This Week in Tech 480 (Transcripts)

Leo Laporte: It's time for TWiT, This Week in Tech; Christina Warren is here with Dieter Bohn from The Verge and Steve Kovach from Business Insider. We will dissect the big week's announcements both from Apple and Google; take a look at some changes from Facebook, an apology from YouTube, and more. It's all coming up next on TWiT.

Netcasts you love, from people you trust, this is TWiT! Bandwidth for This Week in Tech is provided by Cachefly, at c-a-c-h-e-f-l-y.com.

This is TWiT, This Week in Tech, Episode 480, recorded October 19, 2014.

And. Roid.

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It's time for This Week in Tech. Great show this week because we have a great panel. Saying hello to Christina Warren joining us once again, because we love her so much, from her apartment in Brooklyn?

Christina Warren: In Brooklyn, yes sir.

Leo: Beautiful downtown Brooklyn. Is there a downtown Brooklyn? There isn't a downtown Brooklyn.

Steve Kovach: Yeah there is.

Leo: There is?

Dieter Bohn: Yeah.

Leo: Oh, I'm surrounded by New Yorkers. Steve Kovach is also here from Business Insider. You've been living in San Francisco for the last few months?

Steve: Yep, going back next week, though.

Leo: Can't wait, I can tell.

Steve: Yeah.

Leo: He's got a twinkle in his eye.

Steve: I'm going to parachute out of the plane. It will be great.

Leo: So excited to be back. Also from The Verge, Dieter Bohn is here. Great to have you back, Dieter.

Dieter: Hello, hello.

Leo: You live in San Francisco.

Dieter: No. I live in New York.

Leo: What are you doing here?

Dieter: I was here for Apple.

Leo: You are visiting? Oh, here for the Apple event. Alright, well let's start with that.

Dieter: Yeah.

Leo: Because that seemed like a very lame event to me. Were you in the audience?

Dieter: Yes, I was.

Leo: About a half an hour in were you going ah, you have nothing new to say?

Dieter: Yeah, they always do the we are going to give you the rundown of what we had already announced earlier this year, but they just kept on doing it and it just kept on going.

Steve: It was the bulk of the announcement I feel like was just old stuff.

Leo: Oh, and there is a Mac Mini with Retina. They were throwing away products but they spent a long time rehashing IOS 8.

Dieter: Yeah, and Yosemite.

Leo: Why?

Dieter: Because they only had three products?

Steve: I think they should have waited to do the Apple Watch in the October event instead, and you know, the iPads, minor upgrade, it looks a little different, but if they had waited for the Apple Watch on that day that would have been huge and it would have been a much more exciting event.

Dieter: And they could have completely managed expectations; they could have leaked that it wasn't going to be in September so that nobody would have been super disappointed. We would have been plenty happy and had plenty to talk about with the two iPhones. Then this one they could have jammed out the iPads real quick and not even mentioned the Mini.

Leo: Isn't part of the problem also that there is not, even with the new iPad, and only one of the iPads is particularly new, the Mini is just that they added a TouchID and nothing else has changed, right?

Dieter: Nothing, well you can get it in gold.

Leo: You can get it in gold. So they added a new iPad, a minor revision to the Mini, and they had the new Mac, and they said that now we can tell you that Yosemite will be out today, Apple Pay will be out on Monday, and IOS 8.1 update. That was it. I just did in 30 seconds pretty much the whole thing.

Christina: You just did it.

Leo: Okay, that's not to be faulted, I mean they got a lot of attention, they got people like Dieter flying out from the coast, they got a million people watching the stream, I don't know how many watching the stream, we gave them a lot of coverage, and so that is good marketing. They know what they are doing in terms of marketing, but I do feel like maybe they were running out of steam in terms of product.

Dieter: Well, I think they are doing just fine on the iPad Air.

Leo: They don't need to update it.

Dieter: What do you mean?

Leo: Okay, these are minor updates; put a better camera in that they should have had in years ago.

Dieter: I think they screen is actually better.

Leo: The screen is better on the iPads?

Steve: It's got anti-glare, yeah. You can tell.

Leo: They did add anti-glare? So you both saw it?

Steve: Yeah

Dieter: Yeah, yeah.

Leo: So that's one thing that a lot of people wanted. I didn't even realize this, but on our iPad Today show that was the number one request, can we get a less glary screen? They say 50% less glary, what are they doing?

Dieter: They put, well they did 2 things, it's fully laminated so that there is no air gap between the glass and the display, and that helps with reflection a little bit. They put an anti-glare coating or finish, something like that?

Steve: Something like that.

Dieter: But I haven't, in the hands on room it is nice reduced lighting so you don't really know how good it is yet.

Leo: So you both went?

Christina: Apparently.

Steve: And TouchID was a big deal, too. Putting in on the iPad finally.

Dieter: Finally, that is if you have used it on your iPhone for this long and you don't have an iPad it is a very convenient thing to have.

Leo: Just as Tim Cook said, you know, I keep touching the button on the iPad to unlock it. We all do.

Dieter: I do too.

Christina: I do it every day.

Leo: Yeah.

Christina: I was excited about that and apparently it seems like they have better graphics or a better chip as they do every time, so maybe some games will be better.

Leo: What's the number one feature they began with? We made it thinner. Exactly no one is asking for a thinner iPad. Or am I wrong?

Steve: No, that's right. I think everyone was asking for TouchID and that was about it.

Leo: And maybe more battery life or whatever, but why thinner?

Christina: Because they are obsessed with anorexic iPads, they are obsessed with making everything as anorexic as possible, like they have inspirations.

Leo: They can't get any thinner, come on, just stop.

Christina: No, honestly, I didn't think that they needed to go thinner with the iPad Air. I thought the iPad Air was perfect.

Leo: It's fine. The one thing that no one has ever said it man, I wish this iPad Air was thinner. Lighter maybe, but not thinner.

Steve: Or gold.

Dieter: Or gold.

Leo: Oh, no, I said that. I liked it in fact.

Christina: I kind of wanted the gold one.

Leo: I kind of like it.

Steve: Let the Kardashian out.

Leo: I can has opulus.

Christina: You got the sheen phone, you want the matching set.

Leo: Yeah, it matches everything else of your phones. Actually, I think maybe, the two big, to me who is not a huge iPhone user or iPad user, to me the two big stories are Apple Pay which launches tomorrow, and this new SIM card in the iPad is very intriguing. So let's do them one at a time. Let's start with Apple Pay. Tomorrow, what does that mean it launches tomorrow? Am I going to go into my favorite store and all of the sudden there will be a big Apple terminal?

Dieter: No, it will just be the standard point of sale terminals that they had before.

Leo: Now I can tap my iPhone on them.

Dieter: Right, you can just tap your iPhone on it to pay.

Leo: Or, presumably, if you are going to put the effort in to that I can also tap my Moto X on it or any other NFC phone on it with Google Wallet.

Dieter: If you have got a wallet set up on your Android phone. Chances are that you don't.

Leo: Well, I have Google Wallet on here and in fact Google says that is has a tap and go.

Steve: You can go anywhere with an NFC pad and it will work?

Leo: I would presume if you are going to upgrade to put Apple Pay into your store.

Steve: No, I mean on Google Wallet. Like me, right now, I would have no problem?

Leo: Well I haven't tried it.

Christina: It works. Well, it depends. So you can do it with MasterCard it works pretty well, Visa is kind of iffy, it depends on what brand of phone you have and depending on what carrier you are on. This is why Apple Pay, I think, is such a big deal, with Android they have had it for a long time and other companies have too, but you have to depend on who makes my phone for one.

Leo: Well that's kind of a sucky character, they wanted you to use ISIS, right, sucky character or carriers.

Christina: Or golf cart or whatever they call it now, right. That's the thing. Apple doesn't have any of that stuff so you can use it at MasterCard terminals. The other big thing too is that a lot of banks weren't on board. So Apple Pay is going to come on board, like literally I've looked, like all of my cards with all of my banks will work. My Barclays will work, my MasterCard will work, my Visa will work, my debit card will work, and my American Express will work.

Leo: Did you take a picture of them to enter the data in as Apple said you could do?

Christina: I haven't been able to do it yet because I don't have Apple Pay yet.

Leo: You have to wait until tomorrow, okay.

Christina: Exactly, but I've already checked to see the compatibility, and it will be there. Yeah, I mean whereas with Android it was like, well, I can use it with my Capital One card. It's like the only one that I can use with Android.

Leo: You can use any credit card to charge up my Google Wallet. It is a selected platform now in my tap and pay. So I presume that no merchant is going to say I'm sorry, you had better get out of here Leo, you don't have an iPhone. I presume that they are going to let me.

Christina: Most of them will work. I know that MasterCard, I've talked to them on Thursday I guess, and they were saying that all of the MasterCard places, obviously all of the swipe and pays will work with Apple Pay and they will work with Android too. But there are some merchants who, for instance, didn't bother to upgrade to NFC until Apple Pay; so like Staples being one of them. Staples, where before Monday even if you had Android you couldn't use it. Now you will be able to, so that's kind of quietly good for everybody.

Leo: That's the thing that I noted. I've been able to use it at Starbucks, some gas stations, and McDonald's. A few places have had tap and pay, but you are right, Apple is the critical mass. I don't know if you could say until Apple did it that nobody wanted to do it, it was just critical mass. It put it over the top.

Dieter: its critical mass, but the other thing is that if you went to go use tap and pay before, you had some Android phone that didn't work, you were like oh, well, life sucks, everything is complicated, the world is terrible, and I live in a fragmented Android world. It's my fault, it's not the store's fault. But now someone goes to use Apple Pay and it doesn't work then they will get mad at the bank, they will get mad at the store, and it will drive more options.

Leo: Right, also the laws are driving the adoption; the move away from signature cards to chip and pin.

Dieter: Well, we are not all chip and pin in the US.

Leo: But that's starting to happen and by next year...

Dieter: its chip and signature in the US.

Leo: its chip and signature, but there is at least a move, and if you are getting a chip you are going to have to upgrade your payment terminal anyway.

Christina: Right, and that's the thing. All of the point of sale systems now come with it. When you upgrade it comes with NFC by default. Whether it's enabled or not is up to the merchant, but anytime you upgrade your point of sale system it's going to have NFC in it. That's going to make adoption, I think, for everybody bigger. Also with Apple you are talking about the fact that they have sold what, 30 million iPhone 6 and 6+s in the last month? If you say that even 40% of those are in the US, which is probably a low estimate since it just launched in China, that is a huge number of devices that are going to work with these things that quite frankly are probably more than anybody who has ever bought by a factor of at least 10.

Leo: Apple market share for iPhones in the US is still 41%, it's not even half. So it's not like all of the sudden...

Dieter: Yeah, but hang on.

Leo: So everybody who goes to Walgreen's has an iPhone?

Dieter: Compared to what percentage of consumers that have Google Wallet actually set up? It's next to none.

Christina: That's what I'm saying. Out of the gate they are going to have more people than have ever had Google Wallet.

Leo: People are getting that impression that starting tomorrow everywhere I go will be tap and pay. Is that the case?

Steve: No, it's only with those NFC terminals. Then there are also these big retailers who are resistant to it. Best Buy is resistant to this Apple Pay thing because they get a cut, Apple gets a cut. So you can see them like dialing back when they upgrade their POSs. 

Leo: Apple gets a cut in addition to the credit card company's cut?

Steve: Yeah.

Dieter: Yep, and the banks.

Leo: And the banks, so now...

Steve: It's teeny tiny, but it's...

Christina: Teeny tiny, it's teeny tiny but they are getting something.

Leo: More and more it's 1% for them, and 2% for them, and 3% for them.

Steve: That sucks if you are a merchant, you know? Everyone is dipping in.

Dieter: I actually don't think that with the merchants it's about the cut. They weren't getting cuts on those in the first place. What it is for them is it's the data. If you use Apple Pay you can't track it as easy because it's a unique pin and you won't know or be able to figure it out.

Steve: And Apple can't track it either by the way.

Dieter: No, Apple can't track it either, so Best Buy would much rather that you pay with something that they can profile you with.

Christina: Precisely, right. Google was much more willing to let them track stuff. Google basically came out and they were like, yeah you can track everything.

Leo: What do you want to know? We will give you anything that you want to know. What do you want to know?

Steve: That's not very comforting as a user of that, you know?

Christina: No, it's not. No it's not.

Leo: It's been the state of condition with credit cards as well. It's something new, it's not something that we had a choice with at any point up until now. I think that if you trust Apple, and you have to admit that there are people who say, Apple, the company that let all of those nude photos escape? If you trust Apple then I think that is a good positioning. Look, we aren't going to give the merchant any information. The bank has the information by the way.

Christina: Right, well that's the thing. The merchant can still try to track things if they have things like loyalty cards, which you still can do with Passbook and other things. So there are still ways for merchants to track stuff, it's just not going to be as easy as maybe it would be with their typical methods. I mean I think that with Best Buy, Dieter is right that they are resisting this. I would put money on the fact that within 6 months Best Buy would change their tune on this just because they are probably going to get so much feedback from consumers who are wanting to do this.

Leo: That to me is the interesting question, is there going to be a drum beat that you are going to have to support Apple Pay, or is this just us saying that we would like it to be there. Is the normal consumer going to say, hey I've got a iPhone, why can't I pay with it. I think that we are so used to hauling out the credit card that it's...

Steve: It's not going to be everywhere either, it's only those terminals with the NFC on them. They said 220,000 retailers or something like that are going to have it, but most won't. Most places you go you still have got to use credit or cash.

Leo: Until I can leave my wallet at home...

Steve: You can't with Apple Pay.

Christina: You still can't but you are getting closer. I can go to Whole Foods, I can go to Target, I can go to the Apple Store, like it was funny, I was looking down the list of places that accept it and you know actually there were a lot of places that I go to that are...

Leo: Christina can leave her wallet at home.

Christina: No, I still probably can't, but it gets closer. I'm waiting for that day because I have actually left my wallet at home before, and I have realized this, and I have been like kind of in a bind, and you have to find the Uber or whatever to get back because you don't have a credit card on you. This has happened to me more than once. But if you have the Apple Pay it's like hey, that's cool.

Leo: Again, I have set up Google Wallet on here and I have TAPnPAY, as any modern Android phone will. I should be able to walk into any Apple Pay stores and tap.

Christina: Yes you should be able to.

Leo: And obviously with the fingerprint reader, unless I have a Samsung, I will be entering a pin. That's not so bad.

Steve: Is that really easier than swiping though? Swiping a credit card?

Leo: I like the Apple video where the woman has to dig through the Tic Tacs and everything in her purse to get a credit card.

Steve: It's so hard to get a credit card out.

Leo: Somehow she magically has a phone just ready to go.

Dieter: Well, I mean, let's face it. If you are waiting in line at a store you have got your phone on anyway, right? You are already checking it.

Christina: Right.

Dieter: So it's just like...

Leo: I took Twitter off of my phone. I have a very strong opinion about that. We should talk another time. I think Twitter is the single number one reason that we have such a hostile environment, especially for women, in the digital world these days. Because Twitter just facilitates this and has no desire to stop it.

Christina: No, they really don't. My friend Brianna...

Leo: She's your friend?

Christina: She's my friend, yeah.

Leo: Terrible situation, Brianna Wu, right?

Christina: Yeah, Brianna Wu, right, @Spacekatgal. She's fantastic and that was awful. I was in Montreal when that was happening and then when I came back and I saw it I was like, are you kidding me? Of all people? But I loved the article that she wrote for xoJane. That was so good, and it was so right, too. My husband, who didn't realize that we were friends, and he read it and I was like yeah, that's my girl Bri, she's a badass. I was so glad that she wrote that article because she's right, she's completely the wrong person. Like they picked the wrong person with her to kind of go up against because...

Leo: They don't care.

Christina: Well, I know that they don't care, but she...

Leo: Whoever they is, that's one guy.

Christina: Right, but she is somebody who won't back down, which is what's you know. I mean that it's terrible what's happened but she won't back down.

Leo: I meant to ask you, so to keep people up to date she received death threats on Twitter. She tweeted I'm out of here and she and her family left their home. Are they back in their home?

Christina: I'm not sure.

Leo: Has Twitter done anything to that guy?

Christina: He was banned or whatever but I mean, I'm not sure how...

Leo: Which means he had a new account name within 3 seconds.

Christina: I'm not sure what they are doing with that. That's the thing, you know, people say well it was just some guy on the internet. Somebody puts your address in there and making really specific threats. 

Leo: Well she was doxed, which is a particular problem.

Christina: She was doxed, and they were saying that he was making really specific threats, yeah, you've got to call the police.

Leo: In fact, law enforcement will get involved if there is that kind of credible threat to your life.

Christina: That was the thing, so you know. What was Twitter's role in this? You know, Twitter doesn't want to get involved; Zelda Williams we saw the same thing.

Leo: It's worse than that. Twitter, because they are a publicly held company, to prop up the stock price needs to grow 25% a month. They don't care where that growth comes from, they will not stop this as long as they are propping up the stock price. You are never going to see the end of this. So I have personally withdrawn from Twitter. I'm not going to kill my account. I did that once before and somebody took it, so I will keep my account, but I am not going to participate in this and I think others should stop because Twitter is highly irresponsible in this matter.

Dieter: I definitely agree that Twitter needs to be doing more. I don't know that they are not doing it because they are getting user growth out of trolls, I think that they just frankly haven't built the tools to deal with it.

Leo: It's easy, when you block somebody you block their IP address, you keep them from creating...

Dieter: Hang on, there are ways around that.

Steve: There are a lot of trolls on The Verge.

Leo: No, but it's not as easy. They have not done anything at all to keep someone from just saying no problem, I've got a new account now and I will use that. They have not done the most basic thing that you can do to protect.

Dieter: Have you ever looked at their work flow for reporting abuse? It's super long and it puts way to much burden on gathering information on the person that is being abused.

Leo: They do not want to address this because it would kill their stock price. This is something that they want to sweep under the rug, and they are not going to be able to, and anybody who is in the public eye or anybody who wants to do something about this should just remove themselves from Twitter; and I have. I didn't want to bring that up. It's another story entirely, but it gets me angry because I don't feel like they have done anything, and they aren't going to do anything until enough people say screw you Twitter. It's like YouTube comments in public. They are the single most public cesspool and everybody is saying #me. No, not anymore. Alright, we are going to talk more about Apple. We said Apple Pay was the big thing on Monday, but that's not all. Yosemite is out, and the SIM. Oh the SIM. That is something that we should be talking about, but first let's talk about my mattress. This is why I get in trouble on Twitter. I have a Casper mattress. You know, Casper is kind of a cool idea, as you see this a lot now on the internet with these companies that are disintermediating the old school monopolistic, overpriced, super high markup business like eyewear, shaving, and now mattresses. But you might say, well I'm not going to buy a mattress online because I want to lay on it. Well, the question is if you go to a showroom, and I've done this, and you lay on a mattress for 5 minutes do you now know enough to buy that mattress? I can tell you how many mattresses I've bought that have been uncomfortable in the long run. Here's the beauty, with Casper the mattress comes to your door, and you have 100 days. You can sleep on it for 100 nights, and return it, and get your money back. They will even send somebody to pick it up, painless returns. This is so much better than lying down in a showroom. Casper's mattresses are fabulous, visit Casper, c-a-s-p-e-r.com/twit. I will tell you how I can save you some money, but let me explain a little. These are latex mattresses with memory foam on the top so you get both firm but comfortable, long lasting comfort and support. I don't know what they are doing, there is no outgassing; they smell fabulous when they come out. In fact, do you have the video, Chad? Get the video up because I have my Casper mattress, first of all I don't know how they got a queen sized mattress in that little bitty box. It comes to your door delivered, you open the box, the mattress goes shhhhww, and suddenly it's there. It is super comfortable, just the right bounce, just the right sink. Terry and the Casper team sent me a little book as well with my Casper mattress for reading. So here it is in the box. I'm all ready, I've got my jammies on. Well, hey, you've got to, you know. So once you open the box up, and they give you a thing that you take off and open, there is this Tye Veck sleeve, there is like a little letter opener that goes right through it. It just opens up for you. This is the way to try out a mattress. Get it for 100 days, get a feel for what it's like. I love it. Watch, watch.

Steve: Why did you do this in your living room and not your bedroom?

Leo: Well, there is a long story. Because there wasn't enough room to shoot it, and so we wanted to shoot me. Actually it's really comfortable, we actually left it there for a few days.

Steve: When guests come in you just lay down.

Leo: Have a feel, relax, enjoy. Free delivery, painless returns within 100 days, you are going to love these. They are made in the USA. They sleep cool, they sleep very comfortable, even Ozzy loves my Casper mattress. And very affordable, they are eliminating the markup because of the showroom and all of that, $500 for a twin, $950 king size. That's a lot less than I have paid for mattresses that I have not liked nearly as much. You will save an additional $50 by going to casper.com/twit and using TWIT as the offer code. There may be a little reluctance. Go visit the website, you can see how they made it and designed it. It's just really cool. It really works, and trust me it is very comfortable, casper.com/twit. So when you buy a new iPad Air, what do they call it, Air 2?

Steve: Air 2.

Dieter: Air 2. I think it also works on the iPad Mini 3.

Leo: Oh, does it? Okay, so I bought it, and normally you would say Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, what carrier? It just says do you want LTE in there? Yeah. So it's going to come, whenever it comes in the next couple of days, with a SIM card. It's my understanding that that SIM card will work with any carrier.

Steve: Well, what about Verizon?

Dieter: I don't think Verizon is in there.

Leo: Oh, of course not Verizon. That's the last...

Steve: Are you on Verizon?

Leo: But that's up to Verizon. No, but that's the point. You don't have to be "on" anything, you can say, this month I will be AT&T and you buy whatever it costs, $20-$30. Next month you can be T-Mobile if you want. You just choose what you want. They have done a deal with England, so if you are in the UK you can do it. I hope that this spreads. Could they do this with phones?

Steve: I hope so.

Dieter: They could.

Christina: Oh, I hope so.

Leo: This is very interesting. Only Apple has the market clout to do this kind of thing. If anybody else does this they are going to laugh at them.

Dieter: Well, Apple has a history of doing this kind of thing. Apple is like screw it, we are moving to the MicroSIM, screw it, we are moving to the NanoSIM. Everyone else is like, wait, wait, we are going to do something. They are like, nope, we are just doing it, and they get what they want. It's the same thing with this. You know, it's on the road to there just not being a SIM card at all, it's just hardwired into the phone, which should terrify me because I like the idea of the consumer being able to switch SIMs around and have more power than the carrier.

Steve: But if it's programmable with an IOS.

Dieter: If it's definitely programmable and you can still choose your own carrier it's actually better for the end user than the current situation.

Leo: I guess they put a SIM slot in so if you wanted to be Verizon you could go to the Verizon store, get a Verizon SIM, and put it in there. But I love this idea. Again, like Apple Pay, this is where Apple's clout in the marketplace can really make it better for consumers I think, right?

Steve: It makes the carriers compete for you too, which lowers data prices and so forth.

Leo: If I don't like you next month I can go to somebody else.

Steve: Exactly, and that's terrible for carriers and good for us, so I'm okay with that.

Christina: I bet John Legere is happy with it, though. Something tells me that T-Mobile is like...

Leo: It's good for T-Mobile.

Christina: He would probably be the one CEO who would be totally ecstatic about this.

Dieter: We are going to see 8 more uncarrier plan shenanigans based on this one.

Steve: He loves piggybacking on Apple.

Christina: Oh, he does, he does.

Steve: He's a master of that.

Leo: There is a cartoon here of John Legere of T-Mobile going yay, of the AT&T CEO, whoever the hell it is these days, going oh, not again Apple, and Verizon going well screw you, we are going our own way.

Christina: Right, because Verizon is like, we are Verizon.

Leo: We are Verizon, sorry. But Verizon primarily because of New York, I think...

Christina: Right, they were Bell Atlantic, that's who they were.

Leo: They own Manhattan.

Dieter: Until Friday afternoon when it went down.

Leo: But they also own LA, they have done very well in the metros. So much so that everybody in LA and New York says, you know what, Verizon is the best. So maybe they still have enough clout in the market to do that. T-Mobile obviously is thrilled. Anything that can pull business away from the other guys is good for T-Mobile.

Christina: I'm shocked that Sprint was part of it because I would have figured, I guess that they just figured that somebody somewhere might be tempted to go to Sprint. I don't know why anybody would choose that.

Dieter: Sprint needs to do whatever it can right now. It's like going to the bank to get a free checking account and they give you a blanket. If you go sign up for Sprint they will give you a free cooler.

Leo: What do you want? Do you want a toaster? Anything.

Dieter: Yeah, toaster.

Leo: I will give you anything to do it.

Christina: Like please, we will pay you, we will pay you money. Please come to us, please.

Steve: They kind of are in a way.

Leo: Is this though? They should be a little worried about this.

Steve: Verizon?

Leo: Well everybody because Google might do this with their Nexus, right?

Dieter: If they have got the clout.

Leo: So Google is going to sell the Nexus 6. We will get to this in a bit, but they are going to sell this on all of the major US carriers, in fact, US Cellular as well; 5 carriers. Which is kind of unusual with a Nexus phone, they are treating this more like a product than a developer edition. It would be just so great if Google said well, we don't need to be on those carriers, we are just going to put a universal SIM in here and let you choose. It just seems like, especially on a Nexus phone, which they can't expect to sell a lot of.

Dieter: Well no, I think the reason that the Nexus 6 is on all of the carriers, Dan wrote a piece for us about this, is that they couldn't get the price down. The thing is $650 off contract. It's not what a Nexus is usually supposed to be.

Leo: I was wondering if that had to do with the fact that they couldn't get the price down or they decided we should make money, this should be a business for us not a developer platform. They are going to continue to sell the 5, so if you need an inexpensive phone on a developer platform you can buy the Nexus 5.

Steve: Did they drop the price on that?

Leo: I don't know, I bet they will though, right?

Steve: They have to, yeah.

Leo: But the Nexus 6 is such a monster. It's got a UHT screen, it's 6 inches...

Christina: It's 6 inches, it's not a phone. I don't know what it is. It's a tablet is what it is. It's a tablet it's not a phone.

Leo: It's a recognition frankly that the modern computing platform is no longer a desktop or even a tablet, but a phone with a big screen. The question is how big should the screen be? If you don't use it as a phone but you primarily use it as a computer what is the right size? I think the marketplace seems to think that the Galaxy Note and now the Shamu, appropriately named Killer Whale Nexus 6, should be 6 inches. I had a 1520, the Nokia 1520, I still have it but it is broke, but it's not too big, it's great.

Christina: Are you kidding me?

Leo: What do you have?

Steve: The iPhone +, yeah.

Dieter: This is my main computer.

Leo: You have the 6+. Was that too big for you Christina?

Christina: Are you kidding me? The 6 was too big for me, but the 6+, I mean I have the 6 but...

Leo: How tall are you Christina? Are you small?

Steve: Christina is short.

Christina: I'm 5'5", but I'm very petite, like my wrist size, I have childlike wrists. People see the 6 in my hand and they think it is the 6+. More than one person has thought that I had the 6+. I'm like, no, I just have the 6. People who don't have childlike hands, fine.

Leo: So people who say it's too big are smaller people. The real answer is as big as you can stand.

Dieter: So that is funny, I got the 6 and I wish I got the 6+ because I didn't think that I could stand that and then having used other peoples...

Steve: I swapped between 2 of them and I always land on this one. I haven't touched my iPad since.

Leo: Well I agree with you on that. I think its bad news for the iPad.

Steve: It's definitely bad news for the iPad.

Leo: But I like the 6. I like the smaller one frankly. That feels like clown shoes, it's too floppy.

Christina: This is the 6 in my hands.

Steve: The battery life is so good.

Leo: Well the battery life is great on the 6.

Dieter: It's alright.

Leo: It's alright.

Dieter: It's alright. It's a day.

Christina: It's fine.

Leo: It's a day.

Christina: It's a day.

Leo: You are going to charge it every night no matter what. If it's a day and a half are you not going to charge it the night before?

Steve: No, but then I'm not freaking out at night if I go out after work or something that I'm going to have to ask a bartender to charge my phone for me or something.

Christina: That's why you travel with a MOFI.

Leo: No, no, no, no, a MOFI isn't wearable.

Dieter: Get an i6+.

Christina: No, I travel with battery packs, I'm not even joking. I travel with battery packs in my purse. It's terrible.

Leo: That's a terrible idea. That's because you have a purse.

Christina: Well, this is true. People are like, oh, you can get the 6+, it will fit in your purse. Yeah, but it won't fit in my clutch. There's a bit distinction.

Leo: I can't wait for Shamu. The Nexus 6 is my Nexus phone. I cannot wait.

Dieter: The Nexus 6 might be my tablet because I like the iPad Mini, and the new iPad Mini is such a huge disappointment that I'm thinking I will get a Nexus 6 and make it my tablet. Which is insane, but...

Leo: It's not insane, it's right.

Steve: There is only one answer to this, so.

Leo: Well, that's my answer. It's always the right answer as everyone knows. We might as well finish up Apple since we got on this, then we will move on to Google. Retina iMac.

Christina: I'm so excited you don't even know.

Leo: You guys are playing with it. So here is my concern. First of all, $2500 for a 5K screen is what Dell is going to charge, so you get the computer for free. A computer with a 5K screen, 27 inches...

Steve: And a nice computer.

Leo: It's an i5, right, is the base model?

Steve: Base model, right.

Leo: It sounds, on paper, amazing. I'm very concerned that it will not keep up with the screen. So you guys saw it. It looks great, I'm sure.

Steve: It's gorgeous.

Leo: With a still picture, fabulous. Did you try computing?

Dieter: Just a little, it was a demo so they were going to be perfect. 

Leo: I want to get it home and run a browser. I want to put The Verge on it which is my, by the way, acid test. 

Dieter: Well we are way easier on your browser than we used to be.

Leo: I'm sorry. You screwed me over. Yeah, you don't have as many pictures on there. You have text.

Dieter: Since we went responsive it is a much lighter page. I'm sorry.

Leo: I will have to find a new heavy page. It used to be, in fact this is how I used to test Chromebook, if I could load The Verge up and scroll without hesitation then that's a fast system. I want to see that kind of response. It's working well, so you kind of screwed me. I have to find a new heavy webpage. That's what we need to do is see. So I'm holding off on this, but if it's fast, if it's responsive I'm going to sell my MacPro. Marco Arment at marcopro.org said the same thing, he said "I feel Apple has almost screwed me because for less than a MacPro I'm getting a better screen."

Steve: You don't need that Thunderbolt display.

Dieter: Getting a better screen than the MacPro might be able to drive period.

Leo: The MacPro cannot drive it.

Christina: The Thunderbolt 2 is not...

Leo: This is very challenging. I have a 4K display. I have the Asus 4K display on my MacPro which is a great display.

Christina: That is a great display.

Leo: It tears a lot.

Christina: It's doing the duel thing MST.

Leo: MST.

Christina: So it does 2 screens side by side and yeah, it's not perfect but it's okay. This should be better. No, this is what I am excited about, and it's interesting because when the first 27 inch iMac came out 5 years ago they did the same thing which was the same price as what Dell was selling that screen for and you got the whole computer. That is why I bought that iMac and I got a fully tricked out one. That's probably why I'm going to get a fully tricked out 5K iMac for the same reason.

Leo: Marco also points out that because it has the new top of the line i7 with a 4GH processor, it's the fastest single core processor in the Intel line, much faster than the 3.2GH on the MacPro. For single core if you are doing rendering or if you are doing open CL there are certain high end things the MacPro might be better for. The Zeon is pretty old now in that MacPro. For most people, including a lot of photo types, iMac is the way to go. Son of a gun.

Dieter: Typically the first generation of Retina Macs you kind of want to shy away from.

Leo: Remember with the iPad, the iPad 3 was a little sluggish. It was a lot of pixels.

Christina: It was pretty terrible.

Dieter: I think that is why they spent to long talking about the TiCon, timing controller chip. 

Leo: For crying out loud.

Dieter: They made a chip.

Leo: They were so excited about that. That was so you could go 60 hertz, right? Without doing all of that MLS stuff.

Dieter: I have no idea.

Leo: It looked cool in the video.

Dieter: I am more optimistic than I usually am with a first generation Retina product that is worth getting because it seemed fast when we looked at it and it's the most amazing screen I have ever seen.

Steve: I took this great photo of Tim Cook like right as he is describing it, and he is surrounded by press, and the look on his face was like don't you just want it? It's like right. It like draws you in, and it's going to be great. I don't think for normal folks like who just look at Facebook all day should buy this, but if you are a photo or video editor, oh my god. My buddy is a professional photographer and he is freaking out.

Leo: That's the market, yeah, that's the market for this.

Christina: See, what I want to know is does this mean we are finally going to see some 4K content or things like that come to iTunes because now they've got this stuff coming. Are we going to see the 4K content thing pushed further or are we still going to be stuck with the 1080p stuff for iTunes?

Leo: For you guys who live in small apartments in New York, by the way, I want to point out that you can get a visa mount for this, you can put it on the wall. That could be your TV.

Christina: Yeah, we did that with our 27 inch iMac actually to save space. We got the wireless Bluetooth set up and yeah, it's great for that.

Dieter: Can I just point out that nobody else in the past 5 years has managed to make desktop computing anything other than insanely boring except for Apple? The idea that we are excited about desktop computers in 2014 is kind of shocking.

Leo: What's interesting is that I don't think that we are excited about the desktop computer. We are excited about the screen.

Steve: We are excited about the screen. It's just the screen.

Leo: It has nothing to do with the computer.

Christina: It's the screen that has an awesome computer in it. That's the whole thing, right?

Steve: It can't do anything that this thing can't do.

Leo: It can't.

Christina: No, but I think Dieter is right, it's kind of the whole thing. The fact that we are excited about it at all. The fact that for me that was the most exciting part of the announcement was the new iMac.

Steve: I went right to that at the demo area. It's like forget the iPads. I went right to the iMac and it was awesome. That's the photo I took.

Leo: Tim has been on a giddy high for 2 months now. I don't think that Tim is actually touched the ground.

Steve: I'm so proud of that photo.

Leo: That's a great picture.

Dieter: That's amazing.

Christina: That's such a good photo.

Leo: Who is that with the iPhone 6?

Dieter: That's Vincent Winn from Slasher.

Steve: Slasher, yeah.

Christina: Slasher.

Steve: And there is a photo of me from the other side of that that was on Wired on Friday where I am just bored while Tim is talking like I was on the phone or something. I was actually tweeting that photo of Tim as that photo was taken.

Dieter: I came up about a minute after that and I took a photo of him, and I can't use it because Jason Snell was in the background, and he didn't realize I was taking the photo, and I just felt really bad.

Steve: He photobombed you.

Dieter: Yeah, he photobombed me.

Leo: I would use it.

Christina: It's funny because...

Dieter: He's a nice guy. I once published a photo of Steve Ballmer. They call it the Mega man photo because I had to get the picture up really quick and he looked really funny. I've been getting crap from Microsoft about it ever since.

Leo: See the power you wield Dieter?

Dieter: I'm a dangerous man.

Leo: A dangerous man.

Dieter: I didn't do the iMac thing. I looked at it, but the first thing that I had to get was the iPad Mini.

Leo: That's a disappointment. You have got to say that's a disappointment.

Dieter: I'm super angry about it.

Steve: There's no reason to buy it.

Dieter: There is no reason to buy it.

Leo: So Apple had to, in fact it was probably the message of that invitation, it’s Been Way Too Long. What's been way too long? Since we put out an iMac Mini, and there is a market for the Mac Mini. It's a weird market, but there is one.

Dieter: I thought the It's Way Too Long thing was just a jab because we just saw them a month ago, and like ha, ha, ha.

Leo: Oh, it's a joke, ha, ha, ha.

Dieter: Yeah, it's a joke.

Christina: That's kind of how I read it too, that they are just like, oh yeah, we just saw you. But the Mac Mini, it's been 2 years, 2 1/2 years since they updated?

Leo: Yeah, it's been 445 days or something. So actually I thought it was going to be the Apple TV, but I was completely wrong.

Christina: Yeah, I did too. I was hoping it would be the Apple TV. That's been, the REV 3, I know that that wasn't a hardware update, that was March of 2012 because that was the same time that the iPad 3 came out.

Leo: I do think that come June at WWBC they will announce an Apple TV update and it will have an app store. They will at least say look developers, start developing apps for the Apple TV because we are going to put an app store in there. One of the first apps will be HBO GO because HBO announced this week that they were going to bypass the cable companies and start selling direct to customers. That's huge.

Christina: Huge.

Leo: That's the beginning of the end of the cable monopoly, and don't think that the cable companies don't know it and see it coming. CBS did the same.

Christina: Yep, the total access thingy. I don't think that is going to be as successful because I don't see a huge market of people paying $6 a month for CBS especially since you don't get everything. You don't get NFL, you don't get some of their other shows.

Dieter: You do get a back catalog though, don't you?

Christina: Yeah, you basically get the same back catalog that is on Netflix and Amazon. It's basically the same stuff that they have already licensed otherwise. So it's really nothing that you wouldn't get otherwise. So if you subscribe to Netflix or Amazon then you get all of that CBS content.

Leo: Is HBO going to blink? I think that they could blink on this. We are hearing right now from Brian Roberts at Comcast going what are you, crazy?

Christina: They already knew. Comcast already knew this was coming. HBO has played this the smartest that you could play this. I've spoken with them a lot over the years since HBO GO was first announced, and they were very clear. Still, the majority of the revenue for the next 5 years is going to come from cable subscribers. They are probably going to charge, I think they should charge $20 a month, I think they can and I think that they are in a very...

Leo: $20? Wow.

Steve: That's assuming it is HBO GO, which it might not be. It might be like a watered down HBO GO.

Leo: HBO GO currently is everything ever.

Steve: Everything. And you can watch it nearly live. Like when the new episode of the Game of Thrones comes on you can watch it pretty much live.

Dieter: They could do HBO but they would take out the movies so they wouldn't have to pay the licensing on that.

Christina: I don't think that they would do that.

Steve: Something like that, yeah.

Leo: Who wants the movies? Nobody wants the movies on HBO.

Christina: It's all about the series, but I really don't think that they are going to do that.

Steve: And comedy specials and sports.

Christina: I don't think they are going to do that at all. I think they are going to do the exact same thing because if you are an HBO GO subscriber if they had to split it into two offerings maybe they could where you have to log in to two different apps, but I don't think they will do that. The thing is that they have been so smart about this. They introduced HBO GO and they basically said that we are going to give up our home video business, which was profitable but wasn't a huge driver, but we are going to give up anybody buying our stuff on DVD. We are going to do that so that we can keep subscribers longer so that we don't have the attrition rate that we normally have. What usually happens is that Netflix sees this too, we saw this with their earnings report. You lose subscribers when your shows aren't on the air.

Leo: They watch every episode of Game of Thrones or House of Cards and now I'm done and I'm going to stop paying.

Christina: And then they stop the subscription. And HBO goes through that cyclical thing. So HBO GO was a part of two things. One was to drop the attrition rate and keep people subscribed longer. The second thing was put in this ground work for the fact that they can offer a pure OTA offering. The thing is that if they price it at $15 or $20 a month, which is what I think they will do, that's really not any cheaper than you would pay if you had cable. Cable can still make the deal to give you other reasons if you want to subscribe to cable so you can get your authentication to access the Simpsons World App, and access other things, and access ABC, their app and all of that stuff. What HBO is betting on is the fact that 25%, in a study that came out last week was the fact that the Millennials are not pay TV subscribers. Well, if HBO can capture even a small percentage of these people now, when this things starts to become a bigger trend then HBO is still relevant. So I think that they are doing it in the smartest way possible, and if they price it for what it's worth; I think they can charge $15-$20 a month. I think HBO is one of the few networks that is worth that. I pay that as part of my cable plan, and one of the main reasons that I've had cable for years, and I'm not going to give it up just because HBO goes cable free, but when I was in college we had basic cable...

Steve: How did you live?

Christina: Well we got free basic cable in the dorm and I called up Comcast, who was Media One at the time, and I ordered a cable box so I could get HBO. Why, because I couldn't miss Sex in the City. I'm one of those people who the power of those shows is huge. I think that they will still get most of their revenue from the cable companies, but they are going ahead and planting that seed so that they have a real transition opportunity. I think that it will work well for them. The cable companies had to know it was coming. They had to know when HBO GO was first coming that it was going to be an opportunity. Now at this point the cable companies have to do something better with their bundling options, or they have to offer more value, or they have to be ready to say, okay, for the most part we are also an ISP so we are still the pipe regardless. So how do we now augment this so we can get a cut. What that probably means is that when you buy your internet subscription that you can pay and get bundles where if you pay x amount of money then you get Netflix, and Amazon, and HBO GO, and maybe this CBS deal. At the end of the day you pay just as much as you did with cable, and it looks just like cable, and it's slipping through the same pipe as cable, but because its' OTA you can get it on other devices too and watch it out of the home.

Steve: You want it that way too. My ideal setup would be HBO, Netflix, ESPN, Showtime, and maybe Hulu or something. If somebody can offer that over the top, done. What else do I need to watch? Comedy Central maybe.

Christina: Totally, and cable can do that.

Dieter: Aren't you concerned...

Leo: Although Comedy Central is owned by Viacom which is CBS.

Steve: And then they will probably lump it in to a bunch of other stuff too.

Dieter: I don't know that I want my internet provider giving discounts on certain channels on the internet. I don't know that I really want HBO GO bundled into my internet. 

Leo: But the cost of having that over the cable versus over the internet would be almost identical, right? These guys are not idiots. They are going to continue to compete by keeping the cost identical.

Christina: Of course, of course. The thing is that I don't know about you Dieter, but for me Cablevision is my cable provider and they are my internet provider. So regardless I'm paying a discounted rate to them. What I'm saying is that already now they are negotiating fees for ESPN, and HBO, and Fox, and Viacom, and all of those companies. They are negotiating those things, and those carriage rates are being negotiated on the back end, and that is what is determining the cost of my cable bill.

Dieter: Yeah, but the point that I'm making is that I'm fine with HBO playing shenanigans with the cable company for TV, but once they become an internet service then them playing shenanigans with the idea of internet starts to feel like it's heading towards a encroaching on being a problem with net neutrality.

Steve: I see what you are saying.

Christina: Yeah, I could see that, but I think at that point it becomes HBO offers the price, and where the price is if you are a cable company who wants to offer bundles for packages then that becomes an option. But you could still pay $15, or $20, or whatever it is but your cable provider might offer you a special deal. That's not unheard of, I mean they do that already with other sorts of services. I hear what you are saying with the net neutrality thing, but I think that it's probably going to happen. I don't think that they are going to be able to charge more. You will have the base rate and then the cable company is going to do what they can to entice you to bundle more things together. They will probably do that by doing a discount, which is the same way how you end up getting Cinemax and the Movie Channel when you get Showtime or HBO. You don't really care about Cinemax because nobody watches it, but it's like a dollar. So I'm like, alright, I might as well get Cinemax for a dollar, I might as well get the Movie Channel for a dollar because it's free or thereabouts.

Leo: What's really clear, though, is that this is chaos. It is going to continue to be chaotic and the only hope, it seems to me, is a company with enough clout like Apple, and the Apple TV can make the deals that perhaps make it possible for this to work. That's why I think that in June you are going to see Apple make some announcements and that's when the new Apple TV is going to come out.

Steve: It sounds like that got blown up this year with Time Warner.

Leo: I think they have been moving towards it. I hear the drumbeat again and again, and this HBO announcement and the CBS announcement kind of to me confirms it, that Apple is about ready to do this.

Dieter: I don't think Apple has got the bandwidth.

Leo: They may not have the clout.

Christina: I don't think that they do.

Dieter: They are busy. They have to get this watch out the door and not have it be a disaster.

Leo: They should drop the watch right now, seriously. Nobody wants that watch. Vogue China wants that watch. We are going to find out why you hate the Mini in just a second. Dieter Bohn is here from The Verge. You are Executive Editor, what is your title?

Dieter: Executive Editor.

Leo: I like it. I don't know what it means but it sounds like a good pay grade.

Steve: Authoritative.

Leo: It's authoritative. From Business Insider, Steve Kovak, what's your title?

Steve: Senior Editor.

Leo: Senior. Executive, senior, I don't know, they both seem good. Christina Warren from Mashable, well you are at large.

Christina: No, I'm Senior Tech Analyst.

Leo: Oh, excuse me. Me, I'm just some guy. We are going to have more with all three in just a second, but right now its snack time. I have brought the snack box. NatureBox, ladies and gentlemen, is a deliciously awesome snack delivered to your door monthly in a NatureBox. What makes these snacks so good? They are nutritionist approved, there are no high fructose corn syrups, zero grams trans-fat, no artificial colors, flavors, or sweeteners. They are just good stuff. In fact, we buy them for our business. They have a business plan which is good, because we have just been going through them. How many boxes a month have we been getting, like 20? We get like 20. They are testing a business plan. We get like 20 boxes a month at the business. You should get a box every day, or every month to your door, actually every day would be good. This is your favorite Lisa, Big Island Pineapple Rings. The best pineapple rings ever. They have sweet, they have savory, they have spicy. You can get an assortment or pick one you want. They have vegan; if you want to get vegan snacks they've got them. Hundreds of choices really. They've got gluten conscience snacks, they've got snacks for people with allergies of all kinds, so you can get a snack that's good for you and good for your kids. You won't hesitate giving these to your kids by the way. They are going to love these. All sorts of interesting stuff. What do we got? Gentlemen, you can choose, Big Island Pineapple Rings, Flax Fortune Cookies, we've got Tart and Tangy Fruit Medley...

Steve: Is there a spicy one?

Leo: Praline Pumpkin Seeds. You know what you would like is the Sriracha Roasted Cashews.

Steve: That sounds awesome.

Leo: I don't have any of those.

Steve: Thanks.

Leo: Can we get, somebody in the back, can we get a Sriracha Roasted Cashew for Steve here? So you like the spicy Steve?

Steve: I like the spicy stuff, yeah.

Leo: Here's the deal, if you go to naturebox.com/twit you can get a sampler free delivered to your door so you can get an idea of what it is that you are in for. What do you like, anything? You just had potato pancakes.

Dieter: I did just have potato pancakes.

Leo: You are probably not really hungry.

Dieter: I'm not super hungry, but if I were I would probably eat some pumpkin seeds.

Leo: Here you go, take these home for your trip home. Those are Praline Pumpkin Seeds which is better than everyday pumpkin seeds. Naturebox.com/twit, this is our most popular sponsor with all of our hosts.

Steve: Yeah, free food.

Leo: Free food. Christina, have we sent you a NatureBox yet?

Christina: You have not but I would love one.

Leo: We will arrange to get one for Christina. She's been on like 80 of our shows in the last 2 weeks, so we have got to send her something. Snacks would be good. I could send you this new UV light. This is creepy.

Steve: I don't think that I want one of those.

Leo: $16, it will reveal dog and cat urine stains in the carpet.

Steve: Probably other stains too.

Leo: Oh, perfect for hotel room inspection applications, you know what I mean. That's what it says on here. See bedbugs before they get you, reveal rodent contamination, hunt scorpions.

Steve: What? Do scorpions glow in the dark or something?

Leo: Scorpions glow.

Steve: Oh my god, finally I can hunt scorpions.

Leo: And you can tell if somebody has got dental work because it doesn't turn white. Look at that. All of my own, see? Anyway, we are not selling that but we ought to. That is awesome. Okay, why are you mad, Dieter Bohn about the Mac Mini? What's mad about it?

Dieter: So Mac, you can't upgrade the RAM.

Leo: The RAM is soldered in.

Dieter: And it used to be that you could screw the bottom off and you could access everything. Now they've put tamper proof screws on it so if you go to upgrade your hard drive you void your warranty.

Leo: Wow, they did this because they wanted a $499 computer, right?

Dieter: I guess, I don't know. They did it because it's simpler to sell I guess. Do you think making it non replaceable brings the cost down because it's soldered on so it's cheaper to manufacture? Is that what you are thinking?

Leo: I think that really all that mattered about the Mac Mini from their point of view was to get it back to the original $500 price point because they needed an entry level Mac and they had to do whatever they could do to make that work. They didn't want to cannibalize other Macs by having a Mac that was, you know, the worst nightmare was $499 and it's insanely upgradable. You don't want that so you want to make a Mac that people will buy who are very price conscious, but you don't want it to cannibalize existing sales. I think that it actually fills a price point. It's good to have a $499 Macintosh. You don't get a keyboard, you don't get a mouse, you don't get a monitor, but what they've always said about the Mac Mini is if you have already got all of those, i.e. if you are a Windows user, buy a Mac Mini, put it in there, and you can develop for Mac and you can do other stuff. I think that it makes sense, but I agree that it's not...

Dieter: I just think that at that price point it's sort of a computer where you buy it and you are like oh, I will just get the cheap one now and I can upgrade it later because I only have $500 to spend. It just seems like they change it just to lock it down and that is kind of offensive to me.

Christina: I'm with you, but it's weird because at this point it's only the iMac and the MacPro that let you upgrade because everything else is soldered in. I mean you can get third party hard drives, OWC has done a pretty good job of keeping up with the various SSTs. They come up with the custom ones. I don't think that they have the MacBook Air, the 2013 or the 2014 yet, but they do those. Basically they have soldered everything in. It's kind of sad because it's such an Apple thing to do but that's historically been a great thing about the Macs at least that even though you can't do tons of upgrades you can at least upgrade you RAM, you can at least upgrade your hard drive. Now even in the Mac Mini you can't do that, so yeah, it is a problem. You've got $500 and you have got to keep in mind that okay, what I buy now is what I'm stuck with. If I want to buy more RAM later on I'm screwed. So you have to tell people, okay, probably buy as much RAM as you can afford when you are buying it because you are never going to be able to do it again.

Dieter: Well, on the bright side they are not charging quite as much as they used to for RAM upgrades.

Christina: Right.

Steve: I'm looking right now.

Christina: They are significantly cheaper, so that is at least better, but it's still $100.

Steve: It's $100.

Dieter: The other Mini that I'm disappointed in is the iPad Mini. I want the smaller tablet, and there is no reason to get the new one at all.

Christina: There is no reason. I wrote this thing actually last week called iPad Mini is the New iPod Touch. It was kind of my view after the iPhone 6+ how they were going to position the Mini. That's kind of what I think that they are doing is that they are saying the iPad Air is going to be our hero device, that is what we want to push people towards. The iPad Mini is increasingly becoming less important. But to your point, it is such a 180 from what they did last year when they had the iPad Air and the iPad Mini with the same specs. Now basically you can get a great deal on last year's iPad Mini, I think that is now a really great value.

Leo: So they are still selling that?

Dieter: Yeah, it's $100 less.

Steve: And the original iPad Mini. It's $250.

Dieter: The original iPad Mini is $250 which is incredible.

Leo: It's not Retina.

Steve: It's not Retina but you get an iPad for $250 now.

Leo: Did they do that for education?

Dieter: They do it because it's cheap.

Steve: They do it because they are cheapo. The whole deal with the iPad Mini was...

Leo: Because they have a thousand of them in the warehouse.

Dieter: When the iPad Mini first came out people were like, Apple has got to make a cheap tablet, Apple has got to make a cheap tablet. They already figured that they had to do it. Then they released the thing and it wasn't cheap at all. They were like what are you doing? They are now playing in the cheap tablet space at $250, but then they have got this high end one at $500, $400?

Steve: It starts at $499.

Dieter: $500. That is a completely terrible deal compared to last year's model, which was a pretty good deal.

Leo: Right. You know what Apple is never going to do again? Force you to download a U2 album. The band was on Facebook.

Video playing: Please never release an album on iTunes that automatically downloads to people's playlist ever again. It's really rude.

Leo: Bono has the response here.

Video playing: Oops. I'm sorry about that. I had this beautiful idea and they got carried away with themselves. I apologize for that kind of thing.

Leo: He's really humble, this is a great apology.

Video playing: I was prone to that kind of thing. A drop of melomania, a touch of generosity, a dash of self-promotion, and...

Steve: Why are they sitting back to back?

Leo: It's a very weird thing, they did this video on YouTube where they go around and around. Anyway, credit to Bono, that's actually a pretty good apology. It was something that Apple never did even though they did release a tool to remove the album.

Steve: Which I did immediately by the way.

Leo: I like U2. I thought that was beautiful what Bono said. I thought it was a little spammy to push it out. By the way, U2 said that they were going to be working together with Apple for lots of cool stuff over the next couple of years. Innovations that will transform the way music is listened to and viewed.

Dieter: It's pretty easy to be magnanimous when you have 26 million downloads.

Leo: 26 million, how many of those were inadvertent?

Christina: All of them.

Steve: A good amount, I'm sure. When was the last time U2 had a good album, like 20 years ago?

Leo: Oh man, you guys are cold.

Christina: Elevation. Elevation was a decent album in 2000.

Steve: Oh no.

Christina: Beautiful Thing? Come on, Beautiful Thing is a good song, don't hate.

Leo: Vertigo, come on.

Steve: I'm going to hate.

Christina: That's what I'm saying, that was 2000, so it's been like 15 years, but come on.

Leo: You guys are so cold.

Steve: It's dad rock.

Leo: Dad rock, guess what? It is dad rock. So really, so the young people thing U2 is dad rock?

Steve: Oh, yeah, totally.

Dieter: Of course.

Christina: Completely. Dieter, do we think that if WebOS had done this, because you know that U2 owned Palm, do you think that that could have saved WebOS? You would be the person to ask.

Dieter: Completely.

Leo: Are you a WebOS fanatic?

Dieter: Yeah.

Leo: Do you harbor a secret desire?

Dieter: I founded precentral.net.

Leo: I loved the Pre. I loved the Pre and I loved WebOS. What happened, it was LG that killed it?

Dieter: Well it was HP that killed it.

Leo: HP killed it but LG bought it for their TVs.

Dieter: LG bought what was left of it and made TVs with it.

Steve: That was open source wasn't it?

Leo: No.

Dieter: Part of it was open source, and then they bought the part the wasn't open source. But now the guys, the last vestiges of LG, they quit, they are now at Pebble. At the same time there is a rumor that LG is making a smart watch, which is hilarious.

Leo: Really, that will be good. You can't deny, though, the impact of Web OS with cars and the new Android Lollipop.

Steve: Even IOS a little bit.

Leo: Absolutely.

Dieter: You really don't want to open this box.

Leo: I'm telling you, you haven't been in the business long enough if you haven't had your heart broken at least once by a superior technology that never made it. BOS, does anybody remember that?

Christina: BOS, oh yeah, I loved that, I loved BOS.

Leo:  Literally, this is part...

Christina: MiniDisc?

Leo: Minidisc, no I'm not sad. You are sad about MiniDisc?

Steve: MiniDisc was awesome.

Dieter: Why was it awesome?

Christina: It was easy.

Steve: Because it was like the future.

Christina: You could do anything with it. You could connect it to a keyboard and type in your track names and .you could use it like a DAT. Before the iPod came out I would use it as a MP3 player. I would hook it up to my sound card and I would play music through my sound card onto MiniDisc. It would do the auto track titles and this was like in 1999. I would have like...

Leo: The best that you could say about MiniDisc was that it was kind of convenient.

Steve: They were physically just awesome little gadgets.

Christina: They were. They were, and then you could do anything to them.

Steve: They were indestructible, that was great.

Leo: They had the 8 track format. The 8 track compression was awful.

Christina: Yeah, but if you put MP3s on them they sounded great.

Leo:  You could put other formats on them but the players wouldn't play it, would they?

Christina: No, but by the end they could. I even had one that would let you send MP3s directly to your MiniDisc. It was like right after the iPod came out.

Leo: We reviewed a Sony Walkman this week on Before You Can Buy It. Is that still out laying around? It looks exactly like a Zoon HD. They still make Walkman but it plays Hi-Res music.

Christina: Oh yeah, that's the one that looks just like the Pono, and it's great.

Leo: No, it's flat.

Christina: It's flat, but it looks like an iPod Nano from 2 generations ago.

Leo: Or a Zoon HD, yeah.

Steve: Sony.com/walkman is a site that still exists.

Dieter: You guys are searching, have you seen the new walkman? It's hilarious. It's just the most ridiculous thing.

Steve: I haven't seen it in person yet. This is great.

Dieter: Why do you...

Steve: It's adorable Timmy.

Dieter: It's like they just had parts lying in a closet someplace.

Leo: They don't easily let go of old technologies. Remember that they kept that MiniDisc alive, there it is, that silver thing, that's it.

Dieter: They meant to release that 10 years ago and forgot.

Leo: $300.

Christina: It's $300.

Leo: Three hundo.

Christina: For 64GB, it's insane. When I saw that price, I was at their launch, and Tony Bennett was there.

Steve: Is it just because it's Hi-Res?

Leo: Yeah.

Christina: Yes, and Tony Bennett was there, they were talking about all of that stuff, and I couldn't stop laughing. The Sony people were so kind, but I couldn't stop laughing.

Leo: If you put Hi-Res FLAC files on there you get about 10 albums and you are done.

Christina: Exactly, exactly, and its $300. I'm like, are you kidding me Sony, like really?

Leo: A thousand songs in your pocket! There’s one more story which is a sweet story. I’m just going to report it so you can go read it. New York Times had this story today about the autistic kid. I think it’s written by his mother, right? The autistic kid who, basically this 13-year old fell in love and became friends with Siri. And would go on for hours, talking back and forth to Siri. It’s a very sweet story. There’s not much to say about it. There’s no news. It’s probably not a prescription for autistic kids but still it’s kind of a sweet.

Steve: If you haven’t read it, you have to read it.

Leo: It’s heart-warming. Kid loves his Siri. I bet you they make a movie. It’s kind of like Her.

Christina: I was going to say I thought they did and it was called Her.

Steve: It’s not quite like that.

Leo: Last night as he was going to bed, there was this matter-of-fact exchange. Gus: Siri will you marry me? Siri: I’m not the marrying kind. Gus: I mean not now, I’m a kid. I mean when I grow up. Siri: My end user agreement doesn’t include marriage. Gus: oh, okay. Gus didn’t sound too disappointed. This was useful information to have. For me too because it’s the first time I knew he actually thought about marriage. He turned over to go to sleep. Gus: goodnight, Siri. Will you sleep well tonight? Siri: I don’t need much sleep. But it’s nice of you to ask. Somebody designed some heart in this Siri. I think that’s pretty amazing.

Steve: Finally, something useful.

Leo: Something you can do with Siri.

Leo: Alright, we have Google announcements to talk about as well. It was a big week for Google. Google did their announcements a day before the Apple event. But I don’t think they took the wind out of Apple’s sales. You think they wanted to?

Christina: They tried and failed.

Dieter: I don’t know if they totally failed. I saw more reader engagement off of Google’s stuff than Apple’s stuff.

Steve: The iPad event was a snooze. This was actually interesting.

Leo: I kind of agree.

Steve: Our readers are far more into it.

Leo: Very interesting.

Steve: If traffic is any indication, more Moto X’s will be sold than iPad Air.

Dieter: Yea, like Apple got beat by a Google blog post.

Steve: Yea, it’s nuts.

Leo: But can autistic kids fall in love with Moto X?

Dieter: No.

Steve: Google Now doesn’t talk back to you.

Leo: You know what they did, they did a really annoying thing. Listen to this, it’s no Scarlet Johansen. Wake up, Moto X. How old is Scarlet Johansen? It did something really annoying. Opening Google. They added opening Google.

Christina: Are you kidding me?

Leo: Siri will say, Scarlet Johansen is 27 years old.

Steve: She’s my age. I have a chance.

Leo: You have a shot. Is she married? Wake up, Moto X. Is she married? Scarlet Johansen’s partner has been Romain Dauriac since 2013. You got it easy. How can you compete with a guy that’s named after lettuce? You got it.

Steve: I’m verified on Twitter. I’ve got this.

Leo: You have this. So they added, I mean this is a minor pet peeve, but they did an update this week that added opening Google to everything. I know you’re opening Google, would you stop telling me that. That’s a mistake. That’s stupid. We’re going to take a break. When we come back we will talk about the actual things that Google announced in just a bit. But first our word from our favorite audio book company in the whole wide world, audible.com. Anybody here listen to audio books?

Steve: Occasionally.

Leo: Christina, do you need to read the paper?

Christina: I love Audible. In fact, now that I have the Whisper Sync for voice that will link you Audible account and your Kindle account, you can go back and forth. So on the subway I’ll listen to stuff. If I don’t have time to read, I’ll go back and read. I love Audible.

Leo: I did that with the Gold Finch, which is like 800 hours long. I would read it on the Kindle and then it would pick up the audio where I left off. It is so great. And there are times when you’re listening to a book and you’d like to see the text. Like how the names are spelled. Game of Thrones is a good one. You hear the name, Daenerys Targaryen. And then you see it on the page and go what?! That’s kind of a fun disconnect there. Audible has 150,000 titles. Now days, audio has become so important because of people’s long commutes and everything. That every new book comes out on audible.com. For instance, the new Walter Isaacson which just came out, the Innovators. I haven’t read that but I’ve heard people say good things about it. Of course it’s on audible.com. There are so many great books, fiction, non-fiction. Books about our business and industry. Science fiction, I’m a big science fiction buff. In fact Audible has such a commitment to science fiction that they went back and started recorded the classic science fiction which was of course never put out on audio books. Their audio frontiers now has hundreds of titles, including the great stuff from Hein Line and Asamoff. Stuff that was never recorded. I am a big fan if you have not tried Audible, we understand. Maybe you’re thinking I don’t know, is this for me? Well look, Tim Curry and Alan Cuming dramatized version of Dracula. Simon Vance, Catherine Kelly, oh this would be awesome. Fifteen hours, I didn’t realize the original Dracula was that long. This is Brand Stoker’s novel, dramatized. They do this a lot which is wonderful. They’ve done it with Neil Gaiman’s stuff. I think it was Neverwhere. They did such a great dramatization. So look, there’s going to be plenty of choices here. I invite you to go to audible.com, browse around. When you’re ready and find two books-pick two books-then go to audible.com/twit2. That’s audible.com/twit2. Because you are going to get those two books free. You’re going to sign up for the platinum account. That’s two books a month free plus the daily digest of the New York Times or Wall Street Journal. Really great stuff if you’re driving to work or at the gym on the treadmill. Nothing more boring than the treadmill but Audible makes it fun. In fact, it goes by like that because you it’s a page-turner. You want to hear the next thing. Audible.com/twit2. The platinum account. First 30 days are free which means your first two books are free. Cancel any time in that first 30 days, you’ll pay nothing but the books will always be yours. They’re yours to keep. There are so many great choices. Oh look, Neil Patrick Harris reading Choose Your Own Autobiography. This must be new, I don’t remember this.

Steve: That’s got to be hilarious.

Christina: That just came out.

Leo: How can that be bad, right? This is the only problem. You go here and it’s like I want to read that, and I want to read that. Lean Dunham’s new book Not That Kind of Girl.

Steve: Did she read it?

Leo: Yea, of course. I have to say most of the time I don’t want the author to read it. But when it’s somebody like Lena Dunham.

Steve: If it’s a memoir.

Leo: If it’s a memoir and it’s in their voice, it’s great. This is good. One more thing, stories and other stories. This is the office folks, B.J. Novak, Rainn Wilson, Jenna Fischer. This has got Katy Perry! Lena Dunham and Mindy Kialing. Wow!

Dieter: Wow.

Leo: You’ve read this obviously as well! Christina, you’re amazing.

Christina: I have, no actually B.J. came in and did a book reading for Nashville’s Book Club. And I had him sign my Kindle version.

Leo: Yea!

Steve: Sign my Kindle.

Christina: I found a way for him to sign it and then I switched the cover so the cover is the autograph version. Yea.

Leo: That’s awesome. This sounds great. I’m going to have to listen to this. Any way, you have two books. Use them wisely, grasshopper. Audible.com/twit2. You’re going to love it and that’s all I can say. And if you don’t well it doesn’t cost you anything. What did you lose? Well, nothing. You heard some good books. Google, finally. Gosh, here we are an hour into the show and we’re finally talking about Google. Wednesday, they didn’t have an event. They just put out a blog post. That’s very Google-y.

Christina: Well they’re having an event this week in New York.

Leo: What are they doing?

Steve: It’s kind of a showcase.

Leo: Don’t you want to see the shamoo?

Steve: Oh, definitely.

Leo: I don’t care about the Nexus 9. They have a nine-inch tablet, I couldn’t care less.

Dieter: I care only so far as I feel like Google and the HTC need to be shamed for making the base model of the tablet only 16 gigs of memory.

Steve: Same with the iPad.

Dieter: That’s not enough for a tablet.

Leo: You know why they do that.

Steve: To make you spend an extra $100.

Leo: Well they want that price point starting at to be low. They know no one will buy it. Unfortunately you buy an iPad with 16 gigs, you can’t update to iOS 8 because you have no free space.

Steve: I wrote about this today. That’s the most annoying thing with Apple’s storage pricing.

Leo: iOS 8, you can’t!

Steve: You need five gigs.

Leo: It’s like, how could you? Okay, okay, take a breath. So anyway, yes I agree with you. Shame them. HTC made the Nexus 9. It will be nice, I’m sure. But I don’t even want a tablet anymore.

Dieter: Yea.

Leo: I want a six-inch phone, baby! That’s the Nexus 6, not priced like traditionally. Priced like a high-end phone, but it’s what, $650 I think it starts at. Is that the 16 gig version?

Steve: I don’t know how many gigs it comes with.

Dieter: Yea, that’s the starting price.

Leo: It’s 32 and 64.

Steve: So that’s good.

Leo: For $80 more, you can get the 64.

Steve: Does it have an SD card?

Leo: It does not. It’s basically a swollen Moto X, right.

Steve: Is that the new Moto X?

Dieter: This thing is going to feel huge. The 6 Plus is fine because it’s super-thin. But the shamoo is going to feel like a whale. It’s going to feel gigantic.

Leo: Really?

Christina: It is. Because Samsung, the Note 4, even though it’s a bigger screen, they do so much to taper the size that it really doesn’t feel much bigger than a 6 Plus. And this, I mean it’s six inches. It’s going to be gigantic.

Leo: There are a lot of similarities between the Note 4 and the Nexus 6. They’re both ultra-HD six, almost six-inch screens. No stylus of course on the Nexus 6.

Steve: That’s okay.

Christina: This is also very close to the LG G3.

Leo: Yea, and the G3 people complained about that UHT screen because it was sluggish and it killed battery life. Presumably the Nexus 6 won’t have that problem because it has a very big battery in it.

Steve: The Note 4 battery was good too.

Leo: The nice thing about the Note 4-as always with Samsung-you can open the back and put a new battery in. So just carry a battery around.

Dieter: Nexus 6, also wireless charging.

Leo: Chee-charging. Chee!

Steve: I don’t care about that.

Christina: I don’t care.

Leo: I don’t care about that because the Nexus 6 has the Qualcomm fast-charging capability. So you probably going to want to hook it up to a wire.

Steve: Which is really nice by the way. On the Note 4, yea it’s good for charging.

Leo: So the idea is it’s very quick to charge at the beginning. It does slow down as you get to the end of the cycle. But you get the first 50% in an hour.

Steve: Something like that. Oh and 30 minutes, I think.

Dieter: Yea, it’s wicked fast.

Leo: That’s mostly what you want, right? You’re not saying I want 100%. I just need to go a little longer. Let me give this to the bartender and he’ll charge it for half an hour.

Steve: Well you need a special plug. It doesn’t work with the new plug.

Leo: Okay, let’s ask about that. Is it really just a high-wattage charge?

Steve: That I don’t know.

Leo: I think it is.

Steve: They just told me you could only use it with this charger.

Leo: Yea, well we’ll find out. I’m going to have a note for her tomorrow whenever the 6 comes out, I’ll have that. And I’m just going to plug it into my high-wattage charger and I bet you the same thing.

Christina: It probably will be.

Leo: They’re pushing more electrons out. I would bet, but I don’t know.

Steve: It’s also smart enough to start sipping after it gets there.

Christina: I wouldn’t be surprised if they did something special with maybe the plug or something. Because you can usually charge a little bit faster if you use an iPad charger with your phone. But I have a feeling they’re probably doing something to make it sip that must faster.

Leo: That’s a little annoying because I bought the new Moto X and it doesn’t come with that. It comes with the old charger and for $30 I can buy the new charger. But they are bundling it with the Nexus 6. Does Samsung bundle it with the Nu-Core?

Steve: Yea, in the box.

Leo: This is what I’ll try. I’ll try the Note 4 charger on the Nexus 6 phone.

Christina: That will be the interesting thing to see if they align it.

Leo: It’s all Qualcomm technology.

Christina: Right but I could just see the Nexus anyway being like no you have to use ours.

Leo: No it’s the other way around. Samsung flipping a bit. They did that with the USB to go. It’s a little bit different. You can’t really use anyone else’s devices stuff. So Google announced a new tablet. Okay, good. I like the Nexus 7. You’ll get Lollipop. That’s the other thing; they’re going to ship these both as new phones, the Nexus 6 and the Nexus 9 tablet with the next version of Android, Android 5.0. We learned it’s Lollipop. So that’s good. It’s not, you think they tried to make a deal with LifeSavers? Like they did with Hershey’s?

Steve: Lemon Head.

Leo: Laffy Taffy.

Steve: I didn’t like that Kit Kat business.

Leo: It pissed me off. I didn’t want to do an ad for a candy bar every time I mention the new version of Android. Because I did.

Christina: And it’s weird too. It was Nestle in the U.K. and Hershey in the U.S. And it was weird so you felt like you were shelling for two different companies. What’s interesting about the Nexus 9 is that it’s 4 by 3, right? So it’s iPad style which is interesting I think for an Android tablet. I personally think for that size, 4 by 3 is superior for a lot of purposes. I’m excited to have a 4 by 3 tablet.

Leo: I do too.

Dieter: We have a big enough problem getting Android apps looking decent on Android tablets bigger than the Nexus 7 in the first place. So to ask them to be bigger and be on a 4 by 3 tablet? I just, I expect that it’s going to be a bummer of waiting for software.

Leo: This will be a good test of the scaling libraries.

Christina: I was going to say that’s what Kevin Marks is always telling me. Oh but the scaling libraries are so much better.

Leo: It’s automatic.

Christina: And I’m like then why do all the tablet apps look completely terrible? And no one has an answer for that.

Leo: I suspect it’s because they don’t use the scalers. They hand-code the screens. Then they go, oops. Oops, there’s a new screen. But I don’t know. I can’t pretend to know.

Dieter: It’s got that K1 processor and boom sound.

Leo: This is the new tech. And to me this is exciting. You’re talking about the Nexus 6 now. On the Moto X, they put ports for two speakers but one is the music speaker and one is the phone speaker. They don’t do stereo. They had the good sense to duplicate HTC’s One and put left-right stereo speakers on the front. That will be the only other phone with that. And I think that’s great.

Steve: Sounds great too.

Leo: I don’t know if it will sound like boom sound. Boom sound is boom sound.

Christina: Hey it’s a six-inch phone so if it’s even half way decent and has a little bit of power that probably wouldn’t be a terrible Bluetooth thing.

Leo: Maybe there’s a subwoofer that you can add.

Christina: You could probably pair it with something and make it sound like… I’m just saying it’s big enough. It’s bigger than my Jambox at that point. My Jambox Mini is probably smaller than the Nexus 6.

Leo: Do you think this is Google’s attempt? I think it is. To kind of not release a developer platform. This was going to be the silver, right? This is an actual product. And Google says no we could sell phones. Apple could sell phones. We’re going to sell phones.

Christina: Yea but they’ve tried this how many times, Leo? And they’ve failed every single time. The Nexus One was supposed to be a consumer product.

Leo: One of the greatest phones, by the way, of all time. But that’s exactly what they did wrong. They pissed off the carriers.

Christina: And it was a huge failure. Then they tried with a couple other things. They bought Motorola then sold Motorola for scraps.

Leo: This baffles me.

Christina: It’s funny to me they’re doing this big phone and doing this product a year after they sold Motorola.

Steve: It’s also interesting now that you can go into any major carrier store and buy a Nexus phone. Which you haven’t been able to really do. That’s interesting.

Leo: Why are they doing that? They’ve done a deal with Verizon, Sprint, AT&T, T-Mobile, U.S. Cellular.

Steve: They’re brick and mortar stores now.

Leo: You can go to Target, Best Buy. I don’t understand, why did they do that now? What’s different? Is it now them saying oh, we’re sorry carriers. We should have done a deal with you, now we’re going to.

Christina: Probably.

Steve: They just didn’t know how to do it before because they’ve always been like we’re going to disrupt the carrier model.

Leo: They didn’t like the carriers.

Steve: They didn’t know how to sell consumer products.

Leo: That’s a shame because I think that they should continue to disrupt the carriers.

Steve: It’s not working. And they don’t have physical stores. People still go into physical stores a lot to check out the new phones and touch them.

Leo: You do want this. Although a lot of the nerds in this audience and I’ll include us but everybody watching at home, will buy a Nexus 6 site on scene because we trust it.

Christina: The problem is, even if you’re a nerd, you buy the phone and it has a problem. Then there’s no one you can call. You’ve got to get on the phone and at this point it will be Motorola and whoever you can talk to. You have to email somebody to get a return setup because there’s literally no phone number to call. That does actually become a little frustrating from the buying perspective. At least this way you are able to go into a store and if it doesn’t work or you have an issue with it, you can at least physically take it back some place.

Steve: And the carriers have that. That help service.

Leo: I feel so bad. I had a caller on the radio show today. A nice lady named Francine. Her Google mail got hacked. So she Googled to find somebody to help her with that. And she found a phone number in Indonesia.

Steve: Oh no.

Leo: You all know what’s next. She called it. They said well okay, $299 we’ll fix this. And by the way we need remote access to your machine. So they got her credit card number, they got $300, they got access to her machine. And then she had something else so she Googled it again and found somebody in Russia? Or somewhere, I can’t remember. Oh, Qatar. Soccer capital of the world. In Qatar, and they charge her only $50 but they also had access. And I said you know what, you’re done. Just take the computer, throw it out the car window because you’re done. It’s done.

Christina: Yea.

Leo: And people, but people want to call somebody. And that’s the point.

Christina: They do and that’s the problem.

Leo: She said I Googled it.

Christina: And that’s the problem and because people don’t understand. Google’s so big in the fact that they don’t have any tech support. My father, the reason I refuse to give him tech support anymore is he’s not once, not twice, but thrice installed the fake antivirus.

Leo: Oh no!

Christina: The second time he did it I was like I’m done. I told you to buy a Mac, you refused. If you’re going to insist on doing this, I’m not helping you anymore. I’m not doing it. I live in another state now. I’m not doing it. You could’ve bought a Mac and we could’ve been fine. But you insisted on not, so.

Leo: You are cold!

Christina: This is after 30 years of dealing with him though. At a certain point I have to be done with it. And my mom even agreed.

Leo: He changed your diapers, young lady. He put up with you putting peanut butter in his CD player.

Christina: He did put up with a lot. But I’ve dealt with enough. My mom was even on my side. She was like I want the Mac.

Leo: I did what you said. I bought my mom an iPhone 6 Plus. She loves it.

Steve: My mom bought one too.

Leo: She loves it. She’s 83. She wants that big screen. She had a Note 3, I gave her a Note 3. I said you know what, you should have this iPhone now. It’s time. And she has an iPad. She loves it. And I don’t have to do.

Christina: My parents love their iPhones and their iPads. So at this point…

Leo: You don’t have to worry about her installing a third-party antivirus on her system. I got this thing called Malware Bite Me. I hear it’s good. I don’t have to worry about that. What do you think of the new slogan? Android: be together not the same.

Steve: What does that even mean?

Christina: Exactly.

Steve: I’m serious. It means nothing.

Christina: It does mean nothing. They’re saying two things at once. They’re saying be together not the same. And then at the same time they’re showing off the fact that everybody has an Android.

Leo: Yea. We’re together but there are many choices.

Steve: If you want to get really philosophical about this, they make this one brand new skin version of Android that most people never see. Because Samsung and Motorola and all these people are going to go in and strip it out. There’s great design. It’s just going to be ruined. Unless you get a Nexus or a Motorola, you’re not going to see it anyway.

Leo: We should watch this ad. This is clearly Google’s attempt to do things different.

Steve: They love tugging at your heart strings.

Christina: They’re so trying to do this.

Ad: You remember in school when you invited the new kid over to your table? Or you didn’t. If you did, that was a cool move. That was an And move. And moves take guts. But they can mean everything. And moves can put wings on a bicycle. When enough people have an And view, the world changes forever.

Leo: This is totally their thing.

Ad: We’re only here because of an And moment. Opening yourself up isn’t easy. When you do, it’s hard to forget. Because it leads to something new. Something better.

Leo: There’s their autonomy. I don’t know why they did the ALS challenge, but they did.

Ad: For them, and you! Yea, you. Watching this right now, because everyone doing the same thing won’t move us forward. Everyone doing their own thing.

Leo: Oh yea, it’s Google, right.

Ad: Can.

Leo: I still don’t know what that means.

Steve: I don’t know what that means.

Leo: Be together not the same.

Dieter: It’s an attempt to throw some Apple burn. Everybody’s all the same.

Leo: Are they throwing some shade?

Christina: It’s calling shade. It’s not burn.

Leo: It’s not shade. They’re throwing some shade at Apple saying we’re not all the same.

Christina: We’re not sheep but we are sheep.

Leo: Okay, you can’t explain it.

Christina: We’re not sheep. We’re robots.

Leo: Oh yea, much better. Well who would you rather fight? A thousand robotic sheep or a thousand sheep with robot…?

Steve: What?

Christina: I don’t know.

Steve: The real problem is it’s like and you, and you, and you, and Roid?

Dieter: Not a fan.

Leo: Is that the slogan?

Steve: That’s where the text came from.

Leo: You and you and Roid.

Dieter: And who’s Roid?

Leo: It sounds like hemorrhoids. That’s not good.

Christina: I hear Roid, I think roid rage, hemorrhoids. I don’t think Android.

Leo: Okay that was a mistake. Alright, well I’m still going to buy one. I don’t care if they have a crappy ad campaign. I like them for that. Because it means they’re not too slick.

Steve: Usually their ads are good. The Chrome ads are awesome.

Dieter: Yea.

Christina: Their Chrome ads are great. The dear Sophie ads are so coin, and so manipulative. But it works.

Steve: It does work.

Leo: It tugs at your heart strings.

Christina: It does. They totally know how to do it. It’s creepy but you don’t think it’s creepy until way after you think about it. Going huh.

Leo: But this I think the first time they’ve ever advertised Android.

Dieter: No.

Leo: Everybody else has done Droid.

Dieter: They’ve advertised Nexus stuff a bunch. There’s been…

Steve: But just Android though?

Dieter: I can’t remember. The Nexus 7 with the kid in the treehouse with his dad. That’s was touching.

Steve: Was that Android?

Dieter: But that was for the Nexus.

Leo: See the reason it’s important to say Android is because that’s not just Google products. This is establishing a category. One of the things Google’s done lately is kind of tightened the grip on Android. Android Wear watches all have to have the same essential software. There’s no touch wiz on these watches. They’ve been tightening the grip a little bit. And I think that’s part of the process of saying we’re different, but there’s a unified Android brand. And so if you want choice, I think they have to really address the privacy thing though frankly. Apple’s finding the soft spot on Google and they’re hammering it.

Steve: And without saying Google, which is even… you can tell exactly what they’re talking about when Tim Cook came out with that big privacy statement a couple months ago.

Leo: Yea, I’ve been saying this for at least a year. That’s what Apple should double-down on because that’s what differentiates them from everybody else. And Google doesn’t really have a good response to that, do they?

Christina: No. Eric Schmidt had like six responses.

Steve: And he twisted it around and misunderstood what Tim Cook was even talking about.

Dieter. He quote unquote misunderstood.

Leo: He willfully misunderstood.

Christina: Completely. All of his answers were equally terrible. He had like six different answers and you’re trying to untwist it. Like, Eric stop. You’re making it worse.

Steve: He’s the king of foot in mouth. I love that guy.

Christina: I love him but…

Steve: As a journalist, I love him.

Christina: You almost wonder like why do they let him speak.

Dieter: On the Verge, we have the story stream that tag what stories together. And one of our story streams is like What Schmidt Says. And that’s all it is.

Leo: Schmidt-isms.

Steve: He yelled at me at a conference once. From on stage.

Leo: How could anybody yell at you?

Steve: It was at the all things deemed mobile conference. And this was right after…

Leo: Were you heckling him?

Steve: No, I asked a question. Stood up.

Leo: What was your question?

Steve: I asked him right after Facebook home launch. What was that, 2013? So I said, I forget exactly what my question was. But if this becomes big, what do you guys think of this?

Leo: I’ve asked him the same thing.

Steve: And he just like laid into me. There’s got to be a video clip of it somewhere. He just laid into me and told me I asked the question wrong. He was really rude. And I will never forgive him for that.

Leo: Wow. Nice way to piss off the press.

Steve: There’s a great GIF of it somewhere of me asking the question and him going… like this right at me.

Leo: Alright I’m looking for it now.

Steve: He’s such a bully.

Leo: Steve, that’s a point of honor though. That you had Eric Schmidt bully you. And you had Ballmer bully you. And so we got some big shots here.

Dieter: Actually the person who really bullied me was John Ledger. He got real mad at me.

Steve: He’s bullied me too.

Leo: Of T-Mobile.

Christina: See he loves me.

Steve: Oh man. He used to have a hot and cold relationship.

Leo: It’s kind of like your creepy uncle. I don’t know if you want him to love you.

Steve: Let’s text him right now. There’s the GIF.

Leo: Yea, here’s one. There’s two actually. You look a little goofy. What are you stupid? What’s going on with you? Here’s another one. We give you choice here.

Steve: Oh there’s two GIFs? Oh it’s on Imgur!

Leo: Yea you hit the big time. 485 views. You are big now.

Christina: Nice.

Steve: My oversized shirt going with this.

Christina: That’s awesome.

Leo: Alright we’re going to take back. Actually you take a break. You did a great business on Saturday, did a great article on Mark Jermin. I thought that was great, in 9-5 Mac. It was actually about Seth Winetrale. He had a whole story about him. I loved that.

Steve: It was a great story. My colleague Dave wrote that.

Leo: I knew pieces of it but I didn’t know really the story behind that.

Steve: He’s an interesting guy. I’m sure you’ve met Seth before or have at least talked to him.

Leo: I don’t think so.

Steve: He’s a really cool guy.

Leo: He was stuck in Paris. His wife got a job there. He was an IT guy. And said he didn’t have anything to do so he started an Apple blog. It was a business blog at the time which was kind of misguided. But that’s okay. Now he’s got 9-5 Mac. He’s done very well. But he doesn’t pay anybody. He gives them a cut of the ads.

Steve: There’s salary. But those guys do well. And they’re mostly young kids.

Leo: Mark Jermin, he’s in college.

Steve: Not even 21. And then most of them are in high school or early college. And they get a cut of the ads. It’s a great gig.

Christina: Frankly that’s how they get the scoops.

Leo: Right, I mean Mark Jermin is amazing.

Christina: But they get the scoops because there’s plausible deniability from the people who are leaking to them. And there’s not any of the career pressure that you’re going to be pissing off the wrong person and committing career suicide when you’re 20 years old.

Leo: Because they don’t care.

Christina: It’s a very different thing. Mark can write and do things that, like some of us might not be able to do just because we have livelihood.

Leo: That’s a mistake on his part. He is in fact exactly like you guys. He doesn’t know it. That’s all.

Steve: He knows it.

Christina: They will never invite him to an event. Ever. And that’s okay. But you can get away with a lot more.

Leo: I wonder what it’s like not to be invited to an Apple event. I wonder what that’s like.

Steve: Ask me.

Leo: I haven’t been invited since 2010. Facebook, good on you. They rebuked the Drug Enforcement Administration. Remember the DEA Department of Justice defending them, set up a fake Facebook page for a woman they had arrested for minor drug offense. Trying to lure other drug offenders in. And they put pictures of her niece and nephew. They were horrible. Facebook has said that not only is that a violation of our terms of service. They said basically that’s messed up.

Steve: And as they should have.

Christina: When Facebook says it’s messed up…

Steve: Then you know. On a privacy issue.

Christina: When the people that perform emotional experiments on its users and are like okay guys this is too far. You know it’s too far.

Leo: Facebook has long made it clear that law enforcement authorities are subject to our policies. We regard the DEA to be a knowing and serious breach of Facebook’s terms of service. And the account has been disabled. That’s all they can do. You are never going to be on Facebook again, buddy boy. Facebook asked the DEA immediately confirm and has seized all activities on Facebook that involved the impersonation of others. This is the big concern. We know about this one. Well if they did this once, what’s to say they’re not doing it all the time?

Christina: Oh totally.

Steve: Definitely. And not just the DEA either. The FBI, whatever.

Leo: Everybody. The sheriff down the street. Petaluma Police Department.

Steve: A lot of local police departments have been doing similar stuff.

Leo: They do these stings trying to find child predators.

Steve: Or even trying to bust a kegger. That’s happened too.

Leo: There’s a guy in the Petaluma Police Department and doing that. That’s his job.

Steve: To troll Facebook?

Leo: Not Facebook. But that’s why Petaluma was the home of that, what was that, reprehensible NBC show. To Catch a Predator.

Dieter: Oh really that was based here?

Leo: One of the big busts was here. In fact I was on a jury trial of a kid who got arrested. And the judge threw, unfortunately I had to sit through two weeks of testimony, and then the judge threw it out, saying that’s entrapment.

Steve: It kind of is.

Christina: yea.

Leo: It was a very interesting, that was a couple years ago. Anyway, nice article on 9-5 Mac. I really enjoyed that. I like seeing that behind the story.

Steve: It’s a great story behind the story. You know everyone reads it, crushing it, they’re breaking a lot of news on that site. It’s kind of cool to see how it came together.

Leo: I’m embarrassed how often we quote Mark Jermin on MacBreak.

Steve: He’s a really good reporter.

Christina: He’s a fantastic reporter.

Leo: He’s been on TNT. He’s a very nice kid. As you have, Christina and as you have Dieter. And I think you too Steve?

Steve: I’ve been on a bunch of stuff.

Leo: You guys, you’re overexposed. No, we love you. That’s why you’re here. We’re going to take a break. We’ll have more with Dieter Bohn, the Verge. Steve Kovach of Business Insider. From Mashable, Christina Warren. Actually before we do the Square Space ad, you know what? We had a great week. I think Christina may even be on this video. This is some of the stuff you missed if you missed anything on TWiT this week.

Previously, on TWiT: I’m ready, do it to me! Maybe there’s going to be some news. TWiT live specials: how do you make it better? Improve the camera. No. Lower the price. I don’t think so. I think he’s walking towards make it thinner but that can’t be it. Yes it is! Can you even see it? No.

Security Now: was Dropbox hacked? People were downloading some several hundreds of login credentials and logging in successfully to other people’s Dropbox accounts. It’s the internet of other people’s things.

This Week in Google: Oh yea. They also announced a Nexus TV device. You got to get an AV receiver. Spousal confusing device. TWiT, thousands of hours of high-quality drabble. The tablet will be available for preorder on see you later, goodbye, October 17^th.

Leo: I’m preparing because I’m going to be doing Tech News Today next week. Did Mike? Mike is now in Jordan.

Steve: Oh I saw him tweet a picture.

Leo: Yea, did he leave something in the week ahead? Let’s take a look.

Mike Elgin: Coming up this week, Apple and IBM report earnings on Monday, October 20^th. Also on Monday, Microsoft’s holding a cloud event in San Francisco. Apple and Verizon report earnings on Tuesday, October 21^st. And Microsoft and Amazon have earnings calls scheduled for Thursday, October 23^rd. Back to you, Leo.

Leo: Thank you, Mike. Mike is in Jordan for his son’s wedding. His son, there was one wedding here. And now his son’s new father-in-law is in Imam. In the church. So they’re going to do a Jordanian-Muslim wedding. And I think he has to kill a goat.

Steve: Wow.

Leo: Yea, then they cook it and serve it. And it’s like wild.

Steve: That sounds awesome actually.

Leo: So keep watching Mike’s feed. I’m sure he’ll feed us.

Steve: He tweeted some good food pictures earlier.

Leo: It’s exciting. Anyway I’ll be filling in. I don’t know how I’m going to do this. I’m actually nervous. TNT Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday of this week. Then Sarah will do Thursday and Friday. And she’ll do a much better job; she has practice. Our show today brought to you by Square Space. I know these guys. I love these guys. It’s the best hosting ever. But it’s also, because it’s hosting plus the content management system on top of it, it’s just a beautiful, elegant way to host your next website. Whether you want to do ecommerce. They have ecommerce built into all their templates. And really nice. The ecommerce system, they have merchant card for you if you need it. They have shipping calculators, they actually have fulfillment. They have all the stuff you need to do your own ecommerce. But you don’t have to. It could be for a photographer. Amazing portfolio templates. And they even have a portfolio app for the iPad which is awesome. It will pull your pictures from your website so you can show it to clients. They’ve got great apps. The blog app, the media metrics app. This is all free as part of your Square Space subscription. You’ll start with 25 gorgeous templates and the all-new Square Space 7 means you’re going to get the state-of-the-art mobile-responsive design. You’re going to get everything that’s modern on the web without having to know any HTML or JavaScript. By the way, if you are a developer, their developer platform is second to none. You can actually do amazing things with Square Space. The point is you don’t have to. It’s so easy to use. They do have live chat and email support 24/7 from their offices in New York. A wonderful customer help portal that includes self-help articles, forum, video workshops. So there’s lots of places you can learn and get better. Your Square Space site will just get better and better. And the ability to accept donations on every template as well. So these are great for non-profits, cash wedding registries, school fun drives. $8 a month, that includes a free domain name when you sign up for a year. For the commerce, $24 and you get so much out of this. And they don’t take a cut. So you’re going to make money and you’re going to get a great-looking site. All the hosting, all the software. But best of all you can try it right now. Just click that get started button. You don’t have to give them a credit card or any information. Just play with it. You can import all your existing content using their importers. They support most of the blog APIs. One thing I ask when you sign up, use the offer code TWIT. And that way you’ll get 10% off. You don’t need it for the trial. But if you decide to buy, 10% off when you use our offer code TWIT. That’s squarespace.com. We love the clan there. Ireland’s phasing out. I guess a lot of pressure from the European Union. This is where Google and Apple and others store their money in effect in Ireland. They have this double Irish tax break, used often with tax havens like Luxemburg or the Canaries Islands to hide profits. These companies funnel profits over there. Dublin for instance has the largest Google headquarters outside the United States. 2500 people. The subsidiary generates revenue, mostly from online advertising. Pays it in royalties to a separate Google unit registered in Ireland but resident in Bermuda for tax purposes.

Steve: I just love that sentence.

Leo: it’s why all these companies have, Apple, Google, Microsoft all have offshore money they have to…

Steve: Well if they bring it back it gets taxed.

Leo: It gets taxed. So they have to buy European, that’s why you buy stuff outside the United States. Because you got to use the money somehow. Anyway, Google hasn’t said anything. But apparently European Union has put a lot of pressure on Ireland. They’re now basically going to face that. I bet you the United States has something to do with this as well. A little tip, we have mentioned before that the Samsung A40 EVO hard drives are great hard drives. But something weird happens with them; they slow down over time. My friend Allyn Malventano writes for PC Perspective and is our SSD guru. He says there is now a tool available from Samsung for these drives that will fix this problem. So if you’ve purchased an A40 EVO SSD, get this tool. It’s free or download and it will be in the firmware I’m sure in new SSDs from Samsung. In fact don’t buy the A40 because the A50 is due out any minute now. And Allen says it’s killer. Good news on that. Let’s see what else. I just want to wrap it up with a couple of the last little bits here.

Steve: Oh can we laugh at Google quick? For selling the Nexus Player?

Leo: Oh yea!

Steve: The real hockey puck.

Leo: It was delayed because the FCC approval hadn’t happened. But it has now so you can preorder it.

Dieter: Yea but they put it up for sale without FCC approval.

Leo: Well that’s a little mistake.

Dieter: Little? You’re sending the electronics, you want to do one thing before the other thing.

Leo: But they got the approval fast

Steve: But beyond that, why are they making this? Why did they keep…?

Leo: It’s a Fire TV.

Christina: They try and they fail.

Dieter: This is them not ambitious. This is just basically a Fire TV. We’re not trying to take over the world. We’re not trying to take over every TV. We’re just saying screw it.

Leo: It’s remarkably like the Fire TV. $99.

Christina: It’s identical, almost.

Leo: It comes with a remote, you can talk to it.

Steve: The game controller.

Leo: For an additional…

Christina: The remote looks almost the same. It’s kind of scary how much the remote looks like.

Leo: And then you buy, you can buy a gaming controller for what, $40 extra? It’s exactly, it’s like they…

Christina: Exactly like Fire TV.

Leo: By the way, they’re out of stock already. So somebody wanted it.

Dieter: It supports Google Cast so instead of getting Chromecast.

Leo: If you want or have a Chromecast and you use that, which I do all the time.

Steve: Chromecast is so great.

Leo: Chromecast capability to the TV as well. I like the Chromecast.

Steve: Buy a Chromecast, that’s my answer. Why buy this?

Christina: There’s an app for Fire TV that will add Chromecast support too.

Leo: Oh really? Is that all-cast?

Christina: It is all-cast, I think it is. Pretty good.

Leo: I use all-cast.

Christina: I use that but then I’ve hacked my Fire TV. I’ve got XBMC and Plex on it.

Leo: What?

Christina: You can actually, it is very easy to hack and mod. If you have an external hard drive hooked up to it. I’ve got Plex, I’ve got XBMC on it. All kinds of front-ends. It’s probably the best XBMC box I’ve had in quite some time.

Leo: This is good to new. Because I have a Fire TV unopened on my shelf.

Christina: It’s basically a Roku but when you add the other stuff with it, it’s like everything Ulio was supposed to be but then they… this I’ve got saved to the Nexus box probably pretty good XBMC, Plex. Or what is XBMC called now? Kodo, or something? It starts with a K. Anyway whatever that, and Plex. It is probably a pretty good front-end for that.

Leo: Kodi, Kodi.

Christina: Kodi. But you know, why not.

Leo: This is a quad-core 1.8 GHz atom. It’s pretty fast. Faster probably than the Apple TV I would bet.

Dieter: That’s not hard to do.

Leo: A gig of ram, that’s enough. Eight gigs of storage. Well, you know that’s not enough. But maybe you can hack this too. Does it have, yea it has a USB connector.

Christina: Yea it’s probably out of the box not supported for external stuff. But there are ways around it.

Leo: Tell us all about that, where you got your… that’s good.

Christina: It was really simple. In fact what’s cool about it is you can enable developer mode and do SSH over Wi-Fi so you don’t even have to connect it to the computer to send APKs over. Then you load in a few files and a few root commands so you can connect an external hard drive to it and other stuff. Then I can literally fling stuff from my computer to the box without even having to connect it. Once I had it setup, I had a small little portable USB hard drive that I had connected. You could even use a thumb drive actually. That would be great. And I mean I should write it up actually. Probably something I should write up for Mashable. How to hack your Fire TV. It took me only a couple hours and an afternoon to completely trick it out.

Leo: Find Geo Hop Productions, this guy’s great.

Christina: Absolutely. He’s the best

Leo: You can find a step by step on XDA Developers of course. Wow, I didn’t know you could put SSH; I didn’t know you could do that. So you rooted?

Christina: Yea, super simply. You root it and the thing is you don’t even have to root it. You enable developer or enable advanced settings in the settings on the Fire TV. That’s all you really have to do. Then you can connect remotely over Wi-Fi.

Leo: It’s very similar to the rooting Android process.

Christina: Exactly. It’s very simpler. Once you’ve got it done it’s done and you can still go to the official Amazon firmware updates. Which is the nice thing because I do like their front-end for that.

Leo: You can put Busy Box on there, SSH. You’re all set. This is it. Awesome. Very nice. Until Christina writes it up on Mashable, XDA.

Christina: XDA, they’re awesome.

Leo: Anything else you want to talk about? There’s a tool on Facebook, they have a tool that lets you say I’m okay.

Steve: That would have been great during the earthquake.

Christina: It’s a great advent.

Leo: I climbed to put a Facebook status of I’m alright!

Steve: I had so many people texting and calling me.

Leo: Because you’re an east coast guy. They’re like what’s going on? The whole city is falling into a hole.

Steve: I slept through it. I had a rough night the night before.

Leo: This is called Safety Check so the idea is if… actually the way they’ve implemented this is quite clever. If you have Facebook app on your phone, it knows your location. If it says hey wait a minute, there was a big earthquake in that area, it will then pop up a message on your phone saying…

Dieter: It pushes it right out to you, doesn’t it?

Leo: Yea it pushes it to you: are you okay? You can push I’m safe or I’m not in the area. Then I guess it will do it in a status update. But it will let your friends and family know. It will also allow you to mark your friends as safe.

Christina: That’s cool.

Leo: So you can say everybody here is okay. I think that is actually a good use of Facebook.

Dieter: Yea.

Leo: Safety Check.

Steve: So there’s no answer for no?

Leo: Are you safe? I’m safe or I’m not in the area. I guess if you’re dead you probably aren’t responding. That’s an interesting thing.

Steve: Yea they need something like I’m okay, but I don’t have a leg or something.

Leo: Yea, I’m okay. I’m in a hospital. Send flowers.

Christina: Or at least a link to contact authorities. That could be interesting if you think about it. Maybe Facebook pushes something to you. Maybe you’re in a position where you can’t reach out. Maybe Facebook will be able to, if you authorize it of course, send stuff out to first responders or what not. Say we know these people in this location are in need of some assistance.

Leo: I shouldn’t be so flippant about this because this is I think the 25^th anniversary of the great earthquake of 1989.

Christina: That happened during the World Series didn’t it?

Leo: Yea that happened when I was at the Candlestick Park when that happened. But there were some other people in our business who were not in such a safe place. John Andersen and Derek Van Austeen who are writers for MacUser Magazine. They were caught in the earthquake. A brick wall tumbled on them and both were killed. And it’s probably good for us to mention that. It was 25 years ago, October 17^th that that happened.

Steve: They had not a memorial but something this week for it, right?

Leo: Yea I think so. Fred Davis who was the editor of MacUser at the time posted on Facebook. That was what alerted me to it. They were, John was a great guy. They were really fun, exciting, young guys. Kind of your age. Getting into the business. And it was a great tragedy. And not a whole lot of people died in that earthquake. But those are two who we really will miss. So that’s 25 years ago today. And now people say on Facebook, I’m okay. We didn’t have it then. Hey on that bright and chipper note, I’m going to wrap. Anything else? Did I leave anything else you guys wanted to talk about?

Steve: I kind of wanted to loop back to iPads for a second because tomorrow Apple’s reporting earnings. And we get to see how the iPad business is doing.

Leo: It’s been two quarters now, will it be down for a third? I bet you it will.

Christina: I bet you it will be.

Leo: I have to think the 6 Plus will continue that trend, right? Why would we need an iPad?

Christina: I think the 6 Plus will but I think the iPad Air 2 is a good enough upgrade that a lot of people who have iPad 2’s will probably be saying you know, the touch ID, the faster stuff, the better camera. The better body. Glare-resistant screen. I’ve had this iPad 2 for three years now. I might as well upgrade. They might end up getting a good upgrade cycle but I think that we all, all of us that underestimate, A: we first all didn’t think the iPad would be as successful as it was. I was bullish on it but I wasn’t expecting it to be what it was. Then I think we all overestimated how frequently people would update these things.

Leo: What do you think the cycle is? Three years, four years?

Dieter: At least three.

Christina: Probably two, two and a half, three.

Leo: It’s an expensive thing. People don’t have unlimited budget to buy phones and tablets and computers. And I think the iPad 3 is good enough. If you have a retina anything, you’re fine.

Steve: Yea.

Dieter: Yea.

Christina: Yea.

Leo: Touch ID is not going to push you and thinner is not going to push you in. A faster processor is not going to push you in. So it’s anybody who doesn’t have retina yet probably should look. And you probably should not get a mini.

Dieter: No. You get last year’s mini.

Christina: Last year was a great price. But it’s interesting that they’re still selling the mini from two years ago. At this point it’s the same guts as the iPad 2. My friend Allen Pike wrote a really interesting blog post about developers basically saying that developers now are basically going to be expected to support the iPad 2 at least through 2017. And that’s kind of putting them in a weird position when it comes to games and other things because the hardware just isn’t keeping up. But I think until it gets to the point where the iPad 1 reached us very early because it only had 256 megs of RAM. It’s a first-gen product. Until it gets to the point that it’s really slow for people. Most people who have an iPad, they use it for web browsing or games, or Facebook. You kind of don’t need to upgrade. It’s nice to have the better screen, maybe the touch ID or the other stuff. But for a lot of people it does exactly what they need it to do. And it’s not significantly slower or worse than it was before. So until it gets to that point where it’s really just kind of crawling, which happens with the phones, a lot of people aren’t going to need to have that itch to upgrade to a new tablet.

Leo: There’s still a lot of iPad 2’s there. They stopped selling them six months ago.

Christina: That’s what I’m saying. The guts are the same on the iPad mini which they’re still selling.

Leo: They’re keeping it alive.

Christina: And they’ve sold a ton of those to education, and so I think that you’re probably right. It’s probably one of those things where three or four years as an upgrade cycle. Which is two and a half times as long as a maybe a phone cycle. And yea, so I think that’s probably why the business is slowing primarily. People just don’t need to replace them as frequently.

Leo: Big week. You should watch TNT all week long because it’s going to be a big week for quarterly results. I noticed Steve Kovach you’re not carrying your iPhone 6 in a case.

Steve: No. It’s too pretty and it slides in my pocket.

Leo: Do you have a case?

Dieter: I took the case off my phone yesterday. I went and bought Apple Care and was like now I can…

Leo: It’s so pretty.

Steve: A case is too, I can’t fit it in my pocket. This thing is so pretty.

Leo: So just get more. Buy more. How about yours Christina? Did you put yours in the case?

Christina: I got the gold one. I want to show off my new gold phone. If I pay for the Kardashian phone and I’ve got the Apple Care, so yea.

Leo: I don’t have mine in a case.

Steve: Mine’s already scratched up too.

Leo: That’s alright. That’s just part of life.

Dieter: I’m going to put it back in the case now.

Leo: You know what I like that they’re doing now is the melting the glass around the edge so it’s softer.

Christina: I love that.

Leo: It’s like a worry stone. You want to rub it more. Thank you, everybody. We have had a good time and thank you Christina Warren for once again coming in here and being a part of. We just love you! We think you’re the greatest. She’s at Mashable, @film_girl if you still use Twitter. I don’t know why… but I know that both Steve and Dieter have Twitter fired up. You’ve got tweets going. You guys, lay off that thing! It’s just poisoning your mind. Steve Kovach, he is senior editor at Business Insider. Great to have you. You’re going back when to New York?

Steve: Saturday.

Leo: Damn! Why didn’t we have him in all the time while he was in San Francisco? Damn man!

Steve: I’ll be back.

Leo: Alright you come back. Dieter Bohn, you come back too. Dieter does go back to New York after the Apple event. He’s at the Verge, executive director there. Thank you for stopping by. I feel like the old man here with all you youngsters. I’m dad. You youngsters, yea! We do TWiT every Sunday afternoon, 3pm Pacific, 6pm Eastern time. 2200 UTC on twit.tv. We love it if you watch live. The chat room is always a lot of fun. Or you can be here in our studio live. Just email tickets@twit.tv. It’s free but we want to know how many are coming so we can put a seat out for you. But as you can see we overdid it. There’s always a few extra seats. If you’re in the area, stop by. And of course if you can’t be here live, let’s not forget the best of! Chad’s giving me a little hint on the video. We are getting ready for our holiday edition of TWiT and as with many of the shows on our network, we like to do a best of. So if there’s a moment you particularly enjoyed this year, to the best of your memory put in the information at twit.tv/bestof. If you don’t know the time, go to the episode number. That’s alright. Whatever information you can give us, that’d be very helpful. And it’s for most of our shows, are doing best of. We’d love to hear from you if there’s something you remember. Remember that thing that Dvorak did with the thing and the thing. That, like that. Twit.tv/bestof. If you can’t get the show live or you can’t be here in studio, we do make on-demand audio and video available after the fact at the website and twit.tv. But also everywhere you can get podcasts and net casts, iTunes, Xbox Music, Podcasters, Dog Catcher, Insta-Cast. We have lovely apps written by our very devoted third-party developers. We thank you guys on Android, iOS, Windows Phone, Windows 8, Roku. So if you’re on one of those platforms, or many TVs too, just look for TWiT. Thanks for joining us. And we’ll see you next time. Another TWiT is in the can!