's time to buy a new iPhone right well there's I hear from people all the time like conspiracy theories that Apple purposefully makes sure that new iOS updates run slow on their phones so they're forced to upgrade or something I always find that kind of stuff funny but um yeah it seems like it runs pretty well on older Hardware so uh if you've been holding off an upgrading because you're concerned about speed uh now might be a good time to take the plunge brilliant this is our episode this is episode 52 of the Apple Insider podcast and Neil where can people find you on the internet well you can read what I write at uh Apple Insider uh and I am on Twitter at thisis Neil Shane where can people find you on the internet I too am an apple Insider but not on Twitter if Neil is to class president and makes all sodas free we'll be sure to tell you all about it on next week's Apple Insider podcastyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to episode 52 of our show where we discuss the latest news about Apple iPhone iPad mac Apple watch Apple TV and more we're recording on Thursday January 21st 2016 joining me today are Neil Hughes our managing editor hey how's it going also joining us is Shane Cole Holla At Your Boy Shane I know we were talking before we started recording and one of the topics you wanted to talk about was the Donald Trump Story the Donald Trump Story the Donald Trump story yes which you're have more specific than that well you referred to it as Donald Trump Jesus but the the story as I remember is that Donald Trump was speaking at one of his events one of his campaign stops in the United States and he made a comment about how he was going to cause Apple computer to start producing their quote damn computers unquote in the United States actually I believe it was their damn computers and things go ahead and correct us tell me exactly what he said I I don't know what he said I'm not going to look it up I choose to believe however that he just forgot what other things Apple makes like it's been so long since he interacted with any piece of consumer electronics that he just couldn't think of anything else he's like I know they make computers they make other stuff I'm sure so did you say they make fantastic products uh I don't know I I'll be honest with you I couldn't uh I couldn't force myself to read anything but those five words okay I'm going to read the quote and the quote is we have such amazing people in this country Smart Sharp energetic they're amazing Trump said we're going to get apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country instead of in other countries okay well godspeed later on he um he I don't know if it was at the same event or at a different event he said that he would do it by putting a 35% tariff on products manufactured outside the United States now I don't know if he means all products or just electronic products or just Apple's products uh but it's never that will never ever ever ever ever ever happen for a variety of reasons one I think I put this in the story The World Trade Organization would have a little hisy fit if we suddenly started enacting 35% protectionist tariffs they would have something to say about that I mean given that China's average tariff is only like 5% and they're famous I mean the the luxury tax in China now is I think 12% on clothing so if we went to 35% on electronics I think there'd be a little bit of a of a huff uh but yeah it's it's never going to happen it's an absurd campaign promise and it would cost billions and billions and billions of dollars and nobody could afford to buy iPhones anymore so there you go Bringing new meaning to Apple tax oh yes that would be the Android protectionist act because then you'd be able to afford Android products instead of iPhones is that the idea I I have no idea I have no idea what the end game is here I mean it's you know it's a lot of campaign Bluster to tell people what they want to hear it it it's like the fifth graders saying that they're if they get elected class president they're GNA make sure the soda is free you know like okay yeah I mean like it may get people interested and it may get you some votes but it doesn't change the reality of it I mean certainly more ambitious or uh less ambitious I should say promises have been made by presidents in the past that weren't able to be kept um you know I don't want to get too political here but you could look at something like the closing of Guantanamo Bay which is something that President Obama repeatedly promised to do and then once he got in office realized the logistics was doing something like that were a little difficult and so therefore it's still open to this day uh and here we are what seven years after he's been in office so nearing the end of his last term right so uh certainly a lot of presidential candidates make promises that they can't keep this is one of those that I would have to think would be pretty impossible to keep I mean technically speaking the president had has a limited power to impose protectionist tariffs that said I don't think this would ever happen I mean even if there were some scenario which he could he he could could impose a 35% tax on electronics manufactured overseas there's no way that he could possibly beat the tens of millions of dollars in pack money and lobbying cash that every consumer electronics manufacturer would suddenly shovel down congress's throat to repeal the Tariff Act of 19 22 which gives the president those Powers interestingly I mean I was thinking about this we know that when the iMac was first in production way back in 1998 that some of them were produced in California some of them still are go on so so some of the current flat panel iMacs are made in California assembled in California assembled yeah yeah the Freemont PL is still open it's reduced now but it's still open and the Mac Pro is in Texas I mean the so is the the uh a A8 Samsung's Fab for the A8 is in Austin I think but I believe the only top to bottom facility for manufacturing owned by Apple is in Ireland correct but even that's not top to bottom that's still just assembly is it oh okay yeah I mean they're they're not like fabbing Wafers there or anything right well yeah do but well they could make pcbs there though I don't think I think it's just populate them there I think it is larest assembly I think it is their largest manufacturing facility Apple owned is in Ireland yeah I think so well even the Mac Pro one is not Apple owned it's only Fremont andand I think the Mac Pro one is uh Flextronics I think uh Flextronics is now named just flex but isn't it a foxcon facility in Texas not a Flextronics or Flex it's not Fox it's either Flextronics or pegatron it's one of those two yeah I don't think Flex I don't think foxcon has do they have any Manufacturing in the US at foxcon I don't think they do I think they're brail do but not for Apple I don't think not for Apple so I mean I don't I don't the less interesting part of this story to me is Donald Trump I mean that's just campaign Bluster at that point I think any reasonable person can agree on that even people who support Donald Trump um but I think the more interesting part of this story is this kind of push uh and it's been going on for years by Apple itself to try to manufacture more in the United States uh Tim Cook himself has said that he would love to manufacture iPhones in the United States I don't think that's ever going to happen at least in our lifetimes but uh certainly an internal push for Apple to build stuff more in the United States could be a possibility without the need for any uh you know Apple taxes being imposed by the federal government or something like that right I mean what realistically do you think could be done to bring more manufacturing to the US well there is an economic incentive to bring manufacturing closer to the end consumer right um shoe companies now are actually at the Forefront of this Nike and Adidas are pushing really hard to that's why Adidas came out I don't know if you if you follow shoes at all but Adidas has these new 3D printed uh this new 3D printing process to make shoes and it's totally experimental and not right for prime time or anything but their idea is eventually that you make shoes at the retail store they're bought at which does a ton of things not the least of which is significantly cuts down on the complexity of your supply chain and removes the need to run a complicated uh Logistics operation well you don't have to worry about inventory any longer you got raw materials yeah so this this will happen eventually um anybody who has ever heard the 3D printing is the wave of the future thing that's why it's the wave of the future it's not for any other I mean there are some things you there are some things you can't make or you can't make reliably without being able to 3D print them that's a secondary Factor the real the real reason 3D printing is important to the future is this kind of thing it's bringing manufacturing as close as is humanly possible to the end consumer and now that's for us and by us I mean Americans that's a problem because our manufacturing economy is based around heavy industry right we make well not much anymore but we make steel yeah you know we make cars there's it's it's going to be tough times still make cars yeah it's G to be tough times for a while um but eventually eventually we'll get there well when you talk about shoes it makes me think you know obviously wearable devices have a lot in common with shoes in terms of custom style custom fit you know people need certain uh sizes and and widths and stuff on their shoes and stuff like that and you think about the complexity of uh bringing the Apple watch to the masses in terms of uh how many different colors do they offer now and different watch band combinations and sizes and all that kind of stuff I mean it took them a while to ramp up manufacturing of the Apple watch and it was in such limited capacity for those first couple months and when I say a while I mean like two months it was really a kind of a model Miracle of uh Logistics when you think about it but I mean think about all the possible combinations of Apple watch that are out there between the bands and the Styles and sizes um do you think that that's something that could be made a little simpler by uh uh if not manufacturing State side then at least doing something else State side what could they do there to to simplify it and make it cheaper for apple and better for the consumer so that's a little bit more of a complicated question because they the something like an Apple Watch or an iPhone is difficult to make in a a small scale process you know like making a shoe printing a shoe in a store is one thing but all of the the disperate components that go into an iPhone or Apple watch is a little bit harder what will happen eventually is that instead of having 350,000 people at a foxcon factory in Shenzhen you're going to have uh 10 guys looking over 150 robots at 10 different factories around the world right so if a iPhone the Mac Pro Factory in Texas that's that's kind of what's going on there as much of it is automated yeah you'll you'll have an iPhone sold in Germany will be made somewhere near Germany and an iPhone sold in China will be made somewhere near China and the same in the US and elsewhere that's where it's going okay maybe not for the electronics just the flow of sorry what about for the bands themselves just the bands yeah that kind of thing can be made bespoke yeah that's a really that's a really interesting idea there's a company here in Hong Kong called casify uh which I don't know if you've ever heard of them but they do they do custom iPhone cases and they also now do custom Apple watch bands you upload a photo and they print it uh they're like if You' ever heard Cafe Press like Cafe Press for watch bands and stuff and they print it and send it off to you and I could absolutely see something like that being in an Apple store you know the like we have in in PetSmart you have the little dog tag stations you know I can imagine in the future you go into like an Apple store and print your custom your custom watch band you buy the the watch itself and everything else is may be spoke we actually featured case toy in like a iPhone case Roundup a couple years ago for the holidays and I think some a representative from the company reached out to us because they said a lot of people were driven to them by our story or something like that and yeah I guess there's a lot of people that really want to get like an iPhone case with their dogs picture on her or something like that yeah there's um three is a big mobile operator in Europe and they also operate here and they are actually running a promo right now if you buy an iPhone 6 you get a voucher for case toy I thought that was a pretty interesting I mean it's not it's not just a side deal it's like their main promo at this moment yeah I guess there's a lot of demand for that kind of stuff it's interesting because normally when you're you're doing it as a carrier you you want to push a case that you've got in stock and take margin on are they taking margin on the voucher deal or they don't sell accessories as far as I'm aware um I mean they have tiny tiny accessory sections in their stores but I literally mean like one end cap it's interesting to me that you know Apple for many years uh has been leaving money on the table by not really playing into the customization of uh people's iPhones and and now with the watches they're obviously getting into it a little more but you think back to iPods and when they start doing them in different colors and stuff like that and then for the iPhone for so long they just didn't really offer a lot of variety they weren't even making cases and you know obviously now they make cases now they make a battery case they make all these custom Apple watch bands and styles and stuff like that that you can really personalize it and make it yours and I think that's been a a subtle but big time shift for the company and their focus um not only because it appeals to Consumers but it's a high margin business too you sell a $50 leather case and it probably costs them you know five bucks to make or something like that so uh they were offended by the idea of people putting terrible stuff on their product right theyed idea of some of these cases yeah it's good money for them as well but but just you know Johnny couldn't sleep at night because someone had put something horrible but colorful iMacs and iBooks and the iPods and stuff like that this isn't a new thing for Apple it's just interesting that they kind of for a few years there after the success of the iPhone kind of drifted away from it um you know you had a black iPhone then you then it took them forever to get the the the glass right on the iPhone 4 and the white iPhone came late and then finally they introduced the gold one one and now they have the rose gold but even still it's a limited number of colors compared to you know what you used to be able to get with an iPod or still can get with an iPod I wonder how so this is something I've been thinking about recently because this is the kind of thing I think about I wonder how if Johnny I has been wanting to do this kind of thing for a long time and always always always got shut down by Steve and the farther away from Steve that you get the more influence Johnny has and he gets to do stuff he's just always wanted to do but was never able to because he was overruled I I I would believe that yeah I mean you think about that first iMac again then that really you know was pretty out there in terms of the colors and and the look of it and everything like that and it was unique and it you could personalize it by buying your own color and the iPods yeah I I I could see that definitely being the case yeah because you for a long time the product marketing or I guess really as far as back as I know the product marketing department has run Apple product development right it's they make what they think they can sell um I mean they make stuff they want to make but they don't make things that they want to make and can't sell that's what I'm saying so I wonder if that if that ba uh balance of power is Shifting somewhat now um so the because Johnny I mean he seems to have Consolidated you know control of the company um for all intents and purposes so I wonder if he is if he with the reshuffling of the executive ranks I wonder if he is just now sort of the guy and Tim says you go do what you think is right you know I'll make I'll make the trains run on time and make sure we make tons of cash from the product side you do your thing don't leave out Phil Schiller in this equation well he just got he just got shuffled around he doesn't even I mean he's still VP uh wwm but he doesn't even uh their their head of internal C doesn't even report to him anymore right he has for years had that same kind of top tier influence he he and Donnie were both right there with Steve so well that's what I was saying he he had been the Arbiter of what they were going to build before because they would say we want to make this but can't we sell it and Phil would say yes or no but it seems now that that's shifting right it seems like Johnny has that I I think I want to wait for another product cycle to see what the results of that shift are I mean I hate to we all hate to do this because we hate when people throw it in our faces but could you what like Neil said look at all the options for the Apple watch could yeah could you have imagined this being in Steve Jobs's 2 by two Matrix uh no no this would not have made the 2 by two yeah I think he I think he only did the white iPhone because his wife wanted one but but you know Neil's not wrong either that it stems a little bit from that that having all the colors that we had for original iPod mini right because the iPod mini with all the different color skews wouldn't have necessarily fit in there either that's true yeah when you take into consideration the different uh capacities as well I mean there's always been a lot of configuration options that are broad for some products but well originally it was it was the 2x two Matrix and it was three options for each product in The Matrix and then when we got the iPod it sort of ballooned out from there and then you look at the iPad you can get it with or without LTE different colors yeah the iPad's a mess yeah they've they've really the product options have grown but it really hasn't gotten into ways to customize your product until Apple started to get into the accessories business I mean you have three four callers now for the iPhone um maybe they'll expand that in the future there's no really not really any rumors about that yet they tried to dabble in it with the iPhone 5c um the accessories business started with the iPhone 4 when we got the bumpers to solve antenna gate and that was there again under Steve right but it was pretty limited and now when you look at the options in terms of the different I mean you have how many colors of cases for the iPhones right and then you have Smart covers for the iPad and all the Apple watch bands and all that kind of stuff yeah and some of this I mean even just talking to to people that I used to talk to at Apple some of it was you you'd go and show them a case and their first question was does this case work with our cables does this case work on docking speaker products kind of thing mhm and you'd find a lot of the cases didn't work that they they conflicted with Docking products that they were too thick to to actually work or that they were too thick uh too tall for the connectors to make full contact on a docking product and you'd find that you couldn't get the Apple cables in or you'd get the regular charge cable in but you couldn't get one of the bigger ones that was like the uh the the VGA or HDMI cable to plug in and that's one of the things that they would reject when they were taking a product into their stores for the retail store was this case doesn't work with all the scenarios that we think our users need we're not going to take it remember when Apple used to charge you an extra hundred bucks to get a black MacBook yes totally who paid for that uh I know knew I knew three people who did yeah do you think that they would do that today no I can ask that's not hard to find out you John Scrivens and ask him if he buy another black MacBook do you mean if people would pay that or if Apple would charge that both I mean well I they wouldn't do it now I don't think because if you look at the a 12-in Macbook that comes in the same color as the iPad they don't charge anything extra for that so yeah I think people would absolutely people would if Apple had made the rose gold iPhone $100 more people absolutely would have paid it no question oh yes because but this is this is where like remember all those oh the only the the plus models are going to get uh Sapphire cover it's like who would pay for this because you can't see it like you you1 there because because when we're talking about Apple watch we have the aluminum body with mineral glass and then you move up to the steel with with sapphire but Neil NE Point yeah Neil's point stands that you can tell the difference between a sport watch and a uh a watch watch this is also on the aluminum watch and a watch watch and an addition watch but you can't tell the difference between uh Gorilla Glass and Sapphire whenever everything else is the same imagine that you were so excited about Sapphire and you're one of those jerks that had to tell everybody you had a sapphire phone the only way you could prove it is to take your keys out of your pocket and try to mangle your phone and go look it doesn't scratch I mean like you know I I can pick out 10 people who do that right well then you should reconsider your circle of friends but if if you look at if you look at you know the Apple watch yes the entry level model the sport has the ion X glass but it also has the cheaper aluminum which looks side by side very different from the stainless steel models I mean it's the entire package it's not just the glass for Apple to sell a model of phone with just the the glass different for an extra hundred bucks or whatever would be absolutely insane and it would be stupid and they would never ever do it now if Apple wanted to somehow defy the laws of physics and make a stainless steel iPhone that didn't weigh a ton then maybe they could do something like that or or you know some mythical uh uh what's that stuff liquid metal or something like that maybe but it would have to have a distinctly different visual appearance and some sort of added value for the consumer I don't think that Apple's in a position here in 2016 where they're just going to charge an extra hundred bucks for a color so on the subject of color can I make a confession sure I really like the rose gold iPhone do you I haveone I have a space gry one I know but I'm a man so there are many many men that bought the rose gold I know I've seen many of them anyway I really I thought it was be I thought it was going to be ridiculous but I've actually grown to really enjoy it the the space if it's ridiculous it's ridiculous in the best way the space gray iPhone is still too light they need to go darker like they did with the Apple watch it needs to go back to the iPhone 5 the black yeah that was really nice it just showed a lot of scratches and stuff more clearly so around theed which color you said you have the which one the space gray I have a space gray 6s space gray 6s and and you same I'm I'm still using the gold six I thought you had a 6S no I do not have a sixs okay no I'm I'm oh no that was the that was the MacBook a few weeks ago where you didn't realize that you had a uh Magic trackpad exactly or not a magic Trackpad a for Force touch trackpad yes that's right I went six months without realizing I the forest touch trackpad I am all uh space gray up and down if I could get a if I could get a space gray 15-inch MacBook Pro I'd buy a new one right now just to do that do you think that Apple would do like a gold MacBook Pro um that's a good question I I want to say no I could absolutely see a space gray MacBook Pro and I want to say no on the gold but you never know I would I I you know I like the gold 12in I would totally have the the gold in a larger size well so they've been doing this campaign recently where they show how everything matches all their collection their colle actually that's now I think about exactly what it is it's their collection right and my wife has been doing this for a while she had everything she has is silver with the white front she has a white uh smart cover on her iPad she has the MacBook Air is silver her iPad is silver her phone is silver and it all looks her Apple watch she wears the white uh white white sport band yeah with aluminum Apple watch and I'm not going to lie it looks killer like when when she's sitting like at a coffee shop or something which I I suppose is exactly the only time it would matter but it looks good I'm a little jealous well that's why they made the uh the the down Market Gold version so that you could match yeah I'm not gonna get the gold i' get the rose gold I would go rose gold probably I had a iPad Air 2 and I sold it when I got my iPad Pro or no I'm sorry I didn't sell it I gave it to my wife cuz she had an iPad Air and we sold her iPad Air uh she had a white iPad air with a blue Smart Cover um and it was a decision for a few days where she had to decide if she liked the Smart Cover the blue smart cover with the space gray uh iPad Air to or not uh she ended up sticking with the black one it wasn't a good match but yeah I mean these are important decisions like what matches well and even when you go into the Apple Store like if you want to try on a watch back when they first started doing the trons I asked them you know if I could try and mix and match uh you know a certain like a space black uh stainless steel with a certain band and they they wouldn't even do it in the store they wouldn't allow it because they let us do it when we went in for our addition appointment yeah but maybe it's because we were trying on the addition and they thought we were Rich you fooled them nice moving on I want to talk about things that Apple can't sell right we talked about all the things Apple can sell but we should talk about something that Apple can't sell and that is I ad is going away now you may not remember I ad I ad was this idea that Apple would create a platform that allowed people to put delightful pretty ads convenient ads ads that weren't terrible in their applications or or other things on their iOS and you know instead of getting these gross popovers and things like that you'd get something welld designed and apple was unable to challenge Google's mobile ad sales so what what are we losing out on here Neil what's what's actually happening with this uh I mean this will affect some developers that are very heavily invested in apple and probably Apple specific developers who are quick to embrace their kind of stuff I mean certainly there are a number of apps that do use I ads so this is going to be a change for that market but I mean in the grand scheme of things it doesn't really change very much I don't think uh I ads didn't really take on the way that apple wanted them to and uh the way that they predicted um it was an interesting concept but the reality of it just was that uh I don't know that Apple's heart was ever really in it either uh it didn't feel like something that they invested a lot in or focused a lot on uh and they certainly didn't talk about it much so I don't think this is a Scott forall project wasn't it uh I I don't know who was behind it Steve Jobs was still around when they unveiled it I believe I think he was of it was part of his thermonuclear war on Google and it just totally failed yeah they tried to do when it started out it was like a ridiculous Buy in like you had to buy a million dollars worth of ads in order to even get in so they only it's at launch they only had a handful of advertisers I think Nissan was one of the first ones and stuff like that and I guess I mean I guess it was kind of neat in a gwiz kind of way you tap on an ad and it worked like an app and it opened up and stuff like that but as time went on they you know they had to open up to more and people didn't want to put that much effort into the ads because that's just more cost in addition to the Buy in and so they just became kind of cheaper and weren't really that interesting they weren't really like apps anymore so in the beginning not only did you have to spend exorbitantly to get in but Apple did the creative you couldn't do your own creative you weren't allowed uh you could work with them obviously but a an IAD team made the ads yeah you know I mean it's it was one in a line of experiments to try to control the entire thing that just F let me ask my my understanding my recollection was that you didn't get the demographics of the people that looked at or tapped through or or waited on your ads and as an Advertiser that's one of the things you rely on to see that they're effective right so that also kind of led to the death of it didn't it yeah all every Apple has ever done in this case has been um uh a failure based on not I mean not a failure but it's it's not done as well as it could have because they refuse to share audience demos yeah there any number of app developers who are so pissed at the App Store can't won't even give them email addresses the the this is not going to affect most of our listeners what will affect most of our most of our listeners by the shutdown of I ad is the I ad Department also covered uh iTunes radio ads for uh uh content uh that you might stream Pandora like on iTunes radio that is no longer going to be ad supported and will only be under the um Apple music Banner which also means that people like myself who don't pay for Apple music but do pay for iTunes Match are going to lose that functionality as part of your $25 year uh subscription so I currently pay 25 bucks a year for iTunes Match and that gives me access to iTunes radio without ads and I can skip as much as I want uh once the changeover happens I'll no longer have access to iTunes radio and that's it I can only listen to beats one sucks to be you although that brings up a question who handles the Beats One ads good question I don't know I mean I'm sure that they'll still maintain some sort of internal advertising Department I I I I don't really enjoy most of what I hear on Beats one i' I've pretty much given up on it so um I I didn't use iTunes radio much either it's not much of a loss for me I know my wife used it a lot um and she's pretty disappointed I know my parents use it as well because they were subscribing to iTunes match it was just an easy way for them to get a Pandora likee service without having to hear ads um so I'm sure there are a lot of listeners out there who are in a similar position and and that's a unfortunate change I think I think they should have at least reconsidered it and kept it for iTunes Match subscribers yeah well the one way that I used IAD that I think I was on the Min minority side of was I used the IAD tools sometimes to mock up application ideas that I had because you mock up many people have done that yeah so it sucks that these tools are going to go away too well before that it was quartz composer was the hotness and then there was I producer for a while and now keynote is the the app of choice I used keynote from the very beginning for this stuff but you just put together a concept with it I mean there's no easy way to export that and turn in and start the basis for an app right code what you do with keynote when you're mocking up in prototyping is that you you link the buttons to other slides that have the resulting display and so you don't give any of the animations but you have I tapped on this oh and it shows you the slide that results and you export as a uh as a basically a hyperlink PDF well now you can actually do the whole thing you can do the same animations um there are teams at Apple that use keynote to do prototyping oh thank God and that's why they added a lot of because I was kopia for for like gosh I was using kopia since it came out in 2009 my suspicion is that the reason keyote has gotten so much love recently in that department it's because there are teams at Apple who do it and they were bugging the keynote team saying please make this happen for us well it's fast and it's awesome at doing it I once demonstrated an app that I mocked up at Apple and there are no other native prototyping apps that come close to the responsiveness of keynot I mean there are there are other ones pix 8 is really good now yeah but nothing else for a long time was around you could tell which things the employees that Apple internally use or don't use based on what gets attention when it's updated and that's why numbers sucks as bad as it does and that's why the remote app has been uh ignored for so many years and was not even a part of the Apple TV launch and the remote is literally maintained by one guy isn't it I know yeah and it was a built it's a built-in feature on the Apple watch and it didn't even work with the new Apple TV which is insane that's why uh Smart Cover unlock uh is no longer function with Touch ID like man you have been harping on that yeah that's well hey it's a it's a nice feature can we move to stuff that you harp about also like the uh the 4-inch iPhone well before we do that before we do that what do you have against numbers all of my friends who work uh in finance uh say that numbers is awful Exel no crap because they're in finance but for like Joe for me who only uses a spreadsheet when it's absolutely I don't care about you so no but I also only use a spreadsheet when it's absolutely necessary but what I do like to do and I end up having to use Google for this is forms right there used to be in numbers on iOS you could create a form and it would populate a spreadsheet with the results and that functionality went away and now I have to use Google Docs sheets in order to do forms that populate a spreadsheet that I can use the information out of later and I would really liked for numbers to have instead of killing the functionality off in iOS to have moved it over and made it also useful on OS 10 and in the the iCloud I didn't know that ever existed it totally existed and it was great but it was only and this was weird it was only in numbers on iPad you could not do the forms in numbers on iPhone interesting yeah I don't know instead of fixing this and making it everywhere they killed it if you're in if you're in finance and you need pivot tables yeah suck for you but I think for the the vast majority of people numbers is totally fun I it's much faster than excels who even the new Excel the new Excel is not terrible no the new office is great actually yeah um but the you know when I just need a quick and dirty spreadsheet I don't even bother opening so anyway moving on some more interesting things another thing that Neil likes to talk about smaller iPhones go on Neil well there was kind of a ridiculous video that came out today that made the rounds where it's really impossible to tell what the heck it is it's just some guy funneling what looks like an iPhone 6 or 6s uh and they claim it's an iPhone 6c a smaller one if the guy has large hands then it could just as easily be a 6S or a six but it basically looks identical to a iPhone 6 and 6s just smaller which so he scaled down an iPhone 6 in solid works and 3D printed a scaled down 4-in iPhone 6 and then spray painted at Gold is that what I'm saying no no I me it's I think it's just an iPhone 6 do with big hands probably probably just a regular phone um it's hard to say because the rumors have said like if you uh listen to what Ming quo has said um he thinks it's GNA look more like an iPhone 5S but he also says it's gonna have the uh 3D coverglass or whatever or whatever 2.5d coverglass where it's curved at the edges uh which is similar to the iPhone 6 and 6s so um there's a little bit of inconsistency about what the device is going to look like if you believe this video which uh Shane and I are very skeptical of but if you believe it then the new phone that's coming out in the 4 in size is basically just gonna be a small iPhone 6 um very skeptical is not negative enough to describe my feelings I I I don't know uh it would be interesting if they did that because then the whole lineup would look basically the same right you would have yeah the six the 6s the pluses and the smaller model would all be the same and just kind of scaled up or down um I don't know why why they would want to do that I think that they especially if they're looking to kind of juice sales at the halfway point before the seven comes out you think that they want to do something a little different maybe um to kind of incentivize the smaller form factor but uh we'll see you know I would personally I i' I'd like to see um you know something a little thicker and fit in a bigger battery and kind of make it the you know uh person who doesn't want to carry a tablet in their pocket you know out on the town for the day kind of phone but apparently I'm the only person on planet Earth who wants that so no in every every single iPhone thread there is somebody are you it might be you just in every one of them going I have multiple accounts and I going I wish they would make it thicker and had a bigger battery yeah I don't know I meane but when Apple concedes on that we get the humpback of iPhone 6 like this battery case is just like the ugliest thing I've ever seen I can't believe anybody would even buy one of these so have you have you tried one no it's so I tried one oh jeez and it actually no no no no no it looks ridiculous I would never actually use it in you know any scenario where I would be worried about being judged by my fellow human beings when when you're using a battery casage because you're at a show and you're not a conference and you're burning battery like there's no tomorrow that's that's when you pull out a battery case well in my case I have a little a really thin uh xiaomi um external battery that I keep in my bag but the battery C the done as it is it feels really good it doesn't like when you have a mopy case on it's just enormous yeah the same thickness all the way around I have the uh the newer mphi the smaller one and I really like it you have juice pack air uh I had the juice pack air before but this is a new a newer model I reviewed it I got I got to look up what it is hold on well he's looking that up uh anyway the with the design that they did for that when you're holding hand it doesn't feel like you have a giant battery case on it it just feels like you have a normal case on it so yeah the juice pack air um I've had for a couple years us with the iPhone 6 and I like it but it's definitely consider bigger it gives you like another 125% battery um and so Mofi sent me last fall the juice pack reserve for the iPhone 6 and 6s and it is considerably thinner uh but it only gives you an extra 60% battery so it makes a lot of concessions in terms of the battery life but it's thin enough uh and enough to get me through the day that it's become my preferred uh battery case so I recommend that one but honestly if Apple made a thicker smaller phone there are a lot of benefits to that uh including the fact that they could potentially fit in an even better camera right now you know as evidence by the protruding camera on the six and 6s they're limited by the laws of physics um if they were to make a thicker phone they could put in a better camera I you know I think that there would be a market for that and I don't think they would have to sacrifice their sense of style or make it that big that consumers would be turned off by it what was the the Nokia phone that had a optical zoom camera on the that was the 1020 was the name for it well so the 1020 was the Windows phone version there was uh one last gasp at actual like Symbian version of it before P view or something yeah pure something it had like an insane uh megapixel count something it was 40 something yeah think 41 megapixel yeah it was a Carl iiss lens on it too yep well and they did that for the Nokia 1020 as well yeah I mean that's a little extreme obviously um and that had a humpback on it too just to fit in that lens yep but you know if I mean if we started to think a little bit outside the box and apple wanted to make like a road warrior slash uh amateur photographer oriented smaller iPhone they could get away with a lot more by making it just slightly thicker or they could just make a digital camera yeah they'll never make a digital camera ever again again yeah they won't it's not g to happen quick cam it won't happen I mean just because the iPhone you know is is their bread and butter at that point but I think they they're never they're never going to make a three and a half inch photographer focused iPhone either no I don't but I don't that's what I'm saying I don't mean photographer Focus I think you could give it a number of advantages where you could make it appeal to a number of segments of the market make it appeal to people who like smaller form factor in their hand make it to people uh who like longer battery life uh people who want a better camera quality I think you could do something like that we'll call it the iPhone shut up finally Edition never happen it'll never happen now all right let's talk about this lifi story so recent versions of iOS the developer code beginning actually beginning with is 9.1 there's a cache file that makes a mention of lii capability so first of all what is lifi uh lifi is a marketing term for I guess it means light Fidelity it has no actual relation to wireless fidelity was always a stupid name also so well yeah uh but what it is basically is Wi-Fi via visible light so you have uh you have something like this in your house probably already if you have a television uh most TV remotes operate by IR infrared light that's why you can't uh point you have to point it generally in the vicinity of your TV for it if you block the end of the remote it will not work yeah exactly uh you can actually see it work if you uh hold it and points it at your iPhone camera while you have the camera open you can see it see it work I have had that work since iPhone 4 because they've been putting IR filters oh that's right they put filters on it now okay well never mind you can't do that so forget that little science experiment if you have an old digital camera yeah then yeah you can see anything without an IR felter on the front of it yeah but anyway so what happens is when you push say the power button it blinks a little infrared LED in the front of the remote control really really fast uh the nominal speed is I think 38 khz I could be wrong uh so 38,000 times a second and the TV sees these flashes of infrared light on its infrared receiver and decodes them into an electronic signal that means you know turn the volume up or turn the volume down on or off what have you and lii works on the same principle except it works with visible light so the uh say the Le if you have LED track lighting in your house it can be pulsed really rapidly uh so fast that you wouldn't be able to see it uh you wouldn't be able to tell it was being pulsed but it can be pulls so rapidly uh to or it can be pull rapidly enough to accomplish the same idea and because the speed of light is you know quite fast uh it would enable much faster communication there are problems uh like IR it needs line of site so you can only get a data connection literally while you can see the light uh but there are a lot of advantages so there you go so I don't think line of sight is an incredibly huge problem because when you're in a building which is where you're going to be if you're using lifi you're pretty much in range of a light bulb right you're you're not sitting in a closet that's got no lights you're sitting somewhere that's got lighting well that's true if you are somewhere with overhead lighting or ubiquitous overhead lighting but don't forget there are a lot of places that use indirect lighting I mean my apartment is a perfect example I don't I have overhead lights but they're never on I have indirect lighting everywhere so if you are someplace like that then it's not going to be helpful what's interesting to me is that this this can combine a couple of different things right because the first question is okay great you can pass data to a light bulb how do you get that data back to the the network in there to the outside world well you could use power line and use the power lines that connect the power to the bulb to transmit back to the router um and that would be reasonable you you could also do um like you know crazy things like Wi-Fi in the bulb and just have the bulb do that but what's what's interesting to me here is is you know this is this has impacts on things like Philips Hugh and some of the other smart light bulbs that we've been seeing so far where now you're going to have a bulb that's not just smart and controllable by the app but also does your data yeah there's a company in India that already has a proof of concept out and they're testing it in I want to say the Netherlands in a warehouse setting so I there's definitely some interesting some interesting options here it's going to need a lot more development and it's going to be a long way down the road uh but we've seen them ex them being Apple explore this before they have a patent I think from 2013 13 yeah yeah uh discussing ways of making camera sensors do double duty so you could set them in image mode to take a photo and the rest of the time they would be in data reception mode wild so it's it's in iOS and it remains to be seen if we'll actually see it as a a practical thing we can demonstrate I would rather they do wi or Wireless power at first but that's just me ESPN still in talks about an apple streaming still in talks with apple about a streaming service what do you like about this story Neil I mean if Apple's going to do it streaming service ESPN's kind of the big dog right you need you need to have live sports for your streaming service to be successful that's so I'm gonna stop you right there and tell you why you're wrong no not okay there was uh somebody did a survey two weeks ago I came out I think two weeks ago it may have been done a long time ago uh something like 55 or 56% of people surveyed said that they were a cable subscribers said that they would drop ESPN if it meant saving 8 a month on their cable the Assumption has always been that the reason people don't young especially young men under 50 don't cut the cord is because of the ESPN but apparently that's not actually the case ESPN has a much bigger mind share than an actual um audience market share I feel like ESPN's relevance varies depending on what sport you're watching too um yes very much so if you watch the NFL um certainly ESPN has Monday Night Football which is by far not even close the top rated program on all of cable it's it it beats most broadcast shows I mean Monday Night Football is huge but that only affects two teams a week so by and large an NFL viewer is going to be able to get their local market games over the air or you know however um through their local affiliate CBS uh or fox or NBC for the Sunday night game um now if you're into college basketball for example uh you're probably way more likely to be an ESPN viewer if you're into college football you're definitely more likely to be an ESPN viewer uh College Football H now ESPN has a strangle hold on that market they uh control uh pretty much all the SEC games except for the big matchup of the week of SEC football the biggest SEC weekly matchup remains exclusive to CBS but uh that will end soon probably um uh the uh Big 10 Network or no it's not the Big 10 Network somebody else also has ESPN running it ESPN runs the network Longhorn Network they run the ACC Lorn Network y and they will eventually run the Big 12 network if Texas gets their head out of their butt yep and ESPN also is the sole broadcaster of the college football playoff and uh college football National Championship now uh that's a really big deal if you're at all into college football now if you don't care about college football you probably don't give a crap about ESPN or college basketball or at the NBA a lot of NBA games are on ESPN but that's split between ESPN and TNT uh baseball's another one where TBS has a lot of Baseball ESPN has a lot of baseball so you may not but if you're if you're a baseball fan though you have an amazing option because MLB.TV is fantastic and they they just had they just went through a lawsuit over MLB.TV and I think for the next two years there won't be any local blackouts it's really a huge deal it's a Content land grab that's been going on for years and um ESPN continues to secure exclusive rights but then then there's some over-the-top services like MLB At Bat that make it less relevant um the NHL is exclusive to NBC um so you know you run down the list of of sports I I think ESPN recently has been making a push into NASCAR um they didn't really pay much attention to NASCAR for years and now they're getting into that um ESPN is also focusing on some more like entertainment focused uh uh content and and and um ESPN doing ESPN is doing professional wrestling now yes they do have a weekly uh segment on Sports Center covering professional wrestling so they're trying to broaden their base uh to appeal to more people but it's really kind of dependent on what sports you're interested in watching but I still think that if you're going to do a live streaming TV service uh the NFL is the most important thing but ESPN is uh probably just as important just in terms of uh the the the breath of content that they have exclusive access to including Monday Night Football yeah now so sling has ESPN or at least some portion of ESPN in it right the oo they have all of ESPN okay depending which package you have the base package I think just has ESPN and ESPN 2 but the sports package has all of them how are they doing uh they're about to pass two million subscribers I think the thing with sling is the inability to record content well the thing with sling is it kind of quality kind of sucks okay with an apple streaming service you're not gonna be able to record content either they have't nailed the streaming technology portion of it yet I mean here's how it works I watch sports live I pretty much uh DVR everything else and so I stick with cable because if I want to watch these programs uh and not pay $3 an episode on iTunes or some crap like that or wait 48 hours or a week or whatever for it to show up on Hulu you got to have cable and so for the convenience of it the ability to fast forward through ads and watch it more quickly pretty much any scripted television I watch DVR um sometimes the same night uh sometimes the next night sometimes they'll pile up and I just don't get around to them um I do have I pay for uh subscriptions to HBO uh now or go whichever one is cable free um and I also pay for the subscription to Showtime uh but those are separate from my cable provider and it's all on demand there is no live streaming component to it we don't have cable uh we have we also have HBO Go and Showtime I have sling which I only use to log in to watch ESPN on the Apple TV so I essentially pay $20 a month for ESPN and will continue to do so I have MLB.TV for baseball I don't watch the NFL live just because it's a pain in the ass I I do watch the Sunday night game because NBC streams those for free um but it's important remember rest is Netflix it's important to remember because there was a study that came out this week showing share of traffic and stuff like that the vast majority of streaming content providers out there are not showing live content they're it's all on demand they're they I mean YouTube does some live stuff but that's not really their bread and butter Netflix does Nothing Live Hulu does Nothing Live uh Apple you know will do an event live occasionally or something yeah twice a year yeah but they don't really do any live content so you're looking at sling um you know probably one of the bigger uh uh live providers is WWE network has a live Channel included with their um their subscription service so you can watch well yeah MLB but but that's a but that's a a game by game basis they don't have a linear channel is what I'm saying right that's true yeah so uh NHL does the same thing where you can subscribe and Direct TV obviously has an NFL uh streaming package as well but those are on game by game basis uh to have a linear Channel with constant content you can't get a subscription to the MLB Network you can't get a subscription to the NHL Network or the NFL Network without paying for cable those are exclusive to cable so to have a linear Channel like ESPN would be a huge deal for something like apple to help differentiate them from the other content providers out there and that's really was differentiating sling now I think sling shortcoming other than the apparent quality issues is the fact that you can't record anything yeah I don't know that's something feel it matters that's something I never considered before I wonder how widespread that is because there there's a lot of little things like that that you don't think about but actually make a big deal for a lot of people do you do you watch scripted television yes but not in any sort of timely manner okay but how do you watch it like let's say like Agent Carter premiered Tuesday night um I would buy an iTunes season pass okay see so it premiered Tuesday night my wife and I didn't get a chance to watch it we were watching something else a hockey game was on I think so we watched it last night it was a 2hour Premiere and we had it we had it tooed and or DVR and we could just fast forward through the commercials and watch it in an hour and a half or whatever it was but yeah I mean otherwise it on Hulu in a couple days otherwise I would have paid uh three bucks per hour on iTunes probably for us it was a two-parter to get it in standard deaf or whatever they charge I'd pay like six bucks when you start adding that up if you watch five or six shows it's actually cheaper to get cable and that's just to watch a handful of shows you know who does this really well I pay 11 bucks for Hulu ad free and I'll just watch whatever I want on that and cheer than cable and only from a network that supports Hulu uh and then also for the ones that support it in ad free because they're as I found some that run ads before or after the show uh who does this really well is the BBC actually yeah except for the geographical region problem I was gonna say you guys have absolutely no experience with this but the oh no no I have an i player account but I player is really I this is how I watched the Sherlock season premiere I think it was on player an hour after it was on TV in England really really well and the streaming is phenomenal I can stream well they finally got their heads out their butts around Flash in full HD from the I player app through please don't kick me off DBC through my VPN because I don't live in England I live in Hong Kong through my VPN through the iPad over AirPlay to my TV with no loss of quality it's extraordinary the BBC used to be about trying to spread the England to the rest of the world and and get their stuff out there and they've been really stupid about the geographical region blocking you know what's that mean for expats it's it's ridiculous well it it pains me to say this but I will commend uh cable companies on doing something right uh by and large on demand Services through cable providers are pretty good these days um so last night trying to catch up on TV again a Tuesday night episode of a new girl that my wife and I were trying to watch for some some reason the recording was messed up and I have a 5.1 system in the center channel didn't record properly on the live broadcast just went to the on demand and played it of course there's no fast forward option so you can't fast forward through the ads but I understand that and it was available less than 24 hours after the episode aired and I had zero problems watching it and high def started right away so um as much as I hate cable and love would would love to get rid of it they do a pretty good job with their on demand Services these days now that said there are some networks that don't participate I believe ABC and Time Warner continue to have a UT so you can't get any ABC content available on demand Through Time Warner and those contract disputes are just insane but that's why this is whole this whole thing to borrow a Steve Jobs phrase is a bag of hurt because you don't know what you're getting into I could switch to Hulu but what Network's goingon to comply and I gotta pay an extra couple bucks to get really adree as opposed to limited ads and do I have to wait 48 hours for it to show up on there it's just a pain in the butt yeah this is this exact thing is what has made me other than Sherlock and top gear which hilarious well not top but yeah exactly but other than stuff that was available on the BBC because it's such a pain-free experience this is exactly what stopped me from watching shows every week you know is my favorite show in the history of television and I still haven't seen the second half of the last season th this is exactly what has stopped Apple from getting into the business because Apple doesn't want to come into this half-baked Apple doesn't want to come in and not have ESPN and not have a deal with CBS to show their content on demand because no one's going to pay for that people you know you might get some early adopters to sign up for something like uh uh uh sling TV where they might you know be eager to embrace it or something like that but for the average person if they sign up for sling TV and they're like oh I can't DVR this or oh I can't get uh you know the Food Network or whatever you know I'm sure that Apple's done the research and they're saying that our Target demographic is this big you look at this initial success that they've had with apple music and they're not half baking this stuff I mean they're already uh out well outpacing Spotify as we talked about last week in terms of their growth and the number of people they've been able to bring in just because of their power and their clout if they're going to get into this business they're not looking to get two million subscribers like sling TV did they're looking to get tens of millions of subscribers they're looking to to accelerate the cable cutting process and so they're going to have to hit all of those points they're going to have to get ESPN they're going to have to get On Demand they're going to have to have you know cloud storage of stuff you want to record or however they do it it's all going to have to work and it's going to have to be affordable too and that's really tough yeah well without getting caught in a loop talking about TV I want to move on to garage band and apple updated Garage Band for iOS with a new interface that that makes it look like a hardware controller for a DJ with drum machines and things like that they also released a music Memos app so what what are these apps about what what's what's really going on here that they've updated them for us can I just say your transitions are flawless thank you sir or Segways I I suppose Segways so I actually haven't used new garage band for iOS but I will quickly talk about voice memos and then Neil can make us some stuff about Garage Band sure so uh sorry not voice MOS music memos is based on the idea of voice memos apparently what we hear is that a lot of musicians were using voice memos on the go and somehow news of this phenomenon got back to Apple and they said you know we can do this better so they made music memos which is voice memos for music and you can record it's it's like a mini it's sort of like a mini garage band uh but without the editing features you can record stuff you can uh tag your recordings manage your recordings but importantly it also includes some of the automatic backing track features from garage band so if you record say a a guitar uh a five minutes of guitar music memos will Analyze That for chord and Tempo and then put a drum track behind it for you so while you're out you can get a good idea of how your your song is going you know you can you can actually develop music uh on the go and then you can bring come back home and bring it directly into logic uh only Logic Pro 10 or the new garage band uh via iCloud so it's actually pretty if you are got person who likes to make music uh it's actually a pretty cool little deal and it's free yeah and it's free it looks pretty huge I mean just the idea of having a good memo app for capturing song ideas is a good thing and and voice memos was always not quite good enough because the recording quality was not uh not great they compressed the files pretty heavily because it was for voice we should note that they uh music memos records in Lawless yeah and and it's adding in the guitar tuner just killed off all of the guitar tuner apps although I I really do like polytune because polytune is seriously cool if you're a guitar player um polytune you can strum all six strings at the same time and it will pick out and show you which ones are sharp or flat at the same time you don't have to play note by note it's is really cool and the fast way to tune your guitar up but uh but still having a guitar tuner built into Apple's one is a big deal uh and as you say analyzing the the key signature and being able to tag for first chorus and things like that uh that's that's great this is really quite cool yeah I'm gonna be playing with this um and Neil tell me about garage band uh so the big changes in garage band are uh there's a whole new uh DJ controller section which would take on the likes of uh tractor and some of the other popular uh iPad DJ options out there I don't looks looks kind of like triggering Ableton Live a little bit with you know a Novation Launchpad for example and this is all in in apple and garage man style very simple so um simple to mess around with and uh for people that want to master it and do a little more technical stuff that's in there too but it does uh features that you would expect for like an amateur DJ like keeping beats in sync with the time and pitch and stuff like that so you can merge and and do cool stuff and make it sound like you're way more talented than you actually are um and they also have a new Drummer mode which uh gives you the option to create sick beats in uh different uh sounds Taylor I just heard your entire Soliloquy in Tay's voice I was I was hearing Taylor Swift but go on yeah I mean it's pretty cool um you know just drum machine go on there kind of mess around uh a little more advanced way to create stuff and uh play along with it um for a lot of people the more interesting features may actually be that uh GarageBand has also been updated to be designed for the retina display on the iPad Pro so there's more options on the screen um when you run it on your larger iPad it takes advantage of the screen real estate which is great um tired of just seeing apps just blown up to the 12.9 inch screen size you know to really take advantage of the iPad Pro you have to put more on the screen uh and do it in a way that makes sense unlike like when you open up the app store and there's just like a million apps to tap on there it's like this wasn't thought out very well um and then uh on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s plus uh Apple's also added support for 3D touch so uh if you're doing things like playing on the piano or whatever you can press harder or softer and it will gauge how hard you're pressing and uh uh emulate the instrument that you're playing accordingly so it looks like as I'm as I'm looking at Apple's copy on this they say to get started pick a template from popular genres like EDM house hip hop and more and then tap a cell in the template to turn on the loop so you're using Loops they've got already created and using that to to make your DJ music uh I you know I go back to things like loopy HD where you can record your own loops and then trigger them and if that was possible in this interface that would be really empowering because then you could Loop and then play live over the loops that you've created you know kind of Stack Up pieces to a song and build a live performance out of it yeah I mean messed around with Garage Band on iOS and and it's like uh iMovie one of those things that uh may not get as much attention as it deserves because it's actually quite powerful and and quite interesting and and quite capable um especially they have you know midi support for instruments and lightning connections and all kinds of cool stuff that you can do stuff can go through the headphone jack too to record through it or you can just use the mic so it's uh it's out of my wheelhouse I'm not I'm certainly not talented enough to use something like this or make something out of it but you play guitar don't you poorly uh but yeah anyway here's wonder wall I I think uh I I think that this is a good update and uh you know I think that it's it's a niche market but it's one that apple is wise to cater to and I updated my iPhone I I downloaded the iOS 9.2.1 update and installed it the other day um we were we covered that update we also covered the 10 11.3 update so what did we get out of these things not much it's basically some bug fixes and stuff the the big uh change for 9.2.1 is there was a bug with installing apps for uh uh Enterprise users so um if that affected you then you may be no longer affected after you update but other than that by the fact that this is a 0.1 update uh tells you all that you need to know about uh uh the fact that it's just basically security and and minor bug fixes yeah been hearing reports from people using iPhone 4S and 5 that It sped up their devices a little bit is there any there was a test that was done on uh YouTube where a guy compared um iPhone running an older iPhone like a 4S running 8.4.1 to 9.2.1 and they were pretty much comparable um in terms of speed uh iOS 9.2.1 did some stuff faster um 8.4.1 did some stuff slightly faster but uh from what I saw slightly comparable I guess people had complained with earlier builds of iOS 9 that their older iPhones specifically the iPhone 4S ran egregiously slow so if you've been holding off and updating may be a good time how El do you know when it's time to buy a new iPhone right well there's I hear from people all the time like conspiracy theories that Apple purposefully makes sure that new iOS updates run slow on their phones so they're forced to upgrade or something I always find that kind of stuff funny but um yeah it seems like it runs pretty well on older Hardware so uh if you've been holding off an upgrading because you're concerned about speed uh now might be a good time to take the plunge brilliant this is our episode this is episode 52 of the Apple Insider podcast and Neil where can people find you on the internet well you can read what I write at uh Apple Insider uh and I am on Twitter at thisis Neil Shane where can people find you on the internet I too am an apple Insider but not on Twitter if Neil is to class president and makes all sodas free we'll be sure to tell you all about it on next week's Apple Insider podcastyou're listening to the Apple Insider podcast welcome to episode 52 of our show where we discuss the latest news about Apple iPhone iPad mac Apple watch Apple TV and more we're recording on Thursday January 21st 2016 joining me today are Neil Hughes our managing editor hey how's it going also joining us is Shane Cole Holla At Your Boy Shane I know we were talking before we started recording and one of the topics you wanted to talk about was the Donald Trump Story the Donald Trump Story the Donald Trump story yes which you're have more specific than that well you referred to it as Donald Trump Jesus but the the story as I remember is that Donald Trump was speaking at one of his events one of his campaign stops in the United States and he made a comment about how he was going to cause Apple computer to start producing their quote damn computers unquote in the United States actually I believe it was their damn computers and things go ahead and correct us tell me exactly what he said I I don't know what he said I'm not going to look it up I choose to believe however that he just forgot what other things Apple makes like it's been so long since he interacted with any piece of consumer electronics that he just couldn't think of anything else he's like I know they make computers they make other stuff I'm sure so did you say they make fantastic products uh I don't know I I'll be honest with you I couldn't uh I couldn't force myself to read anything but those five words okay I'm going to read the quote and the quote is we have such amazing people in this country Smart Sharp energetic they're amazing Trump said we're going to get apple to start building their damn computers and things in this country instead of in other countries okay well godspeed later on he um he I don't know if it was at the same event or at a different event he said that he would do it by putting a 35% tariff on products manufactured outside the United States now I don't know if he means all products or just electronic products or just Apple's products uh but it's never that will never ever ever ever ever ever happen for a variety of reasons one I think I put this in the story The World Trade Organization would have a little hisy fit if we suddenly started enacting 35% protectionist tariffs they would have something to say about that I mean given that China's average tariff is only like 5% and they're famous I mean the the luxury tax in China now is I think 12% on clothing so if we went to 35% on electronics I think there'd be a little bit of a of a huff uh but yeah it's it's never going to happen it's an absurd campaign promise and it would cost billions and billions and billions of dollars and nobody could afford to buy iPhones anymore so there you go Bringing new meaning to Apple tax oh yes that would be the Android protectionist act because then you'd be able to afford Android products instead of iPhones is that the idea I I have no idea I have no idea what the end game is here I mean it's you know it's a lot of campaign Bluster to tell people what they want to hear it it it's like the fifth graders saying that they're if they get elected class president they're GNA make sure the soda is free you know like okay yeah I mean like it may get people interested and it may get you some votes but it doesn't change the reality of it I mean certainly more ambitious or uh less ambitious I should say promises have been made by presidents in the past that weren't able to be kept um you know I don't want to get too political here but you could look at something like the closing of Guantanamo Bay which is something that President Obama repeatedly promised to do and then once he got in office realized the logistics was doing something like that were a little difficult and so therefore it's still open to this day uh and here we are what seven years after he's been in office so nearing the end of his last term right so uh certainly a lot of presidential candidates make promises that they can't keep this is one of those that I would have to think would be pretty impossible to keep I mean technically speaking the president had has a limited power to impose protectionist tariffs that said I don't think this would ever happen I mean even if there were some scenario which he could he he could could impose a 35% tax on electronics manufactured overseas there's no way that he could possibly beat the tens of millions of dollars in pack money and lobbying cash that every consumer electronics manufacturer would suddenly shovel down congress's throat to repeal the Tariff Act of 19 22 which gives the president those Powers interestingly I mean I was thinking about this we know that when the iMac was first in production way back in 1998 that some of them were produced in California some of them still are go on so so some of the current flat panel iMacs are made in California assembled in California assembled yeah yeah the Freemont PL is still open it's reduced now but it's still open and the Mac Pro is in Texas I mean the so is the the uh a A8 Samsung's Fab for the A8 is in Austin I think but I believe the only top to bottom facility for manufacturing owned by Apple is in Ireland correct but even that's not top to bottom that's still just assembly is it oh okay yeah I mean they're they're not like fabbing Wafers there or anything right well yeah do but well they could make pcbs there though I don't think I think it's just populate them there I think it is larest assembly I think it is their largest manufacturing facility Apple owned is in Ireland yeah I think so well even the Mac Pro one is not Apple owned it's only Fremont andand I think the Mac Pro one is uh Flextronics I think uh Flextronics is now named just flex but isn't it a foxcon facility in Texas not a Flextronics or Flex it's not Fox it's either Flextronics or pegatron it's one of those two yeah I don't think Flex I don't think foxcon has do they have any Manufacturing in the US at foxcon I don't think they do I think they're brail do but not for Apple I don't think not for Apple so I mean I don't I don't the less interesting part of this story to me is Donald Trump I mean that's just campaign Bluster at that point I think any reasonable person can agree on that even people who support Donald Trump um but I think the more interesting part of this story is this kind of push uh and it's been going on for years by Apple itself to try to manufacture more in the United States uh Tim Cook himself has said that he would love to manufacture iPhones in the United States I don't think that's ever going to happen at least in our lifetimes but uh certainly an internal push for Apple to build stuff more in the United States could be a possibility without the need for any uh you know Apple taxes being imposed by the federal government or something like that right I mean what realistically do you think could be done to bring more manufacturing to the US well there is an economic incentive to bring manufacturing closer to the end consumer right um shoe companies now are actually at the Forefront of this Nike and Adidas are pushing really hard to that's why Adidas came out I don't know if you if you follow shoes at all but Adidas has these new 3D printed uh this new 3D printing process to make shoes and it's totally experimental and not right for prime time or anything but their idea is eventually that you make shoes at the retail store they're bought at which does a ton of things not the least of which is significantly cuts down on the complexity of your supply chain and removes the need to run a complicated uh Logistics operation well you don't have to worry about inventory any longer you got raw materials yeah so this this will happen eventually um anybody who has ever heard the 3D printing is the wave of the future thing that's why it's the wave of the future it's not for any other I mean there are some things you there are some things you can't make or you can't make reliably without being able to 3D print them that's a secondary Factor the real the real reason 3D printing is important to the future is this kind of thing it's bringing manufacturing as close as is humanly possible to the end consumer and now that's for us and by us I mean Americans that's a problem because our manufacturing economy is based around heavy industry right we make well not much anymore but we make steel yeah you know we make cars there's it's it's going to be tough times still make cars yeah it's G to be tough times for a while um but eventually eventually we'll get there well when you talk about shoes it makes me think you know obviously wearable devices have a lot in common with shoes in terms of custom style custom fit you know people need certain uh sizes and and widths and stuff on their shoes and stuff like that and you think about the complexity of uh bringing the Apple watch to the masses in terms of uh how many different colors do they offer now and different watch band combinations and sizes and all that kind of stuff I mean it took them a while to ramp up manufacturing of the Apple watch and it was in such limited capacity for those first couple months and when I say a while I mean like two months it was really a kind of a model Miracle of uh Logistics when you think about it but I mean think about all the possible combinations of Apple watch that are out there between the bands and the Styles and sizes um do you think that that's something that could be made a little simpler by uh uh if not manufacturing State side then at least doing something else State side what could they do there to to simplify it and make it cheaper for apple and better for the consumer so that's a little bit more of a complicated question because they the something like an Apple Watch or an iPhone is difficult to make in a a small scale process you know like making a shoe printing a shoe in a store is one thing but all of the the disperate components that go into an iPhone or Apple watch is a little bit harder what will happen eventually is that instead of having 350,000 people at a foxcon factory in Shenzhen you're going to have uh 10 guys looking over 150 robots at 10 different factories around the world right so if a iPhone the Mac Pro Factory in Texas that's that's kind of what's going on there as much of it is automated yeah you'll you'll have an iPhone sold in Germany will be made somewhere near Germany and an iPhone sold in China will be made somewhere near China and the same in the US and elsewhere that's where it's going okay maybe not for the electronics just the flow of sorry what about for the bands themselves just the bands yeah that kind of thing can be made bespoke yeah that's a really that's a really interesting idea there's a company here in Hong Kong called casify uh which I don't know if you've ever heard of them but they do they do custom iPhone cases and they also now do custom Apple watch bands you upload a photo and they print it uh they're like if You' ever heard Cafe Press like Cafe Press for watch bands and stuff and they print it and send it off to you and I could absolutely see something like that being in an Apple store you know the like we have in in PetSmart you have the little dog tag stations you know I can imagine in the future you go into like an Apple store and print your custom your custom watch band you buy the the watch itself and everything else is may be spoke we actually featured case toy in like a iPhone case Roundup a couple years ago for the holidays and I think some a representative from the company reached out to us because they said a lot of people were driven to them by our story or something like that and yeah I guess there's a lot of people that really want to get like an iPhone case with their dogs picture on her or something like that yeah there's um three is a big mobile operator in Europe and they also operate here and they are actually running a promo right now if you buy an iPhone 6 you get a voucher for case toy I thought that was a pretty interesting I mean it's not it's not just a side deal it's like their main promo at this moment yeah I guess there's a lot of demand for that kind of stuff it's interesting because normally when you're you're doing it as a carrier you you want to push a case that you've got in stock and take margin on are they taking margin on the voucher deal or they don't sell accessories as far as I'm aware um I mean they have tiny tiny accessory sections in their stores but I literally mean like one end cap it's interesting to me that you know Apple for many years uh has been leaving money on the table by not really playing into the customization of uh people's iPhones and and now with the watches they're obviously getting into it a little more but you think back to iPods and when they start doing them in different colors and stuff like that and then for the iPhone for so long they just didn't really offer a lot of variety they weren't even making cases and you know obviously now they make cases now they make a battery case they make all these custom Apple watch bands and styles and stuff like that that you can really personalize it and make it yours and I think that's been a a subtle but big time shift for the company and their focus um not only because it appeals to Consumers but it's a high margin business too you sell a $50 leather case and it probably costs them you know five bucks to make or something like that so uh they were offended by the idea of people putting terrible stuff on their product right theyed idea of some of these cases yeah it's good money for them as well but but just you know Johnny couldn't sleep at night because someone had put something horrible but colorful iMacs and iBooks and the iPods and stuff like that this isn't a new thing for Apple it's just interesting that they kind of for a few years there after the success of the iPhone kind of drifted away from it um you know you had a black iPhone then you then it took them forever to get the the the glass right on the iPhone 4 and the white iPhone came late and then finally they introduced the gold one one and now they have the rose gold but even still it's a limited number of colors compared to you know what you used to be able to get with an iPod or still can get with an iPod I wonder how so this is something I've been thinking about recently because this is the kind of thing I think about I wonder how if Johnny I has been wanting to do this kind of thing for a long time and always always always got shut down by Steve and the farther away from Steve that you get the more influence Johnny has and he gets to do stuff he's just always wanted to do but was never able to because he was overruled I I I would believe that yeah I mean you think about that first iMac again then that really you know was pretty out there in terms of the colors and and the look of it and everything like that and it was unique and it you could personalize it by buying your own color and the iPods yeah I I I could see that definitely being the case yeah because you for a long time the product marketing or I guess really as far as back as I know the product marketing department has run Apple product development right it's they make what they think they can sell um I mean they make stuff they want to make but they don't make things that they want to make and can't sell that's what I'm saying so I wonder if that if that ba uh balance of power is Shifting somewhat now um so the because Johnny I mean he seems to have Consolidated you know control of the company um for all intents and purposes so I wonder if he is if he with the reshuffling of the executive ranks I wonder if he is just now sort of the guy and Tim says you go do what you think is right you know I'll make I'll make the trains run on time and make sure we make tons of cash from the product side you do your thing don't leave out Phil Schiller in this equation well he just got he just got shuffled around he doesn't even I mean he's still VP uh wwm but he doesn't even uh their their head of internal C doesn't even report to him anymore right he has for years had that same kind of top tier influence he he and Donnie were both right there with Steve so well that's what I was saying he he had been the Arbiter of what they were going to build before because they would say we want to make this but can't we sell it and Phil would say yes or no but it seems now that that's shifting right it seems like Johnny has that I I think I want to wait for another product cycle to see what the results of that shift are I mean I hate to we all hate to do this because we hate when people throw it in our faces but could you what like Neil said look at all the options for the Apple watch could yeah could you have imagined this being in Steve Jobs's 2 by two Matrix uh no no this would not have made the 2 by two yeah I think he I think he only did the white iPhone because his wife wanted one but but you know Neil's not wrong either that it stems a little bit from that that having all the colors that we had for original iPod mini right because the iPod mini with all the different color skews wouldn't have necessarily fit in there either that's true yeah when you take into consideration the different uh capacities as well I mean there's always been a lot of configuration options that are broad for some products but well originally it was it was the 2x two Matrix and it was three options for each product in The Matrix and then when we got the iPod it sort of ballooned out from there and then you look at the iPad you can get it with or without LTE different colors yeah the iPad's a mess yeah they've they've really the product options have grown but it really hasn't gotten into ways to customize your product until Apple started to get into the accessories business I mean you have three four callers now for the iPhone um maybe they'll expand that in the future there's no really not really any rumors about that yet they tried to dabble in it with the iPhone 5c um the accessories business started with the iPhone 4 when we got the bumpers to solve antenna gate and that was there again under Steve right but it was pretty limited and now when you look at the options in terms of the different I mean you have how many colors of cases for the iPhones right and then you have Smart covers for the iPad and all the Apple watch bands and all that kind of stuff yeah and some of this I mean even just talking to to people that I used to talk to at Apple some of it was you you'd go and show them a case and their first question was does this case work with our cables does this case work on docking speaker products kind of thing mhm and you'd find a lot of the cases didn't work that they they conflicted with Docking products that they were too thick to to actually work or that they were too thick uh too tall for the connectors to make full contact on a docking product and you'd find that you couldn't get the Apple cables in or you'd get the regular charge cable in but you couldn't get one of the bigger ones that was like the uh the the VGA or HDMI cable to plug in and that's one of the things that they would reject when they were taking a product into their stores for the retail store was this case doesn't work with all the scenarios that we think our users need we're not going to take it remember when Apple used to charge you an extra hundred bucks to get a black MacBook yes totally who paid for that uh I know knew I knew three people who did yeah do you think that they would do that today no I can ask that's not hard to find out you John Scrivens and ask him if he buy another black MacBook do you mean if people would pay that or if Apple would charge that both I mean well I they wouldn't do it now I don't think because if you look at the a 12-in Macbook that comes in the same color as the iPad they don't charge anything extra for that so yeah I think people would absolutely people would if Apple had made the rose gold iPhone $100 more people absolutely would have paid it no question oh yes because but this is this is where like remember all those oh the only the the plus models are going to get uh Sapphire cover it's like who would pay for this because you can't see it like you you1 there because because when we're talking about Apple watch we have the aluminum body with mineral glass and then you move up to the steel with with sapphire but Neil NE Point yeah Neil's point stands that you can tell the difference between a sport watch and a uh a watch watch this is also on the aluminum watch and a watch watch and an addition watch but you can't tell the difference between uh Gorilla Glass and Sapphire whenever everything else is the same imagine that you were so excited about Sapphire and you're one of those jerks that had to tell everybody you had a sapphire phone the only way you could prove it is to take your keys out of your pocket and try to mangle your phone and go look it doesn't scratch I mean like you know I I can pick out 10 people who do that right well then you should reconsider your circle of friends but if if you look at if you look at you know the Apple watch yes the entry level model the sport has the ion X glass but it also has the cheaper aluminum which looks side by side very different from the stainless steel models I mean it's the entire package it's not just the glass for Apple to sell a model of phone with just the the glass different for an extra hundred bucks or whatever would be absolutely insane and it would be stupid and they would never ever do it now if Apple wanted to somehow defy the laws of physics and make a stainless steel iPhone that didn't weigh a ton then maybe they could do something like that or or you know some mythical uh uh what's that stuff liquid metal or something like that maybe but it would have to have a distinctly different visual appearance and some sort of added value for the consumer I don't think that Apple's in a position here in 2016 where they're just going to charge an extra hundred bucks for a color so on the subject of color can I make a confession sure I really like the rose gold iPhone do you I haveone I have a space gry one I know but I'm a man so there are many many men that bought the rose gold I know I've seen many of them anyway I really I thought it was be I thought it was going to be ridiculous but I've actually grown to really enjoy it the the space if it's ridiculous it's ridiculous in the best way the space gray iPhone is still too light they need to go darker like they did with the Apple watch it needs to go back to the iPhone 5 the black yeah that was really nice it just showed a lot of scratches and stuff more clearly so around theed which color you said you have the which one the space gray I have a space gray 6s space gray 6s and and you same I'm I'm still using the gold six I thought you had a 6S no I do not have a sixs okay no I'm I'm oh no that was the that was the MacBook a few weeks ago where you didn't realize that you had a uh Magic trackpad exactly or not a magic Trackpad a for Force touch trackpad yes that's right I went six months without realizing I the forest touch trackpad I am all uh space gray up and down if I could get a if I could get a space gray 15-inch MacBook Pro I'd buy a new one right now just to do that do you think that Apple would do like a gold MacBook Pro um that's a good question I I want to say no I could absolutely see a space gray MacBook Pro and I want to say no on the gold but you never know I would I I you know I like the gold 12in I would totally have the the gold in a larger size well so they've been doing this campaign recently where they show how everything matches all their collection their colle actually that's now I think about exactly what it is it's their collection right and my wife has been doing this for a while she had everything she has is silver with the white front she has a white uh smart cover on her iPad she has the MacBook Air is silver her iPad is silver her phone is silver and it all looks her Apple watch she wears the white uh white white sport band yeah with aluminum Apple watch and I'm not going to lie it looks killer like when when she's sitting like at a coffee shop or something which I I suppose is exactly the only time it would matter but it looks good I'm a little jealous well that's why they made the uh the the down Market Gold version so that you could match yeah I'm not gonna get the gold i' get the rose gold I would go rose gold probably I had a iPad Air 2 and I sold it when I got my iPad Pro or no I'm sorry I didn't sell it I gave it to my wife cuz she had an iPad Air and we sold her iPad Air uh she had a white iPad air with a blue Smart Cover um and it was a decision for a few days where she had to decide if she liked the Smart Cover the blue smart cover with the space gray uh iPad Air to or not uh she ended up sticking with the black one it wasn't a good match but yeah I mean these are important decisions like what matches well and even when you go into the Apple Store like if you want to try on a watch back when they first started doing the trons I asked them you know if I could try and mix and match uh you know a certain like a space black uh stainless steel with a certain band and they they wouldn't even do it in the store they wouldn't allow it because they let us do it when we went in for our addition appointment yeah but maybe it's because we were trying on the addition and they thought we were Rich you fooled them nice moving on I want to talk about things that Apple can't sell right we talked about all the things Apple can sell but we should talk about something that Apple can't sell and that is I ad is going away now you may not remember I ad I ad was this idea that Apple would create a platform that allowed people to put delightful pretty ads convenient ads ads that weren't terrible in their applications or or other things on their iOS and you know instead of getting these gross popovers and things like that you'd get something welld designed and apple was unable to challenge Google's mobile ad sales so what what are we losing out on here Neil what's what's actually happening with this uh I mean this will affect some developers that are very heavily invested in apple and probably Apple specific developers who are quick to embrace their kind of stuff I mean certainly there are a number of apps that do use I ads so this is going to be a change for that market but I mean in the grand scheme of things it doesn't really change very much I don't think uh I ads didn't really take on the way that apple wanted them to and uh the way that they predicted um it was an interesting concept but the reality of it just was that uh I don't know that Apple's heart was ever really in it either uh it didn't feel like something that they invested a lot in or focused a lot on uh and they certainly didn't talk about it much so I don't think this is a Scott forall project wasn't it uh I I don't know who was behind it Steve Jobs was still around when they unveiled it I believe I think he was of it was part of his thermonuclear war on Google and it just totally failed yeah they tried to do when it started out it was like a ridiculous Buy in like you had to buy a million dollars worth of ads in order to even get in so they only it's at launch they only had a handful of advertisers I think Nissan was one of the first ones and stuff like that and I guess I mean I guess it was kind of neat in a gwiz kind of way you tap on an ad and it worked like an app and it opened up and stuff like that but as time went on they you know they had to open up to more and people didn't want to put that much effort into the ads because that's just more cost in addition to the Buy in and so they just became kind of cheaper and weren't really that interesting they weren't really like apps anymore so in the beginning not only did you have to spend exorbitantly to get in but Apple did the creative you couldn't do your own creative you weren't allowed uh you could work with them obviously but a an IAD team made the ads yeah you know I mean it's it was one in a line of experiments to try to control the entire thing that just F let me ask my my understanding my recollection was that you didn't get the demographics of the people that looked at or tapped through or or waited on your ads and as an Advertiser that's one of the things you rely on to see that they're effective right so that also kind of led to the death of it didn't it yeah all every Apple has ever done in this case has been um uh a failure based on not I mean not a failure but it's it's not done as well as it could have because they refuse to share audience demos yeah there any number of app developers who are so pissed at the App Store can't won't even give them email addresses the the this is not going to affect most of our listeners what will affect most of our most of our listeners by the shutdown of I ad is the I ad Department also covered uh iTunes radio ads for uh uh content uh that you might stream Pandora like on iTunes radio that is no longer going to be ad supported and will only be under the um Apple music Banner which also means that people like myself who don't pay for Apple music but do pay for iTunes Match are going to lose that functionality as part of your $25 year uh subscription so I currently pay 25 bucks a year for iTunes Match and that gives me access to iTunes radio without ads and I can skip as much as I want uh once the changeover happens I'll no longer have access to iTunes radio and that's it I can only listen to beats one sucks to be you although that brings up a question who handles the Beats One ads good question I don't know I mean I'm sure that they'll still maintain some sort of internal advertising Department I I I I don't really enjoy most of what I hear on Beats one i' I've pretty much given up on it so um I I didn't use iTunes radio much either it's not much of a loss for me I know my wife used it a lot um and she's pretty disappointed I know my parents use it as well because they were subscribing to iTunes match it was just an easy way for them to get a Pandora likee service without having to hear ads um so I'm sure there are a lot of listeners out there who are in a similar position and and that's a unfortunate change I think I think they should have at least reconsidered it and kept it for iTunes Match subscribers yeah well the one way that I used IAD that I think I was on the Min minority side of was I used the IAD tools sometimes to mock up application ideas that I had because you mock up many people have done that yeah so it sucks that these tools are going to go away too well before that it was quartz composer was the hotness and then there was I producer for a while and now keynote is the the app of choice I used keynote from the very beginning for this stuff but you just put together a concept with it I mean there's no easy way to export that and turn in and start the basis for an app right code what you do with keynote when you're mocking up in prototyping is that you you link the buttons to other slides that have the resulting display and so you don't give any of the animations but you have I tapped on this oh and it shows you the slide that results and you export as a uh as a basically a hyperlink PDF well now you can actually do the whole thing you can do the same animations um there are teams at Apple that use keynote to do prototyping oh thank God and that's why they added a lot of because I was kopia for for like gosh I was using kopia since it came out in 2009 my suspicion is that the reason keyote has gotten so much love recently in that department it's because there are teams at Apple who do it and they were bugging the keynote team saying please make this happen for us well it's fast and it's awesome at doing it I once demonstrated an app that I mocked up at Apple and there are no other native prototyping apps that come close to the responsiveness of keynot I mean there are there are other ones pix 8 is really good now yeah but nothing else for a long time was around you could tell which things the employees that Apple internally use or don't use based on what gets attention when it's updated and that's why numbers sucks as bad as it does and that's why the remote app has been uh ignored for so many years and was not even a part of the Apple TV launch and the remote is literally maintained by one guy isn't it I know yeah and it was a built it's a built-in feature on the Apple watch and it didn't even work with the new Apple TV which is insane that's why uh Smart Cover unlock uh is no longer function with Touch ID like man you have been harping on that yeah that's well hey it's a it's a nice feature can we move to stuff that you harp about also like the uh the 4-inch iPhone well before we do that before we do that what do you have against numbers all of my friends who work uh in finance uh say that numbers is awful Exel no crap because they're in finance but for like Joe for me who only uses a spreadsheet when it's absolutely I don't care about you so no but I also only use a spreadsheet when it's absolutely necessary but what I do like to do and I end up having to use Google for this is forms right there used to be in numbers on iOS you could create a form and it would populate a spreadsheet with the results and that functionality went away and now I have to use Google Docs sheets in order to do forms that populate a spreadsheet that I can use the information out of later and I would really liked for numbers to have instead of killing the functionality off in iOS to have moved it over and made it also useful on OS 10 and in the the iCloud I didn't know that ever existed it totally existed and it was great but it was only and this was weird it was only in numbers on iPad you could not do the forms in numbers on iPhone interesting yeah I don't know instead of fixing this and making it everywhere they killed it if you're in if you're in finance and you need pivot tables yeah suck for you but I think for the the vast majority of people numbers is totally fun I it's much faster than excels who even the new Excel the new Excel is not terrible no the new office is great actually yeah um but the you know when I just need a quick and dirty spreadsheet I don't even bother opening so anyway moving on some more interesting things another thing that Neil likes to talk about smaller iPhones go on Neil well there was kind of a ridiculous video that came out today that made the rounds where it's really impossible to tell what the heck it is it's just some guy funneling what looks like an iPhone 6 or 6s uh and they claim it's an iPhone 6c a smaller one if the guy has large hands then it could just as easily be a 6S or a six but it basically looks identical to a iPhone 6 and 6s just smaller which so he scaled down an iPhone 6 in solid works and 3D printed a scaled down 4-in iPhone 6 and then spray painted at Gold is that what I'm saying no no I me it's I think it's just an iPhone 6 do with big hands probably probably just a regular phone um it's hard to say because the rumors have said like if you uh listen to what Ming quo has said um he thinks it's GNA look more like an iPhone 5S but he also says it's gonna have the uh 3D coverglass or whatever or whatever 2.5d coverglass where it's curved at the edges uh which is similar to the iPhone 6 and 6s so um there's a little bit of inconsistency about what the device is going to look like if you believe this video which uh Shane and I are very skeptical of but if you believe it then the new phone that's coming out in the 4 in size is basically just gonna be a small iPhone 6 um very skeptical is not negative enough to describe my feelings I I I don't know uh it would be interesting if they did that because then the whole lineup would look basically the same right you would have yeah the six the 6s the pluses and the smaller model would all be the same and just kind of scaled up or down um I don't know why why they would want to do that I think that they especially if they're looking to kind of juice sales at the halfway point before the seven comes out you think that they want to do something a little different maybe um to kind of incentivize the smaller form factor but uh we'll see you know I would personally I i' I'd like to see um you know something a little thicker and fit in a bigger battery and kind of make it the you know uh person who doesn't want to carry a tablet in their pocket you know out on the town for the day kind of phone but apparently I'm the only person on planet Earth who wants that so no in every every single iPhone thread there is somebody are you it might be you just in every one of them going I have multiple accounts and I going I wish they would make it thicker and had a bigger battery yeah I don't know I meane but when Apple concedes on that we get the humpback of iPhone 6 like this battery case is just like the ugliest thing I've ever seen I can't believe anybody would even buy one of these so have you have you tried one no it's so I tried one oh jeez and it actually no no no no no it looks ridiculous I would never actually use it in you know any scenario where I would be worried about being judged by my fellow human beings when when you're using a battery casage because you're at a show and you're not a conference and you're burning battery like there's no tomorrow that's that's when you pull out a battery case well in my case I have a little a really thin uh xiaomi um external battery that I keep in my bag but the battery C the done as it is it feels really good it doesn't like when you have a mopy case on it's just enormous yeah the same thickness all the way around I have the uh the newer mphi the smaller one and I really like it you have juice pack air uh I had the juice pack air before but this is a new a newer model I reviewed it I got I got to look up what it is hold on well he's looking that up uh anyway the with the design that they did for that when you're holding hand it doesn't feel like you have a giant battery case on it it just feels like you have a normal case on it so yeah the juice pack air um I've had for a couple years us with the iPhone 6 and I like it but it's definitely consider bigger it gives you like another 125% battery um and so Mofi sent me last fall the juice pack reserve for the iPhone 6 and 6s and it is considerably thinner uh but it only gives you an extra 60% battery so it makes a lot of concessions in terms of the battery life but it's thin enough uh and enough to get me through the day that it's become my preferred uh battery case so I recommend that one but honestly if Apple made a thicker smaller phone there are a lot of benefits to that uh including the fact that they could potentially fit in an even better camera right now you know as evidence by the protruding camera on the six and 6s they're limited by the laws of physics um if they were to make a thicker phone they could put in a better camera I you know I think that there would be a market for that and I don't think they would have to sacrifice their sense of style or make it that big that consumers would be turned off by it what was the the Nokia phone that had a optical zoom camera on the that was the 1020 was the name for it well so the 1020 was the Windows phone version there was uh one last gasp at actual like Symbian version of it before P view or something yeah pure something it had like an insane uh megapixel count something it was 40 something yeah think 41 megapixel yeah it was a Carl iiss lens on it too yep well and they did that for the Nokia 1020 as well yeah I mean that's a little extreme obviously um and that had a humpback on it too just to fit in that lens yep but you know if I mean if we started to think a little bit outside the box and apple wanted to make like a road warrior slash uh amateur photographer oriented smaller iPhone they could get away with a lot more by making it just slightly thicker or they could just make a digital camera yeah they'll never make a digital camera ever again again yeah they won't it's not g to happen quick cam it won't happen I mean just because the iPhone you know is is their bread and butter at that point but I think they they're never they're never going to make a three and a half inch photographer focused iPhone either no I don't but I don't that's what I'm saying I don't mean photographer Focus I think you could give it a number of advantages where you could make it appeal to a number of segments of the market make it appeal to people who like smaller form factor in their hand make it to people uh who like longer battery life uh people who want a better camera quality I think you could do something like that we'll call it the iPhone shut up finally Edition never happen it'll never happen now all right let's talk about this lifi story so recent versions of iOS the developer code beginning actually beginning with is 9.1 there's a cache file that makes a mention of lii capability so first of all what is lifi uh lifi is a marketing term for I guess it means light Fidelity it has no actual relation to wireless fidelity was always a stupid name also so well yeah uh but what it is basically is Wi-Fi via visible light so you have uh you have something like this in your house probably already if you have a television uh most TV remotes operate by IR infrared light that's why you can't uh point you have to point it generally in the vicinity of your TV for it if you block the end of the remote it will not work yeah exactly uh you can actually see it work if you uh hold it and points it at your iPhone camera while you have the camera open you can see it see it work I have had that work since iPhone 4 because they've been putting IR filters oh that's right they put filters on it now okay well never mind you can't do that so forget that little science experiment if you have an old digital camera yeah then yeah you can see anything without an IR felter on the front of it yeah but anyway so what happens is when you push say the power button it blinks a little infrared LED in the front of the remote control really really fast uh the nominal speed is I think 38 khz I could be wrong uh so 38,000 times a second and the TV sees these flashes of infrared light on its infrared receiver and decodes them into an electronic signal that means you know turn the volume up or turn the volume down on or off what have you and lii works on the same principle except it works with visible light so the uh say the Le if you have LED track lighting in your house it can be pulsed really rapidly uh so fast that you wouldn't be able to see it uh you wouldn't be able to tell it was being pulsed but it can be pulls so rapidly uh to or it can be pull rapidly enough to accomplish the same idea and because the speed of light is you know quite fast uh it would enable much faster communication there are problems uh like IR it needs line of site so you can only get a data connection literally while you can see the light uh but there are a lot of advantages so there you go so I don't think line of sight is an incredibly huge problem because when you're in a building which is where you're going to be if you're using lifi you're pretty much in range of a light bulb right you're you're not sitting in a closet that's got no lights you're sitting somewhere that's got lighting well that's true if you are somewhere with overhead lighting or ubiquitous overhead lighting but don't forget there are a lot of places that use indirect lighting I mean my apartment is a perfect example I don't I have overhead lights but they're never on I have indirect lighting everywhere so if you are someplace like that then it's not going to be helpful what's interesting to me is that this this can combine a couple of different things right because the first question is okay great you can pass data to a light bulb how do you get that data back to the the network in there to the outside world well you could use power line and use the power lines that connect the power to the bulb to transmit back to the router um and that would be reasonable you you could also do um like you know crazy things like Wi-Fi in the bulb and just have the bulb do that but what's what's interesting to me here is is you know this is this has impacts on things like Philips Hugh and some of the other smart light bulbs that we've been seeing so far where now you're going to have a bulb that's not just smart and controllable by the app but also does your data yeah there's a company in India that already has a proof of concept out and they're testing it in I want to say the Netherlands in a warehouse setting so I there's definitely some interesting some interesting options here it's going to need a lot more development and it's going to be a long way down the road uh but we've seen them ex them being Apple explore this before they have a patent I think from 2013 13 yeah yeah uh discussing ways of making camera sensors do double duty so you could set them in image mode to take a photo and the rest of the time they would be in data reception mode wild so it's it's in iOS and it remains to be seen if we'll actually see it as a a practical thing we can demonstrate I would rather they do wi or Wireless power at first but that's just me ESPN still in talks about an apple streaming still in talks with apple about a streaming service what do you like about this story Neil I mean if Apple's going to do it streaming service ESPN's kind of the big dog right you need you need to have live sports for your streaming service to be successful that's so I'm gonna stop you right there and tell you why you're wrong no not okay there was uh somebody did a survey two weeks ago I came out I think two weeks ago it may have been done a long time ago uh something like 55 or 56% of people surveyed said that they were a cable subscribers said that they would drop ESPN if it meant saving 8 a month on their cable the Assumption has always been that the reason people don't young especially young men under 50 don't cut the cord is because of the ESPN but apparently that's not actually the case ESPN has a much bigger mind share than an actual um audience market share I feel like ESPN's relevance varies depending on what sport you're watching too um yes very much so if you watch the NFL um certainly ESPN has Monday Night Football which is by far not even close the top rated program on all of cable it's it it beats most broadcast shows I mean Monday Night Football is huge but that only affects two teams a week so by and large an NFL viewer is going to be able to get their local market games over the air or you know however um through their local affiliate CBS uh or fox or NBC for the Sunday night game um now if you're into college basketball for example uh you're probably way more likely to be an ESPN viewer if you're into college football you're definitely more likely to be an ESPN viewer uh College Football H now ESPN has a strangle hold on that market they uh control uh pretty much all the SEC games except for the big matchup of the week of SEC football the biggest SEC weekly matchup remains exclusive to CBS but uh that will end soon probably um uh the uh Big 10 Network or no it's not the Big 10 Network somebody else also has ESPN running it ESPN runs the network Longhorn Network they run the ACC Lorn Network y and they will eventually run the Big 12 network if Texas gets their head out of their butt yep and ESPN also is the sole broadcaster of the college football playoff and uh college football National Championship now uh that's a really big deal if you're at all into college football now if you don't care about college football you probably don't give a crap about ESPN or college basketball or at the NBA a lot of NBA games are on ESPN but that's split between ESPN and TNT uh baseball's another one where TBS has a lot of Baseball ESPN has a lot of baseball so you may not but if you're if you're a baseball fan though you have an amazing option because MLB.TV is fantastic and they they just had they just went through a lawsuit over MLB.TV and I think for the next two years there won't be any local blackouts it's really a huge deal it's a Content land grab that's been going on for years and um ESPN continues to secure exclusive rights but then then there's some over-the-top services like MLB At Bat that make it less relevant um the NHL is exclusive to NBC um so you know you run down the list of of sports I I think ESPN recently has been making a push into NASCAR um they didn't really pay much attention to NASCAR for years and now they're getting into that um ESPN is also focusing on some more like entertainment focused uh uh content and and and um ESPN doing ESPN is doing professional wrestling now yes they do have a weekly uh segment on Sports Center covering professional wrestling so they're trying to broaden their base uh to appeal to more people but it's really kind of dependent on what sports you're interested in watching but I still think that if you're going to do a live streaming TV service uh the NFL is the most important thing but ESPN is uh probably just as important just in terms of uh the the the breath of content that they have exclusive access to including Monday Night Football yeah now so sling has ESPN or at least some portion of ESPN in it right the oo they have all of ESPN okay depending which package you have the base package I think just has ESPN and ESPN 2 but the sports package has all of them how are they doing uh they're about to pass two million subscribers I think the thing with sling is the inability to record content well the thing with sling is it kind of quality kind of sucks okay with an apple streaming service you're not gonna be able to record content either they have't nailed the streaming technology portion of it yet I mean here's how it works I watch sports live I pretty much uh DVR everything else and so I stick with cable because if I want to watch these programs uh and not pay $3 an episode on iTunes or some crap like that or wait 48 hours or a week or whatever for it to show up on Hulu you got to have cable and so for the convenience of it the ability to fast forward through ads and watch it more quickly pretty much any scripted television I watch DVR um sometimes the same night uh sometimes the next night sometimes they'll pile up and I just don't get around to them um I do have I pay for uh subscriptions to HBO uh now or go whichever one is cable free um and I also pay for the subscription to Showtime uh but those are separate from my cable provider and it's all on demand there is no live streaming component to it we don't have cable uh we have we also have HBO Go and Showtime I have sling which I only use to log in to watch ESPN on the Apple TV so I essentially pay $20 a month for ESPN and will continue to do so I have MLB.TV for baseball I don't watch the NFL live just because it's a pain in the ass I I do watch the Sunday night game because NBC streams those for free um but it's important remember rest is Netflix it's important to remember because there was a study that came out this week showing share of traffic and stuff like that the vast majority of streaming content providers out there are not showing live content they're it's all on demand they're they I mean YouTube does some live stuff but that's not really their bread and butter Netflix does Nothing Live Hulu does Nothing Live uh Apple you know will do an event live occasionally or something yeah twice a year yeah but they don't really do any live content so you're looking at sling um you know probably one of the bigger uh uh live providers is WWE network has a live Channel included with their um their subscription service so you can watch well yeah MLB but but that's a but that's a a game by game basis they don't have a linear channel is what I'm saying right that's true yeah so uh NHL does the same thing where you can subscribe and Direct TV obviously has an NFL uh streaming package as well but those are on game by game basis uh to have a linear Channel with constant content you can't get a subscription to the MLB Network you can't get a subscription to the NHL Network or the NFL Network without paying for cable those are exclusive to cable so to have a linear Channel like ESPN would be a huge deal for something like apple to help differentiate them from the other content providers out there and that's really was differentiating sling now I think sling shortcoming other than the apparent quality issues is the fact that you can't record anything yeah I don't know that's something feel it matters that's something I never considered before I wonder how widespread that is because there there's a lot of little things like that that you don't think about but actually make a big deal for a lot of people do you do you watch scripted television yes but not in any sort of timely manner okay but how do you watch it like let's say like Agent Carter premiered Tuesday night um I would buy an iTunes season pass okay see so it premiered Tuesday night my wife and I didn't get a chance to watch it we were watching something else a hockey game was on I think so we watched it last night it was a 2hour Premiere and we had it we had it tooed and or DVR and we could just fast forward through the commercials and watch it in an hour and a half or whatever it was but yeah I mean otherwise it on Hulu in a couple days otherwise I would have paid uh three bucks per hour on iTunes probably for us it was a two-parter to get it in standard deaf or whatever they charge I'd pay like six bucks when you start adding that up if you watch five or six shows it's actually cheaper to get cable and that's just to watch a handful of shows you know who does this really well I pay 11 bucks for Hulu ad free and I'll just watch whatever I want on that and cheer than cable and only from a network that supports Hulu uh and then also for the ones that support it in ad free because they're as I found some that run ads before or after the show uh who does this really well is the BBC actually yeah except for the geographical region problem I was gonna say you guys have absolutely no experience with this but the oh no no I have an i player account but I player is really I this is how I watched the Sherlock season premiere I think it was on player an hour after it was on TV in England really really well and the streaming is phenomenal I can stream well they finally got their heads out their butts around Flash in full HD from the I player app through please don't kick me off DBC through my VPN because I don't live in England I live in Hong Kong through my VPN through the iPad over AirPlay to my TV with no loss of quality it's extraordinary the BBC used to be about trying to spread the England to the rest of the world and and get their stuff out there and they've been really stupid about the geographical region blocking you know what's that mean for expats it's it's ridiculous well it it pains me to say this but I will commend uh cable companies on doing something right uh by and large on demand Services through cable providers are pretty good these days um so last night trying to catch up on TV again a Tuesday night episode of a new girl that my wife and I were trying to watch for some some reason the recording was messed up and I have a 5.1 system in the center channel didn't record properly on the live broadcast just went to the on demand and played it of course there's no fast forward option so you can't fast forward through the ads but I understand that and it was available less than 24 hours after the episode aired and I had zero problems watching it and high def started right away so um as much as I hate cable and love would would love to get rid of it they do a pretty good job with their on demand Services these days now that said there are some networks that don't participate I believe ABC and Time Warner continue to have a UT so you can't get any ABC content available on demand Through Time Warner and those contract disputes are just insane but that's why this is whole this whole thing to borrow a Steve Jobs phrase is a bag of hurt because you don't know what you're getting into I could switch to Hulu but what Network's goingon to comply and I gotta pay an extra couple bucks to get really adree as opposed to limited ads and do I have to wait 48 hours for it to show up on there it's just a pain in the butt yeah this is this exact thing is what has made me other than Sherlock and top gear which hilarious well not top but yeah exactly but other than stuff that was available on the BBC because it's such a pain-free experience this is exactly what stopped me from watching shows every week you know is my favorite show in the history of television and I still haven't seen the second half of the last season th this is exactly what has stopped Apple from getting into the business because Apple doesn't want to come into this half-baked Apple doesn't want to come in and not have ESPN and not have a deal with CBS to show their content on demand because no one's going to pay for that people you know you might get some early adopters to sign up for something like uh uh uh sling TV where they might you know be eager to embrace it or something like that but for the average person if they sign up for sling TV and they're like oh I can't DVR this or oh I can't get uh you know the Food Network or whatever you know I'm sure that Apple's done the research and they're saying that our Target demographic is this big you look at this initial success that they've had with apple music and they're not half baking this stuff I mean they're already uh out well outpacing Spotify as we talked about last week in terms of their growth and the number of people they've been able to bring in just because of their power and their clout if they're going to get into this business they're not looking to get two million subscribers like sling TV did they're looking to get tens of millions of subscribers they're looking to to accelerate the cable cutting process and so they're going to have to hit all of those points they're going to have to get ESPN they're going to have to get On Demand they're going to have to have you know cloud storage of stuff you want to record or however they do it it's all going to have to work and it's going to have to be affordable too and that's really tough yeah well without getting caught in a loop talking about TV I want to move on to garage band and apple updated Garage Band for iOS with a new interface that that makes it look like a hardware controller for a DJ with drum machines and things like that they also released a music Memos app so what what are these apps about what what's what's really going on here that they've updated them for us can I just say your transitions are flawless thank you sir or Segways I I suppose Segways so I actually haven't used new garage band for iOS but I will quickly talk about voice memos and then Neil can make us some stuff about Garage Band sure so uh sorry not voice MOS music memos is based on the idea of voice memos apparently what we hear is that a lot of musicians were using voice memos on the go and somehow news of this phenomenon got back to Apple and they said you know we can do this better so they made music memos which is voice memos for music and you can record it's it's like a mini it's sort of like a mini garage band uh but without the editing features you can record stuff you can uh tag your recordings manage your recordings but importantly it also includes some of the automatic backing track features from garage band so if you record say a a guitar uh a five minutes of guitar music memos will Analyze That for chord and Tempo and then put a drum track behind it for you so while you're out you can get a good idea of how your your song is going you know you can you can actually develop music uh on the go and then you can bring come back home and bring it directly into logic uh only Logic Pro 10 or the new garage band uh via iCloud so it's actually pretty if you are got person who likes to make music uh it's actually a pretty cool little deal and it's free yeah and it's free it looks pretty huge I mean just the idea of having a good memo app for capturing song ideas is a good thing and and voice memos was always not quite good enough because the recording quality was not uh not great they compressed the files pretty heavily because it was for voice we should note that they uh music memos records in Lawless yeah and and it's adding in the guitar tuner just killed off all of the guitar tuner apps although I I really do like polytune because polytune is seriously cool if you're a guitar player um polytune you can strum all six strings at the same time and it will pick out and show you which ones are sharp or flat at the same time you don't have to play note by note it's is really cool and the fast way to tune your guitar up but uh but still having a guitar tuner built into Apple's one is a big deal uh and as you say analyzing the the key signature and being able to tag for first chorus and things like that uh that's that's great this is really quite cool yeah I'm gonna be playing with this um and Neil tell me about garage band uh so the big changes in garage band are uh there's a whole new uh DJ controller section which would take on the likes of uh tractor and some of the other popular uh iPad DJ options out there I don't looks looks kind of like triggering Ableton Live a little bit with you know a Novation Launchpad for example and this is all in in apple and garage man style very simple so um simple to mess around with and uh for people that want to master it and do a little more technical stuff that's in there too but it does uh features that you would expect for like an amateur DJ like keeping beats in sync with the time and pitch and stuff like that so you can merge and and do cool stuff and make it sound like you're way more talented than you actually are um and they also have a new Drummer mode which uh gives you the option to create sick beats in uh different uh sounds Taylor I just heard your entire Soliloquy in Tay's voice I was I was hearing Taylor Swift but go on yeah I mean it's pretty cool um you know just drum machine go on there kind of mess around uh a little more advanced way to create stuff and uh play along with it um for a lot of people the more interesting features may actually be that uh GarageBand has also been updated to be designed for the retina display on the iPad Pro so there's more options on the screen um when you run it on your larger iPad it takes advantage of the screen real estate which is great um tired of just seeing apps just blown up to the 12.9 inch screen size you know to really take advantage of the iPad Pro you have to put more on the screen uh and do it in a way that makes sense unlike like when you open up the app store and there's just like a million apps to tap on there it's like this wasn't thought out very well um and then uh on the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s plus uh Apple's also added support for 3D touch so uh if you're doing things like playing on the piano or whatever you can press harder or softer and it will gauge how hard you're pressing and uh uh emulate the instrument that you're playing accordingly so it looks like as I'm as I'm looking at Apple's copy on this they say to get started pick a template from popular genres like EDM house hip hop and more and then tap a cell in the template to turn on the loop so you're using Loops they've got already created and using that to to make your DJ music uh I you know I go back to things like loopy HD where you can record your own loops and then trigger them and if that was possible in this interface that would be really empowering because then you could Loop and then play live over the loops that you've created you know kind of Stack Up pieces to a song and build a live performance out of it yeah I mean messed around with Garage Band on iOS and and it's like uh iMovie one of those things that uh may not get as much attention as it deserves because it's actually quite powerful and and quite interesting and and quite capable um especially they have you know midi support for instruments and lightning connections and all kinds of cool stuff that you can do stuff can go through the headphone jack too to record through it or you can just use the mic so it's uh it's out of my wheelhouse I'm not I'm certainly not talented enough to use something like this or make something out of it but you play guitar don't you poorly uh but yeah anyway here's wonder wall I I think uh I I think that this is a good update and uh you know I think that it's it's a niche market but it's one that apple is wise to cater to and I updated my iPhone I I downloaded the iOS 9.2.1 update and installed it the other day um we were we covered that update we also covered the 10 11.3 update so what did we get out of these things not much it's basically some bug fixes and stuff the the big uh change for 9.2.1 is there was a bug with installing apps for uh uh Enterprise users so um if that affected you then you may be no longer affected after you update but other than that by the fact that this is a 0.1 update uh tells you all that you need to know about uh uh the fact that it's just basically security and and minor bug fixes yeah been hearing reports from people using iPhone 4S and 5 that It sped up their devices a little bit is there any there was a test that was done on uh YouTube where a guy compared um iPhone running an older iPhone like a 4S running 8.4.1 to 9.2.1 and they were pretty much comparable um in terms of speed uh iOS 9.2.1 did some stuff faster um 8.4.1 did some stuff slightly faster but uh from what I saw slightly comparable I guess people had complained with earlier builds of iOS 9 that their older iPhones specifically the iPhone 4S ran egregiously slow so if you've been holding off and updating may be a good time how El do you know when it's time to buy a new iPhone right well there's I hear from people all the time like conspiracy theories that Apple purposefully makes sure that new iOS updates run slow on their phones so they're forced to upgrade or something I always find that kind of stuff funny but um yeah it seems like it runs pretty well on older Hardware so uh if you've been holding off an upgrading because you're concerned about speed uh now might be a good time to take the plunge brilliant this is our episode this is episode 52 of the Apple Insider podcast and Neil where can people find you on the internet well you can read what I write at uh Apple Insider uh and I am on Twitter at thisis Neil Shane where can people find you on the internet I too am an apple Insider but not on Twitter if Neil is to class president and makes all sodas free we'll be sure to tell you all about it on next week's Apple Insider podcast\n"