436: ‘Financial Boner’, With Tyler Hayes

All right. I'm going to do something I should probably do more often on this show is back at the beginning of the month, Tyler Hayes at writing a post that I linked to at Yahoo wrote suggesting that anybody looking for a smaller phone should try maybe one of the Motorola Razr flip style phones. And I wrote a response sort of pooping all over it. And you know what I've decided to do? I've had Tyler Hayes on the show right here. Tyler, welcome to the show. let's talk about it. Hey, John, appreciate that. Yeah, it's one of those things that I've been listening to the talk show since it began. I've been reading Daring Fireball for as long as I can remember. And so at first, it's like, wow, Gruber, he linked to me. This is great. And then I read it and it's like, oh, he does not agree. And this maybe it's not great. But at least it wasn't claim chowder or anything like that. It's been a while. But if I could redo the thing, I think I would take out the word perfect from the headline because I think you're right on that part. Well, let's talk about it, though. What's your argument in favor of flip phones? And we're just to give people some context. The article is titled, do you think phones are too big and want a smaller one? I have the perfect solution. And so, again, in hindsight, I don't think it's the perfect solution. But these Motorola Razr flip phones, I've had it for about a year. Just the last couple of weeks, I've had it sitting on my desk. And then by happenstance at a kid's birthday party or talking with other adults, and it always seems to come up in different contexts of my phone is too big. And so then after sitting here with the Razr, just thinking, just kind of the two worlds collided. And so the front screen on the Razr is, I think it's usable enough that people who are just really, really want a small phone could get by with just using the front part of the screen for the times that they're out the times that they just want something pocketable to hold in their hand so i think the i think the new one's about four inches in usable screen and so it's a big difference from the 6.1 or 6.3 inch iphone all right and so here's where maybe and this is why i really wanted to have you on the show just to talk about it. But because I will admit that I'm just shooting my mouth off by my stance that I don't think the front screen on these phones is usable. It's usable. It's glanceable, right? I'm sure because Apple watches with super tiny screens are glanceable for getting notifications, right? So I mean, some people really love that about the Apple watches. is notification comes in. What is it? Just look at your wrist. Okay, it's a text message from my wife, or it's a work message from Slack, or it's something about the weather, whatever. You look at it on your wrist, and you can decide what to do about it. My argument is that I don't think for actually doing something, like responding and typing, the front face is all that usable. But I'm saying that without actually having used one of these Android vertical flip phones. Yeah. And again, you don't want to do a ton of writing on it, but a lot of them have a thing where it says full screen mode. And so basically, it'll just give you just the keyboard and the part that you're writing at the time. So definitely enough to do a text message, a short email, a couple sentences or something like that. Again, a lot of people in their mind, they don't think that they want to write much on their phone, even though they'll type out tons of social media posts, they'll type out tons of stuff like in little short bursts. But I think, again, doing a search for Apple Music, you can use that on the front screen. You can use most of the apps on the front screen. And so any type of little text thing, I think, is more than usable, especially what was the first iPhone, 3.5-inch? Do you feel that's a fair comparison? Yeah, it was 3.5-inch diagonal, which is tiny. And it was several years ago. I guess I'll make a note here and see if I can find it. But I think it was like when the first plus-sized phones came out, like the iPhone 6 Plus, where even with that phone, you could put the original iPhone on the display of the plus-side iPhone, and the whole iPhone fit within the display of like an iPhone 6 Plus. if like me you keep a museum of old iphones and you ever go back to some of the first really pre-iphone 6 the iphones original call it the iphone 1 iphone 3 3g iphone 4 and then the iphone 5 they're tiny in comparison to my modern phones and but it is weird because the 3.5 inch diagonal screen it's like we've gotten so used to the quote-unquote all screen designs of the iphone 10 and later which have taken over the whole industry where there is no chin or forehead the of non-screen space on the front that it makes it seem even smaller right because you say like a such and such iphone now is 6.3 inches diagonal yeah and the iphone original was 3.5 that's an even bigger difference that makes it seem like it's a bigger difference than it actually was as a device that you carry around but it still is a dramatic difference you know i mean it's a huge difference in terms of the overall device size but you can't just go by the display size diagonal because of the chin and forehead that used to be and hasn't been since 2017 or 18 yeah um so i guess My spitball speculation was that with the cameras, when you flip the phones closed, the cameras that are at the top when it's open, the back outward facing cameras, use up space at the bottom. But I guess effectively that's just like going back to having a chin. And when we had chins on our phones, we didn't think it was hard to type on them. And it's funny because, you know, the circles are there. The cameras are there. but depending on the app it just ignores it and puts stuff behind it and even that is not terrible it sounds like a terrible way to use anything but you kind of forget about it as your as your thumb's going over the screen that you just kind of uh just you learn to navigate around it i guess yeah so are you actually using this as your daily driver phone oh no so i'm arguing for this and it It sounds like I'm in love with this idea of using the flip phones, but it's more, I guess, in the sense of it seems like Apple is going to make a book style folding phone, a small tablet style where you open it horizontally. But then the top style folding phones, the old style flip phones, kind of it seems like it just to me, it seems like that is the way that you get a smaller phone going forward. that whether it's Apple or somebody else, that is how you get back to the point of having a smaller phone, is that you take a regular iPhone and you fold it down in half. Because we're not going back to just a 3.5-inch screen anymore. We're past that point. Everybody seems to love the mini, but nobody bought one. Well, it's not nobody, though, right? As you noted before we decided to do this show together, that I've been talking about it on recent episodes and reminiscing. And every time I bring up the iPhone 12 and 13 minis, I definitely hear from the people still holding on to them. My daughter has an iPhone 12 mini because she has small hands and that was the one she kind of wanted. So there's your reason for that. I think it was this year's World Series afterwards where somebody, because you can kind of identify it, where Shohei Otani, his wife, was taking pictures from the stage or the parade in Los Angeles after the Dodgers won the World Series. And she's using, I'm not quite sure if somebody from the color of the phone could tell if it was a 12 or 13 mini, but it was definitely one of them. And there, I think the wisecrack I saw was, hey, Shohei Otani makes $500 million a year or something, and his wife is using a five-year-old phone. Yeah. But I think it speaks more to some people really love small phones. And if you really love small phones, there just hasn't been anything in over a decade close to the size of the 12 and 13 mini. And on the Android side of the fence, while yes, today, and we're already talking about it, Android has both dimension foldables already and has for years. I mean, so many years that might break the record, if all the rumors are correct, that Apple's going to come out with a book-style foldable next September. And the collective reaction from the Android side of the enthusiast world is going to be the always – we've had this for years. It might be the longest number of years ever, right? There have been – it's at least five or six years since some of the Android handset makers have been making book-style foldables. but so while there's variety on the foldable front on the android side there's never been variety on the overall small footprint there's no equivalent to like the 12 or 13 mini on the android side of the fence that i'm aware of yeah yeah no you look into it when you were writing about it no i mean i've looked into it in the past when especially when my kids were wanted a phone as i mean these some of these ones are just huge in their hands and so they want something that was a little bit smaller. And usually it's the Android devices like this. There are little tiny ones, but there's almost novelty style. Right. I've seen some of those. Every once in a while I go looking and I because I think, hey, I really kind of only pay attention to the quote flagships, right? I'll watch MKBHD's new reviews of flagship Android phones. I pay attention to Verge headlines, But I don't pay attention to the smaller brands and the zillion phones that are so far below flagship specs that are sold. There's just walk. If you ever just get bored when you're in a mall or whatever and walk into a Verizon or an AT&T store and just look at some of the low priced Android phones. They're just things you never heard of. and I always say every once in a while I haven't done it in a while because I gave up after too many tries where I think well is somebody making something vaguely the size of a mini and it's just never been true and it's like once the Android phones got big and I'll admit I was wrong about the I still am and I was biased by my own personal preference which hasn't changed for smaller overall smaller phones that back when we used to call them phablets right which really seems It was a terrible name. I'm kind of glad it, I'm definitely glad it didn't stick, but it was almost inevitable that it wouldn't stick because what we called phablets with a PH, get it, phone, tablet, phablet, for anybody who doesn't remember. But it was like when it was a curiosity that some of the brands were making much bigger than iPhone sized smartphones. Eventually, the whole Android market went that way to quote. And then Apple more or less followed. Right. Like even the smallest phones Apple makes now are from the standards of 10 years ago. Huge iPhones. They're much bigger than the normal, quote, normal sized iPhones of 10 years ago. The one I still have at my desk is – I guess it's an – yeah, I know it's an iPhone 7 because it's the jet black shiny one. It seems so freaking small. It's just unbelievable. And it is a little thicker than the iPhone Air, the new iPhone Air, but overall feels so much smaller than even an iPhone Air. I mean it's just unbelievable how much smaller phones were before the iPhone X. um well and speaking of thickness that was one of the things that you called out right i was very a little lackadaisical with the comparing the thickness of the razor to the iphone i think it uses 17 pro and so i went back and looked at some numbers though and so that the iphone 17 pro is 8.7 millimeters in the body, right? Thick. And the Razer Plus, last year's model, is 15.3 millimeters thick when it's closed. So half, something like that, it's a substantial difference. But then the reason I had initially done that is because I just had the iPhone 17 just sitting on my desk. And so by default, the camera bump makes it sit at like an angle. And so if you put both of them next to each other at that top spot where the camera bump is the camera bump is 13.1 millimeters compared to the 15.3 millimeters and so that's kind of where i where i got that the thickness is not a big deal which again i don't think the thickness is a huge deal but that's just kind of so if anybody sees that that's kind of where where that the genesis for that was but i'm curious on your thoughts do you think so say apple or somebody is able to make an ideal folding phone like this that substitutes as now people have a small phone that they can do? Are they willing to have a little bit thicker phone to have a smaller phone? What do you think on that? I color me highly skeptical of all folding both ways of folding phones right now. And as much as there's years, I don't know, it's at least two or three years of very, very sure, as sure as Apple rumors ever get, but the Mark Germans and whoever else, the Ming-Chi Quos, have pretty much been reporting as close as a rumor can get to fact that in 2026, Apple's going to have a folding phone that's book style. And now that we're 10 months away or nine months away, that's not going away. It seems like that's a done deal for next year. But there aren't a lot of details about exactly what it's going to look like, right? Like how it's just something, something, a book style phone and Apple's waited and waited until they could make the crease when it's open, either disappear or relatively disappear compared to the state of the art from Android. And I do believe that because that is the crease is the sort of thing that would drive that just is anathema to anybody who works at Apple. Right. And I know that people who kind of like the book style Android ones are like, yeah, you really only see the crease when it's with the screen is off. And who cares when the screen's off once it's on and it lights up? You don't really see the crease. And I'm sure that's true. I've seen them. I've played with them in stores. And I think I agree with that, that you kind of don't see it or you don't see it much. But that's not the way Apple thinks about some things. But either way, if it's just pretty much like a Samsung Galaxy, whatever book style fold right now, I don't think I'm going to like it. I really don't. No matter how thin each half is, I just don't think I'm going to like it. I just don't want to open my phone. I don't want to do it. That's the use cases. If somebody has a spot that they they they sit back on the couch and they want to. I don't know. They have spots where they can use a tablet instead of a phone. Then maybe that's it's worth the trade off. But unless you actually see that in your life already, it's going to be hard to just take the leap of faith that it's going to you're going to start figuring out places to use a new tablet style device. I do still think it's partly why the phablet started coming into existence when they did around 2013 or 2012 on the Android side was that the Android handset makers weren't and still aren't as good as Apple. Nobody's as good at Apple at making computers smaller. Right. Apple watches tend to be much smaller than any other competing smartwatches, especially the smaller slash women's size Apple watches. There just isn't really anything from anybody else like that. And I think that's why we haven't seen something like an Android iPhone mini. I just don't think something that competes pretty well on specs but is that size and gets, especially with the iPhone 13 mini, gets decent battery life. The iPhone 12 mini maybe it was like barely quote unquote decent. I think I'm going to be right that I personally don't want a foldable either way. But I'm hesitant to extrapolate that to this isn't going to be a popular product. And for exactly what you said, Tyler, I think for people who want to carry both their iPad and phone with them in one foldable size, this could be it. And I could see it. I still I mentioned this anecdote a few times on the show where I don't know at this point. It's like earlier this year. But at some point this year, my wife and I went to see it. I forget even it's long enough now that I remember the phone, but not the comedian. But we went to see a comedian here in Philly at a big theater. And I went to the restroom before the show. And I was coming back to join my wife in our seats. And I saw a guy holding like an iPad in his seat. I was like, what kind of an asshole brings an iPad or a tablet to a show in a theater? And then I realized that was his phone. And it was like a Galaxy whatever foldable. And I was like, oh, that's pretty cool, actually. Here you are and you've got 15 minutes to waste before the show. And here's the part where it's like you don't want to talk to the people you came to the show with. Well, now you've got your whole iPad with you. So I see it, but I don't care about that. When I'm using my phone, I'm using my phone and I use my iPad so little that I still my personal iPhone is still a 2018 iPad Pro. The one time I've seen it in use and I thought, oh, that's cool. We're at an event. Actually, it was at a Padres game. And the camera person was going to put us on the big screen. And so we were all standing there and we couldn't record ourselves on the screen. And so somebody took out their folding phone, set it up as a tripod, kind of using that as a stand and was able to record that on the big screen. But again, how often does something like that happen? The use cases, you can make it seem really cool in marketing. But yeah, I do wonder about I'm a sucker for stuff like that. So I will probably dive into it when it comes out. But I do wonder about the most people. It's almost like you and the iPhone Air, right? Have you decided which if you're sticking with it? No, I'm not. We can talk about that in this segment where my finger is literally hovering over the possibly by the time this show comes out. I'll have purchased a 17 Pro for myself. And again, it's the privilege of having the review units and I can keep going back and forth between the two. And I have. And like I mentioned on this show just recently, after I thought I was done and I was like, yeah, I'll probably get the 17 Pro. I should start using that and just order one. And it was the iPhone Air sales are so bad, they're going to delay the next one. And it made me so mad because even though I don't want one myself, I'm so happy they're making it. It is, even though I'm not buying it myself, it is my favorite iPhone Apple has made since the iPhone X, just because of the ways that it's novel and it's moving in new directions and making different compromises or tradeoffs, whichever word you prefer. but I know it's not for me. And even just yesterday, we're recording this. I mean, you were recording this on Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. And just yesterday on Thanksgiving, I used the 4X lens on the 17 Pro to shoot some of the family of gathering photos I took. And while I'm using it, I'm thinking, if I had the air, I wouldn't be getting this shot. And most, again, I shot over 200 or 300 photos And most of them, 90% of them were with the One X lens. So I could live with the One Lens, but not enough to carry it. And I keep repeating myself on this point. It's the area that really drives me nuts. And it is interesting. Like I've spent more time with the Air as my daily driver than I ever did with the Plus or the Max phones that I've reviewed in the past. even though this is closer to a max size phone than iphone air yeah and the thing i've really noticed and we're using it daily for more time over the past two plus months than i ever have with a phone that big area wise is living in the city center city philadelphia and being a pedestrian most of the time how often i take my phone out one-handed and expect to be able to reach side decide with my thumb without because my other hand's holding a shopping bag or something often a shopping bag i use my phone one-handed more than i knew i used it a lot one-handed but i use it even more one-handed than i thought and the iphone air drives me nuts because it's just too wide this is bringing it back full circle right to the bigger phone and i i think the current was 6.3 inch. I like the 6.1 the best, but you know, I don't have a problem per se with this size, but it's the very fine line between all of a sudden it just too big. And the air is an interesting one because it's, it's almost like an optical illusion for that of you don't realize you pick up the phone and you're, you're mesmerized by the thinness and by some of the other aspects of it until some of the reality set in. And then you're like, Oh, this is a big phone. Yeah. I forget the exact numbers and it doesn't matter because it's the subjective experience that matters more than the math, but it is about two thirds of the weight of an iPhone 17 Pro. And I don't even know what the comparison is to the 17 Max, but it might be the comparison to the 17 Pro Max might be better for some people who know they want the bigger area of the display, because then the weight difference is maybe more like half. But for me, who's sort of torn between these two dimensions of smallness, the smallest possible area, and therefore the best one-handed, just sliding my thumb like a windshield wiper from the bottom usability versus the dramatic thinness of the air, the side-to-side usability wins out, even though it is about two-thirds of the weight, which is really noticeable in pocket. And by volume, if you just multiply the width times height times depth, skipping the camera bump, just pretending that the camera plateau isn't there. The difference in volume is about two thirds as well, right? So it's 66% of the volume and it feels it right That feels about right It just so much smaller in pocket but it just keeps driving me nuts It not the camera The camera is nice and I like having the ultra especially the 4X telephoto but it's the one-handed usability. And it just has, if anything, my other conclusion from it is, God, I hope Apple is done making the smaller ProPhones bigger. I really do. But I'm worried that it's like a never-ending creep upwards. of, but I feel like at some point you are limited by human hands because if they keep making the smaller pro phones bigger, that means the max ones get bigger too. And how much bigger can they make those before their tablets? Yeah. And then you're at the folding phone again. So, yeah, but that's also why I, I've been thinking about this so much knowing that the Apple's foldable is coming next year, knowing that I still want to keep talking about this, knowing that I've got to actually finish my iPhone reviews from this year, this observation by two timing weeks at a time from the iPhone Air to the 17 Pro back to the iPhone Air back to the 17 Pro, just how much I personally use it one handed suggests to me that I wouldn't like a foldable either way because folding is sort of a two-handed unfolding is sort of a two-handed action or do you think otherwise having a foldable in front of you that unfolding the razor is sort of ah it's pretty easy to do one-handed you get used to it but i i think it almost feels a little bit fragile in that sense to keep doing that but again with our old flip phones people got used to just flipping them open like a zippo lighter type of situation yeah i don't know i wish I wish Apple and I get it. You know, Tim Cook, he doesn't say it anymore because the company has gotten bigger. And I don't think it's a problem. I think it's just the nature of the growth they've had over his stint as CEO. But he used to in let's say the first half of his era as CEO, repeatedly talk as a point of pride that the company could put every product it makes on one table in an Apple store. And I'm sure they could technically fit them all on one table at this point, but it would be a very crowded table. But having fewer models of each product lineup compared to their competitors is a point of pride. And some people think they've already got too many, right? That there's too many iPads that they make. There shouldn't be regular iPads and iPad Airs and iPad Pros. I disagree. I think that they've sort of eked out these sort of good, better, best categories and then have multiple sizes within those categories to one smaller, one larger, like iPad Pros, like iPad Airs, or I guess just iPad Pros, but with the iPad Mini. But I kind of wish like the iPad Mini that they stuck with. And it's kind of curious to me that the iPad Mini is seemingly popular enough for them to keep making it, however irregularly that one gets updated, but not the iPhone mini, presuming that even the iPhone mini must have sold better than the iPad mini, but maybe not, right? Maybe the world I'm in where I hear from people who care about small phones so much that it's so disproportionate to the general audience that it didn't even sell as well as the iPad mini. I don't know. I'm still curious on that because it wasn't the iPhone mini was the first one they kind of experimented with, with a different size. And so I wonder if maybe their expectations were too high. And then in hindsight, it's like, oh, well, that was our best one. And it doesn't really seem like we can go back now, but I don't know, maybe. Yeah, I don't know. But it's nobody makes a phone like that. No folds, no opening, no argument about book style versus flip phone style, just a smaller non-flip phone that's like roughly the size of the iPhone 13 and 12 minis. Nobody makes one and hasn't since the iPhone 13 mini, which now is four years ago. Yeah. Well, and that's – I mean that's my recommendation to people is to get a refurbished one. They're still – I mean now they're cheaper. And I guess the iPhone SE is a smaller size than some of these other ones. But again, your iPhone mini 13 refurbished, that's your best bet for right now still. Yeah, and I'd get it now, right? Because I feel like at this point, it's already four years old. It's already close to whatever the drop-off is going to be for when it stops getting iOS updates. And that's the real thing for these things is basically how long do you have before it stops getting the updates? It doesn't matter how long the phone will still work. But if it's not getting the latest software, then you don't really want that. And again, I keep repeating myself, but I keep repeating myself because I think I'm kind of right. Like, I feel like the people who loved the iPhone minis, the 12 and 13 minis, love them so much that they would have paid a premium for them. And I can't help but think that part of the problem from Apple's perspective was making it not a pro phone and charging a premium for it. Right. Because I don't think they're going to sell. They're not going to sell a ton of the book style iPhones, no matter what the price is. but because it's the competing ones, like the Samsung ones are like $2,000, right? Presumably the iPhone fold next year will be the most expensive iPhone Apple's ever made and the most expensive one in the lineup. And so a small percentage of overall unit sales, but at the highest price point, is much more interesting to Apple just from a purely mercenary point of view than the iPhone 12 and 13 minis, which sold, I think, 4% to 5% of new phones in those years were the mini ones, but they were the lowest priced phones in the lineup. So the lowest priced phone in the lineup only selling 4% or 5%, you could see how they kind of lose their, I don't know, financial boner for it, right? Yeah, that's a good point. That it would be interesting if they would just, if there was a little something feature-wise they could have added to it to make it just that much more premium and then be able to charge a little bit more to make it the financials balance out more. Yeah. So what do you think? You think you're going to be an iPhone fold person or no, because it's going to be bigger the overall what and what do you care about most? Is it the area, the volume, the thickness, the weight? What is it that made you even want to write about smaller phones? Yeah. So I mean, mostly, again, the commentary track to all this stuff is that like it just from family members from different people you just hear about it a lot and so then seeing this phone it was like not a perfect solution but it i think that for somebody who's like cannot stand anything bigger than than six inches or five inches or whatever that's you know that is a possibility for me it's definitely the reach ability with your thumb, how far can you extend that? The weight is obviously, I would love it to be lighter than heavier, but it's less of an issue. The thinness is fine. Again, the Air is amazing when you pick it up, but the 17 Pro is not, I don't think that's bad. So yeah, it's just phones just stick out historically, right? Laptops are thinner and lighter than they've ever been and keep moving that direction, right? Like screen size kind of stays the same. That's sort of my hope for phones too, right? That 6.3 inches is sort of the small phone in the way that 13 to 14 inches is the small standard laptop versus 15 or 16 for the large size laptop. But they keep getting smaller, right? The current MacBook Airs are so thin compared to the performance that they offer. think about iPods like the original iPod seemed so small for something that could hold 5,000 songs in your pocket and then the iPhone mini came out or iPod mini came out and everybody was like oh this is so crazy small and then it was the iPod Nano which went from smaller spinning discs to SSD storage and it got so much smaller and it held more songs than the original iPod eventually and it was so much smaller It's like, I don't know, the march of technology in most categories is smaller and lighter with better functionality. And phones are the one where they get bigger and heavier over the course of 20 years. Yeah, that's exactly right. I still remember that the iPod Nano was the one that just blew my mind, that advertisement next to the pencil. But it is interesting that like on the laptops, like phones just, you know, was it 15 years or however long it just they haven't really found a dedicated sweet spot that it's still always in flux. If you go look at charts of the widths and the heights and stuff, it's just they're always noodling with it. Right. And I guess the difference is that the phone is the everything device. Right. And it has. It's absolutely we're talking about the camera, but it's like the whole category. of point-and-shoot cameras has effectively disappeared, right? Except for really niche products like my beloved Ricoh GR3X. What was the one? You linked to it on your site somewhat recently. So the one I use is the Fujifilm X106. All right. I had an X100V. So the prior version. Yeah. Well, it's like two prior versions. Yeah. So you've got that. Which one? The X1006? Yeah, that's the V1 Roman numerals. Yeah, yeah, V1. I forget which one I have. But mine's from like 2013. But what's the camera that's made out of a single piece of aluminum? It's from Sigma. Oh, yeah. The Sigma camera that's like a very, very cool, single-crafted piece of aluminum and does very Apple-like things, like instead gets rid of the idea of SD card slots and instead just has 230 gigabytes of built-in storage and you just connect by USB-C and that's it. Like if Apple made a standalone camera, that's definitely how they would do it. They would definitely not have SD card slots, but that's like $2,000. But so there are interesting point-and-shoot style cameras or small cameras that aren't full-size sensors and stuff, but they tend to be expensive, right? Like how much was the X100 6? Like $1,700. Yeah, exactly. Right, I think I paid like $1,500 for mine in 2013. And again, it gets back to my argument about the 12 and 13 mini being wrongly priced at the consumer end as opposed to premium priced at the pro end, right? Charge over $1,000 for the mini iPhone. And yes, it has fewer lenses than the bigger pro iPhones, but make them really good and charge the premium price for it so that you can find yourself financially motivated to sell something that doesn't sell in huge quantities. But the whole idea of little $200, $300 point and shoot cameras that every family in america owned like two or three of them and they've all disappeared because everybody just uses their phones and at this point gets better pictures with their phones than they ever got with the point and shoot cameras of 10 15 20 years ago certainly 20 years ago because the computational photography angle aspect of it has gotten so good where the computer helps you with things like, oh, it's so good at finding faces in the frame and making sure the faces by default are in focus and so good at doing exposure compensation and doing white balance computation. It's just all sorts of problems that you still have with nice standalone cameras today, like individual, you know, just looking at the photos I took at Thanksgiving yesterday with my Ricoh, a bunch of out-of-focus ones that I never have out-of-focus shots with my iPhone. I just don't. And I have the habit from 25 plus years of prosumer hobbyist photography of knowing that I just shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot, shoot with a standalone camera and trust that while some of them are be out of focus, if I just shoot hundreds of photos, a bunch will be in focus. but that's not how people treat with the phone so the fact that they've just completely eaten the point and shoot consumer phone industry and put it in the phone of course the phones have gotten bigger and heavier because now it's a phone and a camera and a walkman and this and that and it's getting back to the hey what if you could open it up and it could become your ipad it is the primary computing device for ever more people every single day more people tend to be younger but a lot of people who are older it's the only computer they use is their phone and so of course bigger is better and they've grown bigger heavier bigger batteries bigger screens etc yeah and so to that point when the phones were growing especially when the phablet was a new concept. A lot of people were talking about how women would use larger phones because they couldn't fit any phone in their pockets. And so they were putting them in their purse anyway. So it didn't matter about how big or it could be huge because they just put it in their purse. Yeah. The very first time I ever remember thinking, oh, I think maybe I'm wrong about these phones. I was in a T-Mobile store here in Philadelphia and it was to deal with an issue because I'm not on T-Mobile normally but I used to have now I think I'm on yeah I'm on Google Fi but I have a spare cell phone account that I use for like a spare Android phone so I can keep at least one foot somewhat in the that side of the pond or whatever the metaphor is but I had to do something in the store to get the number changed I don't know so I had to visit the store and this is like 2014 2013 I don't know a while ago and there was a couple young couple in their 20s and the woman was a very small Asian woman very short and you know I just small hands small everything and her boyfriend it was like a something out of a commercial he's trying to say aren't you aren't you worried this is too big because she was she wanted to buy like the biggest Android phone that they had and she literally just said I can't fit any of these phones in my pocket anyway so why not get this one i keep it in my purse and he was like okay and i could tell he was saying okay like okay you're gonna get a phone you're gonna hate and i was listening to her and i was like oh no she knows what she wants she wants a big ass screen on her phone i was like this is pretty interesting because i totally had thought bought into that argument that women with smaller hands and smaller pockets would want smaller phones but it turns out that with smaller hands and smaller pockets they're all too big so why not get the one that you're going to carry in your purse anyway That's where I started turning my attitude around over the prospects of it. All right. Let's take a break. I'm going to thank our first sponsor of the show. It's a return sponsor from earlier in the year, our good friends at Click for Sonos. C-L-I-C. No K. Click for Sonos is a much better, much better alternative to the official Sonos apps for controlling your Sonos audio. Click runs everywhere. iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch on your Mac with a really nice Mac menu bar app with global keyboard shortcuts that you can use for controlling the audio and even a proper Apple TV app with big, beautiful artwork. Click now supports liquid glass and all the 26 OS's across the board, iOS, Mac OS, Apple TV, too. And with the kind of deep Apple ecosystem integration that just feels right. This is not just a cross-platform app, but a cross-platform within the Apple ecosystem app, like native in the right way across all of these platforms. There's a bunch of UI refinements in the latest version. Smarter sorting, marquee text where it should have always been, and richer playback details like bitrate and Atmos support when you're playing Atmos music. Scenes in Qlik got seriously upgraded. You can add music to scenes, rearrange them, even make a scene from whatever device you're listening to right now. And cue management is much improved in the latest version. Batch edits and up next view and reordering that behaves the way you expect. If you use Sonos, you are crazy if you don't check out Click. It is so good and such a great suite. I don't know if to call it an app or a suite of apps because it runs everywhere and they're native on all of these Apple devices. Go to click, C-L-I-C, click.dance, great URL, click.dance slash talk show. Go to click.dance slash talk show. And my thanks to Click for Sonos for sponsoring the show. All right, next on my list, sort of a good segue, Apple TV. You just wrote, Tyler, under the headline, Apple TV is finally worth $99 per year. Yeah, finally, huh? I think it's, I don't know. Because it used to be $5 a month, right, when it first came out. And I think when it came out at $5 a month, I think it was worth $5 a month. And I think maybe they raised the price or started turning the dial up. I think they just sort of clicked it. It wasn't like one jump to $10 a month, $100 a year. But I think, I don't know. Yeah, no, I think it went to $7.99 and then it's slowly gone up, especially for the monthly cost. I'm not sure about the yearly cost, but $99 a year. I went back and looked at some of these other services and I mean, they're always fluctuating. So again, if you're hearing this a couple months later, it may be way different. But like Peacock right now, and again, it's Black Friday, so there's deals and stuff. But in general, Peacock with ads is $110 for a year. Netflix with ads is $96 for a year. HBO Max with ads is $110. And so, I mean, even Disney and Hulu together was $156 with ads. And Apple is $99 without ads. They give you 4K plus whatever sports they have. Yeah. So is there a max tier with ads? There is? Yeah. I'm sorry. Max. Yeah. But is there an ads tier for HBO Max? Yeah. Yeah, they have one now. See, and that's where I feel like they've diluted the HBO brand. Put aside the shenanigans over the getting rid of it and just calling it Max for a year or two or however long that was. But I do feel it dilutes part of the HBO brand from the outset in 1970-whatever when HBO first became a thing and you used to have to get a special box just for HBO from your cable company to decode the signal was no commercial interruptions. Right? It was just part of the brand. Well, a whole box office. Right? Right. And I think it's an underrated aspect of the long game Apple's playing with Apple TV that they're going to be or maybe they already are the last one standing who doesn't even have an ad based option. As far as I know, that might be the true. Right. And Netflix was obviously the big one, right? And for a while held it as a, you know, like on analyst calls, quarterly calls when analysts would, in their polite analyst way, gently ask about an ad-supported tier. Ted Sarandos or whoever was on the call would, you know, more or less come out and say, like, no, that's part of our brand is not having ads. And they've come around and now, you know, they're doing very well, ARPU wise, active revenue, or whatever the A stands for revenue per user from the ad tiers. If anything, I think from my friend Ben Thompson, I think maybe they arguably make more on the ad based users, but there's a brand aspect to it, right? So if you're Netflix and your only business is the streaming, then it's kind of important. I totally see why Netflix added the ad based tiers. I almost think it would be untenable for them not to have done it. And they seem to have done a good job of after an uneven start using other people's technology for the ads, they've sort of taken control of their own ad tech. I don't see the ads because I paid to get out of it. I pay to get out of the ads on everything because I'm an idiot and money runs through my fingers like water but i can't stand ad commercial interruptions i really can't well yeah and so i i do have some of the ones that with ads again having kids you just we need to have a few more services than too many of the yeah whatever but no i mean i can't watch who show certain shows on hulu anymore because i just can't stand the ads on that one right they just are particularly bad on Hulu, it feels like. Netflix, again, it's okay, it's doable. But no matter how the ad is itself, it still feels super disruptive to be in the middle of a show or a movie. And they're not shooting these things for ads. And so there's no gentle letdown, no, no breaks. It's just bam, ad. Yeah, it's sort of an underrated aspect of 20th century television, Right. The television from our childhoods that they sort of perfected the, hey, we're going to go like seven and a half minutes at a time and then we're going to have a natural break. Right. Whether the show was a sitcom or a detective, an hour long detective show or a news show, it didn't matter what the show was. there was a way where the commercial, it's not like people loved commercials. People have always loved bitching about commercials, but it felt natural at least, right? There was like a almost cinematic aspect to, oh, there's a little mini cliffhanger in this episode of Dynasty or whatever the show was. And it was like, it would almost be weird if there wasn't a break. And when you watch them now, those old shows on streaming, if you just go back and watch, my wife and I, watched a bunch of seasons of Seinfeld just a couple years ago and without commercial breaks it is weird not to have a commercial break and even when we had and we watched for years and years and years with TiVo you still had to with TiVo until the very last few years you'd still have to pick up the remote and kind of blip blip to you'd have to do something right yeah it wasn't just sit there and do nothing and you just cut right back it's weird when the shows that have natural commercial breaks are shown without commercial breaks. And it's even weirder when a show or a movie without commercial breaks has them inserted. Yeah, it's abrupt. Yeah. One of the things so it when Netflix raised their prices in earlier this year, April, March, something like that. That was the the thing that kind of pushed me over the edge. It was like, we've been paying 15 bucks a month. And then all of a sudden now it's $18. And it's just need to because then it's looking at am I going to pay a month or am I going to pay a month And that becomes a bigger price gap And so that kind of pushed me to look at Tubi Tubi is owned by Fox They stream the they had their moment when they streamed the Superbowl for free I don even think you had to sign up or anything You just click on Tubi but it was kind of the idea of like, if you're going to show me ads anyway, might as well get the whole thing for free. And I'll just watch your ads if I want to do that versus it feels a little insulting now in the streaming age to, to pay for the service a hundred dollars a year, and then still have to watch the ads. So there's select services that I'm like, HBO, there's no ads on, and there's one other one. It just felt right. And again, part of it I know is the bias of I grew up, I was born in 1973, and the whole commercial infrastructure of TV was already there. So of course, I think it's normal. but it just felt right that it was like all these other channels you could just get over the air and yes they're every seven or eight minutes there was a commercial break but you were getting them for free they just came over the air and when cable was first invented and became widely available in america it really did feel like you weren't paying for channels it felt like you were paying for a service that came into your house with more channels and significantly better picture quality. Right. Like the thing that got my parents to get it and my parents were both notoriously just really cheap. I can't believe we had HBO. We only had it for a couple of years. My parents got rid of it just because of the cost. And my sister and I begged them not to because we actually watched it. We watched the movies on HBO and they're like, you can go and rent movies at Blockbuster or whatever. But the thing that got them to get cable kind of early was as soon as they saw cable TV at somebody else's house and could see how much better it looked than over the air where the picture was often static, literally staticky. They're like, oh, that's worth it. But it didn't feel like in the early days that you were paying for channels. It felt like you're paying for the service of just having a better picture quality and more channels. And it just felt natural that they all came with commercials except for HBO and its sort of siblings like Cinemax and Showtime where, okay, you have to pay extra for them. But because you're paying extra at all, you get no commercial breaks, right? Free with commercials, paid with no commercials. That's it. And now it's, oh, well, paid with commercials that you can't skip, right? Which is so annoying. It feels so backwards where the computerization of watching TV with TiVo and the other DVRs of 25 years ago in the early days were all about giving you the user control over skipping or fast forwarding commercials. And now the computerization of watching TV is ever more elaborate ways to make sure you can't possibly fast forward or skip the commercials. Yeah. Well, in hindsight, we should have seen this coming. They were spending so much money on these original shows that it just or in movies and all this content that you could see it wasn't sustainable. And so I guess the way of TV is that you charge twice for it. That's how eventually you'll go back to that. Yeah. There was one. It was almost like torture. I forget which one. it might have been peacock i don't know we weren't paying for it or we had the free tier and my wife was watching i think the real housewives one of the real housewives there's like a zillion of them shows and if it's let's say it was an hour-long episode and she only got through 35 minutes of it but then she wanted to come back the next day and watch the second half of it she couldn't fast forward through the original commercial break she'd still have to she could only go as forward as the first break which she'd already been to before and i was like stop this i don't even watch this show but it's making me so angry i'll just here just give me the remote and i'm going to upgrade this to the one that doesn't have this annoyance like this is crazy making it's like a torture device so i think apple has something going here where they're the one and yes that means that there is no lower price tier with commercials But it does mean that no matter who you are, if you have Apple TV, you have no commercials. Yeah. Well, and so again, now we can kind of talk about the other benefits of Apple TV that like I think that there's enough content there. There's almost 300 titles of shows and movies. And of those shows, like 65 of them at least have more than one season. and so to go through and try and watch all these in a year you would i don't think most people could do that just in a year of all the ones they wanted to watch yeah and so i think we're at a spot now was it six years into apple tv that there's just enough of a back catalog there's enough of these shows that are prestige quality that have won awards that are people are talking about that you can subscribe for uh several months and still not watch all the stuff you want to Yeah, I think one of the I comment on this periodically, I think, but it's an underestimated institutional quality of Apple is that they are very good at playing long games. Apple Pay is another one. And it's like I did look back recently at like when Apple Pay first came out and how many articles there were in the months after it debuted. Who called it a flop or something to that effect because there were so few places where you could use it and so few terminals that took it. and I remember that in the early days of Apple Pay, there was so much more talk in the early days about who officially supports it, right, and who's an official partner of Apple Pay and who wasn't. What was the stupid thing that Walmart had? Current C, remember that? Oh, yeah. Yeah. It was spelled current and then a capital C, like currency, and it was, yeah, you don't need Apple Pay. It was like just use currency and come up to the register and show a QR code and something will happen. I think they still do that. Yeah, they might. I don't know. But they don't call it currency anymore. But there was a whole thing where it was like Rite Aid or somebody, some one of the CVS. I think it was CVS. Yeah. Caved. Well, no, it was a major U.S. drugstore chain. Rite Aid or CVS. Call it CVS. who had terminals and they took Android Pay, but they didn't partner with Apple. So they didn't have the official Apple Pay. And somebody figured out, well, they just tried it. They set up Apple Pay on their iPhone, went up and they checked out and it worked because it's not a totally proprietary thing. And that's why it's sort of taken off everywhere. And now in today's world, I don't think you can buy a point of sale system that doesn't support Apple Pay. It's almost like You have to go extraordinarily out of your way to run a store that has a computerized point of sales system and not take Apple Pay. But it was like without the official support, it just worked. And it wasn't like it worked like, oh, if you shake the soda machine, free sodas pop out the bottom and somebody is going to fix it because the kids all figured out they can get free sodas. It wasn't like you weren't getting charged. You were getting charged. But then they took out the whole thing. They took out and cut off the Android pay that they were taking because they didn't want they want. I guess they wanted Apple to pay them something to take Apple pay. So they it's like a classic cut off your nose despite your face. They just ripped out the terminals that took any of the payments. And nobody else complained because before Apple pay, even though it technically worked on some subset of Android phones, nobody used it until Apple came in and did it. And there were all these articles in the first year, maybe even two years after Apple Pay came out saying it's a flop. It's only in 10% of U.S. retailers, blah, blah, blah. And Apple just nose to the grindstone, just waited and kept improving it and kept waiting for stores to replace their point of sale systems. And yada, yada, yada, without any kind of a claim or one moment, boom, here it is. It's everywhere. And I don't even hesitate to leave my house with no way to pay other than my phone a lot of the times these days. And I kind of feel it's the same way with the Apple TV library, right, where Apple TV shipped 67 years ago. And the thing was, hey, it's only five bucks. But my God, it's, you know, they don't have they didn't buy any existing catalog of movies or TV shows. Right. And without a library of TV shows and movies, who's going to pay anything for it? Even $5 seemed like too much. And Apple's response is, well, we're building our own library. And here we are in 2025. And like you point out, it's actually a pretty good library at this point and still growing. Yeah, I wonder long term. I mean, I don't think Apple TV is a moneymaker in the sense of it's not going to prop up any. It's not going to set the world on fire. But I think if it can mostly pay for itself, if you can get enough subscribers, I think there's so many halo effects to having this original content. again, with the awards and just then having something to display on your devices, having the, that kind of stuff is beneficial just across the spectrum. Yeah. Do you ever listen to The Town with Matthew Bologna? No. Have you heard of it? Yes. And he was on, he did a cameo as himself on the studio. On the studio, yeah. Right. Right. And the idea, you know, and Matthew Bologna has become this sort of the go to gossip columnist for Hollywood. And his podcast, The Town, is sort of the go to Hollywood inside gossip podcast. And Eddie Q was on in September. It was a really good interview with Eddie Q. I love interviews with Eddie Q. I wish he did more of them, including my show, which he's been on at least once. That was the one where he mentioned that he had a problem with his iMac and Craig Federighi came over to his house to fix it. Classic. But I love Eddie Q on interviews because he's so unrehearsed and he's not sticky. You can't knock him off what he wants to talk about, but he just does it on the fly without memorizing talking points in advance. it's like he knows what he wants to talk about and what he does not want to talk about but he doesn't rehearse talking points to do that and it makes for such a better interview than say just to name a person at apple say tim cook who is just comes across as very very rehearsed and yeah it's just a different personality style and much more reminiscent of steve jobs at EQ, interview-wise. But he said, you know, Matthew Bologna expressed the Hollywood trepidation about Apple and Apple TV, which is, it's got this reputation for being a great place to have a show or to do a movie, that they're very friendly and collaborative with the creative people. They're not overzealous about giving notes and trying to, you know, take... You know, there was a lot of fear before Apple got started that because Apple has an overall sort of Disney-esque, G-rated company brand, that they weren't going to have sex or violence or curse words in their shows. And in fact, there are certain things they shy away from and there are certain things they absolutely avoid, like China, right? There's never going to, or at least in the near future, there's not going to be a show where China is the bad guys in an Apple TV movie or show. There's the very cute little gimmick where they really do seem to insist that if there's a bad guy or villain that they and they have a cell phone that it's not an iPhone. Yeah. And does actually make for a bit of a spoiler where if you're watching an Apple TV movie and you see somebody who's using an Android phone and they're not a bad guy, you're like, oh, that's like a traitor, right? They're going something's going to something's going to happen to them. And it's always true. But overall, they've got a good reputation but matthew baloney expressed this belief that yes you guys have a great reputation and you guys are making great shows like the studio which because it's about hollywood is a super big hit within hollywood the morning show you name it uh slow horses severance is the biggest severance of course yeah severance that's the one i was fishing for it's you guys have a great reputation but people in hollywood are just worried when's the other shoe gonna drop like when are you gonna lose interest in this and just walk away and like ah you guys aren't making money they're going to get bored and the the well's going to dry up and eddie q was like no we're in this for the long run and we actually think the show we actually think it's doing great and we're hitting hitting our targets and no we're not i'm not going to talk and he tried to get him to talk like how many subscribers they have how many people watch certain shows and he's like no we're not going to reveal those numbers but we're very happy with them and we're in this for the long haul they're as committed to it now as they were when they got started six years ago and i think it shows right yeah well and speaking of money and subscribers it just with apple one having something else to put in these bundles like uh with iCloud storage and apple music and then now apple tv i just couldn't leave the bundle i don't think right because i need all those things anyway i sort of feel like apple i'm surprised because it felt like when apple came out with apple one it felt like yes this is the reason they're doing apple tv or what we used to call Apple TV plus, right? Yeah. This is why they have this whole streaming video movie endeavor is to make the Apple one bundle more appealing. And yeah, I would say the big three are Apple TV shows you love and now sports that maybe you're interested in Apple music, right? So you pay this one fee and now that's your streaming music and the iCloud storage, which either you already need or you should be buying because you need it and you're somehow getting by with five gigabytes of online storage and therefore not backing up your phone online, which is a disaster waiting to happen. And it feels to me like they don't promote Apple One enough. I really expected that would be, you know, like in the way that Amazon never, ever, ever gets tired of promoting Prime membership. And it's not any one thing. They just promote everything. It's like, yes, you get better shipping, you get free shipping on more products, you get discounts, you get Prime-related discounts certain times of the year, and you get Prime Video and this and that and the other thing, and Prime, Prime, Prime, subscribe to Prime, subscribe to Prime. You just don't see that from Apple. I see more promotions for the individual things like Apple Music than I do for Apple One. Yeah, and it seems a little crazy because, again, most of these people, they kind of want a music service. They kind of want, they need storage, I would say. And it's getting to the point where Apple TV is becoming something that it just, you kind of, most people could enjoy that a lot. It's not like Apple Fitness where it's like, well, what am I going to do with this? Should I be using this? Right. I know some people love Apple Fitness and I know that they're competing against the Peloton, which isn't just a bike. It's actually like perhaps the bigger appeal is the Peloton instructors or sort of mini influencers slash celebrities. There's the Apple Arcade where you get games that don't have in-app payments and all the annoying stuff in a lot of other games. Yeah, which is – that's probably one of the sleeper hits of the thing because if you have any kids in the house, it's amazing to be able to say whatever you want to download on Apple Arcade, just do that. And it doesn't even ask for a password. It will just go. Oh, I didn't even know that because my kid is too old. But that's interesting. But again, that's another little thing that I'm surprised they don't promote more, right? And I guess with that one, maybe it's the conflict internally at Apple where, yes, they make this thing called Apple Arcade that if you have small kids is great because the games have no in-app purchases. there's no pay to win gamification within the games because of that they're rigorously content rated so you know that any kind of apple arcade game for kids isn't going to have any kind of inappropriate content i guess the conflict internally is that the company makes gobs and gobs of money on the other side of the app store outside the apple subscription bundle from the games that do do all the things you're comparing it against like yeah to make the killer commercial talking about how awesome apple arcade could be with small kids you've got to have the other side of the argument which apple actually takes 30 of the money from and is a big source of their services revenue yeah so they're playing both sides of the fence there but it makes them not be able to i guess i don't know but if i would rather see them promote it and yes keep taking to 30% from the other side, but promote the hell out of the arcade version. Because I suspect there's just a lot of people with iPhone families who don't realize that Apple Arcade is there. And for a very reasonable monthly sum, gets you out of the hell of in-app payments to play games. Yeah. Do you watch MLS or F1? Are you into any of those? Might. No, but I feel like I could maybe get into F1. I've thought about it for years. I feel like my sports time is already taken up by the sports I already watch. And I'm intrigued as a professional Apple observer. So I've watched a little bit of MLS specifically because it's on Apple just to see what they're doing with it. The F1 one is particularly interesting. I guess with MLS, they own it, right? that it's the same thing, but it's, F1 is such a more popular sport. No offense to soccer fans here in the US. But, and again, Eddie Q, often, you don't have to read between the lines. He comes out and says it. Like when they made the F1 deal, they, in interviews, he said, they're interested in owning the whole experience for the sport. So they're way more interested in paying a lot of money to get, to be the exclusive streamer for F1 in America than they would be to pay a similar fortune just to get Thursday night football from the NFL and outbid Amazon for those rights to get one game a week on the NFL and to have the NFL dictating a lot of what they can do that might be innovative with the broadcast or something like that. Yeah. Well, and I don't watch F1 now, but the same idea of if it comes there and it's available included. I like the idea of trying it. I like the idea of possibly being into it. Yeah. And that's something that they're adjusting with MLS too, where they kind of had to wait out the existing pro tier for MLS. And now they're just like, yeah, if you pay for Apple TV, you just get it. It's just included. Well, and I lucked out on MLS part because San Diego just got a team this year. And so it's a little bit easier to follow when you're interested in that, And especially because now we're, I think, quarterfinals or towards the end. But it's been great. I love being able to follow it. And again, everything is kind of very Apple-esque in the presentation and everything. Yeah. And they do have Friday Night Baseball, which is the thing I said. And I don't think that's why they don't talk about it as much as the other sports because they don't own all of baseball. But they do have a Major League Baseball telecast. And there were rumors that they were going to lose that to ESPN or somebody. but no the new rights for the next three years came out and this apple still has friday night baseball so and they definitely bid on some nfl package they weren't going to be the exclusive no way it wasn't even on the table for apple to be the only place to watch the nfl i mean that would be bananas at this point but they tried they tried to dip their toes and i do think this is a long game where people, sports fans can say, ah, Apple TV for sports, who cares? It's just MLS and F1 and one baseball game a week on Friday nights. They're not a major player in sports, but I think their interest in sports is much more serious than that would look. And the F1 thing, because I know F1 fans, I'm not a fan, but I know that for a lot of sports fans, F1 is their most favorite sport around the world. I know how huge F1 is, even in the U.S. And so I know that's a big deal. And I really do think it could be another one of those. Just the sports aspect itself is a very long game. And 10 years from now, the amount of sports on Apple TV is going to be so much more than today. But never with one. It's like, oh, 2028 was the year where they got serious about sports. It's one sport at a time with ever increasing amount of rights. And boom, there they are as a major player in sports. Oh, yeah, absolutely. Have you seen the other thing I want to talk about before we move on is the new opening. I keep calling it a fanfare, but maybe I don't know what you call it. But like the every streaming channel has it. You start a show on HBO and you get the HBO static, right? You start on Netflix, for example, you get the ta-dum, right? They even call like their company blog ta-dum because it's so brilliant for them to market around the sound name. Right. The other name for these things is a Sonic logo, which is a pretty good name for the thing. And Apple came out with a new one this month or last month, sometime in the last year. Coinciding with the renaming, the simplification, getting rid of the Plus and Apple TV Plus. And however confusing it is to call the device and the app and the streaming channel Apple Just Plain Apple TV, coinciding with that they've got this new sonic logo i in between recording and when this episode airs i'll have a small post on daring fireball about it but you know i'll spoil it here since the article should be out before the podcast i love it i think it's fantastic did you go back and watch the old one again just in comparison it's hard to though have you because it's funny because you think oh i'll just go watch an old show but they've replaced it i think on or no they have but they yeah they've slipped it in so i went so you're right you can't go back on apple tv and find it but i went just did a search on youtube before we started and it yeah the new one is is a lot better and it's not that the old one was bad it's just that like it somehow the visuals and the music of it go together and capture that pretty well the old one was just a little harsh just the harsh piano sound and then a slow fade but the new one is is fun yeah and i think the old one i think i don't recall anybody from apple ever verifying it but i think it was sort of a piano key or a couple of piano chords meant to sort of mimic the macintosh startup sound but it's very it's too it's not the macintosh startup sound but it's too similar not to be an homage to the Macintosh startup sound. But I don't think that, and as much as it warms my heart as somebody for whom the Macintosh is always going to be their favorite my favorite Apple product it warms my heart that they would call back to that but I don think it made for a good Sonic logo It just it wasn bad like you said I think you said it very well, Tyler. It wasn't bad, but it wasn't great. And I think the new one is great. It's sort of iconic in the best sense of the word. And there's a bit of a fuss made over the fact that they actually shot the new thing practically. They used like pieces of glass and prisms and actual cameras and actually the lighting and everything. Yeah, the lighting and everything. They shot it practically. And I'm not a fetishist for, hey, practical effects always beat digital effects. It's like all that matters is how it looks in the end. But I think I think what gets lost when you say when you advocate for, hey, don't shit on digital effects. that oftentimes they're as good or better or do things that can't be done practically. All that matters is the result. But sometimes, on the flip side, sometimes practical effects just look beautiful in ways that are hard to simulate digitally. There's just, I don't know, it just looks cool. But the way that it's like a prism and you get the colors of the rainbow, to me, deliberately harks back to the sixth color Apple logo. So there is a sort of, in the way that I think the old sound of the old one harked back to the sound of a classic Macintosh starting up. I think the new one harks back to the classic six color Apple logo. And in both ways, I think it's a way, just a subtle way of saying this whole thing is not a lark or side project for us. This is something we're very serious about and we consider a very, it's not a detachable appendage to Apple the computer company and service computer services company it's an apple thing it is very apple i like it i like it a lot i really like it well and i mean it's not something that you would see the the introduction of five second introduction visual effect and you don't you're nobody thinks oh they they shot that with with thing it looks like a digital yeah uh thing but it is fun to then find out and see the behind the scenes yeah it just blows your mind of that that they did this Yeah, but I think they did it again. How many times are they going to use it in the next 10, 15, maybe 20 years? I mean, this might be built to last for a very long time because, I mean, the HBO static thing has been around. And again, I don't know if they've reshot it. Obviously, they had to upgrade it for HD at some point. But it's like, I don't know. I know when The Sopranos was new or Larry Sanders was new in the 90s. There was the HBO static. Whenever I hear the HBO static, I still, no matter how many years have gone by, I expect the Sopranos theme song to kick in afterwards. I think part of the reason for that association is on the Sopranos, it was never a cold open after the HBO static. It was always the opening credits. And it was opening credits for the Sopranos with a distinctive song that I never wanted to skip. But I still half hear that. I always hear the Sopranos song, but it's iconic. So I don't know. I love the new Apple one. Yeah. And it's interesting how some of those will stick where probably it has to do with if you have good association, if your favorite show was on this service, if there is an affinity for that. So I'm sure different people have different ones. But the Peacock one, they did for a long time the dun-dun-dun type of melody. Yeah, sort of an NBC callback, right? Yeah. And then, of course, Netflix has their ta-dum. And so that's easy to pick out it. Yeah, it is. And it's a real credit and reflection of the strength of the overall Netflix brand. And I know Netflix has tweaked theirs over the years, but only to sort of clarify it. And I would expect that. I think with this one, that's what Apple will do five, ten years from now, whenever, is they might come out with a new one, but it would be just an upgraded version of this one. that most people wouldn't recognize as new. You'd have to be a nerd like us to sort of think, oh, they changed it slightly. Because Netflix has done that a few times over the years with the ta-dum, but it's always basically been a Netflix and logo and ta-dum. Yeah, did you see that? So Apple has different versions, I think. I think there's like a three-second, a six-second, and a 12-second version. Yeah, the 12-second ones for feature films. Yeah, and it's very nice. And they all kind of work together. It's like a little, wouldn't it be nice if they had three sizes of iPhones? Mini, regular, large. Anyway, they've got three lengths of the new opening fanfare. All right, let me take another break here. Thank our other sponsor of the show. And it is our very good friends at Squarespace. The show, the talk show, once again, sponsored by Squarespace. The all-in-one website platform for entrepreneurs to stand out and succeed online. whether you are just starting out or managing a growing brand. Squarespace makes it easy to create a beautiful website, engage with your audience and sell anything from products to content to time, all in one place, all on your terms. It's a website. When you go to Squarespace, you get a website that you own. Let me talk about two things I often don't talk about when I do these reads for Squarespace. One of them, analytics. Squarespace is built-in analytics. You can measure your end-to-end online performance with powerful website and seller analytics. So in terms of seeing where the traffic to your website is coming from, they've got it. In terms if you are selling products or selling your time, in terms of being able to measure that or chart it over time or patterns and stuff like that, Squarespace's analytics have you covered. And it's really just a beautiful analytics interfaces can get so complicated and so look like an airplane cockpit. It's like you need professional training just to be able to parse them. Like you might as well just be looking at a CSV file in Microsoft Excel or Numbers or something. And Squarespace Analytics couldn't be more opposite of that, where there really is a very thoughtful information graphic design to presenting a lot of information. The other thing I'll tell you about is domains by Squarespace. Look, every website needs a domain name and Squarespace domains makes it easy to invest in a domain name confidently. They've got premium privacy and security features included with every purchase. There's no upsell. If you register your domain with Squarespace, you get all the stuff like the privacy features included automatically. And you can choose from millions of available URLs. I guess an infinite number of URLs from a whole bunch of top-level domains and get world-class management tools included for managing everything from renewing the domain and pointing and figuring out how to get your email working with your domain and stuff like that. It's a great part of the Squarespace service. So head to squarespace.com slash talkshow. And with that code, talkshow, you save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. Just remember that code talkshow at squarespace.com slash talkshow. Speaking of top level domains, you've got a fun one, Tyler. Yeah. All right. So your newsletter, you're an independent, like a freelance writer, but you've got your own site. I'm going to get the name wrong. This week, the trend is the name of the site. But the domain name is. Well, so before you do, I'll just, I'll spoil it. So basically, freelance technology writer for over a decade. And the best time to do something was long ago, but the second best time is now. So earlier this year, I started this week, the trend as a newsletter, but more so it was just a brand for kind of stuff that I was going to do on my own to then have a spot for, have a brand name, have a, have a thing for it. And so just because the media industry is so brutal in terms of stability. And so I should have a place to fall back on in case I need to do that. But in September, so I was doing a newsletter, but in September, I started publishing through Yahoo's creator program where I could bring my own brand. All the stuff is just independent through there. I just publish through their site. And so that has kind of, again, muddied the waters on my side in terms of like I don't have a dedicated website where I'm publishing everything specifically. But that's more of stuff that I need to clean up and to have a hub for. But because you guys have – you've talked about recently with Dan Fromer and Stephen Robles about just how Substack and YouTube – it's hard for a text-based creator to find the audience and to get an algorithm to distribute it to people. And so Yahoo's has been a good place to do that so far. So that's kind of where I've been digging in in terms of writing more stuff. and that's where i found and linked to your story about the motorola flip phones which you know and here you are on the talk show but you've got for the website this is where i was going with the top level domain it's this week's trend dot xyz xyz yeah i like that i like that a lot i thought it was fun basically and and in terms of like this week the trend it's you know i think mike hurley has talked about, he started doing stuff with the enthusiast. And so I like the idea that it's just, I'm not pigeonholed into any specific thing, just a lot of stuff, which I'm passionate about at the moment. And so this week, the trend is XYZ. So let's talk gadgets since just to wrap up. And that's one of the things you've covered at this week, the trend, ever since you started writing it. But what's caught your eye of late? What's on your list for Christmas gadget? You know what's funny is that a lot of the gadget stuff, I mean, there's big stuff like robot vacuums and headphones and stuff I can mention. But a lot of the ones I'm very excited about are the chargers and the little tiny gadget type of things. Anker has their nano charger, which is three ports, and it fits very comfortably in the size of my hand, and it's a 70-watt charger. These things used to come, laptops came with a 65 watt charger and it was ginormous and it weighed a lot. And so now the chargers that are just the suit as they keep getting smaller and smaller, like I find that more liberating, I guess. And this, the fact that you can grab one charger and it will charge your phone and your laptop and your iPad and it will do it pretty quickly now. And then I also, I'm a big, big sucker for anything with a screen. So there's a Sarge has a charger called the Pixel 100. And it's claimed a kind of notability is that it will display light through its dot matrix front, and it will show what speed or how much power device is drawing. And then it will cycle through and show you like the total amount for the chargers using and then each individual one. And so, again, these little things of is my device actually charging at full speed, you just kind of never know. And so it's fun to see that on the charger itself. You know which charger I've really started? I haven't written about it. I should. And a couple companies make it. I know Anker has one that's similar, but it's from Nomad. And it's the Nomad, I forget the exact name, but it's thin. The slim one. Yeah. And so Nomad makes two slim chargers. there's a one port one that's 35 watts but the one i like is the 65 watt with two usb outs and 65 watts total so you can get if you just plug in like a laptop in the the blue one which indicates the pd port you can get up to 65 watt charging which is i mean i don't know who really needs more than that portably wise. But I love the slim form factor. So instead of sticking out, it's very slim. It goes right up against the outlet. And then the charger goes in the bottom and goes down. And there are pieces of furniture that it fits behind so much better. Like if you have to put a charger behind your bed or behind a cabinet or something, having it oriented this way lets you put the furniture really close to the wall once you slide it back into place. And I also find as I travel, especially like notoriously airports and as an East coaster, Amtrak trains, which have the nice thing about Amtrak or at least the Acela is that there are actual power outlets, not like USB outlets, but actual power outlets at every seat. But they are so loose, right? Like whenever you find a – you're like at an airport and you're like, oh, there's a socket, a wall socket. Great. I'll sit here. And then you put your charger in and it falls right out. And the slim design helps prevent that, right? Because it's like the slimness, it's sort of like a – I don't know, like if that's a cantilever, I don't know what you call it. But the actual shape of the charger and the fact that the weight goes down, not out, keeps it from falling out. So it's really good in a loose outlet. Well, and that's one of the most frustrating things is to have this top heavy charger and to go to plug it in and it just falls out. And it's like, oh, man, what am I going to do now? Just have to hold it here with my hand. I bought an Anker, I forget which model, a couple years ago. I don't even know if they make it because Anker turns over some of their stuff so often. And it looked and sounded great. It had at least two or three ports, maybe three. It was a lot of watts. And it was relatively small volume-wise, but it was almost like a tube that sticks out of the socket. And so it was the worst for a loose socket. So it's sort of like the opposite of the slim ones. I'll tell you another little gadget that just came out that is, again, I don't know if anybody listening is going to love this, but the SwitchBot has a candle warmer that has Wi-Fi. And so candle warmers are instead of lighting it, you just put it under the lamp and it heats up and still gets the same same effect. But this one is on matter. So I will work with Apple's, Google's Alexa. And the cool thing about that is then you can add automations to it. So, again, if you leave the house, you can have it turn off so that your candles aren't burning up when you're gone. And so it's kind of like this awesome fallback that technology is solving with these home products. I'll make another recommendation, and I'm totally stealing this from my wife. But she – I guess we didn't throw them out. But I have notoriously anybody who follows me or my wife on social media knows, especially from years ago when we posted more. But my wife loves Christmas and Christmas decorations and enormous Christmas trees. And she takes it all very seriously. and she we replaced all of our christmas lights this year with the govee g-o-v-e-e smart christmas lights which to me sounded like and you'd think as the resident computer nerd in the family that i should be the one who's like oh yes let's get the smart christmas lights but i it's maybe my crotchetiness maybe my middle age it's i think oh isn't it nice to have something as simple as Christmas lights where all you do is plug them in and there's not even a switch. You plug them in and they turn on and you pull the plug and they turn off. And we have had smart plugs, plug the Christmas lights into a little smart plug and some of them, you know, it's complicated, but some of them are on Alexa smart plugs and some are on HomeKit smart plugs. But just put a plug in the outlet and that's the smart. But she got these Govi Christmas lights and there's an app that comes with them. And they're actually, it all just works. And I didn't do any of it. I didn't configure any of it. I didn't help her in any way. And now she can make them dance to the music she's playing and they pulse to the beat of the music. And it really is, it just works. It really is a great experience and just works. And they are really beautiful Christmas lights. They are so much brighter than old school Christmas lights. And you can adjust the color, you know, like which colors out of the crayon box you want and the brightness and the color temperature if you want white lights. So like the disaster of having white Christmas lights where you're like, oh, this one strand burned out. Go buy another box of white Christmas lights. And the new one is a slightly different, but different enough that it looks terrible with the old ones. And so you've got to throw out all the old ones and get all the new ones from the same brand to get the same color temperature. You can make all the white Christmas lights the same temperature you want. Or it's so amazing. You can like deliberately choose to have the strand have slightly different shades of color temperature of white, which adds depth on the tree. It's really cool. It really does just work. I tried those before and you can get sucked into a hole. It does take a little bit of time if you're going to start doing them individually and make it super custom. It will take a lot of your time, so watch out for getting sucked into that. I think most people use the preset ones of having the different candy cane ones or whatever it is. But yeah, those are fun. Yeah, well, it absolutely sucked my wife's times. Other than Thanksgiving yesterday, I haven't seen her in over a week because she's been playing with it. but not because it's complicated. No, it's more just that you can do this. Yes, exactly. And it really does amuse me because I see in her what I know, how when I fall in love with a new gadget or computer or something like that, how I get and I just disappear for 18 hours a day at a time. That's how she's gotten with these Govi Christmas lights where she's just off programming them in ever more elaborate ways. but absolutely almost giddy with what they enabled her to do. And again, they're just really good lights. And having helped her put them on the tree, they're just, in terms of build quality, so much better than pieces. They are more expensive, but just the build quality is obviously significantly better over standard $15 Christmas lights. Really good. Yeah. And I mean, you could theoretically just reuse those, too, of wrap them, do something else with them throughout the year because most of them are just lights, the twinkly lights that some people put in their rooms or different things like that, that if you wanted to reuse them and use them on the patio or something because it's not like it's red and blue and all the preset colors. Wow. Really, really cool stuff. Anything else from you to recommend? Last thing, I'll just talk about the Aura Ink. So it's an e-ink photo frame. I think that this is a, I've tried a few now, and this one is, they added their own dithering effect to it, and they've done some work with e-ink's Spectra 6 display. And so while it's not perfect, if you get close, you can still see the dots and it kind of looks a little pixelated. But to have the ability to put a digital photo frame on the wall without a cord hanging down and have it last for three months of battery life, I think that is starting to, it will start to become something that people like, I've always wanted a photo here. I want to be able to switch it every day, but I haven't been able to do that yet. So I think that that's in the next year, we'll start seeing a lot more from different companies doing stuff like that. Yeah, I saw a post on The Verge by way of Nilay Patel on social media where they were talking about the frame TVs. And Nilay had the interesting observation that if these things are getting more popular, it's sort of bad news for Hollywood and streamers in general. and I think it's an interesting observation that for the TVs that they're terrible TVs that's where Neelai was coming from because Neelai like a lot of us are is very picky about high quality TVs they're terrible as TVs but the whole point of them is that they look good when they're off and if that's what people are focusing on is how do I make my TV look better when I'm not watching TV, it's sort of a bad sign for the central place in so many of our lives, at least our recreational lives, that actually watching TV, wherever the content's coming from, right? Whether it's coming from Blu-ray discs or cable TV or streaming Netflix or watching sports, if what you're most concerned about is how does it look when I turn it off, it's sort of a bad sign for where our screen attention is going right and it's not a statement that society is moving away from screen attention it's that we've all gone to our personal devices in our hands our tablets and phones and stuff yeah i have a few frame tvs that same thing people ask me should i buy one and it's i don't know it's not a good tv but you're gonna love it because when it's off it looks awesome and so it's a very contradictory thing uh that's one of those things and it's She doesn't listen to the show, so knock on wood, she won't start with this episode. But I don't want my wife to find out about those TVs because I'm afraid she would be very interested in hearing about a TV that looks better when off. But I couldn't bear it myself personally. So I don't know. It could be, after all these years, the source of our divorce. I don't know. I'm trying to think, was there anything else that I wanted to mention? I guess that's a good list to get people started. I love those Nomad Chargers. Well, and they do have a 100-watt one now of the same slim one. So if you ever do need more wattage, yeah. How many outlets or how many USBs? Still two. Well, I don't know. I feel I don't want to be Bill Gates saying 640 kilobytes of memory ought to be enough for anybody, saying 65 watts ought to be enough for anybody, but it ought to be enough for anybody. But if you do, there you go. Anyway, thanks, Tyler, for joining the show. thank you very much in particular for being a very good sport about the fact that the last time i linked to you was sort of to disagree which i think i did politely but here you were to make your case and it was a pleasure to have you on the show have a good thank you and thank you for joining me over this thanksgiving weekend and have a good holiday season people can follow you on threads and blue sky at tyler h right yep that's the best one and again because uh you know meta and threads love the algorithm and all the velocity of new follows to follow there yeah follow there give them some juice yeah and have a good rest of the holiday season thank you yeah thanks