Would you leave your Amazon Echo or Google Home for an Apple smart speaker? (Extra Crunchy, Ep. 82)

[MUSIC] We're live. My name's Stephen Beacham. I'm coming to you from San Francisco. And on the Skype with me is Mr. Brian Tong, host of the Apple Byte Extra Crunchy podcast What up, everybody. Welcome to the show. It is episode 82. That was a more kind of warm, casual introduction. That was a weird one, yeah. The last two of them have been kind of weird, but you know. I'm okay with it. It's me running the show. It's weird because you're in another place, so I'm used to saying, "We're here." I know. I'll get you hyped up next time I'm back in town. All right, everybody. Welcome to the show. It is episode 82 of Apple Byte Extra Crunchy. This is, again, our complimentary piece to. The Apple Byte video podcast and the reason why we do this show, people are like people who are complaining on video about this specific show, this is an audio podcast. It's actually meant to be audio, we just put it up on video just cause we can, so all you haters, shut up. [LAUGH] Shut up. Okay That's not very nice of me. And let's get to the show, and again, it's all about you all. Call us, be a part of this, contribute your thoughts, your opinions, whether you agree with what we say or not, just what you think in general. 1-800-616-2638 is the number to call. Name, where you're from and just get right into it. Try to keep it around a minute or less and we'll get on the show so we have plenty of calls as usual. And I think this show specifically is gonna get you guys and gals interested. The first story that we kick off with is Apple's Echo-like smart speaker. We've heard of this rumor that Apple's been working on something like this. It could debut as early as WWDC. Now this is a story that popped up a little earlier in this week Sunny Dixon, an Apple leaker, I guess you could almost call him, typically puts his stuff out on Twitter. He watches our stuff. He's a friend of the show, as they would say. But according to reports and according to what he's saying, Apple is currently finalizing the designs for the Alexa competitor. And it is expected to be marketed as a Siri. Type airplay device. It's believed to carry some form of Beats technology, and is expected to run a variant of iOS. In a following supporting report from [UNKNOWN] himself, they also said that the design of this [LAUGH] could kind of look like the Mac Pro. Which makes sense! A cylinder shaped futuristic- Okay yeah. Apple echo type looking, doesn't that make sense though? Yeah totally, they all have a round, everything looks like a thermos now, all these speakers, they look like thermoses it's weird. Like you could drink fluid out of it or something. We're in the age of the cylindrical Long device. And other reports, the information is really what kind of started, the information which is a website, a tech website, but you do have to subscribe to get into its information. [LAUGH] The website itself said Apple was actively developing the product that would compete with the Amazon Echo and Google Home. Citing their sources with direct knowledge of their plans, it says it would include again a speaker, a microphone that could be used for features like we know about this, listening to music, getting news headlines, and more things like that. In addition to that, this is kinda the big thing, and they really need to do this. Apple is planning to improve Siri by opening the voice assistant to outside developers. For those of you that are on iOS, they have been very specific with the partners and third-party apps that they'll allow to access Siri and use it. It's not like hey, everyone go and get Siri. That is one of the reasons why the Amazon echo was so. They straight up put out their APIs. Let the developers jump into it. Let Joe Schmoe, whoever that is that traded that Amazon app where I can just listen to Ocean music Yeah Like ambiance sound, somebody just did that cuz the Amazon let them do it, that's not like Apple but my gosh when we went to CS, Alexa was in everything it was in like every speaker you could see, you could think of was everywhere, was in cars, in you know, media players, like it was it was every where so hopefully the same thing happens with Seri They're even doing more integration with appliances right, the overlap using Siri. Yeah, refrigerators. So the information report says Apple plans to require developers to use the tool responsibly. Translation, we are going to specifically control. Who we allow to use this device, whenever it comes out. So the SDK, the developer kit, most likely will be introduced sometime. It's gotta be WWDC, if you ask me. Apple's already almost two years behind on this smart speaker. Although some of the reports are like, hey. Apple has been working on this before the Amazon echo well not only did the Amazon echo come out before it, it's already a damn good product Yeah And the biggest thing that you know could say or where the Amazon echo Behind, it's not with third party partners. It's just the fact that the Google algorithm exists out there that is smarter than anyone, and then Google also just updated their Google Home to support up to six users with different voices. So, it can identify the voice And match that with your profile, so now you can do things like hear your own personal calendar, right? That doesn't exist on any device other than that Google Home right now, so I think not only does Apple have to have catch up to that space. Third party partners, apps, which let's be honest, Amazon's skills are I think they have somewhere around like 10,000, something crazy, right? If Apple's gonna be this controlling they're not gonna have that many third party partners right out of the gates. And the biggest thing is Siri has to get better. Yes, Siri is pretty slow. Siri isn't as smart, it's just not as good. It's good enough, don't get me wrong. But it has to be smarter, so when I look at hearing about this. And I wanna hear what you all think, remember, this is a show that is all about you. Maybe you can write your comment in the live stream right now or call us at 1-800-616-2638. I wanna know specifically what you all think about an Apple Amazon like Angular device. Do you like the idea? Do you not like the idea, because to me, not only are they behind, what other than maybe being late to your Apple eco system, which is a little compelling. What But other than that, it's going to make it that much better. You can ask it, "Where's my iPhone," and then it will like beep your iPhone for you or something. That's going to be the bell and whistle that everyone wants. So, check this out. What me to tell you something cool? Go ahead. There is a skill using the ift, or the IFTTT platform if this. Than that, and an Amazon Echo that will actually send a call to your phone to find it. Okay. Already, now it's not find my iPhone where if it's turned off an alarm goes off, but someone's already come up with something like that. Again, it's not directly linked to Apple's Because Apple would never let anyone get direct access like that. But I'm just curious. Beecham, what would they have to do. Do you have an Echo? I do, yeah, I have an Echo. I use it all the time. Yeah, okay. Mainly just to turn on lights, play music Yep Timers. Timers, stuff like that. Stuff like, that I would do with Siri, but now I do it with the Echo, because now I don't have to touch anything or reach in my pocket. Yeah you don't have to reach for your phone, it's just there. Yeah yeah. Like, I have to turn it off before we do this podcast otherwise it's going to go off. Totally, so yeah, I mean, I don't know what they would do, they'd have to really do something compelling. Put some sort of feature in there that makes us all wanna buy it but right now I'm not at all interested in the Apple thing [LAUGH] Until I see it and see what it has to offer. I mean other hooks that they could do, look there was this idea of thinking that they should have just made something like their Apple TV box An Echo/Apple TV box, but all the reports are indicating that it's just going to be an Echo-like speaker. That would have been really compelling, but look, this new Apple, let's just call it the Apple Echo for now just for poops. Just for **** and giggles. The Apple Echo like guy If it could link to some of those apps or the watch now app you could say hey, I want to watch Flash and it turned on your TV, jumped to that show, stuff like that. That would be very empowering, definitely. Just literally don't say turn on my TV and navigate it, just say Your tv is off, the apple, blah, I wanna watch the flash and it goes direct to the last, stuff like that could be interesting but again price's in the consideration. Are they gonna make it cheaper than the eco, no, mostly likely not No Like I really love the eco Yeah, eco is cool. Like if they could marry all those things together, video Music, voice commands. If they can marry it all together then that would be very compelling. Cuz right now I have a Chromecast for different things. And the Echo for different things. And it would be cool if. Actually Amazon does make something that is like Echo for Video, right? I think so, I might be wrong. Someone will correct me If they could do that- [LAUGH] That'd be awesome. Again, like we've always said, it comes down to the ecosystem. The power of the ecosystem means something, right? Yeah. We are married to these things and it takes a lot for a person, no matter how amazing the device is It still takes a lot for a person to then say, I'm going to change over. So we'll see what happens, I mean there's even reports that a new Echo is coming out really soon, with an actual built-in screen, a video screen. Yes. And- I'm curious what that's gonna be like. And it could be on deck for next month. It's code named night And it could even be used for video chats, like we have our phones but there is something, again, I don't know, that doesn't sound super compelling to me, but it's interesting because Echo has created this new space and really put a name to it, a face to it, and people are buying it. So I'm always curious with what they're doing. The one thing, though, that kind of threw me off, but then, I'm gonna tell you, I kinda like this in a sick way. Did you see that Echo Look product that they just announced? Yeah, yeah, totally. I would never put that in my bedroom. Never. [LAUGH] Ever. Okay, so here, I'm thinking about this, okay? I'm gonna keep an open mind. So for those of you who don't know the Echo Look is basically another iteration of their Echo platform but it's a camera basically that has all of Echo's functionality. So it has that speaker capability but it has a full, it's like a rectangular, oval-y pill shape. It stands vertical. It has a camera. And what you can do is you can stand in front of it It blurs out the background, like kind of a [UNKNOWN] effect, not as good. And then you can take pictures of your wardrobe and then log it like every day, and select favorite outfits, and then maybe say, I like that combo, remember that. At first, yeah, the ad that they put out, the video, has 80%, like four women and one guy, but I'm kind of one of those guys, because [LAUGH] I've never done OOTD, but this could be my personal OOTD without everyone knowing? Yeah. [LAUGH] You know OOTD, right? Yeah, I don't know actually. Tell me about it please. What that means? No. If you #OOTD it's outfit of the day. [LAUGH] A lot of people that are way too into themselves New hash tag OOTD, because they think they fly. That is funny. No I just feel like so many security risks with this. You know? There's a camera in your house taking pictures of you. You know, it can get hacked. Amazon, a creepy Amazon engineer can get ahold of it maybe, who knows what could happen. [LAUGH] [INAUDIBLE] I wanna see your OOTD. Take a picture. Someone would just give me props for my shirt, my Oaklandish shirt. That's what that is? Dope shirt. And local brands. [LAUGH] Oaktown. No, no, no, no. Full body OOTD Stephen/ Beacham, I wanna see it. Blue jeans. [LAUGH] People that are listening are like, what? I'm gonna just describe it really quickly so we can move on with the show. A dark heather gray shirt with this cool Oaklandish logo. Blue jeans, form fitting around the **** area and a pair of black, black vans. Form fitting. With white socks. Yeah if you look at my closet it's mostly black t-shirts. We've gone on a semi tangent, but echo look is a legit product, it almost. Think it's like an April Fool's joke. But it's interesting, because Echo, Amazon is so ahead of this now. Because they've seen how people are responding and using this. Like, they have so much more data and information than Apple does. And Apple hasn't even released anything. You know what I mean? Yeah, yeah. So is the book judging, someone was like making comments on Twitter like it was judging your outfits or something. It doesn't do anything like that, it just kinda logs what you wear, right? It logs what you wear. You can set favorites and then also if you want to it has some feature that analyzes what you're wearing and makes suggestions. So I think it may be like- So it does judge you. [LAUGH] Yeah, well it's judgey judgey. I mean, let's be honest. There are some people that choose not to match they are close in any way shape or form. Because that's actually a style. I don't know if this will work with them very well. I'm sorry, but this is just gonna like make the morning routine a little bit longer. And I'm not for that. Right, I have to get two kids dressed, take them to school. You know, get myself dressed, take myself to work, it's already more phenomenal, I'm not going to be taking pictures all morning, you know? You know, it's almost like we should do a different podcast about like the other stuff outside of Apple. I know, right? Haha Caesar maybe, I don't know. Okay, let's get onto the show. Back to Apple, back on track. Apple cars. This is, this picture just came out from Bloomberg. Although you may not see it, that's fine. But this is Apple's cars that they're using to do their testing for their self driving car technology. They're using the Lexus RX450H. That's kind of like the I don't wanna call them mini-SUV, it is like they're mini SUV. Bloomburg has photos of it because someone basically tracked the cars emerging from an Apple facility this week to identify what cars they're using. It has an array of sensors, the person that took this photo and provided it to Bloomburg said it included a Velodyne [UNKNOWN] top of the range 64 channel [UNKNOWN]. It's kind of that rig that's on top. Two radars, there's camera sensors on the side of the car. One on the front. Very similar to some of the stuff that you have seen in these self driving cars. But Apple is testing them out in the wild. And Apple spokesman declined to comment. And this also comes on the heels of two weeks ago. The California Department of motor vehicles gave Apple clearance To start carrying out trials with three vehicles earlier this month. This is part of their project Titon for those of you that remember we had talked about this a lot but Apple was working on an autonomous car project. First they were trying to make deals with car makers like Volkswagen AG, BMW AG They were clearly kind of taking a lot more than they anticipated, like a lot of car pundits really said. They're like, it's not that easy just to build a car when you have no experience whatsoever. So Apple changed their plans. Bob Mansfield, who formerly was their head of, VP of hardware for a while over at Apple. Came out of retirement. That's right, yeah. They recruited him, right? Take over the leadership in April of last year for the Project Titan. He's kind of refocus what they're doing it's now looking to be developing more of an autonomous driving software platform. And not an actual car. So this is something that Apple could still license out. But all reports indicate, again, no car. The physical car project is dead. And that this is all about the autonomous driving software platform. Maybe they could integrate it with the iPhone down the road. Obviously, with CarPlay, there's. Those are easy hooks but if it exists or is built into specific car manufacturers down the road, that's obviously what they're hoping to be, right. They're trying to be the iPhone of car systems but it's not that easy. Especially when cars, manufacturers are invested in their own platform, again, Apple has really not done a platform where they're just software. It's very rare, typically right? They're software and hardware, that is how they're able marry the two and be able to give us certain things that are unique to it. But this car project is not that, it's totally different. Yeah, and I also think it ties into the story we talked about last week. About the satellite internet. Like what if the Apple cars or this Apple software only talks to that satellite Internet, it's like exclusive to that. That would be a huge thing, definitely a huge selling point for a lot of people. And I would be on board, for sure. Because I love satellite radio, and satellite Internet would be killer. So I don't like my phone dropping its signal everywhere I go. And people were quick to point out to me. They were like, hey dude, satellite internet exists. I mean, I know DirecTV has satellite internet. But we're talking about the next generation of it, basically. Yeah, yeah. Beyond It's kind of what exists today. So, yes, y'all are right. The well actually is correct. [LAUGH] You know how I- Well, actually, you know the- It does exist but we're talking about taking it to the next-level, next-generation stuff, in line with 5G LTE. Could give it LTE when it comes. All right Moving along with kind of other projects Apple is dipping their toes in, we had heard a while back that Apple is potentially working on, they have their Apple Pay platform. Tim Cook a long time ago made a quote about how Apple Pay will replace cash in, I can't remember how many years, he said, did he say five or ten years? He threw out some bold thing like it's going to replace cache. Okay, we'll see. I think the funny thing about it is after he had said that, admittedly Apple had said publicly that the adoption rate for Apple Pay has been slower than they anticipated. But what they're doing now according to recode. Is flirting again with building their own money transfer service which appears to be back on. Who knows what they'll call it. Some people are throwing around the term Apple Cask, which seems like of opposite because I thought you wanted to kill cash? Yeah, kill cash. Don't call it Apple Cash. No. The report says the company has recently held discussions with the payments' industry partners about introducing its own Venmo competitor. According to multiple sources, the service would allow iPhone owners to send money digitally to other iPhone owners. Now they expect the new service to be announced sometime later this year Another person cautioned that the announcement ans launch date have not been set at all, This is how I look at it right if, Apple was talking back even in 2015 to get this rolling it didn't take up, I'm sure Apple in a way Almost wants to be their own bank, right? Look there are so many competitors out there. There's Paypal, there's obviously Venmo, there's Square Cash, So I get that and they already work with my phone? Yeah, I use all three of those. Right. Right, All the time. I use them all the time. They are great. Right now, today, for all of those of you listening and watching Would just jump over to Apple Pay? Just cuz and use it primarily? I think, again, when you're late to the game, you have to offer something so much more compelling than what's there. And I think, when I see what's happening with the iPhone They haven't yet, maybe the iPhone 8 will be it. They haven't offered something super compelling as a, but you know it's cuz they've established a market but this is what they used to. They would come in later and create something really compelling. We talked about, earlier, an Amazon Echo like product. I don't know if they can make something super compelling from a market that's already figuring itself out. What about Apple Pay? If it's just for Apple, like iPhones to iPhones, that does nothing for me. When you said that I immediately thought they're shooting themselves in the foot if they make it just iPhone to iPhone. Because there's so many competitors out there, they have to open it up wider. That work on everything, like is Apple, when we've talked about like Apple losing their focus, are they trying to be a bank? Like really, don't be a bank, this is not your expertise. Like, you have, what is it? Something like how many hundreds of billions of dollars, right? Like, right it's not hundreds of billions, but I think it's around two billion. $2 billion of cash they're sitting on. Don't choose to be a bank. This is not your expertise and you're losing your core audience by doing some of this stuff sometimes. Yeah, we have plenty of banks. We don't need anymore banks, especially an Apple bank. I don't know, it just seems funny Get your Macs right, get your iPhone right, get your Siri right. > Well, one way they could get me, if they do create an app or some sort of Apple cache service is if their fees are cheaper or free? Like square, they take out a fee every time you charge a credit card. If you punch in the numbers by hand it takes an even bigger fee. Paypal takes a fee if you're doing transactions with people. Unless it's like friends and family or something. If Apple makes it where it's completely free all the time then maybe that would be compelling but then how do they make money?>>Exactly.>>It's a hard thing to get into. Tim Cooke's MO is to make money. He actually has shown us it's about making money for him specifically, not coming out with the best product out there. I'm sorry, but [CROSSTALK] Right now, right? Venmo's completely free. It's so easy too, you just, you login to your bank account and then boom, you're setup. It's the easiest thing. PayPal's really easy, It's getting complicated sometimes but yeah, and PayPal is free if you do friends and family. Yep, and you always should choose friends and family whether it's friends and family or not. Always. [LAUGH] I always tell my customers. Loophole [CROSSTALK] [LAUGH] So again, I don't know if it's gonna really be different, fine. But you make this just an Apple to Apple platform I don't really care, I really don't. Yeah. And I don't see it being, to your point Beach, making it absolutely free. It would be a nice ideal right? It's nice, right? What are they gonna do, put advertisements in the app? I don't know. [LAUGH] I don't know either. How would they make money? I don't understand. All right. Talking about other services, Apple is looking to work with or actually partner with. This is again another report from [UNKNOWN]. Musically. Do you know musically [UNKNOWN]? Tell me you know musically? I don't actually know. Okay okay, this is good. Let me talk about the story a little bit. I didn't think you did only because your kids aren't that age yet. But Musical.ly is syncing up with Apple Music in an attempt to kind of expand its reach as a marketing partner. For those of you who don't have kids that are like. Let me guess here, maybe like seven To 16-ish is kind of the sweet spot because I have nieces and nephews that are all about this although the older one is just kind of like over it now. It allowed you, it's actually really cool, it will allow you to create these quick, fun music videos Videos where you lip sync to the top songs directly from your phone, add effects, slow modes. People do things where they're like imagine singing and then they open their mouth, like you're going in their mouth, and then the edit cuts and then you're somewhere else, like stuff like that. Clearly I know way too much about this, right? [LAUGH] I think I've seen stuff like this on,- It's fun. People post videos Instagram and stuff. If you like a lot of hand cutting and motions. While they're seeing they're like And it like speeds them up too, I see that a lot. Yes. I think I put a link so you can even watch some of this while we're talking about it. Apple is linking up with Muiscly, we talk about how they let users create and share their own music videos with snippets of songs. So starting Friday, Apple Music will be one of the services That supplies the actual songs. They're still working with music distributor, 7digital. Apple will be another partner with them. But it gives, again, Apple this new channel for marketing. It'll promote Apple's paid service to its own users. And it will allow Apple music subscribers to listen to full songs within the app. So it's just kind of weaving these two things together. I think that's the Apple music.>>Oh this isn't it. I was just putting it up for>>Oh okay.>>For musical effects.>>Oh for musical effects you know.>>So anyways, there you go, musically three year old Shanghai based company. I mean it exploded. I can't tell you how much my nieces would use this app. But again, Apple getting involved with them so we'll see how that plays out.>>Cool. Cool. In other music news, you know WWDC is coming around the corner and maybe while I'm talking Beats, you can Kind of think about maybe what's one thing or a feature you want to see in IOS 11. You know it's kind of hard because we are getting to the point where our phones are doing so much but This is a report from Bloomberg's Business Week. And it was really of a profile about Jimmy Iovine, one of the heads of Apple Music. Kind of more on the creative side. And former record label exec, who has all these relationships with all these artists. Apple may include. A new videos feature in Apple Music, we've heard about the carpool karaoke, the Dr. Dre documentary, but they're looking to have 10 original series planned for this year. Hmm. 10 series, so they're trying to make this not only a music platform, but. [SOUND]. A video platform around music-based content. They, thing like, there's been a lot of rumors that points to Apple doing a documentary about Bad Boy Records. I'd like to see. [LAUGH]. That would be awesome. I'm down with that. P Diddy. Yeah, that's the first video, that's the first show that you mentioned that I'm interested in watching. [LAUGH] No, totally fascinating. What about Cash Money Records? Bird Man? It's a documentary? Yeah. Lil Wayne, [LAUGH] I'm not really a Lil' Wayne fan. Manny? Juvenile? [LAUGH] Back that app up? Back that app? You know that. Do people even know that song now? I hope they do. Baby gotta back that app up. You look good once you back that app up. Or they don't say app though. Yeah. Okay. So anyways they're working on documentaries like that. One about Clyde Davis. That's cool. And recently Apple acquired the documentary rights to do this so that looks like that's on the docket as well. I mean P Diddy announced that they're working on this documentary about it's gonna be called Can't Stop, Won't Stop, A Bad Boy Story. [LAUGH]. I wanna watch that. I wanna see that too man. Long term they want to do additional content with a music focus. The report talks about partnering with JJ Abrams, Brian Graser, if any of you don't know he's a sensational producer but currently is the producer behind a couple of shows, Empire, which used to be amazing And, then, this new series, called Genius, which is a documentary, like a ten part series about Albert Einstein, and all the things that he went through during the rise of the Nazis, and also, just, his relationships. It,actually, is pretty fascinating, and I got to see a little screener of the first episode, so... It's on National Geographic. So they're working with high-level, cream of the crop producers to create content that they hope to start rolling out by the end of the year in Apple Music. Again, it's gotta be so good [CROSSTALK] That I would put money down. I know, I know. That's so weird. That's still is so weird. Like why not Apple TV. I mean, that makes sense you know. We already argued about. We didn't argue about it but we talked about this before. How it's just weird. Apple Music Seems like a strange place to put all this content you know?>> I will tell you being out here and talking to a lot of different people, that there is a new wave of individual companies looking for plays to create their own pay for on demand channels with exclusive content behind that. And we are talking about like five dollars services, right. So for any of you who are familiar with like the nerdest stuff, right. Yeah. They have like this thing called the alpha channel. Alpha which is their pay for platform, which is like five dollars a month. Vimeo is getting into it, to start creating exclusive content. I don't know exactly when they are going to launch it. They just made an announcement. Other companies are doing the same stuff like okay five dollars. So what's going to start really being interesting is a not only that content have to be amazing. But how many companies am I going to be giving five dollars to watch stuff? I know. Right, like everyone's doing that right now. It is out of control almost. [LAUGH] Those are just a few of the companies. I mean there's At lease 10 more that I can't remember off the top of my head that are doing this kind of five dollar. There's the comic con HQ. There is another one of those. So there's a lot of people that are trying to figure out. But again, comic con HQ has this like show with Mark Hamill Luke Skywalker hanging out with super fan boys. But I'm not going to pay five dollars a month to watch that. No way. No way. I'm just not there yet, it has to be ridiculously good. So Apple putting all this content behind Apple Music, an interesting move, we'll see how it goes. But at the same time, Apple's subscriber growth, I think it hit I think it was around, did they hit the 20 million mark? Or I knew they were at least at 15. I don't know that. And they're still trailing a lot behind by Spotify, Spotify has something around 50 to 60 the last time I, I'm just taking this off the top of my head from what I remember. So but, they're trying to make it happen, and if you're a subscriber, if this is what keeps you locked in, and maybe they're making enough revenue from their subscriber base already. And with their projections, they're like, you know what? Whether or not we get new ones or not we're making a lot of money to make this more compelling. I could actually see how that supports that. Yeah, totally. Also, did you like exclusive performances or something? Tidal's doing that too I see Tidal's launching concert performances on their site. That would probably help a lot too. But who knows what they're gonna do. Yeah, it's an exciting, it's always exciting times in the text space where there's so many different, disruptive, things that are going on. [LAUGH] Disruptors, there's so many disruptors. You don't know how it's gonna play out but everyone's trying to Corner of these spots, so i just think it's pretty fascinating. Okay Beej, did you, is there one feature in IOS 11, this next IOS that you hope they would do or maybe something that you hope that they do better? I'm just even saying just one. Yeah, I mean I've said it maybe 50 times on this podcast, but just make iTunes work. In landscape [LAUGH] [UNKNOWN] music, work in landscape mode. I mean, it's like the simplest thing they can do and it would solve a lot of problems for me. That's one thing I want. Even the phone itself now has speakers on both ends for a more stereo effect Shouldn't we be able to navigate our music collection in landscape especially because of that now. yes please, please. That's all I'm Asking for Apple, I mean everything else is great. I use my phone, I have no problems with it, it's just when I'm at the gym when I turn my phone sideways but it doesn't tilt or anything. Shot in the dark. Very Annoying Shotinthedarkessay on Periscope is asking for iTunes VR. [LAUGH] How would that work? I don't wanna know. You know what iTunes VR is gonna be, is put on a headset and we'll just play the visualizer [INAUDIBLE]. That's what iTunes VR is gonna be. Yeah. Be all like acid trip baby.>>Yeah. All right. One other story before we get to the calls. This is a story. You know what give me a second. I actually have to look it up because I accidentally closed it. Oops. You know how people do that. But this is a story about, we know about the antennae issues that Apple had with the iPhone 7. I jumped on that really early because I felt right when I started using my phone The antenna just didn't work nearly as well as my iPhone 6s. And then we started hearing the stories about how there were two different antennas in the iPhone 7s. One was a Qualcomm-based one, one was a Intel-based one, and the Intel based one actually didn't perform as well. And then, in addition to that, Apple Report allegedly throttled, or changed some of the performance you know affected the Qualcom based ones so that they would be a little more on par with each other. Although people with Qualcom based ones said I got better signal in these areas, or you know better performing signal like I used to So now Apple and Qualcomm are going back and forth in the courts, but here's a new development about just this upcoming iPhone 8. I stayed away from iPhone 8 stuff this week because it's all the same crap right now, right? [LAUGH] It's like, hey look at this render. Hey, look at this plastic shell that may or may not be the iPhone 7. There's a vertical camera. There may or may not be rear touch ID. I think If you're listening to this, you know about all this stuff already, right? Totally. So wanna talk about different stuff. It makes the show more interesting. But this one, I did find interesting, according to Roger Cheng, our own from CNET, the iPhone iPhone 8 may miss one key feature already in the Galaxy S8. And that feature is Gigabit LTE. Now for the record, Gigabit LTE is not here yet. It's a, okay, fine, we may not be getting a gig of data via LTE but it's gonna be pretty darn fast. According to reports, T-Mobile will be rolling out their own gigabit LTE, and promises it by the end of the year. If you're wondering why does gigabit LTE even matter, okay, in speed tests run by OpenSignal, based on an average speed posted by T-Mobile and Verizon, right? These, again, are tests, to give you an idea. But based on these tests, give it LTE was 18 times faster than the average speeds posted on T-Mobile and Verizon based on what we used right now. Ho, that is fast! 18 times, so what the issue here is that Apple is still expected to use a combination of Qualcomm and Intel antennas inside of the iPhone 8. Well, guess what? The current Intel modem that will be available for consumers and commercially ready. It doesn't have the ability to hit gigabyte LTE spits, No. Fore cams can. Yeah, right? Yeah So, if you think about this, Apple could potentially again, potential, this is all speculation, right? Let's get that out of the way. It could mean Apple might end up maybe slowing down the Qualcomm modem to ensure that iPhones are on the same footing. This is what happens when you have two suppliers. And unfortunately, this is also what happens when you have one of the world's most popular phones that you can't keep up with the demand, that you have to start looking at. Multiple suppliers, so that you can still sell hundreds of millions of phones. Yeah, they've done it once before. They're probably gonna do it again. That's what I would think, is, are they actually repeating history? I think another thing about this, is if this. iPhone is going to be the next like flagship iPhone, right. The iPhone 8, like they're tenth anniversary, badass phone and then it literally doesn't have and we've seen this on other phones, don't get me wrong. When the first iPhone came out, it didn't have 3G. 3G was actually readily available, it had 2G on the original iPhone. Gigabit LTE not on this iPhone's tenth anniversary but it will be flipped on switch. It feels like kind of almost like deja vu, right? Yeah, yeah. And they have proven that they did this before with the iPhone 7. So I honestly, if it takes them time Or maybe this is an issue that time won't fix itself, because they're using in some modems, they're using in some modems along Qualcomm modems. It's kind of something that people can point out, like your phone is literally not even is ten times, not even eighteen times total, let's say it's a. Difficult day and everyone's on the phone, your phone is ten times slower than mine. That's a lot. Yeah that is a lot. And basically throttling themselves, right? I always complain about AT&T throttling me after I get to like 20 gigs of data since I'm a grandfathered unlimited data guy. But now we're gonna complain that Apple's throttling their own phone Yep. It's basically the same thing, right? Am I wrong? No, it is, ish. Ish. [LAUGH] Yeah, I mean also Samsung's Galaxy S8, the chip inside it, there's a Snapdragon 835 Processor and the modem that they're using hits gigabit LTE speeds. So arguably the top rival phone that is out today Will have gigabit LTE support and that's to me. That's a big deal, you don't want that. You wanna be on the equal you wanna be on the, you wanna have the same at least specs in general but, will they still sel tens of millions, hundreds of millions most likely yes, but I think it's important When Apple is trying to play a lot of catch up and more and more every year it feels like they're behind. They need to stop being perceived that way. Totally, like you're saying they need to stop being perceived that way. Someone in the chat room, Everett [UNKNOWN] just said Apple is ALWAYS, in caps, behind. So that's their perception now. Yeah, it is. So, there you go. We'll see how it all plays out, but I thought that was a story, iPhone story we're talking about. All right, do you wanna go check out who gave us a cally-call on the phones? Do you wanna do the last story? Just cuz I had something cued up, the Marvel. You did? Do you want me to talk about it? Yeah, go ahead. Why not? Okay. All right, so check this out. Wow, [UNKNOWN] like more content, more content. [LAUGH] Just yesterday I got fired up about this and I should have brought it over here. But Apple, on Apple's iOS this works for iPhone and iPad. They released this new app, it's called Marvel Color Your Own. Okay. Why is this important? I'm a fan of the iPad pro. I'm that dude who wants to use the iPad pro. There's adult coloring books, not like Why using pro? Yeah but they're actually like really good to relax your mind, things of that nature, that's That's what they do, right? So I've been for the longest time I've been like, come on, Marvel and DC, put out adult coloring books where I can color in the actual comics. Because again I got the iPad Pro because I freaking read comics every week. I have a rotation. I want to be able like go like Hey, Star Lord, I like your jacket like this. Or hey, Deadpool, what would you look like with yellow highlights. Stupid stuff like that. Well, they put out this app now. That's awesome, dude. Color your own. It's straight up adult coloring book. I gotta get this for my kids. And for kids. They will freak out coloring Ironman and stuff. But you have to have the Apple pen, right? No, no, no, I believe it works with iPhone, though also. It does? Cool. Yeah, it works on the iPhone. So here's the catch because all things are a catch. Marvel's not gonna give their entire library of just inked versions without color of their comics for free. But what's cool is there are at least, I think there's around like ten different properties in there. There's like Civil War, Guardians of the Galaxy, Avengers, Dr. Strange. And they give you at least two pages that you can color in, and again these are gonna take you hours if you really wanna do them right. If your kids are just gonna play with them they can, but there's also a subscription service- Really? To pay for it to use it monthly so that you can get access to all of the content. I put a tweet out, and I got a On Twitter, and it has my screenshot of it. But if I recall right, let me just even pull it up, so I can relay this information at least over the podcast. So in this service, again, there's a couple that are free. For each of those comics. But it's called Ultimate Access Feature, you have a free seven day trial other than just coloring the ones that they made available, it'll put some watermark on it. But if you really it to be your own, it's $7.99 a month. God. That's another thing, that's a lot [UNKNOWN] And then here, click on the middle. On the right hand side, there's three images. Click on that, one more down, okay, go to the next one. Here you go, 7.99 a month if you wanna use it for the entire year and unlock All the pages, the color like, it's pretty amazing but it's $39.99 a year and that's 50% off. Wow. 50% off? That's crazy. So again, I get it. They need to make money cause they shouldn't, they really shouldn't just release their entire collection of ink. Pages, and let people go to town, but wow, that's a lot of money! That is a lot of money. But it is- But again I love it, so I'm gonna take my time and color the free ones that they have. But it is pretty expensive, right? Tsk, definitely. [CROSSTALK] were just complaining about $5 a month [LAUGH] and now this things like $7 a month. [LAUGH] Crazy. I mean, that's a lot of them. But yeah, it's X-Men is part of that, a lot of good stuff in there. Cool, right on, all right, well I'm glad we finished the news on a high note. So let's go do some voice mails. [LAUGH] Yeah, for your own wallets. [LAUGH] Okay, here we go. Let me get my voicemail system set up here. Number one call, thanks for calling. Let me turn off this, hang on a second. [LAUGH] I had the Marvel theme going and now it's Jungle Book. It's jamming, just jamming. Here we go. Yo, Brian, what's up with the 12 inch MacBook. They usually come out March, April. No update this year. What's the deal, man? [LAUGH] I like how he says it like it's you, man. Like what did you do, Brian? Nothing, that's real. Just keeping it real. I wish he'd dropped his name, but thanks for calling. You know what? The Mac Book is like a product that is like their sleekest, sexiest device. But it just doesn't have enough power and I think because they put so much again when Apple has too much attention on so many other things, they put all their attention on the Touch Bar Mac Book Pro's. That's all they did for the past Two years or so. And that's why, and the Mac book isn't a top seller but it's their sleek and sexy design and it is expensive because it's like their design. I remember the Macbook Air which was kind of the Mac book that you see now before it came out, right? It was the super sleek one that was below an iBook and a Macbook Pro. And it took two years for it to actually have enough speed to compete with some of the others. And that's when I bought it. I see it the same way with this MacBook. Just a beautiful proof of concept piece. They know that Apple loyalists will buy it. It is ultra light, it is ultra sexy. It is functional. But it just doesn't have enough power to hang as like a. A hardcore multimedia type machine. This is really like an expensive entry level Macbook. You know what I mean. Just based on design. So, I do expect them to update it normally it's around actually more like the August, September timeframe. So hopefully we see something with that. It's gonna be most likely just new processors and whatnot. But I, I do not expect to see them putting a touch bar on the Mac, which is the size of it. They're not gonna be able to keep it that thin. So just stay posted. If you have one all ready, and if you want a new one, I can understand why you might be frustrated. But I don't think they've updated it for, I feels like a year and a half or so. I should double check that. But we will we'll find that out. We'll get, go get to the next call to see if I can find it while we're listening. All right. Next call. Here we go. Hey Brian and Steven. This is Alex from Colorado and I wanted to piggyback on Brian's comments about iWorks. I wrote my entire dissertation in pages because at the time Office for Mac didn't render the right to left scripts correctly. Pages 09 wasn't great with right to left scripts, like Arabics, but it was more than functional compared to Office for Mac. The [UNKNOWN] update a few years ago drastically improved the functionality and as a result I stuck to Iworks even though Microsoft and Mac is getting better with the right [UNKNOWN] Ok, take care, thanks guys. Legit, see, this is why, ok, I think I started the storm because When I said like, who uses Pages? [LAUGH] People definitely let me know that they use Pages. But they were cool about it and cuz I want to know, so that was an awesome call, using it for your dissertation. I had another writer. [BLANK_AUDIO] And his name was Sam [UNKNOWN]. He has a verified check on his name too. But he was like, I use Pages all the time. Plenty of you told me that but i thought it was interesting, cuz you never hear about pages. But like I think I almost poked the bear or something. Like, I was like dude I use pages [LAUGH] So, I'm gonna hold back because I don't use it, I'm not, I shouldn't be judgemental about it and I'm not but I'm just curious like how who actually uses pages cuz I'm always using google docs or Microsoft but those are like legit reasons and I'm glad people are using it that's cool. It's better that it's free now Yeah, and a big reason why we use Google Docs, too, is cuz it's tied into our work email. So we're kind of almost forced to use it. That's super true. That's super true. So yeah, we're not being judgey, all right? Judgey, judgey, judgey, judgey. [LAUGH] Okay, we have one more call. Cordcutter update, I'm a homie in Alameda, my neighborhood. Here we go. Hey this is Nick from Alameda. Hey I just wanna give you a cord cutter update. DirecTV Now has gone and pushed back to features that they had discontinued for couple months. One is a rewind feature on certain channels for shows, so if you missed a movie or you're catching the tail end of it you can hit a button and it'll take you back to the beginning of the movie. Which is awesome, definitely worth it's weight in gold, and the other one is a 72 hour Rewind feature for some channels. Lets say it's Friday and you missed the episode of your show that happened on Wednesday. you can rewind that channel all the way to that day and time and then watch The TV show. So hey, thanks a bunch. Just figured I'd give you that update. And the last podcast I was on me and my wife got a kick out of how you guys called me out for Mickey and the Roadster Racers. [LAUGH] But I was going off of the premise that you guys had or Steve had children so You know, I was just throwing somebody a bone. But it was all in good fun. Talk to you later. Bye. Yeah, you had it. Mickey what racers? Mickey [UNKNOWN] to racers man. He had to get it out. Can you say Mickey Roasters Racers five times really fast, do it now. Mickey Roasters Racers. Mickey Roasters Racers. No, I can't do it. I didn't think so. It's hard to do. I want to throw out there. Just a quick follow up on some of the calls. The last time they updated the Mac Book was just a little bit over an year ago. So they're actually kinda on track with that. It's actually around 370 days or so. so I just wanted to let people know that. Cool. And also, also Because of my judgy-judgy on Apple's Pages, I will accept a bad Apple. [LAUGH] Bad Apple, Bryan! Bad Apple. Hey when he was talking about the rewind at the beginning of your show I guess DirecTV? There's a lot of products have that. Amazon has that. But the 72 hour saving all of your favorite channels in the cloud or something? For 72 hours? That's pretty cool. I've not heard of that before. The thing is with the AT&T service though although that is cool for the Direct Now service, look, I use Playstation View and it keeps Shows that you missed, that you DVRed up to a month. Wow. And it's in the cloud. But what he was saying, it sounded like it's an automatic thing, like it just saves the last 72 hours. Of like the last thing you were watching? Yeah. Seems kind of neat. That's cool. It's just like a backup, like an automatic backup kind of thing. That's kind of neat. I mean, I gotta, it's so layered that it's hard to do one that's simple, but I should do a comparison about all four services. It's That'd be a 20 minute video, no one's gonna- I know. People don't even watch this for five minutes! [LAUGH] Some people, a couple people do. I know I know, actually there's a good amount. All right, so I think we're good, Beach. That's it Yeah, thank you. That's gonna wrap it up. All right, thanks so much. Everybody again, be a part of the show. Call us, call me. We don't to hear what you think about that Apple Echo stuff though. 1-800-616-238. Let us know where you're from. Tell us how it is. Have a great weekend, be safe. Beachem you wanna say goodbye? Yes. Thank you all for watching. Have a great weekend and we'll see you next week. Peace. See you all [MUSIC]