MacBreak Weekly 444 (Transcripts)

Leo Laporte: It's time for MacBreak Weekly, and the Apple Watch leaks come fast and furious, who got an invite? Who didn't get an invite? Let's talk Apple Watch and a whole lot more. MacBreak Weekly is next.

Announcers: Netcasts you love, from people you trust. This is TWiT! Bandwidth for MacBreak Weekly is provided by CacheFly. That's C-A-C-H-E-F-L-Y dot com.

Leo: This is MacBreak Weekly, episode 444. Recorded Tuesday, March 3^rd, 2015.

Apple Watch and Wait

Leo: MacBreak Weekly is brought to you by FreshBooks. The easy to use invoicing software designed to help small business owners save time billing and get paid faster. Join over 5 million users running their business with ease, try it free at FreshBooks.com/macbreak. And by Gazelle. The fast and simple way to sell your used gadgets. Find out what your used iPhone, iPad or other Apple product is worth at Gazelle.com. And by SquareSpace. SquareSpace is the easiest way to create a beautiful website blog or online store for you and your ideas. Go to SquareSpace.com and enter the offer code MacBreak at checkout to get 10% off. It's time for MacBreak Weekly, oh we've got stuff to talk about. Somebody said you should just call it Apple Weekly. Okay, but for historic reasons we call it MacBreak Weekly. And that's Rene Ritchie who's laughing right now. He's at iMore.com, very smart. You put no word from Apple in there at all, just an “I.”

Rene Ritchie: But now they're dumping the “I” Leo, I should have gone with Apple Logo more but then I would have been sued. There's no good answer for this stuff.

Leo: You can't win!

Rene: No.

Leo: From Montreal, how's the weather?

Rene: It's slowly getting better.

Leo: Good.

Rene: Winter is still here.

Leo: Not patio weather yet?

Rene: It is if you want to come out of your igloo and take a couple steps out and chill your beverage nicely, it's beautiful patio weather.

Leo: Very nice.

Alex Lindsay: (laughing) Chill your beverage nicely.

Leo: Chill your beverage. And from Rwanda, Mr. Alex Lindsay of PixelCorps.com and he's in his classroom in Rwanda.

Alex: Yes.

Leo: Kigali?

Alex: Yes I'm in Kigali for the next 10 days so lots of meetings and classes and so on and so forth.

Leo: You got a little snow there in Kigali?

Alex: You know there's not a lot of snow here, low in the lower 60s and high in the lower 80s and it's kind of just been nice and humid. A little rain in the afternoon, that's pretty much it.

Leo: Love that. It's probably that way year round isn't it? Pretty much.

Alex: It's pretty much the same the whole time, it's just a matter of whether it rains more or not. I mean, we're pretty close to the equator so...

Leo: Singapore's like that. It never changes.

Alex: Yeah. It's a pretty big shift, I was driving through freezing rain to get to the airport from... my flights got canceled over the weekend from Hilton, I thought I'd go for a warm vacation that turned out to be very cold and drove through it so it was quite a thing, got on the plane and it was freezing. Got off the plane and it was cozy.

Leo: That's nice!

Alex: Yeah.

Leo: But you know really the king of this is the man who is in snowbound New England. Mr. Andy Ihnatko from the Chicago Sun Times.

Andy Ihnatko: We are attempting to shake ourselves of or icy chains and reclaim the freedom that is our birthright as the patriots, the founders of our freedom of America.

Leo: More tea in the harbor sir?

Andy: If we threw the tea in the harbor it would just bounce off and skid. It would be an empty gesture at best.

Leo: Well I saw pictures of Niagara Falls frozen. Wow I thought, wow, that's cold.

Andy: Somebody did some drone flights over Boston like off Boston Common and Fenway Park and it really does look like, oh so that's what it's going to look like in 8,000 years when we are all dead and now the dinosaurs reclaimed the planet.

Leo: After 100 inches of snow.

Andy: It looks like abandoned property.

Leo: Oh man, here it is. By drone. I love these drones, I've got to tell you. We get such great footage. So did you get... while we're watching...

Alex: Does not look like fun.

Leo: But it's so colonial. I could practically see Ben Franklin wandering the...

Andy: That is Beacon Hill it's like one of the oldest parts of town. John Hancock... and there's the Bunker Hill Memorial.

Leo: I cannot... it's amazing what we can do with these quad-chopters.

Andy: George Washington there is one of my standard test shots only there's normally not so many snowdrifts.

Leo: Usually a little greener?

Andy: Yep.

Alex: Just think how cool it would have been to have a drone in the revolution, that's all I think when I think of these things.

Leo: Think of the footage we'd have. Just think of the footage.

Alex: Ramparts... you know...

Leo: Did you Andrew, did you get an invitation from the fruit company?

Andy: I did not, I believe Apple knew Logan was going to be shut down this weekend anyway, we're getting another storm so they decided to be proactive and make sure that they don't even tempt me with an invitation.

Leo: Nobody from Boston got an invitation this year.

Andy: That's what I keep telling myself.

Leo: You know, you're weird because you're on and off. We were talking about this on TWiT I think, with Jason Snell who's going of course. And I thought, one thing I thought was kind of cool is that even though Jason Snell is no longer editor in chief of Macworld, he's a blogger now. Six Colors, his blog. They still invite him which I think is awesome. And he said it really is about the relationship not about the publication. But he said you're an odd case because sometimes you get invited, sometimes you don't and that's atypical.

Andy: Yeah and well that's why I think a lot of people make the mistake of thinking that there is like a formal black list or there is a good list. A naughty nice... a naughty list and a nice list. There are just a lot of variables, most of which you won't understand and so again, every time there's an event I anticipate maybe getting invited, maybe not. Either way I can do my job so it's really not a problem.

Leo: Rene you did, in fact I know you and Serenity are coming down for the event.

Rene: Yes sir.

Leo: That's exciting.

Rene: They're taking mercy on me and getting me out of this weather.

Andy: (laughing)

Leo: Yeah, thank goodness. The... I was actually want to find the... the invitation, I want to find an invitation that has the text on it. Because a lot of... so did yours just look like that?

Rene: It had at the bottom it said spring forward.

Leo: Yeah.

Rene: Yeah there it is.

Leo: So I've seen some I guess, maybe some publications put that information up. “Spring Forward” it says, with what looks like the NBC peacock.

(laughing)

Rene: Must see TV.

Leo: And Apple will hold a press event March 9^th, you're invited it's the Yerba Buena Center which is a smallish place, that's what the iPad was announced. And it will be Monday.

Rene: Yep. 10 am Pacific.

Leo: I think given spring forward it is the day after we enter summer time here in the United States but I think given the name, the title Spring Forward we could assume it's a watch.

Andy: Isn't that when the clocks go back? I think spring... spring I believe is March 20^th, we've been very focused on that date of late.

Leo: Oh I thought... yeah spring is March 20^th, but I'm sorry, summer time we go into our daylight savings time March 8^th. I was told unless I'm completely...

Andy: Exactly, right. According to no less a source than Google, daylight savings time Sunday... search for end of daylight savings you get a card that says Sunday March 8^th. 2 am as a matter of fact.

Alex: And I'm bitter about that twice a year.

Leo: Yeah I know.

Alex: It's just why, why do they do that to us?

Leo: Was it you who said I just want the sun overhead at noon no matter what time of year?

Alex: I just... just don't want to change my watch.

Leo: Yeah.

Alex: It doesn't matter to me, I don't want to figure out what my off sets are, because different countries are off set.

Leo: That's right because it's Sunday for us but I don't know if it's Sunday everywhere. Is it Sunday in Wales that you change the time? Yes. I have 3 Welshmen in front of me, so I would know.

Andy: The worst thing is like when you're... I'm glad that I don't have to at least fly to San Francisco on like Daylight Savings day because when the clocks go back because I had a conference that I went to like 3 years in a row in which my travel day was that Sunday and so I was also like flying 3 time zones west so I would lose like 4 hours and I was just an absolute... and because of Sunday flight schedules, the only way to get a flight out that's going to really work is to leave the house at 6 or 7 in the morning and then there would be a reception at 8pm and I would be an absolute freaking' wreck and I have to speak in front of like 500 people at 9am on Monday the next day so I looked and felt my best on the kickoff day for...

Leo: Andy, you have an invitation, we are going to broadcast of course because Apple is streaming it, good news. We will do our usual snark. Our Mystery Science Theater 3000 version, 10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern, 1800 UTC. Oh. No, 1700 UTC.

Rene: There's going to be so many people missing it by an hour.

Leo: An hour! And Andy you said you could join us?

Andy: I absolutely will join you.

Leo: Yay. And then the next day a week from today we'll do MacBreak Weekly with Serenity and Rene in studio.

Rene: Yep.

Leo: You guys are going to come up.

Andy: Both of whom will be wearing suspiciously long sleeves that they keep out of camera range.

Leo: So obviously it's the watch. Although Tim Cook said at the earnings call that it won't be available til' April so we know it's an announcement for a product that will ship 3 weeks later. Or thereabouts. Or as much 6 weeks later I guess.

Rene: Yeah that's odd because usually it's same day or 10 days later or... you know, it's unusual to have the event that far ahead.

Leo: Is it possible that it's ready?

Andy: I doubt it.

Rene: The rumor was that it was tentatively scheduled for March but they pushed it to April because they wanted a little bit more time, and I'm happy for Apple to take every minute of that personally.

Leo: Oh yeah, let's get it right. Absolutely.

Rene: Absolutely.

Alex: And on the totally crazy side it may not be the watch.

Leo: Oh come on, stop it. Just stop it. Knock it off.

Rene: They're making a spring.

Alex: That would just be showing off, wouldn't it? You know, it's like yeah we've got this big watch coming but let me show you this other thing that we have coming out.

Leo: Right. Oh the watch? We'll do that in a couple of weeks.

Andy: Seriously though if they had a minor piece of news that they knew they're not going to get any attention for if they just simply say well here's what we're actually going to be doing with Beats, here's the new Beats music app. They know that's a way to get not only like 500 people to fly out for this event but also to be paying attention because okay this applies to the watch how? The music plays in the watch? I wouldn't be shocked, but I think this is such an important launch for Apple and such a unique one for them too. Because they have never... you really have to go back to the iPad for when else have they launched something when there is no indication that people actually want this, not even any indication that people understand what this is. I mean Leo, you and I wear smartwatches every day, we know cool they are. But we still have, I still have problems explaining to people here's why I love wearing this watch every single day. So they really need to spend a lot of time crafting a Game of Thrones scale story with texture and effects and special guests and flying dragons and everything they can do to make the case for why you want to spend $350 for a new gadget wristwatch.

Leo: Yeah yesterday in the New York Times, big article. “The Apple Watch is Nearly Ready, But is the Public?” There is a considerable question mark over whether people want a smartwatch.

Rene: I wonder if we're over thinking this. I wonder if the mere fact that Apple is making a... like who makes your phone? Apple. Who makes your tablet? Apple. Apple has a watch now? Oh that's interesting, let's go take a look at it. Oh look, shiny. I wonder if the tech press is over-thinking this.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: Well I think the fact that then we go back to the iPhone where a lot of people were willing to buy it not only because it was cool, because it was a cool Apple gadget, despite the fact that it wasn't really ready for mass consumption for at least 2 years after that. There's... I don't see any way that this is not going to be a big hit. The question is, how soon do they get normal people to start buying these as opposed to Apple fans who are just excited about the next Apple product?

Leo: So is this a fair headline? Selling a smartwatch to an uninterested public? We're interested.

Andy: Uninformed rather than uninterested.

Alex: Well and I think that a lot of it's going to... one of the advantages that Apple has is of course they're going to get this huge surge of the believers that want to try it out and get ahead of everything and that makes it easier to develop for. That you have a lot of, one large group of people that are all doing the same thing at the same time. And I do think that when you start to see the kind of things being able to, I think we're going to see companies that change their security systems so that you walk up and just open the door. You know, you don't have to have some little card...

Leo: In fact Tim Cook said that, a number of hotels are already adopting Apple Watch not only as a way to open the door which they showed at the event but to check in, to bypass the front desk.

Alex: I need the watch to tell me what room I'm in so I can remember which room I'm in.

Leo: That would be nice.

Alex: That would be good.

Andy: NFC might be the killer component inside this watch because you can do so many things with NFC that you can't do through radio and that is the sort of feature that if I can open a door just by tapping my watch against it, or hopefully that's a sapphire crystal on it, but just by proximity. A lot of people I think, nobody's going to spend $350 for that one feature, but that's worth $103 at least and that it a lot more palatable.

Rene: And the thing Alex, so much about that technology is that, I've used Bluetooth trusted objects or Bluetooth trusted devices before and I don't really like them. They're deal breakers for me because if I grab Phil Nickinson's little dongle off his shirt, I'm Phil Nickinson, I can unlock all his stuff. And what I like about things like TouchID and with the Apple Watch is either it's a finger print or it has to maintain skin contact so once it's authorized it knows that it's on, you take that watch off it's useless for somebody else. But that watch on me could unlock my house, could unlock my car, could unlock my Mac. Could unlock one password for me. So there's a lot of potential I think once you make the sensors not brilliant but a little bit smarter and they start to understand all that information.

Leo: Finger print is going to be so important going forward and Apple really led the way with that, we've seen fingerprint readers before but none of them as good as TouchID. Samsung announced this week its Galaxy S6 which will be available next month. And it has a new fingerprint reader that doesn't require a swipe.

Rene: The S is for shameless.

Andy: Oh come on, that's cheap.

Rene: No I'm so to the point I didn't add phone.

Leo: Really? It looks a lot like an iPhone inside from some angles.

Andy: Are you...

Rene: I love the new HTC, I love the new Motorola I think they're doing... like the HTC one yes it's iterative but I like a lot about HTC to begin with, the Motorola I think they're really pushing things down market.

Leo: You're talking about the E?

Rene: The E yeah absolutely the Moto E.

Leo: $150.

Rene: For people who are interested in those kinds of phones, making smartphones more accessible to more people and more parts of the world, I think they deserve tremendous credit. Samsung is a company and based not just on all the inside stories floating around how they're working internally as a company these days but to me I don't ever want to care more about my phone than the person who makes it. The intent of Samsung is so directionalist, I don't know who to recommend that phone to any more. It used to be if you want a removable battery, if you wanted waterproofing, if you wanted certain features.

Leo: They took the stylus, the removable battery, the SD card and waterproof.

Rene: And there's no reason that phone has to look from any angle like an iPhone... there's no reason that Samsung has to look like Apple. All of that stuff to me just shows an absence of design culture. And I want people who are passionate about phones.

Leo: Oh come on. Nobody's done the curved thing around the edge like that, that's unique!

Rene: Yeah that's way more... the Galaxy Note edge, the Galaxy Note has always been a more interesting phone to me than the Galaxy... the straight Galaxy S. I'm looking forward to the Note again this year.

Leo: But that won't be til the fall probably.

Andy: It's just that, what else... are you... it's unmistakable that the design direction of the new Galaxy S6 is certainly influenced by the iPhone, we can even go so far as to say it was a ripoff of a lot of different design elements. But when you get into like little details, like... I just don't like it when there's a comment like... a fingerprint ID that works by actually touching it, of course they ripped that off from the iPhone. As opposed to no, for years that's been the desired way to make fingerprint ID work, they just now have a component that is not made by Apple that makes that work. There are even people...

Leo: I'm surprised, in fact I feel like there will be lawsuits on this. I mean I thought Apple really owned this.

Andy: That's a stupid lawsuit. There was also like a couple people were saying oh and guess what, let's see the iPhone 6 has a bumped out camera lens. Gee I wonder if the S6 is going to have a bumped out camera lens too?

Rene: They've all had bumped out camera... that's...

Andy: Exactly. Here's one from 2012...

Rene: That's the thing, copying is fine... like everything is a remix. Just copy forward that's all I'm asking. I think the note really does copy forward. It takes good ideas and makes better ideas out of them, but I think the Galaxy S series is not taking...

Leo: We'll see, I'm going to buy the Edge, I think that's really cool looking. There you see how close the bottoms are.

Rene: Fake Jony Ive said they got the Lightning port wrong.

Leo: (laughing) Fake Jony Ive, right. Hey but look at John Gruber's tweet.

Andy: They got the Lightning port wrong in the sense that this cable does not make any money for Apple ever. So that's the wrong way to do that.

Leo: I'm actually a little disappointed they don't do the new USB... what is it, USB 3C...

Rene: Yeah.

Andy: Yeah.

Leo: Because that would have been reversible, that would have been nice. But on the other hand nobody has that cable yet so... John Gruber tweets the picture from Android Authority of how you register a fingerprint on the Samsung Galaxy S6. “Looks familiar,” writes Gruber. “Can't quite put my finger on where I've seen something like this before...” You register the fingerprint just exactly as you do on the iPhone.

Rene: And Samsung Pay looks the same and S Voice look the same.

Leo: The good news about this though is that you don't have to push, it is very much like TouchID. And I'm encouraged because I thought Apple might have, with their acquisition of Authentic really kind of snapped that up and owned the idea that you could just put your finger on it.

Rene: They get like a year to two years advantage by doing technology... even when you look at unibodies on Macs they get about a year or two years head start by owning the technology and then everyone else sort of catches up. And I think it's great that Samsung...

Leo: Well are going to yell at Apple if they do a curved screen next year?

Rene: Samsung's going to build it. They're going to buy it.

Leo: That's true... somebody said that too when we were doing the Samsung event, maybe it was you Andy. That one of the things that Samsung is making is a demo of all the parts you can get for your phone. Because that's...

Andy: I think that was part of the keynote, where they list... they went to the technical section with this thing, here's all the components that go into it. They didn't say it explicitly but I think it was not an accident they were saying oh and here's the Samsung made CPU and here's the Samsung made type of RAM we're using and here's the Samsung... I don't think that was a dig against other manufacturers, but it did... it was part of the ongoing picture they wanted to paint of we don't just make phones, we make components that go into phones and so please ignore how much this phone looks like the iPhone 6.

Leo: I have to say, I'm kind of with you Andy. If there's innovation from somebody, whoever it is, and it really is good. Such as TouchID, I want to see it on more phones. As long as they're not violating patents.

Rene: I agree with that too. There's a chance to think forward.

Andy: I think it is tasteless when you see something as bold as the way that they did S4's voice, the way that they're doing the fingerprint registration, stuff like that. But even when I'm testing an Android phone I am thinking things like gee I really hope Apple steals this idea for the iPhone because I want the best phone possible and I also want the best phone possible for all consumers so I don't care if they're even just saying outright in the keynote, yeah we really like the way that Apple did their camera assembly so we did one just like it because we wanted to have the best camera assembly we could possibly have.

Leo: It would be nice if they just admitted it, right?

Rene: I want to speak clearly, when I say shameless as intentionally as an insult, one of my favorite quotes from Buffy ever was when Cordelia said like shame is something to be proud of, you can absolutely be incredibly successful in business when you're shameless. I just think that last year, I said something similar about the Galaxy S5, people said I was dumb and I think the Galaxy S5 now is not widely regarded and I think next year this won't be wildly regarded. I think if you're going to be shameless you better be successful because otherwise all you are is shameless.

Leo: We'll see.

Alex: They're playing Apple's game against Apple. They're playing right up against them rather than all the other things that distinguish that phone from what the iPhone was. There was a lot of things that it wasn't, with the battery, all the other things that it had, and I think that going head to head with Apple is probably... in my opinion not probably the best business solution but we'll see.

Rene: Best phone they could have made for Apple.

Leo: While the S6 is not waterproof, maybe the Apple Watch will be. Apparently visiting German chancellor Angela Merkel, Tim Cook mentioned that he wears his Apple Watch constantly, even in the shower. You know, and Tim... there's no accidents with Tim, obviously he knows everything he says is going to be parsed.

Andy: Okay but look who's saying that, he can afford to buy a new watch every single day.

Rene: That's what I was thinking, every hour.

Leo: I just call Jony and say “Ah I showered with it again, can you send me another one?”

Rene: Leo, you shower, you peel off a new watch and put it on immediately.

Andy: Exactly, he's like Jerry Lewis...

Leo: Alright we know $350 for the sport one. Which is not going to be the most beautiful one, it's going to have like a plastic band... I don't remember, can the sport one have the like Milanese band?

Rene: It's unclear. All the bands are theoretically interchangeable although I don't know if Apple specified if they'll be technically interchangeable between collections.

Leo: Ah.

Rene: I think there is some... like I was thinking earlier today about the reason for being the Apple Watch edition, why Apple would make a gold watch.

Leo: A $10,000 gold watch.

Rene: Maybe.

Andy: Maybe.

Rene: Maybe 10,000 maybe five. Who knows? But it's definitely gold so it's going to be at least as pricey as gold is pricey. But a lot of the coverage I've been looking at has been people guessing about prices, specifically about the edition. When Vogue has had it on the cover or in exhibit it's been the Apple Watch edition. I think the aluminum one, you say no one's going to want it but I think sports people are going to love it and I think people will like the idea that its aspirational, yes there's a gold one out there sitting at the top getting a lot of attention but you can have essentially the same watch for $350. It's that old everyone drinks the same coke argument.

Leo: Well don't get me wrong, I think it will... the least expensive one will outsell the others 3 to 1 or 4 to 1, but I think people will... you're right, people will look at the other one say, gosh I wish I could afford that. And will they be happy with the sport version?

Rene: Yeah.

Andy: I think the sport version is going to be the default for most people.

Leo: It is.

Andy: I think the stainless steel one is going to be the actual aspirational one. And I think the gold one is going to be... I just don't understand rich people at all.

Leo: (laughing)

Andy: I really think that's...

Leo: Rich people are not like you and me.

Andy: I think that this is... not to, and I hope I'm not being indelicate in saying that you're crazy if you buy a gold Apple Watch but I'm saying that there are people who understand that there are people who can be moved up from hey this stainless steel one is made out of a harder material, it's probably longer lasting, it's a little bit classier than aluminum. There are very few people who can be talked up from stainless steel to gold or from sport to gold. The people who are going to be buying the gold watch are the people who I think would never have considered buying anything but the gold watch.

Leo: Right. So Kevin Rose is here, Jason, for our 10^th anniversary TWiT on April, what is that, April...

Jason: Something...

Leo: 15^th? I don't know.

Jason: I think it's the 19^th. Somewhere around there.

Leo: He'll be wearing one, we'll get to see one then.

Jason: I hope so.

Leo: Kevin's a watch buff right?

Jason: Yeah he'll definitely be here.

Leo: And I think he can afford it no matter how much it costs.

Rene: Well that's the kind of thing, the Apple Watch Edition is for people who want an Apple Watch but happen to wear gold watches and they think about the $10,000 watch the way someone with a Lamborghini thinks about gas.

Leo: Right. Do we know, do we have any speculation here, we are less than a week away. I think I really would love to get the stainless steel one, but do we know what that's going to cost? I don't want to pay $800 for it.

Andy: Unknown.

Alex: I'm getting the stainless steel one.

Rene: Apple can charge what they want. I mean it's not based on anything other than what price they think the market will bear.

Leo: It's a thousand, isn't it? It's going to be a thousand.

Rene: Between 500 and 1000 seems like the range.

Alex: I think $600 or $700 seems like the right...

Rene: Depending on the band too. Because some bands will be more expensive.

Andy: That's what makes this so interesting, especially when you get into the edition. You feel as though, I'm of two minds. I can see Apple serenely standing back while everybody speculates $10,000, $12,000, $15,000... and then having a price that's just under 5 just so that it will seem not as expensive as it should... as it might have been, despite the fact that it's still a $5,000 electronic gadget that no one's really sure that they actually need yet.

Rene: iPad gambit.

Andy: Exactly. Or I could see them saying look, we're not going to take over the market for gold watches but man, we can really elevate the entire brand if everyone knows that there is an $18,000 version of this watch and I know someone, I don't have one and I don't know someone who has one but my uncle works with somebody at his firm who has one and boy is it cool. And that's where I'm... I want to see the dry erase board where the numbers at Apple, where they're trying to figure out what to change keeps going up and keeps going down and you see all these like little ghost images of like 2, 2 and then like 3 cross-throughs on it.

Leo: Would the 42mm cost more than the... what is the other size, 38?

Rene: 38, yeah. And it sounds like a very small amount but it's basically 10% of the size of that device.

Leo: So the gold watch is going to cost more, obviously.

Rene: And there's one thing people who are watch fanatics should know is that Apple's measuring vertically not horizontally which I think is the norm in the industry so it's 42mm high not wide.

Andy: Yeah. I was talking to watch makers about... showing them pictures and giving them impressions of when I wore it in September and they really opened my eyes to here's how little goes into the case of a watch like that, we really are talking like a pocket watch case and it's really, they gave me numbers that are all over the map for how many grams or ounces of gold would have to go into a case like that. That's why I throw up my hands.

Leo: We don't know what it's going to cost.

Andy: I absolutely have no idea. I thought I'd get some kind of a ballpark but...

Leo: We could get a minimum if you knew it was going to be 8 grams of gold or whatever and you could get a minimum for the gold alone.

Alex: I'd be really interested to see if there's, when you're thinking about the gold I'd be really interested to see if there's any thought of the anti-theft kind of things that you see with the iPhone as well. With all of them.

Leo: The kill switch.

Alex: Yeah some kind of kill switch. It knows who you are so theoretically unless you unlock it and make it available to someone else it could just not work for anybody else.

Leo: Will the guts be the same?

Rene: Yes. It's the S1 chip. The only difference, again, is the sapphire glass on the higher end models. The stainless steel and the gold model.

Andy: Yeah. It doesn't seem to make any sense. Unless they can say that this is the exact same watch only in different cases I don't think that they, I think that causes way more problems for them than they can solve.

Alex: It's hard to develop for, it's hard to...

Rene: We don't know capacity yet though, if there's a difference in the amount of flash storage in different models but they haven't said anything about that yet.

Andy: But I think that's even... that would even kill their whole argument if they, if they say that the gold version of this watch does anything that the stainless steel or even the sport one doesn't do, then I think they've lost their argument over the specialness over edition. That this is designed, this is luxury, and even more than that this is fashion. We're not charging you an extra X thousand or $10,000 for an extra feature for more RAM, the ability to have more apps resident, the ability to stream more music directly via Bluetooth from the watch. We are telling you that we have designed an item of sophistication and elegance and that's why we're asking an extra X thousand or $10,000 for it.

Rene: Exclusive Rolex watch face.

Leo: Well, it's exciting. Anything else? Any surprises Monday?

Alex: I don't know if the watch is the only thing that they're going to talk about. I think that there's a lot of things that are, I mean...

Leo: I'm telling you it's not about the watch, that peacock. It really is about an NBC deal for the Apple TV is really what this is all about. You guys missed the whole thing.

Andy: That would be a beautiful place to sneak that sort of thing in, but I thought about this last week and thinking well what could they really release? And there are rumors of an iPad Pro and they wouldn't want that to be overshadowed by Apple Watch. There are rumors of a compact Retina Air, I think that too they would not want it to be overshadowed by the watch. It would have to be an announcement that is so simple that this is the only way to get people to pay that much attention to it but not so big that they want people to...

Alex: Which would lean you towards the Apple TV.

Leo: I would expect some Beats news maybe. Because...

Alex: Maybe.

Leo: If the watch can play music...

Rene: Although Beats stuff is supposed to be iOS 8.4 and we still haven't had 8.2 and 8.3 roll out yet. And to Alex's point, the iPad's traditionally had, or at least one year they had Apple TVs with them. The original iPad, I'm sorry the original iPhone introduction had Apple TV.

Leo: Yeah but times have changed now. They have many more events then they used to, they're completely capable of having 2 events in 2 months, we know that from last year.

Rene: Would they do 2 spring events? That would be super interesting.

Leo: That would be.

(all talking, indistinct)

Alex: Yeah like a Retina Air or some kind of... you know, the pro model and an Apple TV. Between this and the watch it also just shows Apple's ability to continue to do stuff. So I think that there's a statement that makes if they do that. And if they're looking at releasing in April you're still looking at you know, 3, 4, 5 weeks of run assuming that it's ready to ship relatively soon.

Rene: Remember when there was nothing in the spring? We had 2 years and nothing in the spring and now we don't know where they're going to fit all these products.

Alex: Yep. Because the problem is is that after the watch, and I think you have to give up 6 weeks before you do anything major so, you're now starting to push the... any other announcements into June which might make sense when you're looking at WWC but otherwise it seems like you might have to push some stuff out that you might want to get out earlier. The pro, the Air or whatever they're going to call it, the pro version of the iPad is going to... they're going to want to get that out in the spring because they want people to be thinking about it for fall.

Leo: Tim Cook said some other things in Germany, it wasn't a public event. He was talking to employees, but he did say they'll be... it sounds like they're going to show a host of apps on Monday in addition to the watch itself and that would make a lot of sense. These aren't apps that would be the watch standalone but these are phone apps that will have a watch presence. Panera Bread will, an early Apple Pay partner is working to jump on the Apple bandwagon according to Mark Gurman at 9to5Mac. Salesforce.com, Cook said is also developing... you've done for Salesforce.

Alex: We do a lot of stuff for Salesforce.

Leo: They're also apparently doing software for the Apple Watch.

Alex: Yeah and they've been... Salesforce has been way ahead of iOS development from day one and they have issued, I don't know to every employee but to many many employees, all their sales staff and everything else all have iPads and so this is an easy move for them. A lot of their development is all based around pushing the iOS and this is a perfect solution for a sales person so I think that it makes a lot of sense for them.

Rene: Going to be super interesting because...

Leo: Go ahead Rene.

Rene: I was going to say, the actual notifications as far as I understand if you've implemented them iOS 8 style that will just work. So if you have a favorite communications app that sends you personal notifications now that has like that reply or mark as red buttons, those should just work on the Apple Watch. It will be able to pull those in, you can set them the way you like them. If you want to make a glance, you have to build that. That's like a little widget, it's like building a widget for the today view notification center. So it's a little bit if work but if you just want to have persistent information instead of information that comes and goes based on an alert system you can do that, and then if you want more interactivity you can build a watchkit app which like a remote view that displays on the watch instead of on the phone and that's even more work but it gives you more capability on the phone and I think the interesting thing will be to see what apps figure out exactly what they need and how they need it, but Apple's been bringing in developers since before the event. We saw Twitter I think maybe even Facebook at the event back in September and they had been bringing developers in over and over again since then so we should see some really well thought out, well honed stuff.

Leo: Apparently...

Andy: It's actually...

Leo: Gurman says 100 developers have been invited to Cupertino to polish up their apps prior to the launch.

Andy: That's not a surprise because I've been seeing a lot of interfaces and a lot of people have been showing me interfaces and my notes back have been... this screen is a lot smaller than you think it is. I think it is going to be like developing for the iPad where there are so many... I did not meet a developer before the iPad came out who did not have some sort of cardboard or resin model of the iPad that they were sticking screenshots into to get some sort of feel for what this will feel like to use and I don't think that it's easy to figure out how this is, how an interface is going to interact with when you scale it down to this size. But that said it's no accident that during the September event one of the big things they were showing off was look at this huge constellation of circular app icons. Look how easy it is to zoom through all of the different app icons you will be able to pick from when you launch this app. This is a very Apple approach to this sort of product. It's not about putting cards, notifications and having Google now sort of have a presence on your wrist, it really is you have to have a targeted app platform. That's what Apple does so very well and that's the strength of the things that they make.

Rene: And one of the big things that they did and I think really smartly, is if you go to Apple's developer stuff they really try to help you see it, like this is a watch. People aren't going to be sitting there playing with it for hours. They're not going to be looking... your app is going to surface to them when they need it. Either a notification will come up or they'll know they have to go and check some sort of delivery information or reference information so make sure that your experience is not app-centric but action-centric and also make sure that there is Handoff on the watch for example. So anything that might be too long or too fussy, just send it back to the phone. The watch is supposed to save people time, not be there to fuss with so give that back to the watch, they can do it much more easily on a big screen.

Leo: The developers have been... this is funny, almost prophetic. The article Mark wrote about developers coming to Cupertino is from February 16^th. He said it was as if something urgent was motivating Apple like an event was imminent. The developers were traveling to Cupertino on an urgent time line, they said that a sense of secrecy surrounds the meeting, the different developers in the room were not identified by name but by unique numbers so that other developers in the room wouldn't know what others are up to. Some leaks coming out of this, Mark's got them all. Developers in attendance called the watch's digital crown quote “really nice.” But one said that forced touch takes time to get used to. Another developer said the taptic engine vibrating feature is not as impressive as expected. I don't know what that means.

Rene: I've heard good things about the taptics. The problem with the force press, I think some people it's supposed to be like a second click but I think some people mistook it for a hamburger button and just thought they could put every function you wanted, as soon as you hit that the screen would light up with buttons. Which is something that's fiercely, fiercely looked down upon.

Leo: Right. And I'm sure that one of the reasons those developers were there was to get spanked about stuff like that.

Alex: Well and I think it's so important for Apple, and I think this is the thing that a lot of people miss is that it's so important to make sure that they come out of the gate with some great apps. They don't need thousands of great apps, but a hundred of them would be enough to show some great examples because that's going to set the pace for everyone else. I think that a lot of times when developers don't figure that out and just kind of throw it out there and hope people will develop for it you get a lot of geeky stuff that doesn't really work and then that affects the entire platform.

Leo: And I can verify that employees in the store are getting training because we've an abnormal number of retail employees in our studios the last few weeks coming to Cupertino for training. What about the rumor that there's going to be a big kind of look change to the Apple store? Somebody pointed out that Jony Ive said well, I would never want to buy an Apple Watch unless I'm standing on carpet.

Rene: (laughs) But not orange and brown carpet, because...

Andy: That way the static electricity will destroy the device and they have to buy another one for $12,000.

Leo: And then Niko Damon in our chatroom had a very good point. Probably no preorders because this is something you're going to want to go into the store, right? And get it, and...

Alex: Oh I think there's a lot of people that are ready to order it. I think that that's...

Leo: But don't you, I mean are they going to size it or do you just get a band and then you figure it out later?

Rene: You size it yourself, they pop off and...

Leo: Oh, okay. Yeah, I mean I'll buy it sight unseen.

Andy: Yeah. It will be interesting, I'm so interested to see what the packaging is like for the edition. I'm so interested to see what the sales experience is supposed to be like. If it really can be, you walk in, you're met at the door by someone in a T-shirt holding a phone.

Leo: Welcome.

Andy: They swipe your credit card, you stand there for 5 seconds, they hand you a box and send you on your way.

Leo: We've been expecting you. Are they going to do it the same way they do the phones when the phones come out? Lines out front and the countdown, you go in and take all the watches...

Rene: I don't think so, I mean there's something special about those events, especially for new products when they launch.

Leo: I know what's going to happen. I'm going to be number 4 in line and I'm going to get to the front and they'll say well we've sold out of the $350 and the $5,000 version but there's plenty of editions left, would you like one?

(laughing)

Andy: Oh, well if that's all you've got...

Rene: Whatever you want Leo, will be sold out. It's whatever you want.

Leo: Oh I'll take it... I do that with the phone, Sprint I got to have Sprint. Oh alright, I'll take it...

Andy: You still have the blue rubber band? Okay well give me the edition with the blue rubber band.

Leo: Oh... you're all going to buy it, right? You're all going to buy watches right? You're going to buy the cheap ones though right? Because you're cheapskates.

Rene: I know some people who want to get multiple ones. They want to get an edition to wear out fancy and once they buy the edition an extra $350 for the sport to wear to the gym is nothing to them.

Leo: Oh my god.

Andy: Yeah.

Rene: One for each wrist, Leo.

Leo: There's a power reserve mode apparently. According to the New York Times that says well when you get low on power, will continue to show the time. So that's good, because... sometimes people do wear wristwatches to know what time it is.

Alex: That's crazy talk.

Rene: The code name was apparently gizmo which sounds delightful.

Leo: I like gizmo. I like that, yep. This is from that uninterested public story. What else?

Rene: People were saying that's because you can't feed it after midnight or can't...

Leo: (laughing)

Rene: I think any allusions to gremlins was incidental.

Leo: Any other... anything else to report? I mean, this is all... this is the traditional and I apologize because I know people go oh... The last show before an Apple event, all it is is sitting around saying “What are they going to say? What are they going to say?”

Rene: I was going through my photos and I saw one with the Hey Siri interface and had kind of forgotten about that, but the idea that I will be able to lift the watch up and say “Hey Siri what's the weather?”

Leo: That's nice.

Rene: I mean that sort of thing to me is much better than plotting, kind of poke around...

Leo: Does it have a speaker on the watch?

Rene: Yep, you can do phone calls on the watch.

Leo: You can.

Rene: It's better not to do them for long periods of time, just hand them off to your phone, but you can do them.

Andy: Yeah I have a piece that's in with my editor right now that's basically just in anticipation of the watch announcement last week, here is everything I've learned in over 6 months of wearing a smartwatch every day and really the ability to just not even work with an interface but just raise your thing up your wrist and just... please do this thing for me, wait 3 seconds for it to acknowledge, okay I'm doing that thing for you. And then put your wrist back down, that in itself is just a killer feature. I use that... at least two thirds of the time I use this watch when I'm not checking the time I'm giving it a voice command.

Rene: So Dick Tracy.

Leo: (laughs)

Alex: I do, I find it amazing how quickly they sucked all the energy out of the mobile congress.

Rene: Yeah.

Leo: Isn't that funny? I mean good timing Apple. Nice job.

Alex: Yeah, I don't think there was... no accident there. That they have iPhoto. I'm sorry, iPhone, Billboards and they announce something that they won't tell you about and everything else. The days that it really takes a lot of energy, it's got to be very frustrating to be in Barcelona.

Leo: We're also learning how Apple hid the Apple Watch, including making Samsung like cases for their employees to wear. Those are gone, by the way. We now know when you see somebody with an Apple Watch it's obvious. But they wanted to make them look like Galaxy Gear smartwatches which is pretty funny.

Andy: The last person you're going to look at is the person who actually bought a Galaxy Gear so that's brilliant.

Leo: Oh god, that guy. Don't be that guy. Also international sales, and I know our audience... you know, a large...

Alex: That would be a great ad. Oh, sorry.

Leo: What?

Alex: Sorry. That would be a great ad with Rob Lowe.

Rene: (laughing)

Alex: The Apple Watch versus the Samsung. Don't be the Samsung.

Leo: Don't be the Samsung guy.

Andy: It doesn't even run Android, it runs something other than Android.

Leo: Apple Watch may be available internationally quickly which is good news I think for a lot of people.

Rene: Woohoo!

Leo: Including Rene Ritchie. According to unnamed employees at the German event, Tim said that the Apple Watch would be available in April, outside the US.

Rene: Best press briefing ever.

Leo: Yeah, because he's in Germany you could assume Germany is one of those countries. You know it's not really a question, I don't think there's any reason why they couldn't be available. I don't even know, I guess it would have to get the equivalent of FCC approval in every country but it's not as complicated as...

Rene: It's usually manufacturing, like the iPad I think it took 30 days to go international, maybe 60 days but it was manufacturing constraints and the Apple Watch, the hardware as far as I know has been ready for a while so that's why I'm not too worried about the software taking time because the more time that takes, the more Apple Watches they can make and hopefully that means more countries they can ship.

Leo: One analyst now saying 15 million in 2015. The leak was that Apple is making, will have 5 million ready. And we agreed last week that the supply would be constrained. Unless...

Rene: Centers from tidbits did the math on the amount of gold it would take to hit the Wall Street Journal's numbers and I think it was most of the gold that was currently on the market.

Leo: You're kidding!

Rene: We'll see how those estimates hold up.

Leo: What? Really? Okay. What is the percentage? It's going to be 75% sport, it's going to be 24.9% stainless steel, and .01 or .1% edition, right? It's going to be a tiny fraction.

Rene: The Wall Street Journal had it at 1/6^th I think which sounded high.

Leo: 1/6^th? No.

Andy: No, that's rubbish.

Alex: That's pretty high. Well, it depends on how much it costs, but at a $1,000 or $1,500 maybe. Which I think is still a pretty high price to pay for a watch but at $6,000 or $5,000 I think you're definitely looking at less than 10%.

Rene: Yeah there were estimates of a million in the first quarter which sounded ridiculous.

Leo: A million editions?

Rene: Yeah 850,000 to a million editions in the first quarter which sounds preposterous.

Leo: No.

Andy: I could see a surge at the very beginning.

Leo: Yeah.

Andy: Because again, I'm trying to...

Leo: A few dozen right away.

Andy: I'm trying to get my head in the space of somebody who would pay that much money for a device like this and I am thinking that I want to be seen as one of these people who not only can afford this but I also have the connections to find the store that had these for sale and sent one of my assistants and beat him or her savagely until they found me the one with the serpentine band that I wanted, I think that's going to be an early sort of thing. It's going to be interesting to see 6 to 8 to 10 months later, is it still going to be a desirable thing to have? But yeah it's ridiculous to think that 1 out of every 6 of these is going to be an edition watch. Anything is possible and I'm prepared to admit that wow I did not expect that, boy was I wrong. But I just don't... I would like not to believe that I live in a world where 1 out of 6 of these watches, when there's a beautiful stainless steel one and an affordable aluminum one would be the solid gold one.

Rene: It's going to be like Ferrari. You're going to have to buy the midnight blue first to get on the list to buy the red one to get on the list to buy the blue.

Andy: How long is it going to take for somebody to come up with some sort of a vinyl product that will let you turn an aluminum watch into a gold watch?

Leo: Ah! Ah!

Rene: I think you can anodize them, right? You can anodize almost anything. I'm sure the color...

Andy: Yeah, exactly.

Leo: You know you're going to see them on award shows, you're going to see the Hollywood royalty will be wearing them, right?

Rene: Kim Kardashian day one.

Leo: But you know, I have to revise my numbers...

Andy: No no. Keep these off the Kardashians. We will give you a million dollars each to never wear one of these watches.

Rene: The gold iPhone's code name was, well the informal code name was Kardashian.

Leo: Was it really?

Rene: Yeah.

Leo: Oh that's funny.

Rene: One of my friends actually anodized an iPhone 6, and iPhone 5 for Kim Kardashian, a gold one. And she was using it so much that they started jokingly calling it the Kardashian inside Apple.

Leo: We're going to take a break, I actually have to revise my numbers because even 1 in a 1,000 editions would, I think, be very high. Do you think it will be...? Well, anyway. We'll see.

Andy: I can't get... 1 in 6 is...

Rene: How many Mac Pros compared to Macbook Airs are there?

Leo: My Mac Pro, by the way, slows down a lot. That's making me...

Rene: What are you doing on it Leo?

Leo: I don't know, nothing. I'm kind of mad. I get a lot of... I'm going to have to rebuild or something.

Rene: iTunes doesn't count.

Andy: At least the Mac Pro and the Mac Air are very different machines. You could say that I need a Mac Pro for what I do. This is why again, I hope I'm not speaking so clumsily as to make fun of anybody who's interested in the edition, I'm just saying I have so confused by trying to picture who would want to buy this as opposed to somebody else that I have to realize that I have no idea. I have to basically say that I acknowledge my humility here, I have no idea who's going to buy this.

Rene: I think it's people who just buy gold watches Andy. I think they just... that they buy gold watches. It's just a different world from us.

Andy: But even then...

Leo: I'm telling you, Kevin Rose, Kim Kardashian, Kanye West.

Rene: Kevin Mitchell, I mean there's a whole list.

Andy: This is not a representative sample, know. But I've spoken to about a dozen people I know in friends of friends, I know who think of nothing of spending spending $15,000 on a watch they really like and there is just not a lot of interest from those people in this watch. The things they like about expensive watches is not, well I just want it to have the same thing that everybody else has, but I want it in gold. They... it's...

Leo: By the way, this just in. 275 pounds of gold were stolen yesterday in an armored truck heist worth $4.8 million. I think we know where that gold went.

Alex: It's on its way to Cupertino.

Leo: Gold looks so good though, doesn't it? Somebody said just buy the sport watch and a gold bar and you'll be ahead.

Rene: Sounds like a classic Joker caper to me.

Leo: (laughs) Our show today brought to you by FreshBooks. FreshBooks is the easy to use invoicing software that I used. You know, freelancing is tough. Being a small business, tough. If you have to do all the book work, including the invoices, that end of the month doesn't look good. It's just a pain in the butt to fire up Word or Excel or Numbers or whatever it is you use and print them and mail them and all that stuff and then you've got to keep an eye on them and as people, as accounts age and they get behind you've got to make the embarrassing phone call. FreshBooks solves all of this, first of all, it makes your invoices beautiful, professional, easy to send out and easy to pay which is really a big deal. In fact, on average, FreshBooks customers get paid 5 days faster because it turns out, your client doesn't mind paying you. It's as much of a pain in the butt for them to do the book work as you, so they just... if they see that pay me button right there on the invoice they go, okay. FreshBooks integrates with all your apps, Google Apps, PayPal, Stripe, Mailchip, Funbox, and Payroll. They've got an API too which means anybody can develop more apps, that's why they're... this is really a rich and growing ecosystem of FreshBooks users, FreshBooks customers. They accept all the top credit cards and if a client should be slow to pay, no matter. Because FreshBooks will automatically send out reminders and it just eliminates a difficult conversation.

Leo: FreshBooks scales with your business too, it's easy to add clients, to add projects, to add staffing. You'll spend less time on paperwork freeing an average of 2 days a month to focus on the work you love. And if you do time and hours, the FreshBooks apps make it easy to add that, to track your time and add it to the invoice. You can also snap photos of your receipts so you can do your expenses. It just, it's just such a lifesaver. An award winning team for supporting you, the best software. You're going to love it and you're going to try it free for 30 days right now when you go to FreshBooks.com/macbreak. FreshBooks.com/macbreak. If they do, I think there's a place on the form where they say how did you hear about us? Make sure you tell them MacBreak Weekly would you? FreshBooks.com/macbreak, we love them. Always very grateful to FreshBooks. Alright enough about the watch, we're all excited. Live coverage once again. Monday, the Apple stream begins at 10am Pacific, 1pm Eastern Time, 1700 UTC. We will be here shortly before that with me and Andy and I imagine there will be quite a few others on our team as we watch with interest to see what Apple announces. And then a very special MacBreak Weekly, one week from today. Rene and Serenity will be in studio with us and we'll be figuring out what it all means. They're not going to have them available there. You're not going to like, walk away with one. I want you to.

Rene: Some people were talking about that, because Apple... I've never gotten a pre-release review unit from Apple but it always seems like those are a week out? I don't know if Apple's ever given review units to anything a month out.

Leo: That would be cool.

Andy: That would be pretty long. They've done it before, where again there was a meeting on site in which you get stuff a couple weeks before there... sometimes have done stuff where you meet them in a neutral city, so to speak. So I think either people, some people are going to be leaving with early hardware or some people are going to be making trips to New York and/or San Francisco in the near future.

Leo: I was a very jolly boy this morning when my...

Andy: I'm telling you Rene, make sure you join whatever airlines frequent flier program just in case.

Leo: You'll be back. I would strongly suggest if you're in the public beta for Yosemite that you get over to your updates and see what you've got, I got up this morning, my Mac Pro said “Hey, 10.10.3” It's in beta, still, but the public beta and it includes photos! So Serenity wrote a nice article about this, including how to get it if you're not already in the public beta program and now we know a little bit more about photos. What's new, Rene, in Apple's photos? Which is basically replacing Aperture, as far as we can tell.

Rene: Yeah it's replacing iPhoto and Aperture. It's probably more towards... it's sort of like an iPhoto Plus. It doesn't have all the features that Aperture has and Apple's not pretending that it does, it might get extensibility, you know photo plug-ins at some point. There's none in it right now.

Leo: I played with it a little bit before I came in this morning. It felt very much like iPhoto.

Rene: Yeah it's based very similarly on the photos app for iOS, so much so that they're using UX Kit which is sort of like a bridging framework to actually develop it which is really interesting. But if you take the iOS version of photos that you are used to and you add more advanced, a few more advanced editing features and of course the scale and power of the Mac to it, then you'll have a pretty good idea what you can do with Photos.

Leo: When I launched it, it asked me do you want to import your iPhoto library, I said yes. It did that fairly quickly. I don't know. What happens, do you lose any data if you're using Aperture and it ports your Aperture data?

Rene: It will do both, it will import it and it's also very space conservative when it does it because it references the existing files. But once you've imported them, you can still go back and use iPhoto or Aperture but the changes you do to those will not be reflected in photos.app and vice-versa.

Leo: So it's not a common database any more.

Rene: No. It's brought in but then they remain two separate things. It's for people who want to play with it but don't want to commit to it yet.

Leo: That may change on release, we don't know. When will release be? Do we know?

Rene: The spring, yeah. They said the spring which sounds to me again like an April sort of thing. And they also advise that if you want, if you have multiple... you can have multiple libraries on photos, you can do the same sort of alt click, I think it's alt, and open it. But if you want to reconcile your libraries first, do that in Aperture before you move them over.

Leo: Okay. That's good to know. And your stacks, projects, and events will be converted to albums so you don't lose any organization.

Rene: Your ratings become keywords which will irk some people but it's a ratings free world in photos.

Leo: Oh that's interesting.

Rene: So like 1 star will actually be 1 star as a keyword in that photo.

Leo: Oh god that's really annoying. Okay. And then you have an option, at least in the beta, to turn on iCloud photo library.

Rene: Yes, also in beta.

Leo: Do you recommend that?

Rene: You have to go all in. My photo stream is not going anywhere, Apple said that my photo stream which is the one that does the 1,000 photos or 30 days is going to stay available so if you're used to using that you can. What photo library does is it gives you nearline capability, so if it's not your main photo library, any Macbook Air or other Mac you have or any iOS device can download optimized versions of the photos that you use most frequently or your favorites, and leave the rest in the cloud and then bring those to you on demand. That means that you won't have your entire device clogged up with photos anymore, so it has some advantages, it's much more stable than iCloud has been traditionally. It's based on Cloudkit which knows a very stable framework, but it is beta so... don't throw your main library in there yet.

Leo: Too late.

Rene: If you do it, do it everywhere because otherwise it won't sync.

Leo: Too late. So now I'm logging in, I haven't put, I don't have 10.3.3 on this laptop, and I don't have, obviously iPhotos, but I do have photos beta in my iCloud. Should I open it?

Rene: It will not blow up, nothing will happen.

Leo: Will I lose everything that I've worked on? Oh I see, it's repairing my library. And this will work the same on iOS?

Rene: Yep. And a lot of people are amazed because you really do have all your photos with you on every device. Of course, depending on how much iCloud storage you have. But if you throw a terabyte at it and put all your photos in there, they really are just on every device and every edit you make is non-destructive and synced between every device.

Leo: That's pretty awesome, actually.

Rene: Every favorite is the same. It is, I'm using it on everything and it's working terrifically well. I know some people have had a few issues with it here or there and Apple's following up with them but it's been great for me. I don't even worry about my photos, where they are, any more.

Leo: Well I don't worry about the butt photos anymore, because you delete them in one place it deletes them across the board, right? I hope.

Rene: Remember Leo, it puts them in a deleted photos album for 30 days so make sure you go into there...

Leo: Yeah, don't look in there.

Rene: Then delete them again.

Leo: Them delete them again.

Andy: Leo, can we get some clarification. Now, are you talking about photos taken by sitting down with your butt, or photos of your butt.

Leo: No no no! Who would take photos of their behind?

Rene: There's a selfie stick for that.

Andy: Well let's do a Google image search.

Leo: (laughing)

Alex: Yeah.

Andy: We might get some hits.

Leo: Oopsies. Apparently didn't delete them everywhere. Okay, so... good to know. Good to know. (laughs)

Rene: It hasn't been...

Leo: Jason close your eyes. Only Jason saw that.

Jason: It's too late.

Rene: iCloud photo library hasn't been as fast as syncing for me as photo stream was. It sometimes takes a little while for the sync to happen.

Leo: But you know, this is kind of cool. So now I'm working on the web in here, can I edit this?

Rene: I don't believe there's any editing tools available as of yet.

Leo: No I don't see, I see... I can make it bigger or smaller. I can hear it, I can download it. So if I had photos on here I could modify it. That's cool. Yeah, and I actually think I cropped this. But maybe I didn't. Maybe I didn't save the crop.

Rene: I'm not sure if it respects all, again though it's all very beta. I'm not sure the web viewer honors all the edits that you make.

Leo: How much is a terabyte, let's say, of storage?

Rene: I forget the price, I think it's $9.99 for half a terabyte and $19.99 for a terabyte but I would have to look at that.

Leo: A month.

Rene: Yeah.

Leo: Yeah.

Rene: Yeah the one thing is they're still not competitive at all with anyone else when it comes to... well I mean there's a few niche boutique players that target specific needs but if you're talking about the Dropboxes or the Google Drive or the Microsoft...

Leo: Do you think we'll ever have cloud editing? I mean, Google does. Aviary does it. Is there...

Rene: They have iWork. And the iWork stuff just went public. Anybody who wants to now, whether you have an Apple device or not, can get a gigabyte of storage and use iWork on the cloud for free. So I mean never say never.

Leo: Right. iWork doesn't have any photo editing yet, but what you're pointing out is that you could. An optimization does what? Does it reduce the resolution?

Rene: Yeah, so if you want to on your main Mac or if you have a lot of room, you can make sure that you keep the original version of a file, even if it's a raw photograph on the cloud and on the device. But if you want to maintain, if you want to keep storage minimums, storage requirements low, you can optimize it and that means that it will bring down a screen sized resolution version and keep the original on the cloud for you. And it will do more moving stuff around back and forth.

Leo: And I... Serenity checked and when you do delete a photo locally it says delete from all devices, this photo will delete from all your devices. There's no way to delete it just locally.

Rene: We're still following up on that, they want to... they very much want to manage it for you, so when you have something, like when you have a near line system and it's a word that you use in databases a lot, but it's not... consumer driven for us, and Apple did this with iTunes Match as well. They basically are going to determine the photos you access the most, the ones you favorite, and the ones you do more recently and put those on your phone and leave the other ones in the cloud and they don't want you messing with that sort of algorithm by arbitrarily deleting things that they're trying to download or upload in the background. It's like a fusion drive, they're trying to manage all that for you. It's almost like saying I want to delete this from the SSD but not the HDD in my fusion drive. To them it's one logical volume.

Leo: Got it. Photo stream has not gone away. Or is this going to replace it?

Rene: Maybe eventually but Apple said they're going to keep my photo stream around for a long time to come.

Leo: Oh, alright. And that family sharing, the photo sharing is nice. That feature will continue, then, as well?

Rene: Yeah.

Leo: Yeah I like that. And then, I highly recommend iMore.com because Serenity's got a review of all the editing tools and some great pictures of her roller derby career.

Rene: She's doing a call every Tuesday she's doing another aspect of the photography.

Leo: Good timing, I like Tuesday. Yeah. And you can still print books and calendars, not in iOS but you can do it in the desktop app.

Rene: Yep. The photos the photos.app for Mac. And they have a whole bunch of new things, including squares that are like the Instagram generation of photos.

Leo: Square prints, that's kind of cool.

Rene: Yeah. And they have a new feature that's really cool, it will just automatically, you just set a size and it will automatically fit all photos to that size on one of the edges.

Leo: Oh neat. That's neat.

Alex: Anyone who hasn't printed books, and I've done a couple of them.

Leo: Oh they are good.

Alex: They are big family, you know... they give you a lot of credit for those. And it's so easy.

Leo: Apple contracts with somebody to do this, but they're really good.

Alex: It's so easy to throw one together,  you know I've done ones for birth, when my kids were born, I've done ones for vacation. You just take a bunch of photos and you... I mean literally, I'd be in the evening I'd throw them a couple more pages together while I'm on vacation, it's what I do, and then you're done and you send it out before you get on the plane and by the time you get home, like a day or two later there's the book.

Leo: It's so great, isn't it? I love it. And I have tried other services that print book and the quality varies widely. So...

Alex: And it's more clunky. I have to say that there's just none that are as easy and I've tried a bunch of them, because I wanted to test them and haven't found one as smooth and easy. But if you haven't done it, and you do a lot of stuff in iPhoto I would definitely suggest printing a little one and you'll get kind of addicted.

Leo: Yeah. And the prints are just the quality is just superb. I used to know who they used for their... I don't know who they use now, but I used to know.

Alex: And I haven't done any prints at all, just books. I don't know how the prints turn out.

Leo:  It's the same.  The book is just bound prints.

Alex:  I sent some to my mom and she wasn't happy.  She's like, it's not a real photo until it's printed and so on. 

Leo:  Yeah.  We tried some, I think Lisa had a coupon for some...I can't remember the name of it.  For some other photo book printing service.  It was very disappointing.  It felt like it was all low-res images and stuff.  Use the Apple stuff if you've got it.

Andy:  It would be great if there was some sort of service that would say we will give you the first one way below cost because the thing that made me timid about that stuff is that the minimum is something 28, 30 dollars for a hardcover book, and so many times I'll get prints back and if I spent 1.80 for a print it's like that's not as intensive as it was on my monitor.  I just spent 35 dollars on something that I have to chuck in the trash now. 

Leo:  You know what we've been doing is metal prints.  Really, they're not printed on metal I don't think.  Maybe they are.  They're great.  They're just metal.

Andy:  The glass ones are nice too.

Leo:  The glass—how are they doing that?  Are they printing out a film and putting it on the glass?  I really like them.  It's fun. 

Rene:  People are used to seeing stuff on glass now, so it's a juxtaposition between the real world and the virtual world.

Leo:  Metallic prints look great.  When we have a special photo, we'll print it on metal, that way after the zombie apocalypse, something will live on. 

Rene:  You could use it as a weapon in the zombie apocalypse.  You could cut a zombie with that.

Andy:  Then crack addicts are going to break into your house to steal your pictures. 

Leo:  That's the mad max universe.  That's a different Universe.  Zombie mad max!

Alex:  When you hear them pulling this siding off the walls, then you know it's time to hide the photos. 

Leo:  Our show today brought to you by Gazelle.  If you're getting ready to get money together so you can buy yourself that nice edition watch, or maybe you see a phone you'd like or a tablet.  It's time to go to gazelle.com.  They're the folks who give you top dollar for your existing phone so you can buy a new one.  They even buy broken iPhones and iPads.  They'll also buy Samsung.  They'll buy blackberries.  They'll buy Surface Tablets, Google Tablets.  Pretty broad range of things.  Go to gazelle.com.  There's no obligation, so it's easy to find out what your stuff is worth.  In fact it's guaranteed at that price for 30 days, so you can take your time deciding.  Waiting until an Apple Watch comes out.  How long before they buy Apple Watches on the Gazelle site, I wonder?  Probably pretty quickly.  The neat thing is not only can you trade in your old stuff and get top dollar, by the way they turn around fast.  They pay the shipping.  If you forget to wipe your data or you can't because it's broken they'll do that for you, don't worry.  You can get PayPal credit, which is almost instant.  You can get check mailed to you, but the best thing to do is to get the Amazon Gift cards, because they bump those up by 5%.  After you sell all your stuff, time to buy the new stuff, Gazelle now sells the best.  The cream of the crop on the trade ins with their certified pre-owned products.  There's two categories.  Certified like new, which is new.  Somebody got something, they never used it or whatever.  Then there's certified good.  Maybe some gentle signs of wear, but you get an even better savings on those.  One thing I know, all the devices are put through a rigorous 30-point inspection.  They're working fully, they're doing great.  You have a 30-day risk-free return policy.  There's no risk involved.  If you lose a device, you don't want to go out again and buy it for full retail.  Go to Gazelle.  Gazelle.com.  They buy, they sell.  They're called Gazelle.  What's your iPhone worth?  Go to gazelle.com.  We thank them for their support.  MacBreak Weekly, Andy Inatko from the Times, the Pixel Core.  All the way from Rwanda.  Thanks for doing that.  What time is it in Rwanda Alex Lindsay?

Alex:  It's 10:30.  Not bad.

Leo:  At night? 

Alex:  It's not that bad.  These are brand new in Rwanda, by the way.  These are the little 4G modems.  It's 50 megs down and 20 megs up.

Leo:  You look really good.  What are you on?  Are you on a landline?

Alex:  I'm on a hard line.  The school has a pretty good connection.

Leo:  As always, you look fabulous.  It's like Johnny Appleseed for bandwidth.  Wherever Alex goes bandwidth improves.

Alex:  It's a requirement if it's around MacBreak that I Have to know where the good bandwidth is on Tuesday.  When I was in Rome a couple of weeks ago, I made them install an Ethernet jack into the hotel room.

Leo:  OMG. 

Alex:  On the website it says hardline and there's no hardline here.  Some guy came and put it in.  It's not by accident.  I pick carefully. 

Leo:  Apple Pay fraud?  One wouldn't think it's possible.  Experts say it's a haven for rampant credit card fraud.  This is the Register writing.

Rene:  I spent most of yesterday trying to—

Leo:  Track that story down?  Is it true?

Rene:  It was not just The Register.  Recolored does a story about that.  The Guardian, Wall Street Journal just put their version live.  So basically what's happening is there's a standard social engineering attack that people use on banks.  It's either identity theft or they get fraudulent cards approved and then they go on buying sprees.  The difference now is that they're taking those cards and adding it to Apple pay and then going on their buying spree.  Apple Pay is—

Leo:  It's not Apple Pay's fault.

Rene:  No.  Apple Pay is so secure the only way you can attack it currently that we know of is to trick a bank into authorizing you.  The problem is that Apple will send the device ID, they'll ask for the numbers on your credit card, your telephone number, your last few transactions and other information from your account in an encrypted way to the bank that already has that information.  But they want you to be able to compare the device information.  What the people are saying basically, with what they already have.  The bank can check that and they can choose to immediately approve it, demand a call, demand a visit.  They have all sorts of things, and some banks just chose not to do anything with it, so they were subject to again the same kind of fraud attacks that they have with everything else, but Apple Pay makes for a better headline.

Leo:  So this is really BS.  In fact, at the end of the article, they point out that every other mobile payment system, including Currency and Samsung's Loot Pay will have exactly the same potential risks.  The Apple Pay that's been cracked, it's the bank's authentication process which sucks.

Rene:  They're not using the resources available to them.  The same way they don't do it if you fill in a form and you send it to them and they send you a card without checking it. 

Leo:  You're no more liable than you would be for anything for a credit card either.  I mean, it's the same thing.  If the bank has bad—lacks security, it doesn't make you more liable because it's Apple Pay.

Rene:  There was a suggestion that you could buy more things because retailers trust Apple Pay more, but the retailers can escalate the same way they can with any purchase.  If it's out of pattern, they can require a phone call, they can require a check, a physical card check.  They do that already.  They have to make sure they follow those practices.

Leo:  So it really comes from this one guy.  Charion Abraham:  a mobile payment specialist, who says fraud enabled by Apple Pay is rampant. 

Rene:  The banks were shocked according to one article that this was possible.

Alex:  Because they've never seen anything like that before.  Fraud, and this specific kind of fraud. 

Leo:  Criminal gangs are handing Smartphones to low ranking members to use them to commit fraud, particularly at Apple stores, so it could be that crooks are buying high-end iPhones.  It could be.  I'll just make something up.  Crooks are buying high-end iPhones with imbedded payment features in order to further the fraud.

Rene:  The thing that irks me about this is Apple published all the stuff they do at Apple Pay to make it secure.  It doesn't look like any of the articles did the basic research of looking at the website before publishing, and it scares people.

Leo:  Yeah.  They're all pointing out that Apple Pay has not been cracked.  It's not a flaw in Apple Pay.  You might be able to dazzle the clerk—wait until you have an edition watch, you can buy anything.  Just pass that over your silly terminal. 

Andy:  Also, NFC transactions have been around a couple years.  This is a battle hard in technology.  They all use pretty much the same system; even Samsung's new Samsung pay system uses the same system.  You get a burner credit card number every time you use it.  That's not the weak point of this whole thing.  As usual, the weakest point in any financial services thing is the dope at the end of the customer service line.  Of course we'll send you a new—I'm sorry, I'm sorry.  Will tomorrow be fast enough to activate your new account?

Leo:  Again, you're not liable.  The bank is liable, particularly for that dopey—I'm trying to find the 18 pages, maybe they didn't put it online.  The 18 pages of beauty shots of the Apple Watch in vogue.

Rene:  There's a few.

Leo:  Just a few.  I guess I'll have to buy a Vogue.  Isn't it interesting that all this stuff is in Vogue? 

Rene: Self Magazine, so you get a sporty context. 

Leo:  Where they know they're marketing.

Rene:  It shows that one of the interesting things about the watch to me, and not to digress to that topic, is that there's multiple ways.  You have the sport version, there are a lot of people who love athletic watches and they get lots of different things so they're appealing to that, and some people like high-end watches, and some people just want notifications, and some people want authentications.  There's a lot of ways you could appeal to different people.

Leo:  Apple passes Samsung in Q4 Smartphone sales.  This is some good news.  Boy, this is mind-boggling.  This is global, by the way.  1.9 billion mobile phones were sold in Q4, overall in 2014.  OK.  That's a little better.  Not in a quarter, but in all 12 months.  So that's pretty impressive. 

Andy:  That's a crazy number.  Almost 1/3 people in the world bought a phone.

Leo:  Most are not high-end expensive phones, so those are the inexpensive phones.  Microsoft has been focusing on those with its window's phone market.  You mentioned, Rene, the second generation Moto E, which is $159.  Unsubsidized, and it's pretty much everything the Moto X was.  Not everything.

Andy:  the Moto G and the Moto E are great in that they remind us that premium Smartphones are premium Smartphones.  You can get by just fine with a Moto G and not miss much of what you could get with a better phone. 

Leo:  I would be comfortable with an E, especially if it's your first phone or a kid or you don't have a lot of money.  The E gets you a lot.

Andy:  Once you stop simply being able, "well I have an account with Verizon or an account with AT&T I simply get a new phone every two years" once you start shopping around, you'll be shocked at how much money you're spending that you don't have to be spending.  If you go on T mobile or some other different plan that are aggressively trying to get people to break out of ten-year-old service habits, not contracts but service habits and get new customers. 

Leo:  In the 4th calendar quarter, the Holiday buying quarter, globally, 367.5 million devices were sold.  Of those, as we know, Apple sold 75 million.  Samsung only 73 million. 

Andy:  I'm sorry.  It's possible that that's an aberration, because there is so much pent up consumer expectation for a larger screen iPhone.  It will be interesting to see how the iPhone 7 sells, assuming they're making one. 

Leo: Market share, phones sold up to that point, including that quarter, Samsung still has a wide lead.  25% to Apple's 17.8%.  Lenovo is 5.8%.  WallWay which is sold mostly in China, 5.7%.  Others, the biggest category, 39.3%.  There are lots of other people in this business, even though we don't see them.

Rene:  Market share is just measuring card.  I remember when Pom priced the central to sell, and every one of those cost them money, and it was almost debilitating when they sold a large number.  Apple makes such good profits that even if they don't have a market share advantage they have a huge profit share advantage and they might count customer satisfaction or web usage or some other metric just as highly.

Leo:  I apologize.  I was reading Ford 2013 Market Share, completely reversed now.  That was a year ago. This year, Apple is 20% of the Market.  Samsung 19% of the market.  1/2 a percent dividing the two. 

Andy:  For this quarter. 

Leo:  For the quarter,  I don't know if that's units sold... or maybe it is.  Yeah, it's units sold.

Rene:  It's hard, because not everyone declares units the same way.  Some are selling, some are sell through.  It's really a mess.

Andy:  It's more impressive when you realize that the Android phone market isn't one market the way that the iPhone market is.  It's really 3, 4, or 5.  There are people who are buying Android 2.3, practically disposable phones.  There are people who are buying the iPhone like really impressive Smartphones.  It's hard to break it down into Market Share that way.  Anyway you slice it, it's hard to find a way to look at Apple's sales of iPhones and not say nope.  That's the way that I want it to be.

Leo:  For the whole year of 2014, Samsung sold 307 million units.  Apple sold 191 million iPhones in one year.  Wow.  Lenovo 81 million.  LG 57 million.  Still, the little guys sold far more. 

Jason:  That right there illustrates what a bad year it was for Samsung, right?  30% Market Share 2013.

Leo:  24 a year later.

Jason:  24 a year later, and all that went into the other category, which you know?

Leo:  That's a good point.  Jason Howell makes a good point.  Others did well.  You know, it's the low end market that's really beefing up. 

Alex:  It will be interesting to see—

Leo:  What is that?  The YEP phone or whatever?  They're very small phone companies all over the world.  If you talk about Operating System in 2014, 1 billion Android devices were sold.  Of course 190 million iOS devices.  35 million Windows phones.  7.9 million blackberries in 2014. 

Andy:  The more interesting thing to me is to look at how many units sold across all platforms and across all sellers.  Basically, 244—look at the number on the left and the number on the right.  A lot of people came into this Market place at the same time.  It's impressive that Samsung did not pick up any of those people.  It's not that the percentage went down, if you look at the number of how many they sold, lots of new people came into the market, and Samsung got none of them.

Leo:  They went from 300 million to 307 million.  Boy, a lot of phones sold.  1.24 billion phones sold in 2014. Unbelievable.

Andy:  It's hard to wrap your head around the idea of 1.2 billion being any factor of something sold that isn't a cheap cheeseburger or a can of coke.

Leo:  It's a good business.  Nice work if you can get it.  Enterprise share.

Andy:  I made the wrong choice by choosing to manufacture words and ideas instead of—

Leo:  It's hard to charge for words and ideas, that's the problem.  In Enterprise, iOS 73% Enterprise share in Q4 Android dropping to 25%, Windows phone at 1%.  That's interesting, isn't it?  That's global.  73% of global devices activations in Enterprise in Q4 were iOS.  Isn't that interesting?  Is that the IBM deal?  It's why there's an IBM deal, yeah. 

Alex:  I think it's interesting, because when this started, there was a real question about if Apple was going to be able to get into the enterprise.  People weren't sure if this was going to be a successful market for them.  They have obviously turned this around to the point where Blackberry is in the other category. 

Leo:  Historically, Apple has not done well in Enterprise.  BYOD changed everything.

Rene:  IT buyers are no longer the ones responsible for the decision. 

Leo:  Right. When the end-users get to choose, they choose IOS. 

Rene:  That's Ben Thompson's famous thing about buying form experience.

Leo:  Yeah.  I had somebody in the studio the other day.  He had a Blackberry bold, as well as a more recent Samsung.  I said what are you doing with the bold?  He said work gave it to me.  Work phone.

Rene:  When I flew out there last time I was in the plane, and all the seats around me were taken over by a company that was flying out for a meeting, and all of them had Lenovo laptops running with Windows 7 and Blackberry Zed 30's.  They all also had iPhones, which was a really odd combination.

Leo:  Apple launching the new ad campaign saying our camera phone is the best.  Shot on iPhone 6.  You want to see the pictures?  They are gorgeous, and hard to believe they're captured with a phone. 

Rene:  A lot of those are really amazing photographers. 

Leo:  That is gorgeous.  That was with Visco cam. 

Andy:  I always thought that the real strength of iPhone 6 as a camera platform was necessarily the image but everything around it.  How fast you could launch the App, how fast it takes pictures, the way that it puts features into the camera app that are actually meaningful.  These aren't as impressive, you can basically give any professional photographer—I'm sure you could give them a moto G and say we need some great demo photos.  They'll go great.  I'll go at twilight when there isn't a lot of difference between light and dark, I'll go to this beautiful place I know where there's a lot of sub level detail.  It's the experience of holding in your hand.  My thoughts really about the iPhone 6 compared to the iPhone 5 is that this is the first camera that feels like using a camera.  It got past the point where it's taking pictures that are in many cases as good as a camera.  This is the one where I get to the same picture taking mindset as I do with any conventional camera that I use.

Leo:  That is a big difference.  Instead of saying I'm going to take a snapshot, this is an instamatic, this is probably part of the reason for this campaign, you could say hey, I know this is a good camera, so I'm going to pay more attention and I'm going to do it right. 

Andy:  You can have high expectations of the work you can get out of it.  Did they mention if all of this is JPeg stuff out of the camera, or is there post-production processing.

Leo:  In many cases there is.  The black and white images, obviously.  This is snapseed.

Rene:  It's on the phone though.  As far as I know, everything was—

Leo:  They're being very upfront.  This is all in camera. 

Rene:  They tell you the app and the accessories.

Leo:  Yeah.  So that's nice.

Andy:  I don't think it's deceptive.  I'm on my Android phones I started doing things, well what if I just shot HDR all the time?  Every single picture comes out much better than it used to be.  It really is all about old adage about cameras, it's not the camera itself; it's how to use it properly. 

Leo:  Yeah.  A picture like this, it's gorgeous, but that's a pro.  You can tell.  These are pros.

Andy:  That's MGM the biggest sound stage.  Do we have anything from Brigadoon still in storage?

Leo:  In fact, I'm guessing a lot of these are amateurs, because the photo credits in no case include their last name.

Rene:  They scoured the social—Instagram.

Leo:  Amazing.  It's a little deceptive, because they're printed so beautifully at such a large size.  That makes it look good too. 

Andy:  They're showing it off as best they can.  I think that sometimes this can do more harm than good.  I'll tell you why.  I just got a new Olympus OMDEM5 that was just released, and I'm trying to figure out how to take test photos with it, because any photos that I take with this camera are not going to tell the story.  I've been using the older brother of this for an entire year, and I know how this camera works.  I don't take snapshots.  I spend too much time trying to compose something and keep the lighting right.  I feel as though I'll be convincing—you see a gallery like this, you might take pictures the way that you take pictures, and then wonder why is my sky all blown out and how come mine isn't as sharp as that and how come my colors aren't as good?  The iPhone 6 is the best in class camera you can get when you talk about the entire system.

Leo:  Although we're starting to see comparisons between the iPhone 6 and the Note 4 camera and blind taste.  It's getting more complicated.

Andy:  Now that we're getting 16 mega pixel cameras as the norm in a lot of Android phones, some of the advantages of Apple's post processing is being blunted a little bit by virtue of the fact that this camera is collecting a lot more information than the iPhone camera is, despite the fact that the iPhone camera is doing a better job of post processing.  It's going to be interesting next year, I think.  If there's one thing I would love to see in the next iPhone camera, it really is 12 mega pixels. 

Leo:  They're starting to fall behind, aren't they?  Not that it matters to me. 

Andy:  They wisely decided not to play the more megapixels game.  The fact of the matter is that if you get, I would much rather have a 16 mega pixel image that's not quite as good as an 8 mega pixel image because I can crop down a 16 better than I can with an 8.

Rene:  I still would like to see better low-light performance.  I think that low light has gotten a lot better in the last iteration.  I think they could still keep going that direction.  I think the average person, the number one thing they have trouble with is inside taking pictures of their kids or their family and being grainy or blurry or whatever.

Leo:  These are all taken in daylight outdoors. 

Andy:  If they had one button that simply said Hi.  I'm taking pictures of my hyper active kid, do what you have to do, I think that would lead to better photography.  Throw detail out the window, throw exposure out the window, just freeze my little kid. 

Leo:  Yeah.  Still, this is such a great display.  Apple.com/iphone/world/gallery.  These are gorgeous images. 

Andy:  Curetted, too.  It's a nice selection of photos.

Leo:  Nicely done.  Remember, though, Samsung at their event made a very big point of comparing shots with the Galaxy S6 with the iPhone 6. I think you really nailed it, Andy. It's deceptive, because you can be very aware of the camera's capabilities. 

Andy:  I don't want to say deceptive, because that announces intent.  I'm saying I don't want people to get discouraged when they take pictures with their phone and they don't get pictures as good as the one out of every 1000 that the curator in this collection picked out because they were so impressive.  Even I myself gets so discouraged.  Why are my shots not as sharp as the ones I'm seeing?  Why is the color in my shots not as good?  And then you talk to the people that take those pictures and they tell you how they got the shot that way and you realize, OH.  It's actual experience and knowledge and practice that helps you out. 

Leo:  So many of these are straight from the camera.  That's cool.  Who's a good dog?  You can't resist it, can you Andy?

Alex: One of the things that's been interesting about this is from the time we went from film, in some ways I always felt like being a film photographer what made you professional was being able to afford to buy all that film, to get the number of iterations.  A photographer would always tell you if they got 1 or 2 great images out of one roll of film, they're quite happy with that.  So when we moved to digital and got to a point where we could buy digital cameras that would let us take lots of photos, it's not just that we could take lots of photos, but we could iterate very quickly.  We could see what we did at that moment.  I think that this is the next step and one of the reasons we're going to continue to see better pictures from these phones is it's what we're carrying every day.  We're taking pictures all the time and it's just, as you keep on looking at it, with a little bit of critical eye and some review, a lot of people become very good photographers, and I think this is a good representation of that. 

Leo:  It's quite amazing, isn't it?  I remember very well people saying I'll never shoot digital because it doesn't carry the same quality and resolution as film.  Now we're at the point:  these are camera phone pictures that absolutely rival film pictures in every respect. 

Andy:  You make fun of people taking selfies, you make fun of people using cameras in places where they should be looking at this wonderful vista or whatever.  Judging people for it.  I would never—what a beautiful thing that people are taking pictures as they go and creating art and creating something as an incidental thing.  Not because they're putting on their pith helmet and their tripod and their 8,000 dollar because hey that looks cool.  I think I'll get a picture of it.  That is just awesome. 

Leo:  Who hasn't had that experience of taking a picture and looking at that iPhone and going, "wow.  I got a great one."

Alex:  One of the things that I love is my photo stream is on my TV at home.  It shows up on my TV, and I find it fascinating to come home and you forget all these different photos that pop up from the past.  It's a lot of fun.

Leo:  We're going to take a break.  Your pics, gentlemen, coming up.  Our show to you today brought to you by our buddies at SquareSpace.  Now that you have all those gorgeous pictures, why don't you put it up on a SquareSpace site?  Make a portfolio.  Start your career.  Lots of photographers choose SquareSpace.  It's a great place, hosting and software where you create your professional website, your online store, elegant interface.  Beautiful templates.  Incredible 24/7 customer support right from the SquareSpace offices.  If you are a photographer, you're really going to appreciate the SquareSpace portfolio iPad app, which will take images from your SquareSpace site and display them for your clients in a way that they can approve them in a very convenient and easy way.  That's a nice feature.  SquareSpace does a lot of great apps. That's the portfolio App right there, for iPad or iPhone.  It's so easy to use.  There's something about—especially if you're somebody with an aesthetic site, having tools to create a site that reflects you and your sense.  It's not cookie cutter.  Every SquareSpace site is unique.  You start with those great 25 or 30 beautiful templates but then you easily make it your own.  Make it reflect your taste, your point of view.  You can also, of course, all the media and social networks and stuff like that.  All of this for $8 a month.  I was really pleased when my daughter Abby wanted to start a public service site with a good friend and I gave them a list of sites.  I figured they're going to do this for free.  I only gave them free sites, and they ended up using SquareSpace, and I said that's not free, and they said, yeah, but it's so much better.  We have so much control, and we feel like the privacy features, the collaboration features were so great.  I was so gratified, because I didn't even mention it to them.  I said I'm proud of you.  You chose the right hosting service.  e-commerce 2, by the way.  They can take donations.  Every website comes with a free-online store or a place where you can take donations with cover pages.  This is a new feature in SquareSpace 7, you can set up a beautiful online presence in a minute.  That can be part of your site or a separate thing.  Perfect for creating quick pages, not just for your brand, but maybe if you got a new product or a new service you'd like to promote.  Here's the deal, you can try it free right now.  Go to squarespace.com, click the get started button, and you're done.  You don't need a credit card or anything.  You don't need our offer code.  You've got the run of the place for 2 weeks.  You can even import some content from your old site to see what it looks like to see what it looks like in the spiffy new Squarespace site.  When you do decide to sign up, I invite you—I don’t think Abby used this, to use the offer code: MACBREAK, and you'll get 10% off your first purchase.  SquareSpace.  It really is amazing.  SquareSpace.com, we thank them for their support of MacBreak weekly.  Make sure you use the offer code MacBreak to get 10% your new SquareSpace site.  Pics of the week, Time.  Let's start with Rwanda. 

Alex:  I had a request on Twitter for what I used on Times Lapse.  The app that I've been using the most for Time Lapse photos is Lapsit.  Have you seen Lapsit?

Leo:  I've been using Hyper Lapse all the time so I haven't looked for anything better.

Alex:  Hyper Lapse is great when you're taking a video and compressing it.  I don't know if I would use it to sit.  I use Hyper Lapse a lot, I will say that.  I like the settings in Lapse It.  It's a really easy one where you can quickly set up a settings of exactly—

Leo:  This is more for slowing it down than speeding it up?

Alex:  It will speed it up.

Leo:  I see.  You're watching a flower bloom or something like that.  Yeah.

Alex:  I've used it for a bunch of time lapses.  It's a great one.  I hook it up to a tripod and throw it on a tripod and then I go and—the Time Lapse is good.  I use Time Lapse mostly as a quick and easy I'm going to capture something in video and I'm going to hold it really still and I'm going to turn into something magical.  This one gives me a lot more control than that would.  Anyway, Lapsit, you have different way of encoding it, and how many frames per second.  What the frame intervals are.  Instead of saying 6x faster, you're able to set that up.  Anyway—

Leo:  It's free with a 1.99 pro version.  What do you get if you spend a little more money?

Alex:  I don't remember.

Leo:  You immediately bought it, right?  I do that too. 

Alex:  You end up with two apps otherwise.  You buy the basic one and you're like I just want the pro version.  It's some little thing, but I had the price of a pro version.  It's the price of a coffee.  Not even a cappuccino.  Price of a coffee for the "pro version."  Half a coffee, so that's the best one.  The one I've been most happy with.  I use both of those a lot, but this is the one where I'm going to set it up on a tripod and capture whatever I'm going to capture for the next hour or two.  This has been a great solution. 

Leo: Lapsit.com.  They have an Android version too.  That's nice.  Rene Ritchie, what do you got for us?

Rene:  I've got a couple of things.  I'm pretty sure I didn't pick this previously, it came out a couple weeks ago, but it's the new version of calc bots from tab bots, which was introduced February 19.  It was an older app that gave it a complete makeover.  It now has iOS 8 style design and functionality.  It's clean, it's nice.  There's a single in-app purchase to give you conversion features which used to be in a separate app called Conversion bot, and tab bot has done a makeover and they're only going to be focusing on a couple apps going forward because they're really small team there.  Two iOS developers, one Mac Developer, but they're doing great work.

Leo:  Tell me they're not giving up on Tweet Bot. 

Rene:  Tweet Bot is getting a lot of their attention.  They announced Tweet Bot 4, which is going to be iPhone, iPad, and Universal.  I don't know if they've made that clear or not yet.

Leo:  It's gutsy of them because Twitter just doesn't like the eco system, the third party eco system. 

Rene:  It's so confusing.  It's hard to tell.  They were staunchly for it at the beginning, then they were staunchly against it.  It was sort of like when you send your significant other to college and they leave you for a hotter looking significant other after they graduate.

Leo:  Has that happened to you?  It sounds like a pain point there.

Rene:  No.  But that's essentially the iconographic with Twitter and Tweet Bot, all helped build up Twitter, and then they decided they wanted to appeal to celebrities and the mainstream and they did all they could to kill the brands.

Leo:  And monetize, really. 

Rene:  Absolutely.  The second app I wanted to bring up is there's a new version of Esper, which is John Gruber, and Frank Simmons app.  Full disclosure, they're all friends of mine.  They make a note-taking thought collection app for the iPhone.  It just went universal as well, so now it's iPhone and iPad, which means you can sync now between iPhone and iPad.  The nice thing about this, depending on your point of view, is they raised their price.  They tried going down.  They were initially $5, then they went down to $3, now they've gone back to $9, but it's on sale for $7 or $8 right now.  The big advantage is they decided they can't sustain this app at low prices. Frank recently took a job at Omni because he wasn't making enough off Esper to make it his full time job and they would rather make a sustainable App or not make an App at all.  I have no problem spending 5 or 10 dollars.  Omni Group is a great example of developers that price their Apps for sustainability for an App that I use every day all day for weeks and months and years on end.  Their big hope out of this, I saw an interview with John Gruber on Jason Snell's site where he was hoping other developers could do more of this.  So far, all the feedback I've seen is that they sell less copies but they make more money and their overhead for everything else is lower when they do this.  It's going to come to a point where we have to pay not just for the apps that we have but for the apps that we want and for the developers that we enjoy to keep making these apps, because there really are not a lot of alternatives.  There are a lot of free alternatives, but if you want apps from these kinds of people, you've got to pay for these apps.  I'm hoping that there are going to be other developers who say, this is what it costs to make this app, this is what we're charging, and like everyone joined in the race to the bottom, we hope you join the race to sustainability.

Leo:  I agree with you.  8 bucks is nothing. 

Andy:  I concur.  I was thinking about OverCast, where one of my many comments about positive was that I'm glad that SmartCo is charging real money for this as opposed to get the whole thing for 99 cents, because I feel very positive when I feel like I'm helping this person continue to do what they love doing, which is to continue to make this app.  I don't want them to feel as though that was 2 years of my live and I made a pile of 6000 dollars from it, which is good enough for me to cover the moving expenses of the job I'm going to have to take on the other coast because I can't make a living off of app development. 

Alex:  Selfishly, I want apps to cost a little bit more.  Not a lot more, but a reasonable amount of money, because I want to know that they're going to be around.  I want to know that's a good business and they've got money to develop and they can hire other programmers to make it better.  When it's free and I don't understand how they're going to make money with it, or 99 cents.  It worries me that the App isn't going to be successful long-term, and I'll get a whole bunch of data into it and it's going to be gone.  Or never updated.  What was it?  The one that we still miss.  It's not Glimpse, it's never mind.

Leo:  See how quickly you forget?

Alex:  It's gone.  But it was free.  We were excited about it, we used it every day.  It became part of our system and then one day they turned off the switch. 

Rene:  They get sold and the company that buys them turns them off. 

Leo:  Andy Ihnatko, you're pick of the week?

Andy:  Two picks, hopefully two quick ones.  This happened to arrive today.  It is at long last the Band Wagon, just released on BluRay today.  I pre-ordered this in December as soon as I found out it was available, because it is definitely my favorite musical ever and it is definitely one of my top ten or fifteen movies ever.  I got my mail at 10:15, I thought do I have enough time to rip this before the show, because I can't use the CDU   other than streaming video, and it finished ten minutes before and I spent ten minutes watching the file in single stepping through the dance.  Good heavens, it's such a beautiful movie.

Leo:  Book by George S. Kaufman, which makes it a great musical. 

Andy:  Actually, it's Benny Compton and Adolph Green.  It's a classic.  Minnelli, Arthur Fried production.  I don't think that there's ever been a better movie made.  It's exceptional. 

Leo:  Oscar is so funny in it.  I just love him in this movie.

Andy: Neurotic pill popping. 

Leo: And this is the one with Got a shot on my shoes. 

Andy:  I don't want to replay the entire movie for everybody but I love it so much.

Leo:  And the Girl hunt ballet, who could forget that?

Andy:  I keep watching that and trying to make logical sense of that.  I think it's like Birdman where you're not supposed to work out what happened.

Leo:  Just enjoy it.  Sit back and enjoy it.

Andy:  The dance between Fred Astaire and Cid Charise in Central Park—not just is it a beautiful dance, but what it represents and the role that it plays in the story, I don't think there has ever been a single better musical dance number in any movie ever.

Leo:  Is that dancing in the dark? 

Andy:  Exactly.  I was single stepping through it. Even when you're playing it at 1.20 speed, it's still gorgeous and you still have no idea how these two people manage to do something that beautiful.

Leo:  It's a good BluRay to get.

Andy:  It's good.  I wish that it were remastered BluRay.  It went to the original camera inter-negative; I think it's better than it was before.  This is the first time I've seen The Band Wagon and recognized oh.  Fred Astaire is wearing reddish hair. 

Leo: It really is the Birdman of 1953.  I think you should —it has some similarities.

Andy:  And shot in one continuous shot.

Leo: It's amazing how they did that.

Andy:  Minnelli said you want to do one more for safety?  They all said, look.  We've been dancing for 2.5 hours.  It's good enough.  There's such thing as over-thinking this.  My iOS pick is this really cool alphabet for toddlers called Metamorphabet.  It is just a multi touch alphabet book in which they go from letter to letter where they touch and interact with it.  Letter C, it turns into something related to the letter C, you get to see it in 3D.  Cone, it says cone.  t turns into, it keeps morphing into things.  Cone becomes a car.  And a caterpillar is driving the car.  You can play with the car.  It's supposed to appeal to kids that are pre-verbal and tactile, but it's like, the caterpillar is driving the car.  I wonder what it becomes next.

Alex:  My question is how many people stare at you when you're at the train station pushing around little cars?  When they do laugh at you, you just look at them and go C. 

Andy:  You almost want to keep a copy so if you get stuck behind a crying kid on an airplane, let them borrow your iPad, at least the noises are OS approved.  Door.  Dawn.  Make the sun bounce up and down.  Oh look.  See we're all mesmerized by this?  It really does plug into our—

Alex:  I bet this is really popular at colleges where there's a lot of acid being passed around. 

Andy:  around 4:20 PM, am I right?

Alex:  Oh dude. That is deep.

Andy:  Tablet apps.

Leo:  For those of you who haven't seen The Band Wagon, I have a little clip of that famous Fred Astaire, Cid Cherise moment with their dancing in Central Park.  It's so beautiful.  That's actually Gilda Radner and Steve Martin from the 80's.  This just came in from 9 to 5 Mac.  A leak of Apple's Apple Watch retail pitch.  We've got a minute.  Security Now starts at 1:30 in fifteen minutes.  If you want, we could run through it.  Many customers have already decided that they want an Apple Watch with the right questions and the Apple service, you can make a great Apple Watch recommendation that suits both personal style and life style.  What does your customer already know?  Listen for cues that reveal what they care about.  Then highlight the ways the Apple Watch will add value to their life.  What interests you most about Apple watch you might ask.  How do you see yourself using the Apple Watch?  Tell me about who this is for?  Is this for yourself or someone else?  Is there a special occasion?  Ask them if their iPhone is compatible.  If not, position the benefits of upgrading to one that is  Why not?  Discover what they love about their iPhone now that highlights how the Apple Watch would enhance the experience.  I don't know where Mark German got these, but as we know they're training people now.  What's their personal style?  Are you looking for a watch that's more casual or formal?  Would you like additional bands to suit different occasions?  Do you prefer metal or leather bands?  I like metal bands myself. 

Rene:  ACDC.

Leo:  ACDC, you bet.  Anyway.  It's all on 9 to 5 Mac, if you want to read it.  We'll find out soon enough.  We'll be back in five minutes.  We'll be back next week as well for special coverage of the Apple Watch, what we presume to be the Apple watch.  10 AM Pacific, 1 PM Eastern Time, 700 UTC next Monday.  Tuesday, a great MacBreak weekly.  Rene Ritchie, Serenity Caldwell in studio with you guys and we'll be talking about what we know.  Rene and Serenity are going to be at the events.  Thank you Andy Ihnatko, Chicago Sun Times.  I love your blurred background.  Sunday in the Park with George?

Andy:  Indeed it is. 

Leo:  I can't believe I got that.  When you make an 8-bit version of a pointalist painting, it really does dissolve.

Andy:  It's fewer than 8 bit.  I did it as square pixels, I thought that was too minecrafty, so I did it in 3 by 1 pieces.

Leo:  I like it.  I can't believe I guessed it.  I was joking.

Andy:  I thought it was, I'd be surprised if people weren't able to guess that after a little bit.

Leo:  I remember calling it Saturday in the Park with George in front of Steve Martin and he said that was a good day.  Thank you Rene Ritchie.  iMore.com.  Always a pleasure.  Look forward to seeing you in town next week.

Rene:  Absolutely.  Likewise. 

Leo:  That'll be a lot of fun.  Maybe we'll do some roller derby with Serenity if we have a little extra time.  

Rene: Watch out, she's dangerous.

Leo:  Tell her to bring her skates, OK?  You're dangerous.  You showed me some dangerous stuff.

Rene:  It was  Brazilian Ju Jitsu, Leo.  It's the art of love.

Leo:  Holy cow!  The art of love and asphyxiation.

Andy:  We've got to talk about your upbringing.  Either you have older brothers or a situation—

Leo:  Something.  Mr. Alex Lindsay, all the way from Rwanda.  Man that's awesome.  pixelcorps.com.  Follow him @ Alex Lindsay.  He's always doing some interesting thing or another that he tweets about.  Thanks guys.  Great show.  We do MacBreak weekly every Tuesday at 11 AM Pacific, that's 2PM Eastern.  Next week, it'll be 1800 UTC, as soon as I figure out how to do the non-daylight time so we're back in daylight time again.  Someday, it'll be noon when the sun is overhead.  That's all we ask.  If you can't watch live, on demand audio and video available at TWIT.tv/mbw, youtube.com/macbreakweekly, or subscribe at iTunes or whatever you use to get your podcasts.  Your overcast app on your iPhone.  Make sure you get every edition.  This was episode 444.  That's pretty cool.  Thanks for being here.  We'll see you next time.  Get back to work, because break time is over!